Letter to David Sklansky

[MagnoliasFM]

Hi David,

Have you ever thought about the chance of there being more to life than book sales? It seems like all you do is geared towards making more book sale profits. Have you ever thought about your spiritual life? I'm sure that being the math whiz you are, you see why if there is only a 0.0000001% chance of there being an eternal life after death, it is hugely +EV to believe in God. In fact, if you don't, the EV lost will exceed all the poker and book sale profits that you could ever make in a thousand lifetimes.

And by the way, in your hypothetical heads-up question, B is wrong. You said to assume that you are a multi-billionaire and not worried about the money, implying a near-infinite bankroll. It was also implied that your opponent started with 1 billion dollars. If you were a multi-billionaire with a knowledge of game theory you would take far worse advantages than KK vs. K2 because if you have many many more times what your opponent has, you can afford to call his bets with worse than KK vs. K2 and still have an approaching 0% chance of not getting all his money eventually. If you had, say, 1,000,000,000,000,000 dollars, waiting for KK vs. K2, while being one of the winning strategies possible, is certainly not the only statistically guaranteed winning strategy. With a chip lead that big, it might be correct (from a winning is all that matters standpoint) to call in a multitude of situations. Taken to an extreme, if you had an infinite bankroll, you could just call him forever and eventually at one moment in time you would have all his money. If you factor in time, there is no way that waiting for the best possible matchup to put your money in is correct.

This is not meant as a criticism of you or an insult, but I think that a lot of 2+2ers along with myself are a little disappointed in how you have handled yourself since winning a couple of matches against the world's best poker players. It is understandable that wins like this can cause a man to feel very proud of himself, but I think you have gone too far when you insulted another poster's intelligence in this post. I've read your books and respect your intellect, but seeing as how you are a role model for many poker players out there, I would like you a lot more if you didn't make posts like that. I understand that you make book money by having people debate about you and whether you are good or not, and a lot of your posts are meant to perpetuate that debate, but, there is a good chance that there is more to life than book sales.

-Random 2+2 newbie with an average intelligence