Fooled by randomness

Hope everyone had a fun weekend. This is my last week in New Zealand. I've got most of my work done, so should have more time to concentrate on poker this week.

After taking a few days off, it sure is hard work getting back into the poker grind. If I'm playing regularly I get used to playing each day and mentally prepare for it. When I take time off I realize how much I enjoy doing other thing and struggle to get back into my usual poker routine. Hopefully it will just take a few days to get back into it.

I've been trying to catch up on some reading while over here. I've reread the "Full tilt strategy guide" which is a great book, and I've just finished reading a book called "Fooled by randomness" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It's an excellent book and gives some great insight into both the mental aspect of Poker and life itself. The book examines what randomness means in business and in life and why human beings are so prone to mistake dumb luck for consummate skill. This failure to recognize randomness leads us to make various cognitive errors. First, we ride our luck and eventually encounter what he calls a black swan - an event that should have been incredibly unlikely. Second, we worship those who have enjoyed even more luck than us and attribute to them guru-like status. Reading the book it is easy to see how some of the top poker pros have achieved a degree of their success by pure luck, and why a lot of players fail to live up to their potential because they are fooled by short term randomness.

In one section of the book the author talks about how people react to positive and negative events in their lives. The general idea of the section is that negative events are felt more strongly by people than positive ones. He estimates that negative events are thought to be as high as 2.5 times stronger than positive ones. An example of this in poker is if you get dealt AA and get all-in preflop and get called by KK, then a king come on the river you feel gutted. Conversely if you have KK get all your money in preflop and your opponent turns over AA and then a king comes on the river, I don't know about you but I usually feel it is owed to me to make up for all the suckouts I have taken. I certainly don't get the same emotional return as I get from the negative situation.

I think the moral of the story is that in both poker and life a person need to try and place more emphasis on the positive things happening and try to place less emphasis on the negative ones. Easier said than done, but worthwhile working towards. Pick up a copy of the book if you get a chance.