Making good decisions in life involves a specific skill set. For example, you have to be able to identify all the variables, weight them relative to each other, and determine their effects on the spectrum of possible outcomes. If you can’t do this in life, I don’t see how you can do it in poker.
But I think poker can help improve your decision process. You get immediate feedback, which isn’t usually the case in real life. It’s also easier to see and understand that making the correct decisions doesn’t always mean you will get the desired outcome. In poker or in life, you can do everything right and still fail.
So I would say that working on your decision process in poker can help you in the real world, but those who don’t have a clue what should go into real world decisions will just make bad ones in either setting.
Who knew Immanuel Kant had an opinion about games of chance? Anna Konnekova paraphrases here:
“In his Critique of Pure Reason, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant proposes betting as an antidote to one of the great ills of society: false confidence bred from an ignorance of the probabilistic nature of the world, from a desire to see black and white where we should rightly see gray.”
I’m thinking that losing a few bets helps cure magical thinking. Any comments?
I think so. For a start, to do well on RP you need to be able to do mental arithmetic calculations very quickly to determine whether you have favorable odds to make a call or a fold.
I would expect those players who are most successful on RP to be, on average, more successful in their employment careers, because they will have made a decision to learn how to win at poker, and executed a plan to that end.
Kant was right, but in any kind of betting, the odds will tend to be against you, otherwise the counterparty would not take the bet. The key to winning in any kind of betting is to get the money in when the odds are in your favor.
But most bettors never learn.
“Life is just a bowl of Jello.”
" I’m stuck like a dope
With a thing called hope…"
Another quote, with a metaphor I appreciate as it helps me approach a move with deliberation:
“Every tactic you use, you have to ask what it accomplishes and whether the same thing could have been accomplished more cheaply. Do you need to send in the whole battalion where a handful of soldiers would do? Is this the job for a scout—a tiny probe bet? Do you need to pull out the big guns and show up with your whole army?”
Another week, another quote. With luck, I won’t put the same quote up twice! lol
“Be solid, fundamentally. Cultivate the solid image. And then add the hyper-aggression, but at the right place and the right time. Not always, not continuously, but thinkingly.”
I had a boss once who praised “planfulness.” Same thing as “thinkingly,” I believe. Lots of players wing it, “feel it.” There’s something for the brain to do in poker, I’m convinced!
Here’s another quote: (Although I finished the book weeks ago, I’m glad I saved highlights for this purpose.)
“Mike Tyson said it best. ‘Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.’ And he’s right. Until you go through a month of everything going wrong, you won’t know whether you have what it takes. You will never learn how to play good poker if you get lucky—it’s as simple as that. You just won’t.”
Being lucky isn’t a bad thing, unless you depend on luck.
Being unlucky will pass, unless you think it won’t. As Joe Clark once said, “Defeat is not bitter unless you swallow it.”
The key to growth is critical self-evaluation.
When you win by getting lucky, nothing is learned.
When you lose by getting unlucky, nothing is learned.
Mistakes present the only real opportunities for learning.
Of course, without a solid understanding of the “mechanics” of the game, we can’t identify our mistakes. Brutally honest self-evaluation is the way to discover our mistakes so they can be corrected, and correcting our mistakes is the only true path forward.
“Poker isn’t just about calibrating the strength of your beliefs. It’s also about becoming comfortable with the fact that there’s no such thing as a sure thing—ever.”
