I first started playing Texas Hold ‘Em poker at Harvey Mudd College, in Claremont, California, while working for the NSF. I have many fond memories of staying up until 3:00 AM playing poker, drinking, and just having fun being a young person with few responsibilities in the world. When I moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in May 2007, I quickly found a poker game and that’s how I’ve made most of my friends here. I’m still more or less a beginner; by my estimate I’ve played maybe 10,000 hands of poker. I’ve learned a decent amount about the game, and I think a lot of the lessons I’ve learned from playing poker are transferable to life in general. I thought I’d share those lessons for those interested.
- In the long run, ‘lucky’ players make their own luck
This lesson is by far the most important lesson I’ve learned, both in Poker and Life in general. Over the course of a single night a player may get incredibly lucky or incredibly unlucky. In the long run, though, players who consistently make intelligent moves create their own luck by increasing the probability that they will be in situations to make money. The key to understanding this lesson is to repeat the phrase ‘in the long run’ over and over. Players can go on months-long ‘bad’ streaks, but good players will eventually make more money than bad players. Life works the same way. In my experience, I’ve had streaks of terrible luck at some times, and I’ve had runs of awesome luck at other times. I believe the reason I’ve done well in life (at least thus far) is largely the fact that I try to shrug off the bad things that happen to me as mere bad luck, and I try to capitalize on the good things that happen.
Consider this Example: At the end of College, I planned on getting a Ph.D. in Computer Science. At a time when I was living on on about a thousand dollars of income each month, I spent over a thousand dollars applying to some of the best schools in the country: Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Illinois, and Georgia Tech. I chose two safety schools: UC San Diego, and Univeristy of North Carolina. I was rejected outright from every program except UCSD (who put me on a wait list and then rejected me) and UNC. It definitely hurt to be rejected from so many places, but I realized that coming from a practically unheard of liberal arts college in Cincinnati, and lacking any real research experience, it would be a crapshoot for any school to admit me. You could definitely say that I was ‘unlucky’ because I only got into my safety school. I could have taken the job offer I had in Cincinnati, but I knew my career opportunities would be better if I went to grad school, even if it wasn’t MIT. I took what I saw as one of the worst possible outcomes of the grad school application process and turned it into an opportunity to improve my career. Blue Capital Group, my current employer, just happened to be located in Chapel Hill, and they just happened to email my algorithms professor looking for new recruits at a time when I was looking for a job. I took what I saw as a chance for some good luck, and capitalized on it. I now work at a job I absolutely love, at a time when many people are struggling to find any job at all. I could go on and on, because my life has been full of both good luck and bad, and the main lesson I’ve learned can be summed up as follows:
- Recognize and accept that sometimes you’ll have good luck, and sometimes you’ll have bad luck.
Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’ve had way more good luck than bad because you have access to the internet, the ability to read, and knowledge of someone as awesome as myself :-p - When you’re unlucky, try to way to turn your bad luck into an opportunity. If that fails, shrug it off as bad luck.
- When you’re lucky, realize that you’ve been granted an opportunity and do everything you can to take advantage of it.
- Recognize and accept that sometimes you’ll have good luck, and sometimes you’ll have bad luck.
- Know when to hold and when to fold
That pair of red aces you were dealt just doesn’t look so good when there are four spades showing on the board, even if one of them is the Ace. Sometimes you have something really good going in life, but you have to let it go because it’s starting to fail. If you hold on to things that were good and have gone bad, you’ll be doing yourself a huge disservice.
This lesson is especially true in romantic relationships – the longer you hold on to a doomed relationship, the more pain you’re going to cause the both of you, and the harder the breakup will be. Once you realize a relationship isn’t going to work, you need to inform your partner and leave that relationship – it’s the best thing for both parties involved. On the flip side, when you have the nuts (poker lingo for the best possible hand), you have to do whatever you can to increase the pot size, without scaring other players out by revealing what you’ve got. When you meet someone that you connect with on every level, someone you love to spend time with, someone who understands you better than you understand yourself, you have to realize what you’ve got and hang on to it.
- Have confidence in yourself, but not too much
Having too little confidence in your hand will hurt you because you’ll get pushed around by bigger stacks. Having too much confidence will hurt you becuase you’ll call bets you shouldn’t. There’s a fine line you have to walk with confidence, and the ability to determine when you’re being confident enough is an important skill to hone.
If you think you’re the smartest man whoever lived (as I once did), that confidence will help you out at times because it’ll allow you to tackle problems that might scare away mere mortals. It can cost you, though, if you overextend yourself or try something that is beyond your level. My confidence was shattered when I reached grad school and realized there were people who could think circles around me; people who have thought up and then forgotten things I’ll never begin to understand. I went from having too much confidence in myself to having too little. I thought I couldn’t accomplish anything and that I’d never amount to much more than an unhappy burnt-out developer. As I suffered through grad school and started to figure out what was going on, my confidence grew a little bit. I got the nerve to apply for an internship at Microsoft, and being hired for that internship gave me a huge boost in confidence. I started doing better in everything I did.
- It’s all about discipline
I know I’m bad at poker, at least compared to my friends. My main problem is that when I’m not getting cards, I don’t find the game very fun, so I do things that I know I shouldn’t. I know not to play trash hands like Ace-Seven off suit, but I get bored and put money into the pot when I shouldn’t because I’d rather have fun than make money. I don’t have a problem doing this in low limit games, because the amount of money involved in doing so is usually very minimal, i.e. 30 cents. In higher stakes games, this sort of behavior can cost you a lot of money. I stay away from high stakes games because I know that I don’t have enough discipline to play real solid poker. All the theory in the world won’t help you if you don’t follow sound logic and fold when there’s four to a straight on the board, you’ve got two pair, and your opponent has pushed you all in.
Life in general works on the same principle. You can read all the diet books you want, and you can understand body chemistry all day long, but if you don’t go to the gym and lift regularly, you’re never going to be able to reach your fitness goals. You can dream of being a millionaire all day long, but if you don’t work hard, save your money, invest wisely and avoid splurging on things you don’t need, you’ll never make it. Going to the gym, working hard and saving money all require discipline.
I’ll end this already too-long post with a caveat: Not every lesson learned at the poker table applies to real life. Probably the most important exception is the fact that poker is a Zero-Sum game. That means every player who succeeds does so to another player’s detriment. Real life is most certainly not zero sum – there are plenty of ways that two people can interact with each other such that both people benefit. This sort of mutually beneficial interaction is the cornerstone of civilization and, I would argue, the basis for all just governments. But that’s a post for another day.