Bad beats and better decisions
Life is like poker
I just wrote about the downsides of gambling. So, of course, here I’ll talk about why poker is a metaphor for how to succeed in life!
Poker primer
You’ll understand this post even if you aren’t familiar with poker, but a short overview of the main points could still be helpful. From Wikipedia:
Two cards, known as hole cards, are dealt face down to each player, and then five community cards are dealt face up in three stages. The stages consist of a series of three cards (“the flop”), later an additional single card (“the turn”), and a final card (“the river”). Each player seeks the best five-card poker hand from any combination of the seven cards: the five community cards and their two hole cards. Players have betting options to check, call, raise, or fold. Rounds of betting take place before the flop is dealt and after each subsequent deal. The player who has the best hand and has not folded by the end of all betting rounds wins all of the money bet for the hand, known as the pot.
Poker is a game of skill and luck. The best poker players don't win every hand, even against total amateurs. You could have a huge skill advantage, but if your opponent has the best possible hand (“the nuts”), they won’t fold. Poker is not like chess, where top players beat casual players nearly every time. The cards are dealt randomly, so the outcome of every poker hand is a product of chance. At a table with lots of players, one will win only a fraction of the total hands. This makes winning a poker hand a relatively low-probability event.
Other low-probability events in life might include getting a job offer for a competitive position or getting a date with your crush. We’re human, so we try to make (seemingly) low-probability events happen anyway.
In the long run, skilled poker players become more successful than less-skilled players. And although there are exceptions, people who develop skills eventually have more success in low-probability domains than people who do not develop those skills.
If poker is similar to other areas of life, then maybe the ways to succeed in poker are also ways to succeed in life.
Process over outcomes
Losing sucks. But you can lose in lots of different ways, and some of them are easier to deal with than others. Let’s say your sports team loses, and it’s clear why you lost. Maybe your team was physically outmatched or out-schemed. Or maybe you can blame the refs, as fans do. If you know why you lost, then however it happened, you will have gained some clarity, and maybe a little comfort.
Losing in poker isn’t always like that. Sometimes it’s obvious why you lost (don’t listen to your roommate James when he tells you to jam all-in as a bluff). But when you go on an extended cold streak in poker, it can be difficult to figure out whether you’re losing because of bad luck or because of fundamental errors and holes in your game.
So I try to pay more attention to the decisions I make in each hand and less attention to the outcome, as hard as that is.
Quads over quads
There’s a famous hand between poker players Andrew Robl and Toby Lewis that’s a great example of this.1
Robl was dealt pocket nines and Lewis got pocket queens, which are both good starting hands.
The flop always has three cards. This time, it came two queens and a 9.
Robl had to move first. With a full house, a very strong hand, he made a bet of 18,000 chips.
Lewis responded with a raise to 42,000 chips.
The commentators considered Lewis’s raise to be a big mistake. That’s because on the flop, Lewis had the board absolutely crushed. In poker, a good flop is when you make top pair or better. A really good flop is when you make three of a kind. Lewis had four of a kind (or “quads”). He had the absolute best hand you could have in that situation.
Because Lewis had the other two queens in his hand, it was impossible for Robl to have a strong pair. In fact, there were very few strong hands Robl could have in that situation. By raising the flop, Lewis would likely make Robl fold the vast majority of the time. If Lewis had called (i.e., matched) Robl’s bet instead, Robl might have been tempted to fire another bet on the turn, which would obviously be good for Lewis.
Instead, Lewis raised. Robl called the raise, matching Lewis’s bet, with the only hand that could reasonably call a raise. Robl made quads on the river, but worse quads than Lewis, and Lewis took all of Robl’s chips. Lewis’s iffy decision to raise the flop paid off.
And in life, bad decisions are sometimes rewarded, and good decisions sometimes go unrewarded. You might present yourself in an excellent light during a job interview but lose out to someone who did just a little better or who caught a lucky break. Was the hiring manager just in a bad mood when they read your application? It’s hard to know.
Meanwhile, it’s possible to play a hand perfectly and still lose. Maybe that’s why people cling to superstitions: they make us feel like things are in our control. Poker players have lots of superstitions—favorite hands, stacking chips in a certain way, rubbing cards before looking at them for good luck. But superstitious or not, good poker players win in the long run because they can shake off bad outcomes—as long as they made the right decisions along the way. Over time, the accumulation of good and bad decisions matters.
Spread those eggs around!
It’s clear that I shouldn’t get too emotionally invested in any one poker hand, because then I’ll care too much about the outcome. So how do you do that?
If you play online poker (as I’m sure you do, dear reader), you may know that you can play more than one table at a time (“multi-tabling”). The purpose of multi-tabling is mostly to see more hands per hour so that if you are skilled, you make money faster. But by seeing so many more hands, multi-tabling can also have the effect of reducing the emotional impact of any one hand. If a really nice starting hand doesn’t look so nice after the flop, just fold and move your attention to another table.
This applies to all sorts of things in life. To avoid getting too wrapped up in one research project, it’s important to have multiple “irons in the fire,” as my advisor would say. If one study doesn’t pan out, there’s always another one to focus on. One job application fell through? Hopefully there’s more lined up. Diversify your investment portfolio. Make friends in lots of places. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. This even applies to sports fandom. I tune in when my teams are doing well and pay less attention when they’re stinkin’ it up.
So life can be like poker, and you succeed by a) focusing on process over outcomes and b) not becoming too attached to specific pursuits. In some ways, this advice is similar to classic research on “self-complexity”—people whose identity is complex and varied, who engage in many hobbies and pursuits, may deal with stress better than those who maintain a narrow vision of themselves.
In conclusion
I wasn’t sure how to end this post. I didn’t want it to sound too preachy. If anything, I’m writing this as a reminder to myself. In all phases of life, process over outcomes is hard to remember.
It’s hard because social media show us a whole lot of outcomes and not a lot of processes. It’s also hard because outcomes are so much more rewarding than processes. It feels good to accomplish things. It feels… less good to take solace in the process when the outcome fails to materialize. Perhaps that’s a part of our nature as beings that exist ultimately because of an outcome (reproduction), regardless of the process.
Rejection stings, and missing out on a promotion hurts. It’s natural to focus on outcomes even when the process is well-aligned. Focusing on the process is not intuitive, and it requires us to focus on the long term over the short term. It requires practice and discipline, and it requires us to reframe what we perceive as failure.
Alright, I guess that’s it! See you in a week or two for another post!
The commentary of the hand is pretty funny and worth a watch.