poker betting – Use the results to test your beliefs and bets
We cannot just “absorb” the experience and expect to learn from it. As the novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley said, “Experience is not what happens to one, but how one responds to what happens to one. “
The difference between gaining experience and becoming an expert is significant: the ability to find out what the decision reveals and to understand what the lessons are.
Suppose two salespeople from the same company call a customer. Joe sells the company’s product in January and gets an order for $1,000. Jane calls the same customer in August and gets an order for $10,000. What is going on here? Was Jane more powerful than Joe? Or did the company update its product line in February? Or did a competitor who was selling at a discount go out of business in April? Or did the two salespeople have some unexpected reason for the difference in sales? It’s hard to know why, because there’s no way to go back in time and switch Joe and Jane’s positions to conduct a comparison experiment. But how the company attributed the results was enough to influence training, pricing and product development decisions.
For poker betting players, this issue is a top priority. Most hands end with incomplete information: a player bets, no one calls, the bettor wins the chips, and no one reveals what their concealed cards were. After a few hands, players are still not sure why they won or lost. Does the winner have a better hand? Did the loser cover a better hand? Would the winner have made more money if they had played differently? If the loser plays differently, is the winner likely to cover and give up? In answering these questions, none of the players know what cards their opponents actually hold, or how the players will react to different betting decisions. How players adjust their play based on experience will determine the outcome of their hand. How they interpret these unknowns is an important bet that will make them better at playing poker.
People are good at identifying the “better” goals they want to pursue (becoming better, smarter, richer, healthier, etc.), but often fail to achieve those “better” goals because it is difficult to implement all the small decisions in pursuit of them. The process involves discerning exactly “when” and “how” to bet on the feedback loop, i.e., determining if those decisions are learning opportunities in the moment. In order to achieve our long-term goals, we must be more able to discern whether the future that is gradually emerging will allow us to learn and whether it will constitute a feedback loop.