Life Lesson That Can Learn From Poker Game
In life, we must be able to distinguish what we can control and what we cannot. This will help us make better decisions.
This time I will discuss the book The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova. This book discusses the story of a book writer who received life lessons after becoming a professional poker player. Maria had never played poker before. However, after successfully persuading a professional poker player to become his mentor, something interesting happened. He learned many things from a game of poker, especially about life, starting from how to read other people better and also himself and how he can accept luck as it is. For information, Maria is not an ordinary writer, she has a Ph. D is in psychology and wants to study human behavior through the game of poker. Interestingly, the game of poker can help you make choices in life.
I summarize it into three important points from this book:
The journey to become a professional poker player
In 2018, Maria made it to the world of poker competition in Las Vegas. Whereas a year earlier, he did not know anything about poker, he had never even played poker in his life. Maria’s poker adventures are not as easy as it seems at first, but she has a strong background. As a doctoral candidate from Columbia University, he studies decision-making, and in particular the interactions between skill and luck in making important life choices, especially under stress. He was also inspired by the work of mathematician John von Neumann, the father of game theory, whose basic ideas were inspired by poker. Real life, according to von Neumann, is about bluff, a small, deceptive tactic that leaves people unaware of their true intentions. Poker is about the interaction between chance and control, skill and luck, and in that it reflects real life.
Maria told about the bad luck of her family that happened in 2015. Her mother suddenly lost her job and career. Her husband’s startup failed. His grandmother, who had been looking good and healthy, suddenly fell at night and died two days later. Meanwhile, he himself suffers from a strange and mysterious autoimmune disorder. This misfortune seems unfair and hard to accept. This is what made Maria finally solidify her interest in chance and control, particularly learning about the world of poker. While embarking on her poker adventure, Maria set a very ambitious goal of competing in the prestigious world poker series within one year. To help with her journey, Maria tried to get a lot of support and assistance from a variety of teachers, from psychologists to professional poker players. He finally succeeded in persuading Erik Seidel, a poker legend, as a mentor who was willing to share his experiences not only about poker and how to bet, but also about the professional gambling culture and the psychology behind it. One thing that made Erik agree to help him was because from the beginning Maria said that the main reason she wanted to learn about poker was not to make money, but wanted to learn more about life.
Expertise and luck
This is an interesting thing about life. You can do whatever you want, but in the end, there are still things that are beyond your control. This is what underlies Maria to learn the game of poker further, because of its life-like character, which is a combination of skill and luck, as well as things that can be controlled and cannot be controlled. The game of poker at teaches Maria about uncertainty. To be able to win a professional poker tournament, of course, requires qualified expertise, but on the other hand, you also need extraordinary luck. It is the same in life, sometimes no matter how good a strategy or plan we have made, can be destroyed instantly, when the situation changes. The easiest example to take is the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, you are an entrepreneur in the tourism sector. Even though you have good plans for the future, when suddenly there is a pandemic, all your plans can fall apart and you have to be able to adjust.
Read too : Online Poker – How to Know When to Fold
There is one interesting thing. Most people are accustomed to overestimating their level of control over certain events. . They like to overestimate their own skills than luck, as a result of which their decisions are bad. For example, they did what worked in the past or thought that what they decided would work. The person fails to understand that circumstances have changed so strategies that were previously successful will no longer produce the same results in the future. They make bad decisions because they don’t want to hear what the world is saying when it’s different from the decisions they have made. This is a cruel fact that humans feel that they are in control when in fact it is a coincidence.