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October 26 - November 17, 2021
Presence is far more difficult than the path of least resistance.
As an adult, I wanted to disentangle just how much of where I’d ended up had been my own doing as opposed to a twist of fate—like so many before me, I wanted to know how much of my life I could take credit for and how much was just stupid luck.
Here was the cruel truth: we humans too often think ourselves in firm control when we are really playing by the rules of chance.
Our experiences trump everything else, but mostly, those experiences are incredibly skewed: they teach us, but they don’t teach us well.
We don’t often question the role of chance in the moments it protects us from others and ourselves. When chance is on our side, we disregard it: it is invisible. But when it breaks against us, we wake to its power.
For poker, unlike quite any other game, mirrors life.
“If we consider games of chance immoral, then every pursuit of human industry is immoral; for there is not a single one that is not subject to chance, not one wherein you do not risk a loss for the chance of some gain.” THOMAS JEFFERSON, “THOUGHTS ON LOTTERIES,” 1826
We judge the poker player for gambling; we respect the stockbroker for doing the same thing with far less information. In some ways, poker players gamble less than most.
in poker, you can win with the worst hand and you can lose with the best hand. In every other game in a casino—and in games of perfect information like chess and Go—you simply must have the best of it to win. No other way is possible. And that, in a nutshell, is why poker is a skilled endeavor rather than a gambling one.
betting on uncertainty is one of the best ways of understanding it.
When we err, we are much more tolerant than when we think someone else has gone astray.
It’s easy to have an illusion of skill when you’re not immediately called out on it through feedback.
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.
politicians have never exactly been known for their logic or evenhandedness.
Every tactic you use, you have to ask what it accomplishes and whether the same thing could have been accomplished more cheaply.
Not playing scared is not the same thing as being aggressive. It means not making decisions because you’re afraid. It’s not about being passive or aggro. You can be way too aggro and still scared. And being passive can be strong.”
Probability has amnesia: each future outcome is completely independent of the past. But we persist in thinking that its memory is not only there but personal to us.
Doing well at poker isn’t just about playing well; it’s also about playing well relative to everyone else—and even with the best players, you can still lose because chance can be a bitch.
Vegas is the true America. The city of hope. With help from lady luck or the strength of your own pluck, anyone can make it.
And I realize that in Vegas, games and life, fantasy and fact, have become so fused, so seamlessly connected, that it’s no longer quite possible to tell one from the other. This is an adult playground on a lifelike scale.
The best professionals know when to lower the gamble, not just when to ratchet it up.
The reality is that more poker players than not go broke—even the pros.
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 the expression of a certain sentiment, no matter how innocuous it seems, can change your learning, your thinking, your mindset, your mood, your whole outlook.
There is no such thing as objective reality. Every time we experience something, we interpret it for ourselves.
This may serve as something 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. Potential opportunities pass you by; people get tired of hearing you complain, so your social network of support and opportunities also dwindles; you don’t even attempt certain activities because you think, I’ll lose anyway, why try?; your mental health suffers; and the spiral continues.
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. These are the seeds of resilience, of being able to overcome the bad beats that you can’t avoid and mentally position yourself to be prepared for the next time. People share things with you: if you’ve lost your job, your social network thinks of you when new jobs come up; if you’re recently divorced or separated or bereaved, and someone single who may
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Bad beats drag you down. They focus your mind on something you can’t control—the cards—rather than something you can, the decision.
And thinking how much emotional energy I could have saved and invested productively had I just followed that simple piece of advice: no bad beats. Forget they ever happened.
More so than anywhere else, what you find at the poker table is as close as it gets to the fiction that is the American dream.
He was an excellent player, but luck was also on his side. Somewhere out there, I know, are the anti-Fedors: the people on the other end of that distribution who got such bad luck at the start of their foray into the world of poker that they never even realized they had the skill to continue.
Blockers improve your probabilities, but they are still far from certain. And what solvers and highly algorithmic and mathematical approaches sometimes end up doing is giving you a false sense of certainty: because the math tells me this, I’m more confident (correctly so), but perhaps a bit too confident given the extra data. And so I may fail to take in new data—the behavior of a player at the table, say—as I make my decision because I have a slightly misplaced sense of security. He can’t possibly call me here, goes the thinking.
“The good thing about poker is there’s enough luck that you never have to admit it’s your fault you lost.”)
One of the most often-cited quotes about luck comes from Louis Pasteur: chance favors the prepared mind. What people often forget, though, is that the full statement is quite different: “Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind.” We tend to focus on that last part, the prepared mind. Work hard, prepare yourself, so that when chance appears, you will notice it. But that first part is equally crucial: if you’re not observing well, observing closely to begin with, no amount of preparation is enough. The one is largely useless without the other.
Prepared mind or not, in the absence of observation it matters little.
You’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening; you’re lucky because you’re alert to them when they do.
Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has
Degen, short for degenerate gambler, can be a verb, I’ve learned, not just a noun. To degen is to gamble a little harder than one should, to push an edge a little beyond where that edge actually happens to lie. If you hit the craps table on your way from the tournament, you’re degenning.
the human always gets in the way of the mathematical model.
Someone can always be confidently wrong, even about their own mind.
“Generally, the people who cash the most are actually losing players. You can’t be a winning player by min cashing. It’s just not possible.”
But our denial belies the fact that we often don’t really know why we make decisions—and we justify them with objective-sounding reasons even when, in reality, we were acting based on faulty intuitive reads.
“Confident people move from point A to point B quickly. There’s not a lot of hesitation,” Blake says. “When you’re at the top of your range in poker”—that is, at the top of the range of possible card combinations you’d hold in a given situation—“you’re often going to do that, too.”
People aren’t a combination of traits. They are a mosaic of reactions to and interactions with situations.
Boyd was a fighter pilot in the air force, and he invented OODA to describe a dynamic that he’d learned through his years in combat: to succeed, you need to constantly observe, orient, decide, and act. OODA.
Mastery is always a struggle for balance. How much time do you devote to the craft, and how much to yourself?
the craft of poker certainly cannot be mastered without self-knowledge, self-care, and self-reflection.
“Are you going to fire again?” comes the chorus from the pros you meet on your way out the door, the pros who’ve been doing this for years and have bankrolls far larger than your annual income. “You should really fire again. This is such a great field.” And so you say, yes, why not, and you fire again—not quite realizing that what makes the field so great, at least for now, is you. You’re the great field. You’re the one who is going to get slaughtered. Over and over and over.
there’s a difference between knowing what you’re supposed to do and actually having the nerve to do it in the moment.
Here’s a free life lesson: seek out situations where you’re a favorite; avoid those where you’re an underdog. This doesn’t mean never take shots. Shot-taking is a tried-and-true thing in poker, where someone plays a tournament at a higher level than before, enters a cash game at higher stakes than before, to see if she can hack it. If you never take shots, you never know when you’re ready to move up.
Don’t play above your weight class after you’ve just been punched down.
