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Quitting the full-time poker scene

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Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#121

Post by throwaway2037 »

kwar13 wrote: post #101
Tarsul wrote: post #21

I find interesting that no one (yet) in OP or in the comments has talked about my main complaint about playing Poker as a living: it's a zero sum game where you basically only take money from other people. It's not productive. For me, that in itself is as depressing as the grind. But it appears most players don't really care about this, maybe because life oftentimes is not fair and thus being productive is not seen a…

Think of it as entertainment. What does the average professional athlete really add to the world? Poker advances your understanding of probability and statistics, bet sizing, drawdown management, and many other skills that would be useful in the real world. Watching baseball on TV, not sure what you take away from that. Playing sports build health and community and that is a huge benefit in itself, but for some reaso…

    poker gets all the negative stigma
For me, the reason is simple: gambling. The vast majority of people who gamble lose. That's it. Once you see that truth, the whole industry looks horrible. In the last 30 years, gambling has invaded so many communities in the United States for a very much negative effect. It is a tragedy. And, the more normalised gambling becomes, the more addicts it will product.

Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#123

Post by [deleted] »

nkingsy wrote: post #34
Tarsul wrote: post #21

I find interesting that no one (yet) in OP or in the comments has talked about my main complaint about playing Poker as a living: it's a zero sum game where you basically only take money from other people. It's not productive. For me, that in itself is as depressing as the grind. But it appears most players don't really care about this, maybe because life oftentimes is not fair and thus being productive is not seen a…

Years and years later I still have a fond memory of wiping a guy out for 5k in a 2-5nl game at Caesar’s during wsop. He was a fellow low level pro that had been bluffing me all night, making nice and chit chatting with me. Like thinking back now there is just zero remorse. Never saw him again. He didn’t have bus fare. It is a sanctioned place to have a battle of wits for money. Totally agree it is not good for the so…

[deleted]

Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#124

Post by wenyuanyu »

somenameforme wrote: post #119
Tarsul wrote: post #21

I find interesting that no one (yet) in OP or in the comments has talked about my main complaint about playing Poker as a living: it's a zero sum game where you basically only take money from other people. It's not productive. For me, that in itself is as depressing as the grind. But it appears most players don't really care about this, maybe because life oftentimes is not fair and thus being productive is not seen a…

I think this is a rabbit hole that makes you want to pull out of it real fast. For instance consider how many tech jobs right now basically devolve into trying to make people see ads that they don't want to watch. Not only are you not adding value to the world, you're actively making it worse. Of course people can convince themselves with all sorts of rationalizations, like claiming you're introducing people to thing…

Ads are not zero-sum at all... Also most ads are not for the not known things... Coca Cola and Apple are among the top spenders on ads...

Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#125

Post by hnbad »

somenameforme wrote: post #119
Tarsul wrote: post #21

I find interesting that no one (yet) in OP or in the comments has talked about my main complaint about playing Poker as a living: it's a zero sum game where you basically only take money from other people. It's not productive. For me, that in itself is as depressing as the grind. But it appears most players don't really care about this, maybe because life oftentimes is not fair and thus being productive is not seen a…

I think this is a rabbit hole that makes you want to pull out of it real fast. For instance consider how many tech jobs right now basically devolve into trying to make people see ads that they don't want to watch. Not only are you not adding value to the world, you're actively making it worse. Of course people can convince themselves with all sorts of rationalizations, like claiming you're introducing people to thing…

During the genocide of Jewish people in Poland, one of the officers of the German reserve police who were tasked with the executions negotiated with his comrades that he would kill the children, but that he would only do so after their mothers had already been killed by someone else. This way, he told himself, he was doing the children a favor by ending their suffering because surely they had nothing left to live for if they had seen their mothers die in front of their own eyes.

I'm not saying poker (or advertising) is like the Holocaust. I am however saying people are exceptionally good at rationalizing their participation in acts they would otherwise find morally appalling if they end up in a place where they are part of a system and their ability to maintain their social status quo hinges on continuing to be part of it.

> All in all we have a pretty terrible system, but nonetheless it's almost certainly better than all the others.

Completely unrelated fun fact: Eastern Block apparatchiks used to refer to anarchists and other communists as "utopians" and coined the term "real socialism" (or "actually existing socialism") to describe the Soviet system of authoritarian governance and justify why it never met the aspirational goals Lenin and the Bolsheviks initially claimed they had. It's terrible, da, but it's better than capitalism and only a counter-revolutionary would claim that something more radical would be possible.

If you go back to the days of feudalism I'm sure you can find a thinker arguing in not as many words that while the divine hierarchy may feel cruel at times it is clearly preferable to the chaos of mob rule.

Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#126

Post by hnbad »

wenyuanyu wrote: post #124
somenameforme wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a rabbit hole that makes you want to pull out of it real fast. For instance consider how many tech jobs right now basically devolve into trying to make people see ads that they don't want to watch. Not only are you not adding value to the world, you're actively making it worse. Of course people can convince themselves with all sorts of rationalizations, like claiming you're introducing people to thing…

Ads are not zero-sum at all... Also most ads are not for the not known things... Coca Cola and Apple are among the top spenders on ads...

Spend any time working in advertising and you'll fall down the "content marketing" rabbit hole. There's a lot of money in selling Pepsi its own logo or making sure people can't forget about a brand but there's even more money in content marketing and that's entirely a grift.

Content marketing is like a void onion. It's layers upon layers of nothing and it all generates "passive income". Most of it exists to sell to other people who are doing content marketing as a get-rich-quick-scheme. Why bother doing a grift yourself if you can grift by selling your grift to other people and let them worry about how to make it actually work. The actual product and topic doesn't even matter. Is it investment advice? Mental health? Self-improvement? Weight loss? "Passive income"? Offer vacuous goodies like "free ebooks" to get people hooked and then continue selling and upselling them on the promise that if they just pay for one more Mastermind session, webinar, virtual retreat or coaching package, they'll figure it out eventually.

Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#127

Post by hnbad »

saucymew wrote: post #58
Tarsul wrote: post #21

I find interesting that no one (yet) in OP or in the comments has talked about my main complaint about playing Poker as a living: it's a zero sum game where you basically only take money from other people. It's not productive. For me, that in itself is as depressing as the grind. But it appears most players don't really care about this, maybe because life oftentimes is not fair and thus being productive is not seen a…

Many competitive games/sports where you are trading ELO or rankings (chess, RTS, boxing) are like this, but I wouldn't judge it outright as "not productive." I'd reckon it's more about the journey, the stories and friends we made along the way, even though there may be few. Whenever someone asks, "Why do they do that?" I always share the man who holds the Guinness World Records for rolling an orange with their nose:…

I find it hard to understand how you could argue it's productive when it is literally about exploiting other people's inexperience, naivety or honesty (lacking a "poker face") in order to take their money from them. It doesn't produce anything. At best you could argue it's a form of entertainment but it's not even good at that except as an observer sport.

Gambling, for most people, is ultimately a form of fraud. It's built on the narrative that you can get rich quick. Gambling is for the winners. The losers are just paying for it. The narrative hinges entirely on numbing the mark's rationality and making them not think about the odds, getting them to keep throwing money at you until they go bankrupt.

Rolling an orange on the other hand is something you can do entirely by yourself without harming anyone except the people you inconvenience if you do it somewhere public. Neither activity is productive but at least rolling an orange with your nose isn't actively anti-social unless you're a dick about it.

Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#128

Post by jrs235 »

busyant wrote: post #56
xwdv wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why you always keep separate savings accounts away from a spouse.

> This is why you always keep separate savings accounts away from a spouse. Your username bio is hilarious--and it is also consistent with your advice. Have an upvote (on your way to 1K)

I just viewed their profile. They're at 999 karma. Trying to figure out if they have a bot monitoring their own karma that invokes a bot to down vote some other comments of theirs....

UPDATE: Something has to be involved... Or karma aggregation/recalculation isn't instant. I just upvoted their comment, they're still at 999. LOL.

Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#129

Post by silexia »

I was addicted to gambling online via Texas hold em poker for a period in college. I mastered the statistics and broke about even. I should never have done it though, extremely destructive to sleep and healthy mental patterns.

Re: Quitting the full-time poker scene

#130

Post by voitvod »

busyant wrote: post #35
97s wrote: post #15

I played back during the glory days of 2000-2004 and through the net-teller shutdown for America. Back then the money was absolutely absurd, because the game was very new online and very few people understood basics. This combined with the massive amount of marketing that was going on for television, tons of people were addicted to the thrill of the game. Every single year the game became more difficult as more peopl…

> looking for soft players that I had datamined I knew someone on the other end of this. Back in the early 2000s, the wife of a guy I worked with fancied herself a decent poker player. She lost some non-trivial amount of money in an online game and was worried about telling her husband. So, she tried to win it back and lost even more. I think you know where this is going (if not, see Gambler's ruin). She lost all of…

She is like a unicorn because I have personally never met a losing poker player.

Everyone is crushing it no matter what the rake in these games. "The games are all so soft". Sometimes they eventually though get bored of making all this money and move on to something else.

Same with sports betting now. "I win some, I lose some but overall I am up". Everyone says the same thing, even when betting on sports they don't even personally follow or watch.

You know what they say, the house always loses.

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