Thread by @patio11

Since @JoshDoody mentioned it, a brief digression on lessons from poker (which I play a small bit of recreationally, having caught the bug at MicroConf a few years ago) and how it functions as a rich metaphor for life outside of the particular game:

It's been said that you're only at one poker game your entire life; players come and players go, and the dealer doesn't really matter. You're the only constant at your table and the only thing you can directly effect.

I think that rounds to true, except poker *also* rewards smart table selection. In poker this, bluntly, means that you want to find a momentary peer group of people who are less skilled, on average, than you are. Thankfully, in careers / business, that's opposite of optimal.

Movies and popular media about poker lionize the one big hand. This is not how the game is actually played, at least not by people who know what they're doing. The game is won or lost in the long run by the hundreds of boring hands which happen between the big hands.

Poker, like life, is a game of imperfect information. You have to be able to commit to a course of action without knowing all the facts, and your course of action will sometimes be wrong.

Calibrating for minimal risk is suboptimal; you want to take smart, disciplined amounts.

There are circumstances where a strategy which you thought was good earlier is revealed to be less good by future information, where you need to pull out while regretting wasted effort.

And some times you take the negative update, smile, and just have to go with it.

Some people think that math is not descriptive of the world they live in. They are quickly turned into money pumps by people who think that math is descriptive of the world they live in. Calling this unfair does not reverse the direction of the money pump.

(You could go a long digression on how a game where everyone is structurally guaranteed to be equal both a) generates endless complaints among observers that the game is rigged and b) generates marked disparity of outcomes because players are, in fact, not equal in ability.)

Consumption of alcohol, emotional disturbances, and lack of sleep are all not conducive to repeatedly making correct decisions. One important genre of correct decision they inhibit is "How impaired am I by this circumstance? Am I too impaired to e.g. play poker?"

How far ahead of a soft table does "I have read one book and have done whole hours of directed practice" put you ahead? A staggering, staggering amount, even if the average participant theoretically has years of practice and is not, strictly speaking, unintelligent.

The sociology of poker games is interesting in that everyone is playing the same game within theoretically the same rules but that the motivations which bring them to the table are very different, in ways which materially impact the game.

Fun story on that one:

Poker pro: "So you play at home right?"
Me: "Oh no, it's illegal at home."
"Really?"
"Yeah I only get to play the once a year and it's fun but I'm bad at it."
*shocked look*
"You're wondering if anyone can be stupid enough to announce that and yes I can."

(Some times the person who announces that they are a bad poker player is, despite the massive incentive to lie about such things and other indicia of probably being a good poker player, actually exactly the bad player that they announce themselves as.)

Even in poker, which has an incentive system which reads like a bad parody of capitalism (it's a negative-sum game when you count the rake and the strategic way to make a living at is is to preferentially target the weakest players), there is still a widely accepted etiquette.

I feel like "The person who makes the most money at the poker table doesn't play poker... they own the poker table" is a useful insight except that it's probably misleading as stated, since the poker table is generally a loss leader for the rest of the casino.

You could also think of it as less of a loss leader and more of an expenditure of rent on preferred social outcomes. Every university runs a business doing credentialing and occasionally teaches some classes; the Bellagio uses slots winnings to keep independent poker artists fed.

(I mean, you could call them "independent entertainment consultants with variable compensation", but a portion of the service offering *is* performance art.)

It's a useful skill to have to have an explicit mental model of how your counterparty thinks about things, to update that mental model over one's relationship as you gain more information, and to understand ways in which their mental model is different than yours.

Perhaps surprisingly for a game with a relatively clear objective function, it's almost impossible for non-experts to distinguish between good play and great play, and for that matter between good play and abominable play, but the non-experts are convinced they can do so, easily.

(Oh I've got *so* many thoughts on how the tech industry would probably interview for poker playing skill... let's say that the *savviest companies* would land on "Play one hand of poker on a whiteboard with me.")

(If you come for the software and stay for the poker, and not the other way around, the implication is that the variance of a single hand of poker swamps most of the variance in the candidate pool, assuming you've FizzBuzz filtered first.)

FizzBuzz: No lie, if you were to ask "Before I let you go to that table, first: tell me any five cards which would form a flush" that would prevent at least some people from sitting down at the 1/2 tables. Sometimes they win a hand. Sometimes they even end positive on a session.

Continuing the analogy: there are many more people that can talk at substantial length about strategy, sometimes at substantial levels of theoretical sophistication, than are capable of executing that strategy, or a markedly less sophisticated strategy, at a given bar.