Poker is a counter-intuitive game that breaks many players. So is life. The difficulty of poker is that we can do something perfectly, maximizing our chances to win, and still lose.
We can be punished for doing something right and rewarded for doing something wrong. This directly challenges human psychology in a way that often breaks people.
In this article, I want to make a case that the skills necessary to succeed in poker are similar to the skills necessary to succeed in life.
Poker
For people who don't know poker, pay attention mostly to the probabilities I describe. Let's take Texas Hold'em as an example.
This is a game where each player is dealt two hole cards. Other players cannot see these cards. The game involves multiple betting rounds and visible community cards shared by each player, but for the sake of simplicity, let us only consider the first round of betting (pre-flop).
Poker Example
Let's say we're playing at a table with six players. There is a player to your right who appears to be a complete novice and a maniac, playing way too many hands (super loose) and betting way too aggressively. He's not a winning player and has had to buy in multiples time already.
Every time you're in the big blind (last person to act with a forced bet) and he's in the small blind (second to last with a forced bet half the size) and the table folds to him, he likes to push all his chips into the pot. The only way you can continue playing the hand is to call his massive all-in bet.
He has consistently done this five times in a row: every time the table folds to him. He appears like he's trying to bully you around and steal your forced bet whenever there's only you two left in the game.
You look down at your cards and realize you have a pair of fives:
This is generally a mediocre hand, and tends to look even more so when you're facing a massive bet. What should you do? You have two options:
---- 1. Call his all-in bet and risk a large number of chips to effectively double up.
---- 2. Fold and let him have the pot, allowing him to steal your forced bet.
Hand Range
So let's consider the information we have so far:
---- 1. We have a mediocre pair of fives.
---- 2. Our opponent appears to be a maniac and a novice.
---- 3. Our opponent has consistently made all-in bets in this situation five times in a row.
There's a fourth piece of information which naturally follows #3:
---- 4. It is very improbable that our opponent was dealt amazing cards five times in a row.
We can infer a fifth piece of information. This is not guaranteed, but is likely to be true given the information we've gathered:
---- 5. (Assumption) Our opponent is capable of making this bet given any two cards.
This last piece of information is the most crucial. This is how we determine the range of cards he could likely have. In this case, the range of cards he could have covers the entire spectrum (every possible combination of two cards).
When we consider how pocket fives fares against any two cards, we actually have a 60% chance to win. Our opponent only has a 40% chance.
So what should any sane person do when they have a 60% chance to double their money? Obviously we should call. That's a wonderful opportunity to win chips, and if we deprive ourselves of such great opportunities repeatedly, the forced betting is going to eventually dwindle away all our chips.
Bad Luck
Let's say we call his bet. We have a 60% chance to win given the information we've gathered and deduced so far.
Unfortunately, he turns over his cards and shows a pair of queens (amazing starting hand). We now have more information than before which changes the probabilities.
Pocket fives against pockets queens does not have a 60% chance of winning.
It only has a 20% chance of winning.
After dealing all the community cards, we end up losing our chips and our lucky opponent ends up winning all our them. We begrudgingly have to buy in again to continue playing.
The Crucial Question
Did we make the wrong move? This is the fundamental question that makes or breaks poker players.
Our opponent ended up showing a much better hand than we had, winning all our chips. We would have saved our stack if we simply folded. So we should have folded, right?
Wrong!!! Given the information we gathered and inferred at the time we made our decision, we had a 60% chance to double up. There was absolutely no way we could have known that our opponent had pocket queens. He was simply lucky and we were simply unlucky.
If we repeatedly take a 60% chance of success to double up our chips, then repeating this a million times over will lead to us becoming filthy rich. We should take those odds every single time. Calling was the right move given the information we had so far.
Yet many people fail to realize this and will start changing their strategy to a sub-optimal one as a result of bad luck. Sometimes even decent poker players start doing this if they have an incredible run of bad luck; they'll switch to a sub-optimal strategy and end up losing even more money as a result of playing in a way that minimizes their chance of success.
Repeat Situation
Let's say that we run into the same situation again. Now for the sixth time in a row, our opponent shoves all his chips into us from the small blind.
We now have even more information to support our assumption that he is willing to do this with any two cards.
Looking down at our two cards, we see:
K9 suited: again a mediocre hand. We now have this information:
---- 1. We have a mediocre K9 suited.
---- 2. Our opponent appears to be a maniac and a novice.
---- 3. Our opponent has consistently made all-in bets in this situation six times in a row.
---- 4. It is very improbable that our opponent was dealt amazing cards six times in a row.
---- 5. (Assumption) Our opponent is capable of making this bet given any two cards.
Against any two cards, K9 suited also has around a 60% chance of winning. Should we call or fold?
Obviously we should call again, but a lot of players here surprisingly won't. They'll be afraid of running into a better hand since they did the last time this happened with the pocket queens.
