The Problem With Poker

My buddy Mr. Multi and I frequently discuss poker, and the talk is often centered around bad beats and horrendous suck-outs we've endured at the tables. Frequently, the topic devolves into something like this:

Me: Arhgh. I just had aces cracked by some bozo playing 7-4 offsuit.

Mr. Multi: Did you raise preflop?

Me: Of course I raised preflop! He then reraised me! Can you believe it?

Mr. Multi: And you shoved, right?

Me: Of course! I got all my money in. He insta-called me with that crap and then he won!

Mr. Multi: And your point is?

Me: My point!? My point is I can't believe it! Over and over this BS happens. How could he not have known I had a big hand? I was playing tighter than a drum. I was only showing down big hands. I was a huge favorite. I just don't understand what he was thinking when he made that call!

Mr Multi: Well, that's because you're an engineer.

Me: Oh, shut up.

Mr. Multi: I'm serious. You're an engineer by training. When you apply a load to a bridge, you know ahead of time whether it will fail or not. It's a simple analysis. Or when you write a line of code, you know what it will do. If you've done your calculations and planning correctly, there is no doubt what will happen when you run the program. It's deterministic.

Me: And?

Mr. Multi: And poker isn't deterministic. It's probabilistic. And that's fundamentally what's wrong with poker for guys like you and me. We're trained to think deterministically. When we apply that load to that bridge, we don't think, "hmmm... there's an 65% chance that no one will get killed. Let's go with it."

Me: This isn't helping.

Mr. Multi: Maybe not, but it's still the truth. In poker, if we know our hand is going to win even just 51% of the time, we're supposed to make the bet. It's all about EV, the long run, probabilities.

Me: And this is supposed to make me feel better?

Mr. Multi: Sorry.

Me: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so what did you want to talk about?

Mr. Multi: You can't believe what just happened to me. I had KK and some yahoo called my shove with 5-4 suited. Can you believe it!? Five-friggin-four-friggin-suited!

Me: Did you raise preflop?

Mr. Multi: Of course I raised prefrop! He then reraised me! Can you believe it?


I was reminded of this yesterday when I had Kings cracked by Queens, and Aces cracked by Fives in the span of five minutes. In both cases, I did everything right, and yet the bridge fell down anyway. Fell down twice, in fact. "Sorry for your loss, ma'am. There was only a fifteen percent chance that beam would fail, so you will just have to stop whining about how your husband and kids got pancaked by 200-tons of steel and concrete. It's just poker."

All-in for now....
-Bug