How great, or not, is poker?
2024-09-10 12:24:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
Everyone’s playing poker these days. It would seem that anyone who’s anyone, and certainly anyone that’s successful, is playing poker. Just ask Nate Silver. He’s been doing the rounds explaining what it is about poker that’s so unbelievably great. It’s a perfect mix of difficulty and luck. It’s about spotting your opponents mistakes and exploiting those mistakes. Blah blah blah.
Poker is dull as fuck. Sorry but it is. It’s like all the people that optimise things in the world got together, and the people that optimise those optimisers discovered each other, which is no easy feat, because presumably that’s all very secret, and created game that they think is literally the best thing in the universe, making everything "game theory optimal", a sort of combination of extracting water from a stone and death.
Anyway, one of the things about poker that’s like this apparently uterly wonderful thing is developing your ability to see people’s 'tell’s', the body language and turns of phrase that give away some other thing a person is 'really' doing or thinking. It all sounds kind of like it makes sense until one day, you hear them call a tell on someone for saying something completely normal that you yourself occasionally say, and you know for a fact that their tell spotting is total bullshit, because you yourself aren’t doing or thinking the thing they are complaining about when you say said thing. You're just saying something that people say sometimes, a popular turn of phrase that’s a totally normal thing to say.
It’s quite frankly apauling and to tell you the truth, is all total fucking bullshit, just like when you realise that most of journalism might actually be total fucking bullshit too.
Perhaps playing and loving playing poker is the tell y’all. Seems a lot more likely to me.