luck

so anyway, i think a lot about luck. it's important to a poker player, obv., not least because you have to find the right relationship with it. in poker, two things are important to understand: one, that you cannot avoid luck--it is entrenched in the game; two, that it is your friend, because if skill alone was enough, the bad players would lose their money so quickly that they became dismayed, and quit. (the latter is taken to be true by good poker players and I think it is true: there are degens who would keep gambling even when it was hopeless, but they are not numerous enough to pay off the good players in the games that would be left if luck were removed.)

this is not a poker post, btw, because there is a leap you can make here.

i do not win money at lowlimit poker because i'm luckier than other players. i win because i have a better idea of how lucky i might be than my opponents do, and play accordingly.

life is also like that. you often hear about entrepreneurs who "took risks". but i think that they rarely have taken much risk. they simply made the value they could expect out of the situations they were in. that's different. (that's not to say that no one takes risks, but there are different sorts of risktaking: when i push blind v blind with less than 10BB into a big blind that i believe will fold too much, i am only taking a small risk (that he calls with a hand that is better than mine and i don't suck out), and even though the reward is fairly small, it's one worth taking). most entrepreneurs, if you analyse what they did, did this too: they "risked" other people's money. often, they simply took advantage of situations that were nothing to do with them. not that they weren't skilled: spotting a good situation is how you become "lucky" in the first place, unless you are simply handed it on a plate, which many are, although they do not recognise it. (someone who becomes a lawyer or doctor will tend to put their success down to hard work -- and no doubt they worked hard -- but will ignore that they had the opportunity because of their privileged upbringing. it's not even true that everyone can work hard: a child that is poorly fed will be more likely to suffer from ADHD and other disorders, for instance.)

my opponents lose often because they allow themselves to take many small bad risks. they will limp into pots with weak holdings and try to get lucky. this is the worst thing you can do in poker, because "luck" can be quantified. not so much for you personally but for the array of cases of which you are one. Your QJ will not win you the ton of chips you hope for very often, but will lose you many more too often. (this can be quantified because you can in principle figure every board that will come and count how often you will beat other holdings. because you do not know what the other players hold, you cannot know how likely you are to win or lose, but you can know the range of how lucky you can expect to be.) the second part is very important in sitngoes. you will hit a Q or J some of the time, and that will cause you to lose more when the other guy has a stronger hand. in this situation, you've been lucky (you hit the flop about one in three times) but you don't know how lucky you've been (because you have no idea how often someone else might have a stronger hand--it's a skill in poker, maybe the predominant skill, to be able to figure this out). imagine. if you do not know how lucky you've been, you may turn out to have been unlucky.

in life, this is like thinking that you have more ability than you do in an area, or incorrectly predicting the chances of a good resolution to things you do, so that you overextend yourself. we all know people who believed they would be fortunate in the real estate market: they bought a house, taking a risk by indebting themselves over much, then to their horror found it did not rise in value, but swiftly fell, leaving themselves with an asset with a negative value, and worse, because the swift fall is usually the outcome of rate rises, one that they could not pay for.

of course, i complain about my luck. nearly all poker players do. that's because i want to be luckier than i am. i want to buck the trend. remember that i said that you are one of an array of cases? well, that's true, but there's no reason that you must suffer from chance. you can do much better than expected (and somewhat worse). it would even out over enough trials, but life may not be long enough for you to have enough. most players, and most people, have the average luck. i haven't used a luck analyser, as many players do (so that they can post the graphs and whine about them -- personally i doubt the maths are sound because no one ever posts a graph that shows that they've been monstrously lucky lol), but i expect mine has been pretty much as expected. my aces probably get cracked once in five all in with another pair; my opponents hit their flushes one in three times when they flop a draw and get it in with me; and so on. it feels worse than it is, because the losses are more salient than the wins.

so it is in life, of course. we rarely count our blessings. when we look at each other, it's often much easier to note what's wrong than it is to put our finger on what is right. we take the right for granted. we expect to be lucky. well, you do. i expect to be unlucky. that's why i'm not very good at taking risks: i miscalculate the downside in the same way my opponents at poker miscalculate their upside. it's funny. i'll shove my 10BB, knowing that it's going to hurt if i get called (because mostly if i get called, i'm fuxxord), because i understand how unlucky i'll need to be to lose out. yet in life, i'm presented with risks that have much smaller downsides (as small as mild embarrassment) and blow them into huge obstacles.

but, you know, you wouldn't push 83o BvB and i wouldn't either six months ago. so i can learn, right?

posted by Dr Zen @ 4:34 pm