Poker, Probability & Perspective: Learning to Accept Uncertainty in Poker and Life

income at various points and times. But more even than that, it has shaped a lot of the way that Paul and I talk about things, and then I think, at least for me, and I think somewhat for Paul, a lot of how we understand the world. It of course, also comes up from time to time in some of our favorite stories and TV shows and movies, sometimes portrayed well sometimes well not. So we're gonna be discussing that today, and we're not as much going to talk about poker

on screen, although that will definitely reference it. We're more going to be talking about how what poker can help you on understand about the world and about things like probability and uncertainty, and why, at least for me at least, why I think that is such an important issue that does come up in the stories we talk about so much today. So, Paul, why don't you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about your background with poker.

And that's how I learned poker when I was like probably eleven or twelve or something, which I think is funny because you know, it's like, people think of gambling as like eighteen and up, twenty one and up and whatever, and I think for serious sums of money, that's reasonable.

But I think the certain fundamentals behind gambling and wagering I think are actually fundamental to understanding reality and decision making in a lot of ways, and so you know, in high school we played some of those wild wild card games, you know. And then shortly after high school, Rounders came out and I saw the preview, actually the movie didn't even come out. I saw the preview and

was like, I'm gonna do that. And you know, I was living on my own in New York City, in Manhattan and was playing live poker and supporting myself doing that, and which seems like a ridiculous thing unless you know what my rent was, which was not standard New York City rent. But but you know, I did that for a while, and then I played some online poker but kind of went away from poker when the poker boom

happened in like two thousand and three. Came back to it in six and played super seriously from like six until twelve. I'd say, like that was my primary to only a source of income. I then did various poker related things, like I wrote some poker books, I made a lot of coaching videos, I coached individual students, and you know, a lot of my life was around poker

at the time. This was right after I stopped teaching martial arts full time, and then I kind of went away from poker and kind of came in and out. But I did work at a casino actually for a year and a half and had almost every job in the poker room, including one that they didn't previously have, which was actually you play on your own money, but

on certain hours to help keep games going. And then you know, now I play primarily online poker, but I enjoy all forms of the game, and I would say that, you know, poker really informs so much of my worldview to the point where I think there's a like, maybe a couple other things that are on a similar level in terms of sort of how they've affected how I view the world.

poker at an early age. We played for matchticks, and her idea of it was, you know, she didn't want me necessarily to be a gambler, but you know, in the world she had grown up with and that she was part of as a as a professional, she was a lawyer at a time when it was still pretty new for women to be lawyers, especially for she was one of the first women to go to She was one of the first women to go to Columbia Law School, and in her mind, it was you know, look, you're

gonna get invited to poker nights. It's a social thing that people do. It's a good game to know. And I've had kind of a very different journey around poker with Paul, but one that is often intersected in that. For me, as Paul said, there are many different reasons to play poker. For me, it has always primarily been a way to have fun. I was part of the

high school games that Paul talked about. Many things will not be said about because in the case in the law enforcement agents, so listening to this, no, it wasn't that bad, but you know, and I really love those

I started poker nights in college. At various points in my adult life, I've had a regular like Tuesday night, friends come over to play poker, And for me, it has actually served a very similar role in my life as friends come over to play D and D or friends come over to play matchic the gathering or a board game night. It is a way for friends to come together where the money was a way of helping making it interesting and creating stakes so that people weren't

just you know, going crazy all the time. But it

was never really about the money. As I said, I have had times where poker has helped supplement my income one point in about six months where it was my entire income, but I didn't have the skill level to really sustain that for that much longer than that, especially it's been a little more than months, but you know, various points in my life, but for the moment, like at one point when Paul and I were talking about doing a poker podcast or a poker website of different kinds,

I would always infer to myself as the poker hobbyist, because for me, that's what I always loved, and so I love going to a casino. Last week, actually I was at a casino in Philadelphia, and I wound up playing six hours of poker and losing a total of four dollars because I went down and then I went back up, and then I went down and up, and and I didn't look at it as, oh, no, I

had a terrible night. I lost four dollars. I looked at it as I just had six hours of great entertainment at a casino fore and paid seventy five cents an hour. Like that was you know to me, like and we also counted in like the drinks I was getting in the water, and then you know, all it it was worth it. It was a good price to pay.

poker is the key to enlightenment. Meant by any means, it's that I think there are a lot of things in the world that that people really struggle with or that that and I think, especially like the writers and the characters of the stories we love often have trouble with around understanding probability and also understanding uncertainty chaos, if you want to call it that. That feels very relevant, and I think that's kind of what we're wanting to

talk about today. And you know, I think this is a topic that can get a little self helpy, and we don't mean it like that, but I do think there's some elements of especially in this you know, probability and polls and statistics are becoming very important verations in our world today, and I know it's something that Paul and I have a lot of strong feelings about, and so that's certainly going to be an area of focus. But this isn't about, you know, trying to say you

should live your lives the way we do. Don't definitely live your life the way I do, but just about like giving you some other ideas of how to think about these things, and particularly in terms of like the stories and the characters and also in our non world.

