Pokerwiner.com → Games of texas holdem poker

1.REQUIREMENTS FOR SUCCESS

If you were to have a sufficient poker bankroll, the bet you placed would have a positive expectation. You would be offering to pay at a rate of 1000 to 1 for an event that would have 10,000 to 1 odds against occurring. Suppose your customer was to refuse to pay $100 for the policy so you would lower the price to $1. At this price, your customer would eagerly have bought your policy, but you would have just placed a bet with a negative expectation.

You would have agreed to pay at a rate of 100,000 to 1 for an event that would have had 10,000 to 1 odds against occurring. However, there would be a strong temptation on your part to sell the policy for $1, because the chances of the person dying would not have changed. The odds would be overwhelming that at the end of the year you would be $1 richer. Your sale would be much easier and pocketing $1 would be better than nothing. The temptation to have sold the policy for $1has illustrated a paradox associated with gambling. Whatever price the life insurance policy had sold for, the odds had been overwhelmingly in favor of you keeping the money.

However $1 would be a bad bet that should be avoided and $100 would be a good bet that should be made. The difference between good and bat bets would only become apparent when statistics would be accumulated after you have done the work of selling many life insurance policies. If you had sold 10,000 policies, it would become a certainty that at least one person would die. If you had charged $1 each, the $10,000 collected would not have covered one loss. Your business would have been headed for bankruptcy.

However, if you had sold 10,000 policies at $100 each, the million dollars collected would have covered ten deaths. While it would be almost certain that at least one customer would die, it would be extremely unlikely that ten would die. Your business would have to make money. Anything could happen to a single customer. Therefore, a good bet (the $100 policy) could have lost and a bad bet (the $1 policy) could have won. If you had sold only one policy, knowledge of mortality rates would have been useless.

Knowing the difference between good and bad bets would pay off only when statistics would be accumulated, and it would be only through the accumulation of statistics that you would be assured of making money.

The strategies for playing poker described in this book have been designed to maximize your expectations for winning over the long run, as you would accumulate statistics. However, even when bets would be correctly made and hands correctly played, the outcome of any given hand or any given playing session would be uncertain. Poker has been a deceptive game because good players wouldn’t always won and bad players wouldn’t always lose.

There would be statistical fluctuations in the outcomes. Your goal would be to make the right decisions for the right reasons. You should not have get upset or elated over outcomes of single hands. Only as time would pass and trends would become clear, would it be possible to evaluate the quality of your decision-making.