Lessons From Poker

12 learnings and takeaways

When I was in university, I played a lot of poker. Looking back, I was sniped by poker because it promised a meritocratic environment where I could prove my skills while indulging my libertarian and anti-establishment instincts.

Every weekday, I was four-tabling Bovada and GGPoker games on my primary monitor while watching lectures on my second monitor at 3x speed. When I wasn’t playing, I was studying poker charts to improve my abilities.

I played seriously for about 6-8 months. I still play occasionally in-person now, on the order of 5-10 times a year.

The following are my takeaways from playing poker:

1. Game selection is more important than theory.

Figuring out how to get into better games will yield better marginal results than studying charts and theory. There are times of day that are much, much more profitable to be playing than others. This forces you to think through incentives and run experiments on your own.

2. Zero-sum games like poker are capped and you can quickly find yourself trapped in a local equilibrium.

The earlier you realize this, the better.

3. The best players don’t play poker.

Ben Affleck, Nate Silver, and Haseeb Qureshi all played professionally or semi-professionally. They all could have made a career in poker but instead chose to utilize their skills in careers with uncapped financial and social upside.

The social stigma around gambling and poker is a net positive for society to allocate human capital to positive-sum endeavors.

4. Markets are not efficient.

5. The frontier is closer and less sophisticated than you imagine.

The best poker players are not that sophisticated and have exploitable human tendencies. Many become complacent and do not regularly train to improve their skills. Most have a narrow worldview.

6. Cheating is rampant and you should probably be more cynical and think harder about incentives.

The public cheating scandals are only the tip of the iceberg. Cheating occurs everywhere, all the time.

7. Protect yourself, don’t be trusting of people.

Poker is an individual game where you are your own spokesperson. You cannot let people run you over otherwise it will become a pattern.

8. Poker enables you to explore and create your own sub-personality basin.

9. Math prevails, but you want to play exploitatively.

Learning GTO strategy provides a foundational baseline, but you often want to deviate based on player type and tendencies.

10. Poker is a perpetual game, just like real life.

In the long run, everybody gets all the same cards in the same positions. Make the best decision given the current information and don’t spend mental cycles complaining about bad beats.

Everybody is emotional. The best players know the time and place to express their emotions. They do not allow themselves to be in high-leverage situations when their emotions are controlling them.

11. There is an optimal amount of poker you want to play in your life and it’s < 1,000 hours.

Poker teaches you valuable real-world lessons that are hard to learn elsewhere. You can become a competent poker player in less than 200 hours. Poker is an incredible tool to play with peers, colleagues, and prospective business partners to glean information about how they think, make decisions under pressure, and manage risk.

12. Overbet, both in poker and real life.

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