inform you have available at the time. You can't think about you should have made a different decision with some information you didn't possess or weren't able to acquire, and then the outcome, like, the better your decisions are on average, you'll get better outcomes. But there are also many things

that are outside of your control. Right and poker, it's what cards you get dealt, what cards come out after your initial cards are dealt, how your opponents respond to your bets, what cards they get dealt, and these you can't control these things, and so there has to be an acceptance of I'm just going to try and make good decisions, take good actions given the information I have, and then the outcomes will be what they are. And if I keep making good decisions, the better my decisions

are on average, the better my outcomes will be. But that doesn't mean a piano won't fall on my head, right, Like, I mean, you know, if you're walking in the forest, a piano probably won't fall on your head, but like a tree mte exactly that that might be more likely than a piano falling on your head anywhere than outside a piano throwing place, you know, I don't know, there's some game show where they like throw a piano off a conveyor belt or something, and like, if you're standing

down there, you actually have a pretty high probability of having a piano land on your head. But so I would recommend like don't stand there, right, But I mean, overall, the main point just being like, you know, there's things you can control and there's things that you can't, and being able to figure out which of those are which and just do the best with the things you can control, and like that is kind of super self helpy, I

think in some ways. But it's also just like it's also kind of obvious in a lot of ways, but it's not always obvious. What, right, the real ramifications of that are.

it mean that something unfair or something like that. As well as I think there's also a lot of thoughts that I have about why is it that we have so much trouble accepting again, whether you want to call it randomness or uncertainty or chaos or whatever it is. Let me back up though and talk about because I think we're diving into some of the concepts from poker, but that some people who don't know the game may not understand as much because certainly poker is at least

I don't want to get that. There's a whole bunch of debate about whether poker is gambling or not. And poker is distinctly different than most other games at a casino in that you're not playing against the house, you're playing against other players. So like if I sit down a blackjack or craps, I can tell myself I have a very good system, but statistically I am never going to be the favorite, whereas in poker, like there's there's different degrees of that.

know what the individual outcome is. But if you know what cards you have, you know what cards are left in the deck, right, you can know how likely you are to make a flush with one card to come. And if you're putting in, you know, one hundred dollars in order to win two hundred and there's one card to come, and you're trying to make a flush and that's the only way you can win the pot. That's not a good bet. But if you're putting in ten dollars to win one hundred, like, that's a very good bet.

it roughly easier. Stand, you have a one in five chance of winning, but if you win, you will get ten times your money.

In the long run, you know, the one out of five times you get paid is going to make you more money than you lost the four times out of five that you lost, and so your profit is eventually going to come. And that that's what's different. Like, you know, to take the lottery, for example, you could buy an infinite number of lottery tickets and you still would wind up losing because the one time you hit the lottery it doesn't actually make up for all the other times

you could. You could do it, and so that's and I think that's what you were kind of getting at before, about the like you do the small things all the time each time knowing that like that, this is about how you think about a repeatable, every day kind of a thing or you know, instead of just like the one decision you have to make once with with you know, without any repeatability.

to be a win or a loss. And if you're only doing one thing one time, then you know your chances it kind of it doesn't function the same way, right, Like there's when you play enough volume, when you make a large volume of decisions with certain you know, with positive expected value, over the long run, the likelihood of having a negative overall outcome just goes down and down

and down until it becomes vanishingly small. You can be very unlucky, which would be you know, having negative outcomes for a very long time, like a length of time that's shocking to most people. Right. But the longer the time, the less likely it is, provided that you know you're getting your money in good that you're you're making positive effective plays, right.

One of the concepts that people playing poker or gambling or just talking about chance in general is the idea that dice have no memory. Right, talk a little bit about what that means in terms of like probability and expectation.

we assume a fair coin. Well, it's still fifty to fifty, right, because the coin has no memory unless there's like something about the way you're flipping it, and actually there's something about like physics. It's not really fifty to fifty even with a fair cat. It's there's a whole thing apparently that's like recently been. But like if we assume just something's fifty to fifty, it happens once, then it's still

fifty to fifty. You do it again, it's still gonna be fifty to fifty every time, right, And so that means, you know, the chances of heads heads is the same as tails. Tails is the same as heads. Tails is the same as tails heads, right, each one of those has has the same chance of being a sequence of events. Blackjack the reason it's a little different, and I'm not like saying like, oh, go out and learn to count

cards and play blackjack. Casinos actually don't really mind people trying to count cards because most people are terrible at it, that's right. But so the thing in blackjack is the deck does have a memory unless it's continuous shuffle. Because they shuffle deck, you deal some cards, you deal a hand,

and then those cards are dead. So now there's a new state of the deck, right, Like we're playing with a different deck, and I know Blackchick usually plays many decks, and there's there's a whole thing, and.

It doesn't remember where the cards are as long as it's a fair shuffle, right and you know somebody's not putting, you know, an ace on the bottom and then dealing from the bottom or anything like that. The deck has no memory. So each you know, this is the concept of like independent events compared to the pendent events, and if each explain what those mean, right, So if each event is independent, it means that the outcome of the first event has no bearing, no influence on the outcome

of the second event. Right, Like, if you roll two dice, you know there's a one in thirty six chance that you're gonna get snake eyes. Right, you're gonna get two ones, the same as the chances of two six is a three and a four is different, or it's rolling a seven is more likely, right, because there's more ways of doing that. But each roll of the dice is an independent event. Whereas, if I mean trying to think of a good example, there are things that are not as

gambling related. But like let's say two people play a game and then you play a second game, you can view those as independent events. And if they're pure chance and everything's truly reset, they will be independent events. But let's say you and I play a game of chess and one of us wins, one of us loses, and then that affects the mental state of the two of us. Right, That can then make the second game not really an independent event because the first game, the outcome of it

doesn't necessarily directly affect the second event. But we're human, right, and so our ability to play could be changed. Now largely I think games played after one another are considered kind of independent events, but they're probably not truly and if well, five in a row.

cards that are particularly good. So that I think is a good example of where, yeah, the second the second outcome is very dependent on the first outcome.

