Generación / generation

By: Adrian Konstantinov

What motivates people to change careers? To end a bad habit? To move to a new city? Maybe it’s the start (or end) of a relationship, a new addition to the family, or even a desire to make someone proud. But, as with every pivotal life decision, the decision itself is probably far less pivotal than what comes after: the commitment to the decision. Does this commitment have a timeline, an expiration date on the effort to maintain it? You tell yourself you’ll give it one more year to make it in the industry, one more year to fall in love. What about when an insurmountable obstacle gets in the way of commitment? (What even qualifies as “insurmountable”?) When can a person say “Well, I’ve given it my best shot. I’ve seen this through, and now it’s time for something else”?

People like to use outcomes to measure the success/failure of a decision. This is problematic to me because it’s very possible to make bad decisions and still end up with a good outcome, or have all the correct processes in place, do all the right things, and still end up with a bad outcome. Does that bad outcome negate the good process? Do consistent bad outcomes cause people to quit, leaving in their wake unfinished business, even if their efforts were attached to good processes? 

For a little under two years, I decided to dedicate myself to playing the game of poker as a profession. Most people see poker as a form of gambling, and truly, for most people it is a form of gambling. Not because it’s a game with cards, not because there are wagers involved, but because most people have not properly evaluated two things: the amount of variance (luck) in every action in life, and the difference between a positive expectation and a positive outcome. 

In other words, poker is a game with plenty of good outcomes from bad processes, and vice versa.

Unlike a slot machine, which has predetermined odds, the game of poker is a game between people. To simplify it, we can say that every action has an X% chance of winning. For example, if two players “go all-in” after looking at their cards, and one has a pair (two of a kind) of aces while the other has a 7 and a 2 (one of the worst starting hands in poker), the player with the pair of aces will win around 85% of the time. But 15% of the time, 7-2 will crack (beat) aces! So 15% of the time, “bad behavior” is rewarded. 

However, if the player that had aces keeps “going all-in” over and over again with cards that have an 85% chance of winning, over the long run he will be much more profitable than a player who keeps “going all-in” with 15%. This is the fundamental reason why poker is not gambling: find a table of 15% people (e.g.,  a table where the other players will make worse decisions than you consistently) and you will win — in the long run.

Poker is all about committing to the process and ignoring short term noise. So does performing the correct process over a long enough period of time determine when you’re finished with the game?

When I began playing poker, I was most assuredly closer to a 15% guy than an 85% guy. However, after a lot of early loss, and a lot of studying, my percentages started to creep up. More and more often I was in the 85% category. In other words, I improved my process. I kept playing, kept studying, and eventually I had the most profitable months-long time period of my brief career. At its peak, I quit.

At the time, I couldn’t really explain to myself why I quit. I’d just experienced the best success to date. I’d improved to the point where I was consistently making money instead of losing, but I was still some way off from realizing my potential. Halfway up the mountain seems like an odd time to quit.

After some reflection, I told myself that I stopped playing because I was burnt out, that anyways I’d achieved what I had set out to achieve (good process = long term good results). And for a while, I believed that.

However, I wasn’t really tired of poker.  This is where I think I had misunderstood commitment, imagining it as something that had to end in completion. If I committed to becoming a professional poker player, then setting the correct process in motion and performing that process over and over, regardless of outcome, meant success. And when the outcome caught up to the process, that was a just reward for the success of that process.

But what if life doesn’t really work that way? What if there is no final hand, or rather, what if there are infinite hands to play? 

By the standards I had originally set for myself, I finished. I reached the level I had imagined. But I was still left wondering: what if I kept playing? What if I became the best player in the world? Isn’t there always one more hand left to play? 

I still don’t know if I made the right decision, or if I’ll regret stopping when I did. I’m really happy with my current job and lifestyle, and I only play poker less than once a month. Yet for some reason, I’m not sure I can — or ever will — fully let go. Maybe the game has become ingrained into my brain, or it’s  just that I like the competitive aspect of playing, but for some reason not playing cards feels like I’m leaving money on the proverbial table.

Maybe commitment isn’t about seeing something through to the end, because there is no end.  Maybe the most committed thing you can do is admit that you’ve learned what you came to learn, but that there will always be more, and walk away without knowing whether the next hand would have been the one that finally paid off.