What we can control

The obligation to play well.

Photo by Clifford Photography on Unsplash

Less than two weeks into the life of this Substack, and a theme has emerged. My last post was about viewing your money—both your money at the table and, ultimately, even the money in your bank account—as not really your own, in the Stoic sense. “No one should feel pride in anything that is not his own,” Seneca writes. A home, land, money—“not one of these things can be said to be in him—they are just things around him.”¹ One of the things that follows from that is that we shouldn’t feel upset when we lose money, and since poker players have to absorb a lot of losses, including unlucky and expensive ones, that’s always going to be important advice.

Your money isn't yours

But that makes two posts in a row (here’s the first) that are essentially about not worrying about your losses, and I worry that people are going to get the idea that that’s the whole project. It’s not just that I don’t want to seem one note; it’s also that this misperception could seem to encourage lousy play! After all, isn’t the easiest way to stop worrying about losses just to be a fish? The Stoic ideal of being indifferent to financial losses because you understand you can’t control them…isn’t this how some of the worst poker players already act? They cheerfully call raises with any two cards, alternately exhorting other players to “have more gamble” and getting out their wallets to buy back in. They certainly seem “indifferent” to how the cards come, or what their opponents might have, or where all their money went. Is this the Stoic ideal? (Or, as my friend Joe Kugelmass put it in a comment, we wouldn’t say that the proper Buddhist attitude towards health is to smoke as much as you want because “hey, someday, we’re all going to die.”)

Hopefully you’ve intuited that this isn’t what I’m suggesting, and that Stoic indifference would have to be very different from the reckless gambler’s indifference in order to be worth anything. In this as in so many things, the clarity of thought attained by the expert may look superficially similar to the blissful recklessness of the beginner, but in fact they’re almost opposites. It’s a little like the joke about the professor of Greek who observes to his students that although he’s been studying Greek most of his life, it’s only recently that he’s been able to read Greek words like a native speaker, without the English meanings coming to mind. “Big deal,” boasts one freshman; “I’ve been reading Greek all semester without any English meanings coming to mind!”

So why isn’t being a fish or a maniac compatible with Stoicism? And what should we do instead?

The obligation to make good decisions

The maniac and the fish may not care about losing money.² But the price they pay for that indifference is that they don’t care about betting that money badly, either. That tradeoff is one a Stoic wouldn’t support, because to a Stoic the only thing we have that’s truly ours is our “faculty of choice,” our ability to decide what we do, how we react. Thus, it’s our proper nature to use that faculty well, just like it’s a horse’s proper nature to run or a bird’s proper nature to fly. Any time that we neglect or abuse our faculty of choice, we’re acting contrary to nature and missing the chance to improve ourselves as human beings.

If a person’s proper role is to make good choices, a poker player’s proper role is to make good poker decisions: in betting, in folding, in selecting games, in deciding when to go home. After all, what do people mean when they say poker is primarily a game of skill? They mean that it offers players more meaningful choices than games of pure chance. (By contrast, one bet in roulette is not significantly better than another, and certainly not better than the decision not to play at all.)

Now, I doubt if I have too many people reading this Substack who play like maniacs (though any who do are welcome here, and welcome to sit in with me as well!). Plus, one might knowingly choose to sacrifice some optimal play for the purposes of fun and excitement (this is a topic we’ll come back to in a future post). But even those of us who are actively trying to take the game seriously can fall short of our intention to make good decisions—often because we aren’t really making decisions at all. Here are two ways that can happen.

When we’re not present for our decisions

The first way in which we might fail to make careful decisions is through distraction, such that we take actions without thinking about what they mean or whether they’re advantageous. To me, this most often happens due to boredom or fatigue, either of which can make me run on autopilot. But more exotic distractions are possible too.

I remember a hand a while back in which I was dealt pocket aces. Naturally, I bet, and was lucky enough to have two people call. The flop brought more good news: another ace, giving me three of a kind. I bet, and one of the callers came along with me; I bet again on the next card, and this time he folded. Not the biggest pot in the world, but healthy, and I was feeling pretty pleased with myself…until I realized that I couldn’t remember any of the other cards on the board. Not only that, during the hand I hadn’t formed any idea about what my opponent had, what kind of player he was, or what hands I might be targeting to get him to call a bet. Of course I made money—anyone can make money with a set of aces!—but that’s the outcome, the part of the hand I couldn’t control.³ What I could control was assessing the situation and consciously making the right play, and judging by that standard—the only judgment that makes sense—this was probably my worst hand of the session.

Note that this cuts against the idea that focusing on our money goes hand in hand with making careful decisions. In this case, it was the opposite: my excitement at the prospect of winning (something I couldn’t control, and didn’t need any help from me anyway) overwhelmed the question of what I should actually do.

When we deny that we have a decision

This mistake is superficially similar to playing on autopilot, or to being blinded by greed (as in my aces story) or by fear: we think, in some shallow way, that we know what to do, and we do it without giving it serious thought. But while decisions on autopilot are made with little consciousness, sometimes we make decisions with false consciousness, or with what Sartre (who was not a Stoic) called “bad faith.” That is, we deny that we really have a decision to make at all.

What Sartre understood is that making decisions is scary and stressful. We would often rather just act as though the decision is already made for us. In poker, this can take different forms. For instance, we may make a strong hand, but disregard strong signs that our opponent has an even stronger one. It would be painful to give up our hopes for the hand, so we act as though folding isn’t a valid choice: “What am I supposed to do, fold a straight?” Or, “I waited two hours for a hand as good as this—I’ve got to play it.”

We also can give in to fatalism and deny our decisions matter—for instance, when we’re down to our last few chips (especially in a tournament when no further investment is possible). After losing almost everything in a big pot, losing the rest may feel inevitable, and it gives a kind of bitter satisfaction to set our last chips on fire rather than giving serious thought about what to do with them. The Stoics, though, would say that our obligation to make good choices doesn’t go away when our chips get below a certain threshold. Continue to make choices you can be proud of, whatever your chances of success.

Where to go from here

There’s much more to say about what we can control, and I’ll do deep dives into these and more ways in which we may miss chances to make good decisions, and what we can do instead. The bottom line, though, is that the Stoic approach to poker isn’t about having no cares. It’s about something much harder: it’s caring about the stuff it often vexes us to think about—our choices—while working at not caring about the stuff it often vexes us not to think about—our money, our luck, our opponents’ respect for us. It’s a tall order; better get down to it!

1. Letters from a Stoic, letter XLI

2. Though plenty of bad players care a lot when they lose! I remember one player’s brash attitude when he shoved his first two hands in a tournament without looking at his cards first; on the second one, I called him with King-Queen, and won, and I’ll never forget the look of queasy regret on his face.

3. And of course, since I wasn’t paying close attention to what I was doing and how my opponent might react, I didn’t have a way to assess whether I could have earned even more money by playing a different way.