We want to try and make exploits, we want to adjust to the other person's strategy, Who's then going to try and adjust to ours, and we're trying to counteradjust, and that makes hands not independent events in terms of the strategical approach give, assuming that we're actually adjusting to one another's play, but it does make them independent events in terms of the dealing of the cards.

everything from just the energy level, the power level of the people, how they're feeling that day, how distracted they are, whether they're sick, what you know, does one of them fight better when there's a lot of like rubble around, or you know, do better when it's all clear ground, Like, there are so many variables that go into these kind of things, you know, And one of the most famous that gets talked about, or one of the ones that gets most infamously talked about, I think, is the fight

in which in Phantom Menace sorry is the fight in the Force Awakens, the Force awakens, thank you, in which Ray defeats Kylo Ren, And people will often look at that and be like, well, but how could that happen because you know, Kyler Wren beat this other person all this kind of stuff, when it's like, well, he's grievously wounded already from something that happened earlier in the fight, Like, yeah, that's not a fight in a particular. I think this

is true in Cobra Kai as well. Is not just you know, this person's the seven, this person is the six, so the seven will always defeat the six. There are so many random variables that are going to be different every time.

in quickly on the person who's big and slow, but like the person who's big and slow can maybe get past the person with long reach because like the whatever the person long reach is using, like doesn't actually stop

the big person. Right, Like this is a super contrived example, but like the point is, like you can have kind of a rock paper scissors scenario where it's like, yes, player A has an advantage on player B, player B has an advantage on player C, and player C has an advantage on player A. Not to mention, like, if someone's a six and someone's a seven on a good day, the six is better than the seven because like, performance is not constant either, right, when somebody's rattled, when somebody

just didn't get a good night's sleep, when when somebody's injured, there's all sorts of reas.

it's a desired outcome. But the problem arises when we choose a strategy that we thought was good, We apply the strategy, and then, because of chance, the strategy doesn't succeed, don't We don't get the desired outcome, right, And then there's a mental decision, Oh, well that wasn't the result I wanted, so that must have been the wrong strategy. Like as if you know, you put in ten dollars to one hundred dollars with a flush draw and you didn't get there. You said, oh, that was that was bad.

I did the wrong thing. You know. It's like, no, you've got a very likely bad outcome after making a good decision, and that's super common and it's you know, the good decisions are not always going to get you good results. Like in poker, you can play well and get bad results. You can play poorly and get good results in the shorter term, right in the longer term.

For looking at you know, poker over like a month, two months, six months, a year, five years, you know, a long run, tens hundreds of thousands of hands, millions of hands. Even if your results are bad, you're doing something wrong almost certainly right over a longer and the longer period of time and the worse the results, the more likely it is that you've got an issue in

your strategy. And for what it's worth, basically everybody can always be improving their strategies like poker, in most games like outside of like Tic tac toe, usually there's more you can learn, right and you know, fighting, so you know, results oriented thinking is basically reasoning backwards from well, this

was the result. Therefore there was something wrong with the strategy, you know, and sometimes there is something wrong with the strategy, but it was still the right decision because you didn't have the information right, Like you're trying to make a bluff and it's a totally reasonable spot to make a bluff given what you know. But then your opponent calls you with some hand that seems super ridiculous, and you realize, oh, this person just doesn't know how to throw away a hand.

They're never folding if they called me with this hand right right. Therefore, in the future, I'm going to adjust my strategy. But that's not because it didn't work. It's because I've acquired new information and the information wasn't this didn't work, It was this person made some ridiculous call down that now I want to adjust my strategy. There are other hands they could have called with that we'd go, oh, okay, they're supposed to call with that. That doesn't mean this was a bad strategy.

one car and it's it's done okay so far. It's a Corolla, you know, and like that I heard from somebody that this was a reasonable car to buy, and like, if it had crapped out on the first day, that doesn't necessarily mean I made a bad decision, right, Like it maybe just is super unlucky.

that information. It's like, well you should have, right, And then you learn that and you're like, Okay, in the future, make sure that I check this out, but like you can check all the boxes and then it's just like you're you're just trying to maximize your probabilities, right, like the odds of a good outcome, and sometimes you don't get the good outcome anyway, and sometimes like you do

something bad. This is actually a big one. Is like somebody makes a bad decision and then nothing bad happens, and so then that reinforces the oh, yeah, I can keep making this bad decision. You know. It's like somebody drinks a lot and then they go drive and they're like, oh, I got home fine, you know, yeah, And that's I think a big danger with things that have a small chance of going horribly awry right right where you can everything can be fine time and time and time again.

But then like the one time if you you know, if you do that one time, and say you have a one percent, five percent, ten percent chance of something going of getting in a wreck right and possibly dying or killing someone, but like the chances of that worst

outcome are probably fairly small. But like, if you do that one time, I'm not saying that's fine, but the chances of getting away with it and being okay are much better than if you do it ten times or one hundred times, or if you do it every night for a year, Like, if it's a one percent chance, there's a really good chance. Now over three hundred and sixty five instances, you're gonna have a terrible.

let's say it's a one hundred dollar bet. If I have one hundred dollars, well, I only I don't have enough to bet enough times that the money is gonna work out for me. And someone might say, okay, well if you have five hundred dollars, then you're okay. Even then, because like I said, the law of averages takes a while to catch up. You actually have to have you know, enough of that bank roll so that eventually the you know,

the numbers will catch up with you. The idea of okay, well you know, I'm gonna spend my life savings on one particular bet, even if it's a like I have a you know, seventy percent chance to win. Okay, you may well wind up with a very good situation, or you may wind up you know, completely and utterly screwed, where the negative result is so big as to say, like,

is it worthwhile a bet? And I think that's the kind of thing there where to me, it's not just that the the one percent is going to add up, but it's the if I have this very small chance to do something truly and utterly horrible that will end my life and someone else's life, you know, something like that. Then then again that that kind of the thinking of like, well, sure,

it's not that it's the one chance. It's that even if the small chance, the damage of that small chance happening is enough to say the whole thing isn't worth it or whatever, in the same way of saying, like, is the chance of it happening make everything worth it?

