Day Forty-Seven

Is there meaning in the cards? Perhaps. You can explore the symbologies of the game, and that may help give your life a more graspable context. The strategic value of this analysis is minimal. However, there are ways of looking at the game that can aid you, especially at times of crisis.

The basic perspective is statistical. I’ve written about it quite a bit and can recommend Mason Malmuth’s book as the primary access point to this form of mathematics. Despite the overuse of the word “variance,” all but the most circumspect players have much understanding of variance. Variance is not necessarily a downswing or “running bad,” it is a measure of the dispersal of results over some number of events. A downswing can be an outlying result, true, but it can also be the natural result of a strategy.

I am indeed wounded by my latest results. Soon after this disaster, I will take a much more annoying one, a result that leaves me far more tilted than any normal runbad. In a three-bet pot against a wild tournament player, I flop top two, leaving my opponent nearly drawing dead with what turns out to be second pair. His equity is again close to five percent, but he will find it. I pay off his one-third pot value bet on the river, and even that is questionable: I can find this fold.

Similarly, still hurting, I sit down for another session tonight, but am out within two dealers. I run kings into aces, then lose a flip.

Am I running bad? Is this variance or the result of my play? The answer is both. I might have folded the kings versus my opponent, a fake action, all talk kind of guy who is feigning being high. On the other hand, it was a hundred big blind spot and I did not want to fold kings. The damn straddle was on again, too, meaning I was playing bigger than I can afford. I’m setting myself up for failure under the guise of being in a “good game.”

The problem is also sample size. These losses and these choices are all within a certain realm of what my natural return on investment is. I could have dodged the flip. I could have folded to the aces. I was not playing to full potential. So, these losses, even if I am an overall winner, can be understood as within my expected return. I am, as all players are, better in some situations than others.

“To assume that the symbols which we constantly play with mean nothing is from one perspective, a choice, and from another – arrogant. It presupposes that there is no underlying structure to our reality. It assumes everything is random and that the experience of reality lives and dies within the physical world.”

Here Lucky Chewy steers into some classic rhetoric. There are many in the theological world who posit that without a divine power, all is mere “matter in motion.” It is also akin to the argument that there is no morality without God. These arguments have easy rhetorical sway, but neither ultimately work.

For the first, structure does not have to arrive from sublime power- of course Andrew would agree here. Structure can emerge over time, and in fact that is the structure we live in and which we are composed of. The extraordinary powers of time and energy show their faces in evolution. In other words, we can imagine that there are structures underneath reality that Andrew cannot see, which means structure versus randomness is a false binary. Some structures can mean more than others, which we can see when interpreting card suits as one would a tarot deck.

For the second, divinely ordained morality turns out to be too stiff and will break down; think of Peter Singer’s thought experiments. He has suggested we are not moral when we do not work to salvage every losing situation. Yet all he has really demonstrated is that that morality itself is relative to other forces, not that morality is impossible. Finding pure consistency is not merely the hobgoblin of small minds, but of great ones, too, it would seem.

That philosophy remains unresolved in our advanced age might even be reassuring. The unclear future, the difficult concept, the balancing of impossible concerns are all challenges, but that is why you know they are real and matter. Many retreat to non-existent absolutes, unable to deal with the confounding and painful nature of reality. However, the poker player and gambler, if he can see the unsolvable three-body problem of skill versus luck versus time, may find peace in seeing that he not as good as he thought he was, even while the deck and the universe are antagonizing him.

The beating I took tonight is hard. It’s been a whole quarter of failure and has consequences. I am ready to despair, yet reminding myself of the nature of skill and variance gives me relief. It is doubly reassuring when sensical thoughts function and matter in a world so dangerously in love with notions and lies and jargon.

Still, like Andrew, I am wondering about my reality: why it is that the gate of winning continues to close? Morally, this is probably the right thing. I deserve the struggle, unlike Andrew, who has probably lived a better life than I have. This blog itself, so dedicated to how interior things map to exterior things, is a testament to my failings but also to the cold feel of the prison bars. Above all, I sense the limitations of my life while playing and analyzing the game.

Yet this is exactly when we find some of the answers Lucky Chewy might want. The sample size is never right. Our skill itself evolves as well. In fact, everything is evolving, including everything all around us. This means that while we have free will, we are also subject to different forces and therefore different variance quotients. We are free to want similar things but are living out different graphs because of our personal sample of the universe.

What is this individual variance quotient and what does it mean is therefore one mystery Andrew is pressing against. This is the mature version of the “childish mind” which grasps at fading historical symbols.

The universe is expanding faster than the speed of light. We are therefore watching galaxies disappear which we will never experience, not even our most advanced future selves. There is so much we will never touch or even know to touch. Our losses are trivial, our standing unknown. Mapping ourselves against the sky, even through the lens of a parlor game for hustlers and addicts, is something to keep our problems in perspective and ourselves engaged with whatever remains in the cards.

+291