garfunkeling

I miss my old friend Ben Heywood. I used to be so intimidated by him when we first met because he was so damn cool. As I got to know him though I found him to be a great friend. Since I've moved back up to Northern California from Pasadena we haven't kept in touch and I regret that.

One thing I remember that Ben taught me was to always consider the "why" when you write something. I was speaking with him about a paper I was writing for a college course I was taking and he told me that the best thing he learned about writing was to ask why someone would want to read what you're writing, what's the point. That's something to consider when writing my blogs. Note to self: some people read this thing, which is a good thing. Why would they want to keep reading?

I used to keep good records of all of my poker playing, both live and online. I found that tedious and it was difficult, using the system I used, to differentiate between my live results, which tended to be larger swings, versus my online results, which had smaller swings. Now I just use a poker software program to help me keep track of my online results only, and it does an excellent job of that.

One thing I noticed while reviewing my results is the effect variance can have on short term results. Variance, in the manner in which I'm using it, is a statistics term. Technically it means "a quantity equal to the square of the standard deviation". Most of us don't know what that means, and even if we did it might not be useful. Perhaps a better definition is "the difference between actual and expected costs, profits, output, etc., in a statistical analysis". What this means is that sometimes your actual results, in poker specifically, especially in the short term, are sometimes different than your expected results. Take a look at the following graph:

This is a graph of a very swing-y time in my poker playing. Its over a period of about 18,000 hands, which is the equivalent of about 3 months of live poker playing.

Now look at this graph:


This is my overall graph as of yesterday. You'll see the sample of the first graph in the center. Notice how the huge peaks and valleys of the first graph seem more tame in the second one. This is variance. In the short term the swings are larger, because variance has more of an effect. But in the longer term variance has less of an impact and the truth comes out. In this case its clear that this is the graph of a winning player, whereas the first graph was unclear.

So what's the point? A brag post, obviously.

No. Poker is like life. Variance affects us all. Sometimes, in the moment, all we see is the negative, the reasons why what we're doing won't work, the excuses why we are failures. But when you push through the negative and look at the larger picture I think we'll see the truth. Now, variance works both ways. Sometimes success falls like manna from heaven, but that doesn't mean it was deserved. In poker we say that you're running "above expectation". The big picture tells the truth, in either case. So perhaps we should focus not on short term results, but on what we're doing to produce results. If what we're doing is the right thing the results shouldn't matter, because, in the long run, our output will match our input.

This reminds me of something else that Ben taught me. Sad times are usually consciously experienced in the moment, whereas happy times are usually consciously experienced in retrospect. Its easy to identify when we're down, but not as easy to identify when we're happy, in the moment. What if we changed that? What if we tried to focus on identifying the happy times while we're living them? Maybe we'd learn to savor those times in the moment and make them last.