amount of your bankroll to wager? But then there's also real life considerations right where you know, there's some game shows where you can essentially, you know, wager. I think like, let's make a deal. I was like, anybody want to make a deal. Who thinks they're smarter than Let's make

it enough, let's make a deal. And like some other shows where you can you basically you can calculate, like you know how much money is left out there, and you know your odds of each outcome, right, and if one of you know, there's a million dollars and a one dollar there and somebody offers you four hundred thousand dollars, you can look at it and be like, oh, well, but my expected value is half a million and fifty cents, right, So like, of course that's a plus EV gamble, Like

I get an extra one hundred thousand dollars, right compared to just getting four hundred k. But like if you look at it, and let's ignore tax implications and whatever for the moment, but like if you look at it just in terms of life ev basically it's like, well, depending on where you are in your life, Like, what is the difference between is the difference between four hundred thousand and five hundred thousand really twenty five percent of

the difference between zero and four hundred thousand, And for a lot of people that's going to be No, it's like, well, with four hundred thousand, I can buy a house, you know, yeah, I can pay off my house, or I can send like I don't know these days, what is it like two kids to college or one maybe maybe one and a half. You know, one goes to community college, one goes to a four year But like, you know, zero to four hundred thousand for many slash most people is

gonna be life changing. That extra hundred thousand. There's a diminishing utility, right right, And and so maybe it is rational to say you know what I'm gonna I'm gonna take this buy out. As a professional gambler. On some level, I find it appalling, but then I'm like, no, it

makes sense, right, it's fair. Whereas if they're like, well, I'll take one hundred thousand instead of I'm like, look, you're gonna pass up four hundred thousand dollars in ev but it's like maybe that first hundred thousand is way more important than the next four hundred and and so, you know, in poker, there is this like desire to like lock up the win because there's this like dopamine here. There's like this like emotional boost from from having a

winning session. There's like, you know, there's a oh, I don't want to bet too big on the river, Like you have a good hand, you're trying to bet, and you want to get called. But it's like the desire, the want to get called is a very emotional desire, right,

the rational desires. I want to maximize the expectation of this hand, and sometimes that's going to be a much larger bet that's actually much less likely to get called, but still on average is going to net you a lot more money, right, And you know, these are the kind of things that can they can make more sense outside of the game than in the game. And sometimes you have to ask yourself, like within poker, it's like, well, why am I playing? Is my goal to make a

lot of money over the long run? If so, I've got to go for the MAXIV option like every time, right yeah.

I should never do that if my goal is to have a really fun time at the poker table. Actually now, because now it's not just the evy of the cash, it's the huge dopamine hit that happens when I do win that card, particularly if I'm playing against Paul, and Paul goes, how can you play that against me? Which is priceless as a dopamine hit, but also just like, honestly that the three seconds of anticipation as I'm waiting

for the last are phenomenal. And I was gonna say it's kind of like a drug, and it actually is, which is exactly why gambling can become an addiction. And so again be very careful, like any kind of thrill seeking behavior can become an addiction. It's a kind of a form of dopamine addiction. Basically, maybe I don't know the neudro chemistry exactly, but like, so always be careful about that. But I think that that's another thing where you can say, like, hey, is it worthwhile to do this?

You know? And for myself, I didn't always do this when I was young and stupid, but now I will always look at my budget and go, Okay, can I pay three hundred dollars for a night of like high quality entertainment When I pay three hundred dollars to go to the theater tonight and go have a nice dinner, Yes, my budget can afford that. So I'm willing to take the three hundred dollars to the casino, possibly lose it

all or get those really fun dopamine hits. But when it becomes well, I'm playing with my rent money, or even worse, I'm playing with someone else's rent money or someone else's you know whatever money.

end the invasion, maybe it won't. But but if that's the best information, you have the chance that the Avengers will do it, even if it's like a sixty sixty or seventy percent chance, the chance that they won't is that the world is now conquered. You don't have a bankroll for that, you're under rolled. So like I'm not saying that therefore, like they should have nuked it or

kept Nick Fury was wrong. But I think that's a level of thinking that I think we don't do in our own lives enough, and that people in because I mean, watching a person do the exact same thing ten times, fail nine times and succeed in the tenth does not make for good TV, to not make for a good movie.

And so of course they have to do that. But that's why I think it's so important to understand that kind of thinking of Yeah, actually, sometimes the rational thing to do is the you know, the is not to take the big risk, because you got to think about like, what what is the what's the fallout of the big risk you're taking not playing out? And particularly and here I think is the biggest conceit of superhero movies a lot.

If the reason that you think it is not a big risk is because it's you and you know you can do it, that's a problem.

was forced to do this? It's like there were other options there if you do just give it them all, you know, But you know, and then that brings up the well people are acting under pressure, and you know when when we're looking at poker decisions, like we also have to understand like, you know, I can sit down and analyze a hand for literally hours, but let's say you know, a tight fifteen minutes, and it's like you don't have that at the poker table, right, You're you're

making a lot of decisions quicker. But the thing that you said that I most wanted to respond to was kind of about you know, I think it's super important if you play poker, if you do any kind of gambling that's less skill based, right, anything that involves wagering.

