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January 8 - January 10, 2024
It’s not about winning or losing—that’s chance. It’s about thinking—the process. Dan himself is a living illustration of how true this is: he quit not during a downswing but at the top of his game.
“You become a big winner when you lose,” Dan says. “Everyone plays well when they’re winning. But can you control yourself and play well when you’re losing? And not by being too conservative, but trying to still be objective as to what your chances are in the hand. If you can do that, then you’ve conquered the game.”
Oh, and I did learn how to beat roulette.
Not the russian kind
“When things go wrong, other people see it as unfairness that’s always surrounding them,” he tells me. They take it personally. They don’t know how to lose, how to learn from losing. They look for something or someone to blame. They don’t step back to analyze their own decisions, their own play, where they may have gone wrong themselves. “It’s a really big handicap in life to think that way. All of us can step into that sometimes, but it’s important to know the difference. It’s like that great Kipling quote: ‘If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the
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If we lose early, we have a shot at objectivity. But when we win at the start, that’s when we see the illusion of control playing out in full swing.
“No, I like them,” Erik says. “But I read that it’s healthier to only eat egg whites.”
Ahhh. Is that still a thing? The yolk is dense with nutrients
Erik listened quietly and then told him one phrase: “Less certainty. More inquiry.”
I hear this reveresed in Yoda's voice: certaintly less, inquiry more!
Poker is all about comfort with uncertainty, after all. Only I didn’t quite realize it wasn’t just uncertainty about the outcome of the cards. It’s uncertainty about the “right” thing to do. The only certain thing is your thinking.
“Somebody says, ‘Winning money.’ He says, ‘No.’ Somebody else says, ‘Winning a lot of pots.’ ‘No.’ He says, ‘The object of poker is making good decisions.’ I think that’s a really good way to look at poker.”
He won’t tell me how to play a hand not because he’s being mean but because that answer comes at the expense of the ability to make a decision. Of the discipline to think through everything for myself, on my own.
“less certainty, more inquiry” is your guiding light, not only will you listen; you will adjust. You will grow. And if that’s not self-awareness and self-discipline, I don’t know what is.
I think R.A.W. Would have liked this
Most real-world environments are what Hogarth calls “wicked”: there’s a mismatch between action and feedback because of external noise. Activities with elements of surprise, uncertainty, the unknown: suddenly, you’re not sure whether what you’ve learned is accurate or not, accurately executed or not. There’s simply too much going on. And so, in most environments, the problem is far more severe.
Manhattan—and while I sit here, what I am doing is perfectly legal. But the moment I cross back, I suddenly become a criminal.
Very much akin to the silliness of the War on (some)Drugs
My screen name: thepsychchic. One word, all lowercase, chosen after much careful deliberation to embody as many of the traits I want to convey to my opponents as I can. Psych, short for psychology—or psychic, as many of my perhaps not-quite-literate opponents will read it. Or psycho.
Great name, makes me think of some of the handles in Redroom comics
This worries me: one of the ways I manipulated stress and hot emotions when I was designing my psychological studies was by introducing time pressure. I saw decision quality degrade in participant after participant as the seconds ticked down.
You need to have a process, a system, a plan—one that evolves with feedback. If you don’t, how will you know whether the outcome of your battle—a bad one in my case, but successful ones, too—is the result of skill or luck?
the dragonfly manages to capture an astounding 95 percent of its targeted prey.
That is insane. There's spiderman, is there a dragonflyman?
I haven’t mentioned my dragonfly theory to him, and even if I had, he’d likely still argue for dinosaur status.
I think this still works as the dragonfly was around in some form with the dinosaurs?
Three dollars a word, comes the next email. Done. I’ve won the hand and extracted more value than I ever thought I could from it. Thank you, Aggressive Idiot Asshole; you have taught me well.
It's great seeing how she uses the lessons of tbe table in her life
Casinos in general—and poker tables in particular—are germ incubators. They are probably worse even than a preschool, since there the surfaces at least get disinfected when the cleaning crew comes through.
True skill is knowing your own limits—and the power of variance in the immediate future. Because who knows how long “immediate future” might last? After all, probability distributions don’t care about the past.
segregating women into a separate player pool, as if admitting that they can’t compete in an open player pool, feels equal parts degrading and demoralizing.
The floor is a series of black, gold, and red Tetris pieces.
How often do I find myself in a landscape like this, I wonder, only I’m not tuned in, not paying attention as closely as I should, not able to separate the signal from the noise—and so, not able to realize that I’ve got a shark biting at my heels as I swim merrily along and think he’s on my side?
