The Poker Bubble

While I was waiting for my flight from London to Seattle, I perused through the sections of a bookstore, hoping to see if maybe they had Ken Follett's book Never which I had heard was a good read. Instead, I stumbled upon Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Prediction Fail But Some Don't [1]. Most people (including myself) are familiar with his work on FiveThirtyEight but not everyone might be aware that he is also an accomplished tournament poker player. Check out his results from the last 5 years and see for yourself.

For any data scientist or nerd, I'm sure the entire book is filled with neat tricks and insights that Nate has to offer. But for me, the chapter I immediately gravitated towards was The Poker Bubble. Thankfully I had some time to kill so went ahead and read the 30-page section. Here's what I got out of it:

Tilt is probably every poker player's biggest nemesis and what most people struggle to fend off. Card dead for the past 2 hours? Tilted. Can't dodge a 2-outer? Tilted. Bluffed off the best hand? Mega tilted. Poker is a game that not only requires analytical skills but also the sheer ability to handle your emotions over a long period of time. This is especially true in tournaments where the ultimate winner is the person who lasts the longest and ends up winning all of the chips at the end. Which means it's 100% possible to never be the chip leader until the very few last hands where you end up winning it all. Here's a passage where Nate talks about this:

"I realize now what my tilt triggers were. The biggest one was a sense of entitlement. I didn't mind so much when I wasn't getting many cards and had to fold for long stretches of time...But when I thought I had played particularly well - let's say I correctly detected an opponent's bluff, for instance - but then he caught a miracle card on the river and beat my hand anyway, that's what could really tilt me. I thought I had earned the pot, but he made the money."

I will admit that I feel this way at times and I wish it didn't have to be that way. The difficultly of calculating pot odds, ranges, and ICM decisions pales in comparison to the emotional side of poker which can easily push me towards making terrible terrible decisions. There are plenty of decisions that I have deeply regretted and robbed me of a good night's sleep (more on this on another day). To this day, those horrifying memories will come back at the most random times and I'll still be kicking myself like I had gone insane. But at the end of the day, we move on. We must move on. The past is out of our hands and what matters most is what we do now in the moment. Better to have some chips than no chips. It's ultimately about the long-term success, not picking up every pot along the way. And this is what has carried me through it all, for better or for worse.

I'll leave you with this quote that is attributed to Angelo:

"'We tend to latch onto data that supports our theory. And the theory is usually "I'm better than they are"'"

[1] Silver, Nate. The signal and the noise: Why so many predictions fail-but some don't. Penguin, 2012.