Poker is Like Life

How Poker is Like Life at Poker and Pop Culture

Once upon a time, anytime I heard the cliche Poker is Like Life, I was irritated more than I should have been. The thought of comparing poker to other “non-poker” aspects of our lives didn’t worry me. 

Indeed, one of the game’s great delights, in my opinion, is how poker’s intellectual hurdles, emotional swings, and social exchanges tend to mimic “real life” in intriguing, sometimes actually illuminating ways.

What bothered me was the lack of explanation after the announcement. I’d like to know how poker is “like life.” And if the ensuing explanation didn’t go much farther than “you have to play the hand you’ve been dealt,” I was frequently left wanting more.

Poker is Like Life : Methods of Explanation a Lot Like Life

Bridge remained the country’s most popular card game through the middle of the century, with the rummy-variant Canasta subsequently seeing a spike, allowing it to contend for the top place. But poker was also growing in popularity. 

According to a 1940 study done by the Association of American Card Manufacturers, bridge was the most popular game among both men and women. Poker is Like Life already climbed up to second place on the list for men.

Following WWII, John McDonald was not confused with the similarly titled hard-boiled novelist John D. MacDonald, whose Travis McGee books frequently included poker was a Fortune magazine staff writer. He wrote countless essays about business and the economy, as well as occasional musings on other interests such as horse racing and fly fishing.

Poker is Like Life : McDonald’s Interest

Poker had piqued McDonald’s interest, as it did many other Americans’, and after writing a few of pieces noting how poker imitated American capitalism, he ultimately turned his research into a tiny volume, Strategy in Poker, Business, and War.

The book’s major purpose is to explain to a broad audience the relatively new area of “game theory,” namely the results of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in their seminal 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. During and after the war, the pair’s work had already proven important.

The book Poker is Like Life also has a further purpose: it promotes poker as a legitimate source of information applicable to “life” in general, rather than merely an amusing, rewarding pastime for the intellectually inclined. 

As McDonald illustrates, game theory connects poker to other strategy-filled sectors of our lives such as commerce, politics, military combat, and war.

Poker is Like Life

“A Laboratory of Man’s Experience”

Four articles are included in the book of Poker is Like Life, which is illustrated with cartoons by comedian Robert Osborn. The first examines poker as an appropriate game to study in order to further the nascent science of game theory. 

Poker, according to McDonald, “is a kind of laboratory of man’s experience… the laboratory of capitalism, and of socialism for that matter.” The first poker-centric essay contains a review of the game’s origins and history, an argument for money being an essential component, and convincing demonstrations of poker’s centrality to American culture in particular.

Most notably, McDonald separates poker from other gambling games by requiring smart play rather than being entirely reliant on luck. “Knowledge of mathematical probability will not create a strong poker player,” he says, “but utter contempt for them would.” 

Its purpose is to “create doubt among the participants” and to emphasize the importance of “shrewdness, cunning, deceit, conscious plans, suspicious evaluations of value and character, and strong aggressions” in order to prevail.

Why Poker is a Travesty on Existence

Poker is a “travesty on existence,” writes McDonald, guaranteeing that “all of the suppressed values of a competitive society are set loose and placed first in the hierarchy of proprieties.” Nonetheless, it is exactly because of this that poker is such a wonderful “laboratory” in which to examine that culture and the interactions of individuals living it.

Poker is Like Life : Presenting a Theory of Games

The second article aims to convey game theory on Poker is Like Life, as presented by von Neumann and Morgenstern a few years ago, in a fashion that lay people may understand and enjoy. McDonald describes the methods required to develop “a new mathematical approach to economics”.

They had begun to distinguish between pure chance games like solitaire and “strategy games” like matching pennies. The latter “introduces the first significant strategical aspect in game theory, namely, random choice,” such as a technique for the game’s participant to “avoid understanding his own pattern” and therefore avoid being exploited by a watchful opponent.

Other situs judi slot online terpercaya games are then evaluated, with bridge and poker emerging as the best analogues due to their “complete complement of game elements: choice, dependency, imperfect information, and chance.”

Poker is Like Life : Close to Strategic Relevance of Bluffing

Due to the strategic relevance of bluffing, a deceptive maneuver rational players realize must be performed sometimes in order to induce opponents to fold stronger cards and call with weaker ones, poker emerges as “the best illustration of the basic strategic dilemma.”

Along the way, McDonald discusses the crucial idea of  “minimax” which von Neumann initially stated in the 1928 article that sparked the study that resulted in the later book with Morgenstern.

The term “Minimax” refers to a decision-making method that uses logic to maximize the least expected rewards while minimizing the maximum predicted losses. According to McDonald, the theorem was “one of the most talked-about innovations in educated circles today” at the time.

Poker is Like Life : Business and Game on the Marketplace

The third article concentrates on the “game” of business, beginning with the buyer-seller interaction, which may be compared to the condition of a two-man poker game in many aspects. You’ve probably heard similar comparisons before, like as when players discuss bet-sizing strategy and the significance of finding precisely the perfect amount to elicit the desired response of a call if value betting, or a fold if bluffing.

McDonald demonstrates the limitations of the poker analogy here, because oligopolies or monopolies arise so frequently in business that is, circumstances in which certain “players” in the “game” exercise more influence than others, thereby warping the rules. Coalitions are also regularly established, necessitating the development of models other than those based on a game like poker, where such “teaming up” is not generally permitted.

The enormous complexity of the market is also acknowledged, despite the fact that within certain industries, a few of large “players” will typically emerge to battle out a form of a “two-man game” for leadership. / Dy

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