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.