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#1
07-17-2005, 05:42 PM
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Thinking of life in terms of opportunity cost.
For those of you who have never taken an economics course or heard of opportunity cost, it refers to the cost in terms of foregone alternatives. It's a good way to put things in perspective. For example if you skip work to go see a movie, not only should the cost account for the price of the movie ticket, but also that of the next best alternative, which in this case is foregone pay for work.
So here's my dilemma. I have started to live life almost exclusively on the principle of opportunity cost. It doesn't affect my social life since I am willing to give up poker income to party it up. However, I might order an expensive pizza that costs $20 only to eat three slices because it's more expensive to waste half an hour to cook something since I'd otherwise be playing poker. Another example is having an overdue Blockbuster movie out. If it is overdue past a week, they will force me to pay the $20-25 to buy the movie. The thing is, in the 20 minutes it takes me to return the movie, I will make more money on average, playing poker. Not to mention, poker is more fun than driving through NJ traffic. This can lead to some weird decisions, but in the end I feel they are correct given that I ACTUALLY want to be playing poker at that time. What do you guys think? 
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#5
07-17-2005, 07:26 PM
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Re: Thinking of life in terms of opportunity cost.
Put the left over pizza in the fride and eat it tomorrow and join netflix. All of your problems solved.
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#6
07-17-2005, 07:29 PM
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Re: Thinking of life in terms of opportunity cost.
</font><blockquote><font class="small">In risposta di:</font><hr />
Put the left over pizza in the fride and eat it tomorrow and join netflix. All of your problems solved. [/ QUOTE ] nh
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#7
07-17-2005, 07:32 PM
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Re: Thinking of life in terms of opportunity cost.
There's nothing suave to being a hustler. If you watch tape of the old World Series of Poker, you'll see magician [censored]. Doyle reading Johnny Chan's body language and folding a huge hand. Or Johnny sucking Eric Seidel into moving in when he had the nuts.
But that's not what I do. My gig is to be a drone. Some mindless ant worker. I have to play mechanically, not seductively. That's because I'm not there for a game. How I do on any one day doesn't mean [censored]. I'm playing in a year-long poker game. I can never get emotional. It's a total grind. There's no fun or variation in your play. You never act on a hunch. Everything is by the book. You're like a robot. Being smart or creative is actually a drawback. If you look at my poker log, you'll see that I have good days and bad days - good months and bad months. But in the end, as the number of hands increase, the variations really aren't that big. But make no mistake, being a professional poker player is a job like any other. That's when you get in deep [censored], when you start to look at it as work. After awhile you look at your poker log and start to see the hourly wage. It gets you thinking about how much time you're wasting doing other things. You start to think of life as a poker game. That movie costs me fifty bucks because I could have been playing instead. That's when you're [censored]. --Dicky Horvath
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#8
07-17-2005, 09:03 PM
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Re: Thinking of life in terms of opportunity cost.
i think that early in the stages of a players professional poker career they start analyzing everything compared to opportunity costs. i went through this phase myself. its natural to view things this way when learning to apply concepts such as equity, especially when the excitement of making the kind of money many poker players are making begins to happen.
as your poker career grows you may start to see that opportunity costs are not nearly as applicable as you had originally thought. a more applicable concept is the value of time. if your time is valued at $75/hr and someone else's time is valued at $7/hr, it generally makes little sense to spend your time doing something that the $7/hr person could do for you. it may seem that these concepts are the same, or very similiar, but there are very distinct differences between the two.
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#9
07-17-2005, 09:17 PM
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Bad Calculations
[ QUOTE ]
I might order an expensive pizza that costs $20 only to eat three slices [/ QUOTE ] Why not order and eat three slices of an inexpensive pizza? [ QUOTE ] Another example is having an overdue Blockbuster movie out. If it is overdue past a week, they will force me to pay the $20-25 to buy the movie. [/ QUOTE ] Why not find a cheaper way to get movies, rather than overdue blockbuster rates?
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