But I mean, really this is you can expand this to be true for like pretty much anything in life, but especially things that have a substantial you know, sort of cost, you know, risk reward, you know, cost benefit analysis is like, just have a good idea of why you're doing what you're doing. You know, are you going to the casino to play poker because you want to

like play a poker for a living. You know, if so, you need a bankroll, you need a certain amount of money that is really just poker related, and you know, you have to do a lot of math to basically understand like, well, what's my expected win rate? Like what should what should I think? It is, like, what are the chances that I'm gonna go bust over this period of time if I play these steaks? Should I play

these stakes? YadA, YadA YadA. Right, Whereas if you're playing either purely recreationally or you know, the kind of semi pro kind of like well, I would like to make money from this game, but I'm not. You know, if I lose the money I have allotted to it, that's not a big deal because I have, you know, another income. Then you know, then you need a budget. I think, you know, even that sort of semipro, I think it's

not really a bankroll. It's a budget, you know. And you can say, Okay, I'm gonna play two five because I think that's the best game for me, and I have a thousand dollars budget a month. Like that's a large budget, you know for something that is entertainment. But if you're like, well, but it's going to be profitable entertainment, and on any given month, I might lose, but like, in the long run, I think I'm actually gonna have more money and worst case scenario, I have a good time.

But to like have that budget and be like, yeah, when when the money's gone, it's time to go home, you know, it's that's it, the game's over. And you know, having like, Okay, my budget this weekend is three hundred dollars, then you choose the game accordingly, you know, and and if you're comfortable with like, yeah, I can get it in on a long shot, and if it hits, I'm going to be super excited, and if it doesn't, that's okay, and you know, then I'm just going to go do

something else that's cool. Like you know that that's the fact that people enjoy doing That is one of the reasons that people can make a living playing poker, because there are people who are playing just for enjoyment and are fine with the fact that it's like, yeah, you know, they're they want to try to be a favorite mostly, right, Like most people playing poker are trying to win, right, but like are okay with not like maximizing every spot

and maybe making some calls that just seem fun. And as long as you know, you have a concept of like, okay, what's the cost of this if I you know, if if I lose, it's like, well, the cost is literally the money, and then however you're going to feel afterwards, right, and then there's the upside and that's the money and

however you're going to feel afterwards. And if those things balance out to you, then cool, do it, you know, And if they don't, then don't And if you have an issue with it, you know, if you're developing an addiction and then you know, seek help for real.

work out. What I remember it does actually work out from time to time, but I mostly I just remember all the times it didn't work right, or on the flip side, like, actually it didn't work all those times. But I tell the thing is, when I go to Vegas, I don't tell the story of when it didn't work out. I tell the story of when it did. And I

remember when it did. And so part of one of to me, the thing that I'm getting at here is that one of the things I think that we find hardest to understand about probability, and it's particularly around like randomness and chance. The human brain is very very good at finding patterns. That's an essential part of the evolution.

You know, we were able to understand like, okay, as it gets hotter, like these things happen to the plants around us, these things happen to the animals around us, these things happen to the water around us, and like, you know, like thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of years ago before we started having like what we understand

is quote unquote civilization. You know, humans and our you know, nearest ancestors were able to discern patterns about the world around them and be able to learn things from them. The problem is that our brains are sometimes are so good at finding patterns that we absolutely hate the idea that things don't have patterns, So we look for patterns. So we look for Oh I always win, or even more often, I always lose. We look for, you know, and this is where it comes into other parts of life.

whole other range of things we can talk about. But I kind of what started there about the idea of like the human brains desire to find patterns even when they're not there.

marginal hand, right, I'm like, okay. Then you do it again and I call you in a very marginal hand. Then you make a big bet and I call you and you have a big hand, And this happens enough times. You know, we could say that I found a pattern that you know, you bet small with small hands and big with big hands, and that's super useful when you're playing poker. For this is called a bet sizing towel, right. I mean, similarly, you know you could have a big

hand and be like, hmm, want the cookie. I brought props for people.

because there's a pattern. Right, It's like, no, those were random events. Those were independent events probably, you know, unless someone's cheating, unless something's rigged, which I think we always have to acknowledge our uncertainty about, like there are certain conditions that could be different from what we're expecting, but

generally are very unlikely, and so those patterns. Patterns can be super valuable if they're real and you observe them and then you adjust accordingly, but super dangerous when you know, if you're thinking, oh, maybe sevens are hot and then they come out again, it's like, oh, that's it. It's definitely that's the thing, right, And that's where confirmation bias comes in, because it's like, every time it happens, the

brain's like, ah, yes, I found a pattern. Good brain, good brain, you know, And every time it doesn't happen, it's just you know, yeah, it just kind of floats through, unobserved, unremarked upon. And and so there's this fixation on, you know,

the data that confirms our assumptions. And that's something that's very real throughout all sorts of you know, aspects of life, but you know, in poker specifically, like it's and and all sorts of life, Like it's really important to observe, right, And once you're once we're aware of our own biases, it's easier to then kind of counteradjust for them, right, be like, Okay, I tend to think somebody always has the goods when they bet, and so now I'm going

to be like, okay, I have this feeling of fear. Now I have to be like, okay, but that's my bias speaking. Now, let my rational mind come in and analyze the data that's like real, and maybe I'll still come to a conclusion. I think they have a strong hand, but maybe I won't and maybe I'll go You know what,

I'm really not so sure about this. This is my bias coming into play, and I mean in other areas of life, I think it's more important right to be able to be like, no, you know what, I have a bias against people with this or that, you know, aspect or whatever, Like I have a bias against frat boys, and like, you know, like I'm friends with people who went to frats, like not a lot, but like some, and like I don't on a deeper intellectual level, like

I have huge like I think legitimate complaints about the whole fraternity institution, right, but like in terms of just individual people, like I know, if I see someone I think they're like frat related, like I'm going to have an immediate kind of negative reaction that then I have to actually override and be like, Okay, this is just a person. Like let's just approach them as a person,

knowing that this one thing about them is true. But that doesn't define who they are, you know, and you know, other people have some other biases that are maybe more pernicious.

sex orgies with each other all the time. That's because HIV AIDS was a huge problem and there were gay al bath houses and things like that. Although a lot of people were very safe in those bath houses, a lot of people were not. But the point being that if you didn't know someone who is gay, the media stories about HIV spreading through anonymous gay sex was probably the main thing you heard about gay men. And so that's the bias you were fed in the same way.

