Poker and Life - Lessons in both.

A rule that all good poker players live by:
Always try and make the best decision possible with the information you have attained. This makes a good poker player, it may not necessarily mean you will win the hand, or lose the least amount of money, but it's what all good poker players live by.

There is a concept known as the "Sklansky Dollar" named after the mathematical/poker genius of the same name. It is an imaginary amount of money that you earn every time you make a good decision mathematically.

If you get all-in with a hand that will win 80% of the time you will take 80% of that pot and add it to your "Sklansky Dollar" total, no matter the outcome of the hand. For example, you get all in with a hand that has a 70% chance of winning, and the pot total is 100 dollars, no matter if you get sucked out or if you win the hand, you have earned 70 Sklansky Dollars.

Now don't go out and start calculating this figure for all of your poker games, the math will overwhelm you and you won't have enough time to think about the game and will probably start playing worse. It's the concept that is important here. Essentially in the long run after playing thousands if not millions of games of poker you should expect your *actual* earnings to equal your Sklansky Dollars.

This concept helps people realize that the longer you play good poker, the more money you should earn. It also illustrates that you *will* and *should* have your pocket aces cracked from time to time, Sklansky Dollars wouldn't equal out in the long run if this didn't happen.

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So what on earth does this concept have to do with life in general?

Life is an ongoing poker game, filled with many easy and tough decisions every day. Life is also predicated by luck in many instances, in many cases no matter how good of a decision you make you feel like life just crapped on you. In life we often go on "tilt" where we let our emotions take control of our actions, and it often leads to the making of bad decisions.

We can apply the idea of "Sklansky Dollars" to this concept as well. I'll call it "Applebury Dollars" (after my last name). You however can't refer to this quite so much in terms of cash or money, but it helps us monetize and conceptualize the concept.

When we are going through our daily lives we try to think that we make good decisions. Whenever we do we expect good things to happen to us for making such good decisions, they often happen, but they sometimes don't. A good decision will depend on the person, and often when faced with difficult situations we don't know what a good decision will be. But generally you can think of a good decision of a case where you have a better chance of something good happening to you than bad or a case where your decision creates less pain or bad to you than the alternative.

Whenever a good decision is made, you essentially add to your "Applebury Dollar" total no matter the outcome of the decision. This teaches us the same concept in poker, but as it deals with life. We should do two things, make good decisions, and live life to the fullest.

Live life to the fullest? How does that pertain here? As with poker, you will find yourself with more profit if you play more and more poker, as long as you make good decisions. This same concept pertains to life, you must go out and live life, take risks, make decisions. If life craps on you some of the times, then so be it, but we must move forward because if we stop making decisions and stop living we will never be able to to make the most of our lives and we will never overcome the sinister "luck factor".

How do we know if we make good decisions?

This is a much trickier question. In poker, we must discern from luck and skill when playing poker. Mathematics helps us with this, we can calculate the odds and the expected gain/loss from a decision.

We can't do this in terms of life. Some people will make bad decisions and continue to make bad decisions until luck catches up with them and they realize that what they have done is wrong. Some people will make many good decisions and continue to make good decisions only to be crapped on and made to feel that they have made bad decisions their whole life.

This is probably the best reason for having a good education. Being well educated is probably one of the few for sure good decisions that one can make. Education allows us to examine the decisions made by many people throughout the world and time and the theories and thoughts of those thinking about decisions we are making today and in the future. Education allows us to think more clearly about the decisions we have to make, much like the education of a poker player except life takes much longer to learn. As we begin to view the world differently because of our education, we begin to make hard decisions more easy. And often times it takes experience to truly understand the difference between wrong and right.

I hope you enjoy my little philosophical babble. In poker and in life you must first educate yourself, play and live as much as possible, and finally make good decisions. If you follow this creed you will become not only more successful at the poker table, but also at life.

- Justin "Tireur" Applebury