It’s like dumping your garbage on someone else’s lawn. It just stinks.”
“Focus on the process, not the luck. Did I play correctly? Everything else is just BS in our heads,”
How we frame something affects not just our thinking but our emotional state. It may seem a small deal, but the words we select—the ones we filter out and the ones we eventually choose to put forward—are a mirror to our thinking. Clarity of language is clarity of thought—and
As W. H. Auden told an interviewer, Webster Schott, in a 1970 conversation, “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.”
Word to your mother
made the correct decision. Sure, the outcome didn’t go my way, but I thought correctly under pressure. And that’s the skill I can control.
I think of as a luck dampener effect: because you’re wallowing in your misfortune, you fail to see the things you could be doing to overcome it.
If you think of yourself instead as an almost-victor who thought correctly and did everything possible but was foiled by crap variance? No matter: you will have other opportunities, and if you keep thinking correctly, eventually it will even out.
They ignore the fact that the most we can do is make the best decision possible with the information we have; the outcome doesn’t matter.
Vegas is the true America
Everyone is allowed. No one will turn you away because you didn’t come from the right school or have the right connections or diplomas.
but faced with the perfection of The Master and Margarita, I gave up.
On my tbr
I nod. Pay attention: what he’s always told me. But there’s only so much attention I have, and so many directions in which it’s being pulled. Luckily, it seems I’m not the only one who finds focus difficult. He continues. “This is the funny thing about modern poker: even top players are sitting there, on their phones, and they’re missing all the information that’s on the table. It’s really kind of insane.”
Then they were given more information and asked once again for both their diagnosis and their level of certainty. What the researchers determined was that the accuracy of the diagnosis didn’t actually improve—but the certainty in that diagnosis became much greater.
“The good thing about poker is there’s enough luck that you never have to admit it’s your fault you lost.”)
look through a newspaper and count the number of photographs. The self-described unlucky took about two minutes, whereas the self-described lucky took a few seconds. The task was identical, but the self-identified lucky people were much more likely to notice something the others missed: on page two, in huge letters, were the words “Stop counting—There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” Prepared mind or not, in the absence of observation it matters little.
“we need to train our powers of observation, to cultivate that attitude of mind of being constantly on the look-out for the unexpected and make a habit of examining every clue that chance presents.” We can’t control the variance. We can’t control what happens. But we can control our attention and how we choose to deploy it.
myself—“I really hope that you don’t end up choosing the easier way to learn because of time pressure. This is a beautiful game, and I think you have the mind to appreciate it. But you’re not going to be able to take a shortcut.”
But the dark side has cookies
The rote learning method is excellent for high volume and high immediate output, but when it comes to swerving off the lesson plan or reacting to unforeseen events, it leaves you less able to deal. You reach competency quickly, but mastery will prove elusive.
It’s powerful advice. How often do we go off on someone for making a decision that we, personally, wouldn’t have made, calling them an idiot, fuming, getting angry? How much time and emotional energy we’d save if we simply learned to ask ourselves why they acted as they did, rather than judge, make presumptions, and react.
Dunning, a psychologist at the University of Michigan most famous for being one half of the Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has
Little synchronicity here my daughter was just talking about the dk effect
Already, he says, I’ve been making a lot of progress. It’s not just my cashes. It’s the way I’ve been describing hands. I’m no longer leaving out important information. I’m noting things naturally that I failed to notice completely before:
and if everything is feeling good—that is, if I’m thinking through things the right way, making the right decisions, playing hands well, not if I’m winning—April
I imagine myself as I must look, perfectly windswept hair, calm gaze, poised for greatness. I smile with satisfaction. James fucking Bond. (When I later look at a photo, the jet-lagged reality is more Austin Powers.)
Yah! Baaaby!!!! Well at least Austin Powers had only been played by one actor
Maybe he cannot do it yet, but one day, his invention, that calculator of all calculators that will be known as the computer, just might. And the heart of modernity is conceived not in a laboratory but in a casino.
The beauty of Lodden Thinks is that the real, factual answer to any given query doesn’t actually matter. The game is all about perception and psychology: What does Lodden (or whoever is the target in this particular iteration) think the answer is—and can you be the one to see the world from his perspective more closely than your opponents?
So it's a social deduction from of gambling
butchered. It’s the face a parent makes when taking a bite of a cookie his first-time-baker six-year-old proudly presents, only to realize that she’s mistakenly dumped in salt instead of sugar.
