Theory 11: The Longest Run. Part B: The Gamblers' Code

I have now started Part B of Theory 11 on three separate occasions. Unfortunately, I lack the focus to write about what I have scheduled, so I keep on finding myself rambling about things well outside the scope of this web site.

How ironic that just as I gear up to write a Book of Mark submission on how intelligent gambling can help people make better life decisions, the American government moves to prohibit Internet gambling by attaching new regulations to the recently passed Port Security Bill. (For more on how this will impact online poker, I’d suggest going here.)

Having poker attacked by the US government, just as I planned to praise playing poker, has just been too much of a coincidence for my mind to pass up. I keep going off on a tangent.

I am going to try again now and do the post I set out to do. See if you can pinpoint the exact moment when I wander off topic:

Here is where we left off:

Your decisions, not your genes, will define your life.
From the moment you are born, you learn of the importance of your decisions. Your brain receives positive feedback when the results you desire occur as a result of your decisions. Your brain receives negative feedback when you make a decision that leads to bad results.
There is a great deal of gamble in life. Sometimes it is very difficult to know what the results of your decisions will be, and results can often punish good decisions and reward bad ones.

Here is where I am going:

I believe that many people make bad decisions because we are often guilty of relying on our own brain’s feedback without considering the importance of sample size. We rely too much on our own perceptions and do too little to investigate the larger law of averages.
Even though you can’t guarantee what result will come from a single decision, you must accept that the better you are making decisions, the better the results of your decisions will ultimately be.
In order to make better decisions, you must strive to better understand the gamble within life. In order to do this, you must distance yourself from short term results and focus solely and the quality of your decision-making. When you do this you are rewarded in the long run.
As the quality of your decision-making improves, the immediate results of your decisions, whether they are good or bad in the short run, become less and less important. You can still rely on the longest run working out.

Naturally, I hope to draw these points out in a logical way, with all kinds of pertinent examples. Still with me so far? Ok then.

I would now like to take a moment to address every religious person in the world, be you Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, a rare surviving Branch Davidian, or anything else:

Through the course of my life I have gathered that most you benefit from your own personal beliefs and have become better people as a result. I have only respect for that. Good people use their faith as their own inspiration to do wonderful things, enriching their lives and the lives of people around them. Unfortunately, some people use religion not as a means for their own enlightenment, but as justification for limiting the freedom of others, and for other horrible acts.

In short, I make a practice never to judge people by their religion alone. Religious beliefs have inspired great things in great people. They have also inspired horrible things in lesser people.

That pretty much covers my thoughts on religion.

South of the border in the great United States, I have watched as religion has increasingly become the sole driving force behind many of its most important political decisions. Freedom, the one ideal that the US still regularly trumpets as its mandate, is what ends up suffering. Like I said above, religion is what you make it. Too many countries make it into a manipulative fear-mongering tool to justify putting limitations of people’s freedom and slowing down the entire human evolution train. The US has chosen its company in this respect, and it will certainly make for historic times.

Must. Get back. On topic.

Poker, like religion, is also what you make it. To many people, it is an outlet for one’s darkest weakness: A need to surrender to chance and to continue risking until all is lost. My loose understanding of psychology is that chronic gamblers (chronic LOSING gamblers) suffer from innate self-loathing or insecurity to the point where they must keep going until they lose everything. It is an adrenaline rush, and it is fiercely addictive. Bad things happen when people fall too deep within the clutches of gambling. This is why Senator Frist is trying to ban it. He assures me that anyone who loves families must support a government-forced halt to this behaviour.

Believe it or not, poker can also be a positive thing. I know this first hand. As someone who loves to gamble, but will not stand for throwing money away, I was forced to learn to play well. I take pride in the fact that I am a winning poker player. I am NOT a great poker player. I will probably NEVER be a great poker player. I play because I love to play, and I love what it teaches mr about myself.

Being a good player requires many skills, but there is one skill that I value above all others: I have learned to appreciate the long run. I have learned, very slowly and very painfully, that even when you put yourself in a great position, when the money is all in and you are a giant favourite, you still lose fairly often. In fact, you have to let go of the romantic notion that can EXPECT to win on ay given day. There is just too much chance to allow for this. However, if you make right decisions, again and again, over many hands, over a long period of time, you can rely on more good things happening than bad.

Some time ago I stopped worrying about whether I won or lost individual hands. I started taking amusement in bad beats. After all, I play a lot of hands. I have to expect to get unlucky every now and then. But, I trust, I ACTUALLY TRUST, that I am making enough good decisions that it will work out in the long run. And it generally does.

Life, like poker and religion, is also what you make it. We all are forced to make millions of decisions every single day. Some we stress over as if they will be sole determining factor in how life will turn out:

Which career should I pursue?
Should I buy that house?
Should I be gay or straight?
Should I have children?

Don’t get me wrong, those decisions will have a dramatic impact on your life. Some decisions change everything. Some decisions, such as moral decisions, can never be undone. (I consider knowingly making bad moral decisions the poker equivalent of playing with more than you can afford to lose.)

However, if you keep grinding out good decisions, day in and day out, it almost won’t matter what fork in the road you will take. Every single path can lead to happiness provided you navigate it well.

Unfortunately, many poker players take a different tact. They don’t learn the math, and they rely only on personal experience to guide decisions. They remember and attach too much significance to individual hands. They remember the times when they made (mathematically) the wrong decision, and got lucky. This luck ends up costing them more in the long run, as they repeat their mistakes and eventually it all works against them, rather than for them.

Sadly, in life, the metaphor holds. People use single events as a justification for continued poor decision making. They believe what they want to believe and they let their minds convince them that everything will still somehow work out in the end. They don’t evaluate their decision making objectively because they don’t want to face the path they are actually putting themselves on.

And so I give you Theory 11 in the Book of Mark – If you focus on the quality of your decision making process, as opposed to the results that occur from individual decisions, you can have faith that good results will consistently follow. Life may not always be so predictable as to give you the exact results you wanted when you want them, but, IN THE LONG RUN, you will be a consistent winner in the high stakes game of living life. In fact, as long as you trust in your ability to make decisions, you can stop sweating about individual choices. You’ll be OK taking almost any path.

In Part A I posed a hypothetical about a very unfortunate woman. You can argue that she may have wanted to be a better driver, but there is no clear mistake that she has made. The gamble in life means that some horrible things can happen that really aren’t your fault. You need to learn to deal with bad beats and trust in yourself.

Unfortunately, if you live in the US, you may not have the option of using poker as a tool for developing respect for the long run, for trusting in your decisions, or for learning to take bad beats. Your freely elected government feels that poker’s potential for leading people to bad decisions is too much of a threat to your vulnerable sensibilities. I understand that having your own religion is still legal for now, even though it carries many of the same risks as poker. You may want to pursue that perfectly legal option.

Funnily enough, as I head into a period of life that seems to have more forks in the road than I can remember, I take great comfort in what poker has taught me. I don’t really know where I’ll be in two years, but I trust myself to end up somewhere nice.