A lesson from the sciences

[Borno]

Today while sitting in my political science seminar my Professor said something very insightful and is quite applicable to poker. Hopefully this notion will help those of you out there that have trouble seperating results based thinking.


Nature is perfect.

The method by which an individual meets his or her ends is whats important and not the result itself. The result is invariant.

While you and your mother may use the same ingredients to make a pasta sauce and cook it for the same time and at the end you both have sauce. Yours is not tasty while hers is delicious to the last drop.

Further to this we must consider as previously mentioned - nature.

Water gives life and causes death. We could not live without water but in wake of the recent tsunami and hurricane that caused much death should we be afraid of water. The simple answer is no. We must continue to survive off it.

The projection of all this is that the deck of cards each hand after it is shuffled is perfect. The results are invariant. Consider the edge you are pushing and how the method of your play acts seperate from the outcome. You can easily lose a hand and have the result of your liking - you must, however, understand why that specific result was to your pleasing. This is true be it punishing an opponent for drawing improperly by protecting your hand or raising the turn to get HU against a likely bluff and so on and so forth.

Each move you make focus on perfecting your method - as you can never change the results of each hand.

You may always get sauce, the notion of sauce is invariant and perfect - the only thing in question is how good do you want your sauce to be?

*I interpolated this to have a poker bearing. I thank Dr. Salim Mansur for the metaphor.

[Aaron W.]

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Today while sitting in my political science seminar

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This sounds more like a philosophy or metaphysics course.

[Borno]

he was just pointing out that when you are about to write any sort of research paper that you should think about what you are writing and question it. The empirical or systematic method applied to historcal scientific (science in the social sense not in the physical sense) research is what changes the quality. The answer, if going about a systematic method will always be the same.

When your method is no longer systematic the ends cannot be static.

In poker you clearly want to change the means pertaining to each individual situation, but the concept of using a systematic method in a SSHE game to achieve something (good play, a win rate) is not results based.

[DCWildcat]

I like the subject.

While we're on it, let's look at something from the prestigious MCU: the fact that most players make their decisions on a whim. I call it the random bullshit factor.

Many 2+2ers are plagued by their ignorance of it. They put way too much emphasis on hand ranges and obscure reads, and not enough of the basic fact that most poker players are irrational and stupid. Don't play under a rational man theory. If you don't believe me, read Miller's posts criticizing the prevalence of this on 2+2 and how it's killing folks' winrates.

Sorry for the rant.

[aces_dad]

This reminds me of something I read which said that while you may have a solid read on villian in a certain situation, and the current situation in your mind closely approximates the earlier one, villian may not feel the situation at hand is remotely similar to the original one, thus taking entirely different actions.

So villian may be mixing up his play not by design but basically because we're reading the action differently than they are. Is this situation similar to the earlier one? Doesn't matter, if villian is not responding predictibly for any reason (intentional or not), we can't put static reads on them and expect them to be accurate 100% of the time.

[irishpint]

...the...the only reason we die...is because we accept it...as an inevitability...WOA.