Five Life Lessons Texas Hold’em Poker Taught Me
How to Play and Win When the Stakes are High
I have never liked gambling and I resent playing a game where the odds are mathematically stacked against me. I feel no pleasure in pulling the lever of a slot machine, looking at the ivory ball dancing on the roulette wheel or simply scratching a card hoping that, by sheer luck, my future will just get better.
I approached Texas Hold’em Poker (Hold’em) with the same scepticism, but I quickly realised that it had nothing to do with what I described above and, on the contrary, several powerful life lessons could be drawn from playing and observing the game. These ideas have since guided many of my decisions in places where stakes were way higher than the tables I used to play.
1) A game of incomplete information but not a game of chance
For many games it is easy to define whether the outcome is dominated by the players’ ability (e.g. chess) or by chance (e.g. slot machine). Card games often fall in between these two extremes as they almost always combine a) the random draw of cards from a deck (chance) and b) the ability of playing these cards in the best possible way (skill). The tendency for governments and authorities to classify as “gambling” those games where players can…