You know, when all of your depictions of Mexicans on TV and movies are as drug dealers or as other kinds, like, that's the bias that you're being told. And this, I think becomes really important as we analyze the movies we look at because you're right, you know, and I also think it's it's I also have some philosophical problems with

a lot of things about fraternity systems. But I also know that the stories that I hear about hazing at fraternities are the most extreme examples, and that most fraternities probably have much milder hazing that no one ever tells me about because it's not newsworthy. You know, and I

have the same bias that you do. And I think that's another point that becomes so important, is being able to remember, like, and I think this is so true, Like a lot of the stories I think we see are often about you know, people from like warning planets or warning nations or you know, warring groups or whatever, who have these biases about each other, and they can they actually see the evidence of things that are not fitting the bias. And often the heroes the ones who can,

and the villains are the ones who can't. And it's not that clear cut. And I think a lot of times we're critical of heroes because they can't, or we're critical of writers because they can't. Yeah, but I think that's where it becomes really important. Thing is like how can you how can you break out of that confirmation bias to see the information that's in.

which I won't say too much about, but like, you know, there wasn't a ton about biases, but you know there was. There's at least one or two things, and you know, at least two of the heroes is like about, you know, they have certain biases against certain other heroes, and then they're like, I think one of the things that makes them heroes is that they do overcome those and they're like, you know, let's actually judge this person on their actions, not on what I know about people from this place

or of this species or whatever right or race. And in Dungeons and Dragons terms, you know, which is different from from earth races.

about it and observed a lot about it. And the thing that I've learned from so many others who have studied it is that there is the idea that something, you know, the idea, you know, the kind of old joke of like happens that's incredibly hard for our brains to conceive of. Our brains really don't like that and

want to come up with something. What has poker kind of taught you or what do you think the kind of the ideas of poker can translate to this, the idea that, like, when bad things happen to us or people we know, we want to find someone to blame.

It's not supposed to get called all the time? You know, how come I made a call and then they turned over a better hand? Should I have called this orhoul? I folded? Like you're supposed to call and lose sometime. This is how the game is structured. Right. You're not supposed to only make perfect decisions. The only way to do that is you can literally see your opponent's cards, which you know is cheating, so don't do that. And you know you're you're supposed to be wrong some of

the time in terms of getting the desired outcome. And that's that's different even from just chance, right, in terms of a card to come. That's like, we don't know our opponent's cards, We have uncertainty about the situation, and we made the best decision we could with the information we had available at the time. Right, poker is a game that relies on each person has their own private, hidden,

secret information, and then there's public information. And we need to combine the things that we know that are factual about the you know, the cards that are out, what the action sequences, who bet, who raised, stuff like that, and we need to combine that with you know, thinking about well what could they have what would they have played this way? And then we just do the best

we can. And I think a lot of times people do give their best effort, they make reasonable decisions, and things don't work out, and there's a well what did I do wrong? Like did I did I deserve this? Or oh, well this didn't work out. It's totally unfair.

which is unhealthy. That's where results oriented thinking really right and never taking responsibility for any outcome and being like, well, I always play everything perfect and the world's just out to get me, you know. In the truth of you know,

the best approach is it's hard, right. It's like, we need to take responsibility for our decisions and our actions while also understanding that they were made without perfect information about the world, and with the understanding that there's going to be some element of chance, and good decisions aren't automatically going to result in good outcomes, and bad decisions don't automatically result in bad outcomes, and just like trying to evaluate our decisions on their merits and based on

what we knew at the time, and then as we acquire new information then being like, Okay, I'm going to use that to inform my future decisions without beating myself up about my past ones, but while also being realistic about, oh, did I have some information I was overlooking? Was I focusing on the wrong information? Maybe right? You know? And that Ah, that just makes poker a very difficult game to learn because you don't get pure feedback on like, oh you did good. It worked, you did bad, it

didn't work. And I think life's a lot like that too, right, There's so many things you can give a great effort and it just doesn't work out, and vice versa.

I wasn't like paying all my bills. I was getting like scholarship money and stuff, but I was paying my like, you know, day to day money by playing poker when I was in grad school, when I was in seminary, and I was a nice read do my homework at the table, and so people, you know, you're mostly playing a lot of the same people if you're going three

days a week. People learned that I was a seminarian and right now that's would come over and be like, hey, can I talk to you for a second, by you cup coffee or something, and chat a bit, and they would start telling me about like their experience of God or their religious ideas, and I was like, okay, sure, you don't have to tell me this. What it would get at, though, is that they were having a lot

of what they understood is bad luck. And they would one person literally said this, and other people said it in some other phrase, but they said, why does God hate me? Why doesn't God ever let me get the winning cards? Why does God always make the other guy win? Right to me? And this is also about psychology as

much as anything else. One of the ways in which I think this can happen is we'll start to blame ourselves and we'll start to think either a that like some supreme power is mad at me, or just be like, oh, I'm so terrible. This I often see a lot of times in like I'm in a lot of like polyamorous websites and discussion groups, and a lot of times guys will post about like, oh I must be so terrible. No girl likes me. You know, I keep sending these

messages and I never get responses. And the fact is, like sending a anonymous message to someone or like you know with your name but like you never had contact with them. The ev on that is just about zero, because it might be that like you could write the three most romantic paragraphs of dating site instant message, but if that person has already gotten eight dick pics and four things, they may just delete your message, or maybe you never see it. Like there's so many other factors.

