For the purposes of this assignment, I decided to play online poker on an unidentified network.
I have played poker for a long time. I was introduced to the game by my brother playing with some cousins at around age 12 and it instantly sparked a competitive fire as he wiped the floor with all of us. Of course, I couldn’t exactly gamble at age 12, but I started organizing just social poker nights with some friends and this continued through high school on occasion. I wasn’t exactly dedicated to the game or anything, but about two years ago I got much more serious, started reading books, learning about GTO, etc. I would classify myself as having an addictive personality, and I was definitely in the early throes of gambling addiction, but I kept winning, and so I just kept going.
The reason I stopped playing poker was simply that I fell out of love with the game. By distilling it down to a science I actually killed a lot of the enjoyable aspects of the game to me. I couldn’t in good conscience play ‘suboptimally’ and do stupid stuff which ended up giving me a lot of joy in the beginning, like hitting your gutshot straight draw to win a big pot feels like you’re on top of the world, right? But nooo, I just had to fold those hands, they were ‘negative EV.’
The thing that gets you addicted to poker is that it convinces you that there is a large amount of skill at play in the game. It’s unlike other games of chance, you spin the roulette wheel, pull the slots lever, and there’s actually zero agency that you have over the events. You either win or lose and the game has to satisfy you aesthetically with flashy visuals, either a fancy croupier or violently saturated lights and symbols. It’s not like blackjack where it’s mostly a solved game, or baccarat where there’s actually very little game at all. No, poker gives you agency pretty much every step of the way. It heavily encourages metagaming and knowing your table’s habits, and so a lot of poker is spent surreptitiously observing other players, their habits (in online poker many players pay for a HUD which instantly gives them important statistics about other players at their table, if it’s a platform like ACR or Pokerstars where the names are public), what their range is, and constantly modifying your own strategy based on that.
And that’s actually a big reason why a lot of people play poker, too! It’s a social game. You end up being much more successful if people like playing with you – they invite you out more, and don’t get as unhappy if you beat them. This is a thing that many poker players talk about, and to me it always felt exceptionally grody: the importance of being friendly just so you can squeeze more money out of your purported friends.
Texas hold’em is a game of extremely limited information. It’s conditional probabilities stacked on conditional probabilities. You start knowing only what your own two cards are, which means you immediately can start adjusting the rates at which other players can have particular hands (P(Other player has AA | I have AA | Other Player 4 bet preflop)) <<<< (P(Other Player has QQ v KK v JJ v AKs | I have AA | Other player 4 bet preflop)) [of course this is definitionally true because i wrote it as a union of those four hands but just treat those as individual probabilities rather than the union please]. More information comes in both in a certain hand, and over the course of the game, like when you start to glean the other players’ habits (some people write these statistics down in realtime to better inform their decisions), and there’s some basic stuff like counting your outs, how often you’ll hit a flush given 2 suited on the flop, or the straight, etc. These should influence how you play the game, at least if you’re trying to play “optimally”, but of course given that it’s probabilities and not certainties, people get mad at fate pretty routinely.
A humongous part of poker skill is your mental resilience. Everyone gets affected by tilt. You shove your AA against KK preflop and almost 1 in 5 times, you’ll lose. 18% doesn’t feel very high in our abstract monkey brains, and expected value wise, it’s certainly the right bet. I mean that’s a 4:1 bet, which a lot of people would take in a vacuum. This makes it feel rather horrible when you lose it. On the flip side, that 1/5 time when you win as KK feels absolutely miraculous. It’s such an emotional hit because you acutely understand how unfavored you were, but it worked out anyways.
That’s a poor example in my opinion though, it’s a lot worse when people feel skilled with fuzzy stuff. Everyone loves it when their flush hits, and actually a routine mistake many people make early on is chasing sooo many flushes. It’s a 1 in 3, and you gotta do the math on those types of things, while also taking into account other outs / your opponents style, etc.
You can just go so, so, so deep into poker. Thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of blog posts, millions of comments, tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of players, all contributing to this game’s shared history for decades. You can go absolutely as deep as you want it to go. The question I was trying to answer my entire career was “what separates the 99th percentile?” Some of them are “math wizards” but it’s not really any fancy math, just a lot of combinatorics. Some of them are inhumanly skilled at people reading (one of my favorite poker books is this one written by a guy who just talks about the art of truly, truly observing people, and getting into the habit of taking this information in. I still haven’t really mastered that one. It’s rather different from other games of chance in this regard and the addiction is facilitated partially by dreams – there’s a ton of people bumming working 1/2 games thinking that they’re going to make it big. It reminds me quite a bit of wannabe professional athletes, but they get to “keep trying” into their 30s, 40s, 50s…. It destroys people’s lives.
I find it very interesting that so many societies across history have at some point instituted a blanket ban on gambling. Very Chesterton’s Fence. The ancestors saw something was sinister about that entire sector. I can’t help but feel the same way.
