What Poker Can Teach Us

While i despise the whole how-i-learned-life-from-poker flood of blog entries the last couple of years, it's refreshing to see someone stick to the social aspect here.

There's nothing worse than reading an article by someone who's played poker less than 1000 hours in their life saying: "you gotta know when to hold them and know when to fold them. I learned this the hard way when I started company XYZ and...blah blah blah..."

First of all given the popularity in poker in the US and how it is viewed as a sign of masculinity it is not at all surprising that a lot of successful men used to play poker. A lot of men play poker, period. So I am not sure being a good poker player should be viewed as a precursor to success. Even if it is, it is definitely not a positive one. If it is a precursor of success it probably means that good poker players are probably good at manipulating other people and lying, that's all.

Here is what poker taught me: - people can be bastards, and are generally not to be trusted. And I am not referring to the sanctioned lying that is accepted in poker (i.e., bluffing). There is a lot of shit behaviour in poker games outside of that narrow accepted form of lying. - never never drink alcohol and do anything important. In poker you quickly discover that even one beer can cloud your judgement even if you feel completely fine.

Poker taught me how to kill my risk-aversion. Or I suppose it taught me that I'm naturally not very risk-averse. You start to see your decisions in life as choosing a probability distribution over a set of outcomes. And then if you can reasonably assess the value of those outcomes (using whatever metric you choose, e.g. money in poker, or perhaps some more general "utility" in life) you can try to maximize your expected value.

Now don't get me wrong, you can be risk-averse and still analyze decisions this way. But poker helps you start to understand how you feel about things like investments and probable payoffs, and it helps you deal with loss. It helps you set up a framework for decision-making. After that you will relatively quickly discover how risk-averse you are.

One thing poker taught me: don't ever sit next to the author of this article. Also, don't ever get caught in an elevator with James Woods. Both were for the same reason.

Here are some lessons I've learned from poker:

http://www.markpneyer.com/wp/?p=527

I think the author makes an extremely far-fetched parallel between prominent people throughout history being excellent poker players. Could it be the other way round: being an extraordinary personality would make one good at activities that require careful reasoning/observation etc. ?

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http://www.primerealadstate.com/

What poker taught me, was that video poker sucks. That's basically the be all and end all of what poker can teach, beside perhaps the classic 'everyone is a liar'.