But where I'm getting to with all this is I think that this feeling, I think is one of the most dangerous things of not understanding probability, because either a can really turn to a place of self hate and like, ohthough the whole world hates me and I'm so depressed, and then it becomes like you know, recurring cycle and like you know, you can kind of make your own truth. But once you're in that place, you are now incredibly vulnerable to someone else coming along and saying, no, no,

I'm so sorry you feel this way. It's not your fault, it's their fault. And the different racial group where this you know it's because women are so terrible, or because blacks are so terrible, or because you know, you know, the deep state has done all these things or you know,

any of these things. And if you note like this is so often the villagion, the villain origin story is bad things happen to them and then either their own confirmation bias or someone else like giving them confirmation bias, you know, tells the bias. Yeah, yeah, don't. This isn't your fault. This is all the fault of the Jedi. This is all the fault of the Avengers, you know, this is all the fault of well generally it is always the fault of Tony Stark, So that's not really

a confirmation. But yeah, either, Yeah, I think I think that's to me, that's almost the most important thing I want people to get out of this is thinking about in those terms, because I think that's where, honestly, so many of the problems we have in our society come from. Is bad things happen to people, and sometimes it is just random. Sometimes it is like like you know, I do think often big business and like the current economic structure and the patriarchy and things like that are much

more to blame. But like blaming the patriarchy versus blaming like six individual people, patriarchy is such a large amorphous like what the hell do we mean by that? What do you mean by big business? What do we mean by you know, the force. It's much easier to have a specific group you can look at and point to and that you can hurt.

aren't versed, the house runs the game, right. They ensure or hopefully ensure a fair game where everybody gets two random cards or however many random cards, and the cards come out fair and everything's you know, all the betting takes place in according to the rules, and then they just take some of the money. I have some random other phone going off. I apologize for that. I don't know where it is either, I can't hear it, so no wordy about it. Good I found it. I'm turning

it off. Okay. So basically, the house takes a little bit off the top, you know, and they never lose. I mean, they might actually lose money overall because they have to pay the dealers and they have to keep the lights on. Yah yah yahah blah blah blah. They don't make a ton of money off poker. They would just put in a bunch of slot machines a lot of places they do. But the point is is the house just takes money out of the game and then

the players are left fighting for what's left. Right. I think this is like a kind of good good metaphor for like the vulture class and all this kind of whatever, and you know, and some people are gonna profit, but the average person is gonna lose. Like actually most people lose in a game with Rake because a lot of money just comes out of the game, right, Like it's it's people talk about poker being a zero sum game where somebody wins, somebody loses, somebody loses, somebody else has

to win. But it's actually negative some once you account for the rake, unless you think of the house as a player. So you know, that's that's a tough situation where you basically have a bunch of people fighting against each other in a in a spot where everybody on average,

if they're equally pitted or expected to lose. Actually right, right, But I think I think in life and and with poker, like really it's just you do want to hold yourself responsible for your own decisions, right, your decisions, your actions, that those are things you can control. And within poker, you know, as long as you're acting within the rules,

it's like that's fine. You're you're supposed to be trying to beat the other players out of money, right, But in life, you know, maybe we actually can play a positive some game, you know, that's that's a thing. And but a lot of things just happen, you know. And I mean, I'm not gonna challenge people's metaphysical beliefs necessarily, like you can, you can see it however you want, but I'll share mine, which are basically things the world is how it is. People do what they do, you know,

animals do what they do comments follow their trajectory. Like things happen, and most individuals are not in control of a very large number of things that happen to them. And right, we don't get to choose our starting spot in the world, you know, we only can decide how

we proceed within the context that we exist. And dealing with things that happen that are completely out of our control is I mean, at times overwhelming, you know for me, Like the hardest thing is like people getting sick and dying, Like I don't like it, you know, Like I don't think a lot of people are like, oh yeah, no, that's cool, you know, but I do think people often try and come up with way of finding like a reason or like.

you you should think it's wrong. I'm just telling you, you know how I feel, and that you know, if you really think about like everything in the world, it is kind of like, really, this this is all exactly how it's supposed to be, like, you know, but it's it's how it is. This is how it is. And then what's left to us is to decide how do we want to respond to how the world is? You know,

Can we make some changes? Can we work with other people to try and create a more positive sum game, you know, outside of the poker table, and even I mean poker you know, from a financial standpoint, is a negative some game when it's raked, right, or a zero sum game if it's unraked. That doesn't mean it can't be a positive some game from a life ev standpoint, right, Yeah, Like, as you alluded to earlier stated out right, like the money changing hands is not the entirety of the game, right.

