What can one say about Lebron James' shot to win Game 2 last Friday? When the best player in the NBA hits the luckiest shot, is it skill, luck, or fate?
I'm a lifetime loser at poker, and have decided to never play again. I've lost $300-$400 since I started playing in 2006. In that time I have seen about 200,000 cards, I would suppose. Had two cards of those 200,000 been anything but Jacks, I would be a lifetime winner.
It was November 2007. Out of the $800 I had in my name, $250 was in a poker account. My psyche isn't predisposed to gamble, and I don't have a death wish. I just really love to play poker. For months that summer my friend Dan and I played free tournaments online, just to play. It was my passion during that time.
90 people started in this tournament. The winner got $250. That day I went on a streak worthy of Joe DiMaggio. I kept catching cards all day, and nothing could go wrong. If I got into a hand behind, something always came to bail me out. If I got in ahead, all the cards that fell preserved my advantage. I was doubling and quadrupling my chips. Twice there were two Aces in my hand, and both times I doubled my chip count. It was the one time in my life where I was literally running away from the field, I had twice as many chips as anyone else when the final table started. With this advantage I sailed through the final table.
Finally, there was me and one other player. I had twice as many chips as he had, but he was good. We played for twenty minutes and his stack didn't budge. He would frequently make big raises, always when I had nothing. I was doing the same to him, and nobody was getting anywhere. Finally, I was able to limp with an Ace and a King in my hand, hoping he would go all-in. Sure enough, he put all his chips in, and I immediately called. He showed a King and a Jack.
This was an excellent result for me. I was winning the hand to start, with five cards to be seen. If a King came on the board, I would still win because my Ace beat his Jack. In fact, barring a very strange flop, he could only win if one the three remaining Jacks came onto the board. If no Jack appeared, I would win $250, which was a serious amount of money for me at that point.
The first three cards went down. No Jack. Then the fourth card. Also not a Jack. At this point, there were 41 cards that would win me $250, and only 3 cards that would allow him to win the hand and continue (with a large chip advantage and probable victory). I was standing and staring at the screen with my fists clenched. His 41-3 longshot came in on the last card. I won a second prize of about $70, meaning that this one Jack cost me $180. My legs buckled and I lay on the floor for ten minutes, shouting "Fuck fuck fuck." over and over to myself.
Incredibly, this exact scenario happened again the very next day. I was a single card from winning $250. Out of 200,000 cards, those two have lowered me from a lifetime winner to a lifetime loser.
2. Luck and the pivotal moment
Luck is a very bizzare concept. There is a school of thought insisting that the breaks in life even out. While superficially true, there is no person's life which does not contain certain pivotal moments that can only go one way or the other.
At the extreme, take the impact of the 2000 Presidential Election on the lives of George Bush and Al Gore. The ultimate determiner of the election was a messy combination of a few hundred votes in Florida, combined with higher court decisions, with some supposedly confusing voting machines thrown in to boot. Many Jewish people in a certain county claimed that they had accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan based on the system, even though Buchanan had recently written a book opposing U.S. intervention in World War II.
The election was so close then that the ultimate outcome, the selection of the next President of the United States, really came down to the equivalent of a coin toss. Surely had the election been held even three days earlier or later, it is very possible that Al Gore would have won.
In the case of Al Gore, all the good luck in the world will never even out that one bad break. He worked his entire life to become the President, and he failed. Even though that failure owed as much to bad luck as anything, it defined him for years, and he took a lot of criticism from many people for his failure to win that election.
3. The murderous allure of poker to a young man
Many young men in the United States do not find themselves particularly challenged for the first 21 years of their life. If they go to college, they soon find that grades most universities are severely inflated, and an honest effort in any class rarely fetches less than a B. Here are some of the biggest:
- Since career advancement in academia is based on research and writing, most professors have little incentive to pour their time into teaching an undergraduate course. However, a strict professor will be graded more harshly on class reviews, which could have a negative impact on their advancement. Thus, a (non-tenured) professor has little to gain and much to lose by pushing their students too hard.
- Additionally, many adults in middle age have grand memories of college life, and implicitly support this arragement. They may have difficult jobs and many responsibilities, but deep down most of them look back on their days partying in school with a certain degree of affection.
- Finally, American society in general does not push young kids to work hard the way a place such as India, China, or Japan does. Thus, for many kids childhood in general is a quite relaxing era of time, and the contrast with adulthood can be stark.
From 2003 to 2007, these kids were the backbone of the great poker craze. The flight of easy money to the poker tables must have been a windfall for the true professionals. The cause of all of this of course was the World Series Main Event title won by the aptronymically named Chris Moneymaker. In reality, the sheer luck Moneymaker needed was astounding. In the realm of myth and fantasy though, this was not important.
To a young man looking at 50 weeks a year of 45 hour work weeks for the first time, poker can be a very alluring espace. While better connected people dreamed of getting rich flipping condos and McMansions, younger guys looked to dodge the rat race by skimming the marks and rubes on FullTilt, PokerStars, and PartyPoker. Most of them no doubt were driven by the common distaste for hard work and stable living.
"Nobody ever got rich by working." they could point out with some justice.
Every winner in poker needs ten losers, and there is no small supply of losers in the world. The beauty of Hold'Em is that even a terrible player will win a lot of money on certain days. These swings of luck are murderously seductive. A few weeks ago I walked out of the Horseshoe Casino with almost $500 tucked into my sock. In seven hours, I made more money at poker than I would by working for three days. It was a scene straight out of Rounders, and legitimately comparable to a cocaine high. But in the long term, I'm a money loser at poker. There's no way around that.
4. A reason for being
When I was a young child, about 6 or 8 years old, it was my dream to be great at something (but what?). To dominate a field of endeavor the way Michael Jordan or even John Stockton, David Robinson, and Charles Barkley dominated basketball in those days. I was perhaps too young to consciously state this desire, but it was there none the less. I knew I was destined for great things. When I was in third grade, there were three spelling tests for our class. One was for normal kids. One was for smart kids. And one was for Daniel Bryan.
David Brooks recently wrote a terrific article that spoke deeply on this subject. Per the gods of science, genius is made through years of obsessive focus on a very narrow topic. It is not born prepackaged, and only potential is inherent. However, there is nothing I've ever been driven enough to do for 10,000 hours of my life. There is an immense amount of potential within, but it has all been dissipated on trivial things and channeled down blind alleys. In short, my life has lacked any element that this article reccomends. My latest run with poker has convinced me that I must find something to fill this void.
I'll be following a strict schedule from now on:
- Write
- Work Out
- Earn Money/Support Myself
- Socialize/Date
I turn 24 in a couple months, and it's dawning on me how quickly youth vanishes. Not long ago I was 19. I did little by day. At night I smoked marijuana all the time. I got involved with a lot of inane happenings. It would be easy to claim that it was all a big mistake. In truth I did probably blow a lot of good opportunities, and I get mad when I think about it. But I don't apologize for anything I did. When I look back at those years, the time period from 2004 to 2007, it is something I would go back to in a heartbeat if I had the chance. Someday I will write about everything that happened back then. Through it all I still more or less held my life together and even visited 9 or 10 countries to boot, so there are no regrets at all.
24 is not old, but it is a hell of a lot older than 19. For the first time it really seems like I will be 30 soon. By reducing all of life to the above 4 essentials ranked by priority, I will remove all distractions and finally reach the potential that I know I've wasted for the first six years of my adult life.
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