Superstition and fear ends up getting in the way of rational thought.
Life Lessons
Good poker players persevere. They stick to mathematically-optimal decision-making processes even in the face of the worst streak of bad luck. There is a life lesson to be had there.
Life is similar. Everything we do in life is filled with unknowns, since we cannot predict the future or the precise consequences of our actions. That means there's always a probability of success and failure in everything we do.
Even writing this MyTake article has a probability of failure. I might even fall out of my chair and break my arm. There is some probability of that happening, however small. If that happens and I gave into superstition and irrational thoughts, I could then conclude that writing MyTake articles is an extremely dangerous activity that should be avoided at all costs.
As silly as it would be for me to conclude this, a lot of people do something analogically equivalent in life. They can do something with some probability of failure, however small, get incredibly unlucky, and then draw very irrational conclusions from it.
Rejection
As an example of a life scenario where people draw irrational conclusions from bad luck, take the scenario of a guy who asks a girl out and is rejected. He might have a streak of bad luck and face rejection multiple times in a row.
Now he concludes that he is undesirable to every female on the planet. He decides not to ask girls out, yet complains and longs for a girlfriend.
Is choosing not to ever ask girls out again an optimal, mathematically-sound strategy to maximizing the probability of getting a girlfriend? Obviously it's not, yet there are so many irrational types out there who draw these types of conclusions from a streak of bad luck.
This is a type of thinking that forgets about probabilities and strategy. It's a type of thinking that is obsessed with previous results as exemplified by bad poker players. Such thinking is very vulnerable to being tainted by bad luck.
As a caveat, of course such a guy could potentially learn something from his rejections. He may not be using the optimal strategy in the first place. Perhaps he could change his approach, improve his appearance, or anything of that sort to maximize his probability of success.
Yet deciding not to ask girls out ever again as a result of bad luck is definitely not an optimal strategy. It's about the most sub-optimal strategy imaginable given his goals.
This applies to all sorts of rejection. A person who applies for jobs and gets rejected several times in a row might then superstitiously conclude that they're unemployable, or they can simply look at it as bad luck and persevere.
Trust Issues
People who develop trust issues are often similar to bad poker players who draw irrational, superstitious conclusions from past results.
Take a person whose goal in life is to gain valuable, devoted allies (friends and lovers). What is the optimal strategy that maximizes the probability of success? Is it:
---- 1. Start off treating people as trustworthy until they prove otherwise.
---- 2. Start off treating people as suspicious until they prove otherwise.
Which strategy is going to net the most loyal allies? It's obviously the first one.
Yet often people who start off with this strategy could face a streak of bad luck. It's not impossible to treat people with trust and end up being betrayed several times in a row by several different people.
If we run into streak of bad luck, what should we do now? Did we choose the wrong strategy by choosing to treat people as trustworthy by default?
If we obsess on the past results as a bad poker player would, the answer would be "yes". We could have avoided the grief of betrayal if we didn't start off treating people as trustworthy. Under that mindset, we might now switch to the second strategy and treat all people with suspicion until they prove themselves trustworthy and earn our trust.
Unfortunately people who do this often minimize their chances of winning any loyal allies. If we end up treating all of our friends and lovers as suspicious, snoop behind their back, and treat them with mixed hostility, then we can't expect a high probability of anyone becoming a loyal ally.
We end up depriving ourselves of what we wanted in the first place by choosing such a sub-optimal strategy.
Insanity vs. Perseverance
A lot of people define insanity as doing the same things over and over again while expecting different results.
This could very well be a decent definition, but it doesn't apply in the face of unknowns and probability. It only applies in cases where all relevant variables affecting the outcome are identical and known.
If we repeatedly place bets with a 60% chance of doubling our money but lose four times in a row, it is not insanity to keep betting and betting. It's perseverance and strategy, and the only probable outcome doing this repeatedly, provided we can afford many trials, is to come out filthy rich.
Conclusion
Life and poker are similar types of games. They can punish smart actions that maximize the chance of success and reward dumb actions that minimize it. Luck and probability is always a factor in both.
Good poker players are invulnerable to bad luck. They consistently choose smart actions that maximize their probability of success regardless of the results.
When it comes to the game of life, what type of poker player are you? Are you:
---- 1. The type to continue to favor the optimal strategy regardless of past results?
---- 2. The type to draw superstitious, fearful conclusions from past results?
For those of the second type, I recommend you start looking at things in terms of probability and strategy. It's very counter-intuitive to avoid looking at things in terms of results and only in terms of strategy. If this came easily, there wouldn't be any bad poker players.
In actuality there are far more bad poker players than good ones. This is why it can be such a profitable game for the good players.
Nevertheless, this type of thinking will become increasingly intuitive when we adopt this probability-oriented mindset, thinking strategically and mathematically when we choose our actions while simultaneously being able to shrug off bad luck.
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