The Power of Poker

What is the endgame of poker? Does it actually do any good? Thinking about the grand scheme of poker, how and why should it expand?

When I first started playing poker, I wanted only one thing really. That is to not be enslaved to a day job that I heard of so many hating and to do what I wanted. I wanted to be free and play games. A selfish but innocent narrative… But as I won, as you may win or discover playing other games yourself, you may (or may not) get bored and play other games, and play bigger ones. As for myself, I saw this process as never ending and at my natural core to keep playing higher and different games forever. My inspiration for poker was halted however when I reached the highest stakes and could not find a proper outlet to make a great impact. 

And so what? What, after all is the point of video games, soccer, basketball, betting, etc? Is it not just a waste of time? Actually, it may be at the core of all of things. Why have they existed before history began being recorded (around 7000 BC originating from war and entertainment), and are so prevalent today? 

Later in my life, somehow I got to the point of wanting to make the biggest impact possible, but was lost in that I had to pick a sector to focus. But what of so many? I aspired to get to the core of problems. I partnered with Mo Samba and my London friends fed people, but they were hungry and dependent tomorrow. Phil Michaels and Nassim Taleb gave me the idea that you could teach people to grow food and motivate them to work, getting them to even begin to help society on their own, creating a recursive return. They could even, eventually, as humanity is now learning, to become Elon Musk esque and build tech that could recursively bring positive benefits and solve any kind of problem. Was this it? Education to build more tools, makes sense. But, fate would turn me away from this space and rightfully in another direction.

 And who should I educate? The answer seemed to be children, because they were innocent, most malleable, and lowest cost to invest in. Seemed simple, but which children? And who is a child or an adult, after all? Remember your days in school as a kid being taught and loads of things you learned? And how useful it all was? Yeah, I think I speak for nearly all of us in that we don’t remember much at all and barely use any of it today. It turns out education is complicated and has many dimensions to it. An important point is that if people don’t want to learn or care to use the information, they will waste their time. 

It turns out that experts in sociology and making a positive impact cycled through which sector is most important for positive impact and were divided between health, energy, and education. If people had no health or energy, what could they do after all? But then they came up with a different kind of education as a possible solution: Sport, which got people healthy and off their asses learning various life skills in place of questionably useful book smarts experientially. 

Through sport, an element of health, energy was accounted for and now people willingly learned lessons that were immediately useful in their lives. People learned to persevere through adversity developing confidence, they learned to work as a team, to deal with loss, to strategize, to adapt, to improvise, to be disciplined and committed. Their needs for status and socializing were also met. A lot of net positives for these seemingly “pointless” games. Can you guess where this is going?

POKER is a mind sport basically, and nudges us through the incentive to win to learn various and unique traits and skills. More than many other games, it challenges us to critically think through bullshit, to be humble (it definitely teaches us to be humble :) ) , wisely risk for reward, use bankroll management, discipline of thought, vary perspectives, persevere, adapt, etc . It even on a macro level teaches us to be kind, assertive, use unconventional approaches, and be fair when we consider subtler aspects of the game such as politics. 

There are even subtler large benefits. In today’s world there is a big gap between social classes but the poker table is one of the few places the rich and famous get to mingle with the aspiring and ambitious youth, creating social cohesion.Those youth that manage to get to the right tables may never have had the opportunity if it wasn’t for poker, and so especially from impoverished areas poker now redistributes wealth by allowing players to hone their virtues and skills to win money often from those less concerned with virtue. Players from impoverished areas play on the WORLD economy, resulting in winners slightly balancing the world economy! 

The slow burn rate of poker, while feeling frustrating to those trying to ascend, and not allowing for too much imbalances, actually forces people to grow more inwardly if they want to win and distributes more opportunity for all. The irony of these often complained about political barriers in poker (both at a national macro level and private game level) is that they make true winners grow and grow and keep the game from dissipating quicker. On the topic of growth, it also nudges nerdy types (such as myself) to be more social by forcing them to chase live games and change themselves to be more socially attractive, that is if they want to increase their bottom line. 

Above all, it allows us more or less total financial freedom to do what we want if we find success. To be free is one of the greatest virtues, especially with the hope for it to be used for positive means. Many poker players such as Phil Galfond, Doug Polk, Chance Kornuth, Rob Yong, Phil Hellmuth, and Joey Ingram, have created businesses such as and invested, driving the economy. Some such as Liv Boeree and Daniel Negreanu have even become influencers and begun to impact the entertainment industry. Liv and others such as Igor Kurganov, Dan Smith, and Phillip Gruesome have applied rationality to charity projects which they have created raising 10s of millions. I also represent directed positive action myself, now aiming for the biggest possible scalable impact by liberating the champions of poker of tomorrow that may go on to play bigger games for the sake of the greater good. 

For these many reasons that I was reinspired and finally saw the link between my ambitions to help the world and poker. Though it and it’s culture is not perfect, many poker players in fact have developed many good virtues that if aimed in a positive direction and then empowered can create a big difference in the world at large. The challenge, and also a large part of my role, is to first liberate, then steer or inspire them in (what I believe is) the right direction, and create systems to empower many and expound on poker. 

  My hope for you is that you will be free, prosper, and give back to the source that gave you these blessings (not necessarily myself but I’ll redistribute whatever). My life EV is now entwined with your life EV. To me poker crudely symbolizes life, where we place whatever assets (bets) we push an edge and gain a positive result recursively and so is a crude gamification of spirituality. As I evolved I began to see that the concept of making plays to maximize the equity value (EV) of money transcended it to apply into making life plays that exalted virtue, which I hope you will see also for our mutual collective benefit. Should the poker world and perhaps even the result of the world see this, it will be as if we have all somehow won the Main Event many times over.