There is the intellectual challenge, there's the social aspect, which I think is primary for a great number of people, I.

and away the best poker player at that table. I would also imagine, though, just given the small amount of hands that will happen, the amount of extreme randomness from some of the crazy place people play, but also just the stakes, you would have a higher monetary ev spending that time playing poker that you normally do. Absolutely, so, yeah, yeah, and it's yeah.

or or just going to the casino. Honestly, my two favorite places I ever played poker, aside from like home games or something, you know, and maybe there's a third one that's kind of tied, but like the Mayfair Club in New York, which was it was the same people all the time, you know, and I was like twenty one, twenty two, and like, you know, hanging out with people of all ages, I mean, almost all older than me, but like of all walks of life, and it was

just super fun, like having this place to go and like feeling this sense of like kind of belonging and just it was it was a nice community for the most part, you know, and then more recently greaton casino in northern California and in Roonert Park north of you know, in the Bay Area, and I knew everybody there. You know. I would go in and be like, oh, hey, how's it going. You know, how's the one three? Oh it's a good game. Okay, yeah, I'll hop in that. Oh

the two five is really good. Oh okay, I'll play

that one, you know. And it's like people who I knew knew that I was like there to make money, like that's that was my primary goal in going there, but it was like it was also always a social experience as well, and hanging out with people I knew, and the combination of those things, especially for a lot of online poker players where the pace of live poker where you're playing in person is so slow, like you'll get maybe thirty thirty five hands an hour, whereas online

I can get three hundred, three hundred and fifty you can play over a thousand hands an hour. The interacting with people, you know, it's the upside in the downside some other people sometimes you know it's like I could do with that, but but overall, it's like there is this additional aspect to the experience that can make it in life, ev you know, a positive some game collectively.

like what we're talking about. For only five dollars a month, you can become a member. You get bonus content at the end of it. With all of the episodes, you get free bonus episodes. We're gonna be starting those in the fall and also, you just get to help support us. We're using that money to help get better sound equipment, do a whole bunch of things to improve things. Really

make it possible for keep bringing you this content. So, Paul, in term of probability and particular polling, Yeah, if something should happen seventy five percent of the time, but the other thing, the thing that was only supposed to happen twenty five percent of the time happens, doesn't that mean that that seventy five twenty five percent thing was wrong. Oh?

reaction isn't oh, well, that should happen every now and then. Our reaction is that's wrong. It must have been fixed, It must have been broken. That couldn't have happened. Yeah, talk about this, give me your rant.

a four sided die. It's a little pyramid, but like and they're actually honestly, it's funny because a for sided die is really easy to kind of rig because they don't tumble quite the same. But like, that's exactly what it is. And I remember during the twenty sixteen election people talking about, first of all, Nate Silver of five thirty eight professional poker player who turned baseball forecaster, who

turned political forecaster, et cetera, et cetera. And I think it's important to remember that those are forecasts, they're not predictions. And I think the Huffington Post had Clinton at like ninety nine percent or something, and then five point thirty eight had Clinton at like sixty three percent, maybe just before the election, and I think people looking at that were like, oh, okay, good, she's gonna win, and like

that's just a really inaccurate assessment. That would be like, well, okay, you only have a one in one thousand chance of dying from the flu, right, so clearly nobody ever dies of the flu, Like that would be because that's even less likely than the twenty seven Like that doesn't make any sense. You know, if something's twenty seven percent likely, it's it's gonna happen about two times out of seven, right, Like that's that's that happens. Things that happened to out

of seven. Like like somebody who hits like two eighty six in baseball, Like they they get hits, they don't bet zero, they're not like a pitcher hitting right two eighty six is actually pretty respectable these days.

it's going to be like thirteen. It's because there'll be a bad hitter and they'll get a couple of hits and then they'll have a couple of oh for five days and like et cetera.

three aces. That's the best hand you can have on this Bet on this board, I bet they call the next cards a jack, They check, I bet, they raise, I raise, they raise. The river's another jack. So I have aces full of jacks. The only hand I can lose to his pocket jacks. And of course my opponent has pocket jacks. And the chances of them catching two jacks on the you know, one on the turn, one on the river, is roughly one in a thousand. It's

one out of nine hundred and ninety. And I've had this happen four times, this one in one thousand chants. Do I think I'm cursed because some one in a thousand things has happened to me four times? That would be like dying of the flu four times. No, I don't, because I've played millions of hands of poker, and it's not like that should happen. One out of every thousand hands, No, it should only happen one out of every thousand times that a scenario like that that extreme occurs, which isn't

that often. But you know, when when you have a lot of instances and things like presidential elections, you don't you have won every four years, right, so whatever the actual outcome is, you're only getting one. It's like you don't have a big bankroll of like presidential slots, right,

Like your role is one per four years. There's a small budget, so you know, it's just it's like people even a forecast that said ninety nine percent something was going to happen, Well, that one percent means we're not saying that can't happen. We're saying, you know it could, right, it could happen. It's pretty unlikely, but it could.

is not actually a very high sample size. So we're gonna get into a lot more of that in the bonus section for now though, Paul, for people who want to find actually you wanting to do a where to find you or yeah, that's fine, let's actually do that because you have written books abou poker and stuff like yeah, yeah, yeah, So we're gonna get into all that more in our member section again. Become a member only five dollars a month,

very easy. All the informations on our website. Also there is all the ways to contact us, so please do that. But Paul, you have actually written a number of books about poker. If you want to find those, please let us know.

we had some political disagreements you could say. But we wrote Don't Listen to Film Helmeth and another book that was called Critical Concepts. But I think got retitled like how to Crush No Limit Hold Them or something ridiculous like that, both available from Cardos of Publishing, I believe. And then I've got some if you just search for Paul Christopher Hoppy on you know your least favorite bookseller online. They you know, I've got some like low content poker

books as well, and some fiction and whatever. But that's the poker content I'm available at the moment.

back to help support the podcast. I'm also gonna do that with the movie Rounders. If you haven't watched that, you probably can find I think I'm certain you can rent it through Amazon. We have an affiliate link with them, so I'll get you a way to do that. Even if you don't care about poker. It is a phenomenal, phenomenal movie.