On Sunday night I played about an hour of poker with my housemates, using a deck of Princess Mononoke themed playing cards and game pieces from Othello instead of poker chips.
Nothing about this round of poker was particularly different from any other time I’ve played since I was a kid, except the awareness that I needed to watch out for specific kinds of behaviors that threw off my usual playing habits. My housemates’ awareness that I was also playing this to write an essay made also them keenly aware of my own strategies and comments. In short, I was under a bit of scrutiny, including my own.
Here’s what I noticed: more than I noticed addictive or illogical gambling behaviors from other people, I noticed them in myself. I think that this group of people with decent intelligence and intuition have learned over time and through experience that poker is nearly a pure game of luck, and thus have learned to filter out illogical comments about lucky streaks and inherent luck. Not much of this kind of sentiment was thrown around the table—especially by me, who was intent on not making any of these kinds of comments so as to not influence the group. All the while, I noticed myself internally feeling these sentiments, though perfectly in control of not voicing them. Though I can only know my own thoughts for sure, I have reason to believe many of my housemates were feeling as though they had some inherent luck or unluckiness to them, but have learned over time to stay silent about these feelings. I myself have taken entire courses on probability theory, and even used poker as an example probability problem before.
Despite this, I have some very human, innate feelings about my own luck. My mom told me as a kid that I “took all the luck from her” when I was born (kind of grim to tell a child) and this stuck with me in particular; but from the way I notice my housemates betting illogically based on previous failures, expressing disappointment at bad draws, and feeling dejected after a series of bad rounds, I think they may feel very similarly to me. While reason may help my housemates avoid all-out gambling addictions, it can’t help them from having some investment in the game before them.
I do still believe some skill is involved in poker, though. My brief phase of watching tournaments during the pandemic taught me that control over one’s feelings about luck can be the greatest skill of all, since erratic betting can easily bankrupt you. Of course, bluffing and recognition of what hands are more probable to acquire from a given five-card draw will help you play better, but what lands most amateur and even professional players in bankruptcy is going all-in on, well, anything at all. I would compare it to playing slots—you bet small, and don’t try to win back your losses by playing forever. If it was that easy to internalize, though, then I wouldn’t have been playing poker until midnight the day before a midterm.
