Poker

“We recently launched gambit at gambit.com, which is our poker site and you can play gambit on your phone as well, but we're doing poker in a different way too. We're bringing the chess playbook, which is like poker for ratings.”

“If you think about it, it's kind of like poker or golf. It's one of those things, if you get invited to it here, you should go, because it's a great way to take down barriers and get to know somebody and laugh and have a good time without, like, all the small …”

“Poker's a great tool for women to just get in and get the feel of doing risky things.”

“At least a couple 100,000 people have come in because of these guys.”

“All the money in the middle makes it so that you don't have to get your money in front for it to be profitable. That's like an important thing for people to understand. Sometimes, even if you know your beat, if you're being laid a price to gamble, sometimes yo…”

“Because I wasn't a poker player, there was an advantage, because I was able to zoom out and see, this isn't just about poker, this is about community, it's about storytelling, it's about belonging to something, and it's about escapism and fantasy”

“When I saw poker, it was the closest thing I've seen to the training I got as an options trader, right? Because people aren't just going to become options traders. First of all, there's not that many in the world, men or women, and I'm going to go study option…”

“So if you're just thinking about your cards, They might get lucky. You have to be thinking about the other cards at the table. Then you have to think about what they're thinking about your cards, right?”

“And I also say, like, if I could have learned poker when I was younger, I think I would have saved 10 years out of mistakes in my career.”

“The idea is to create this super player where I take the best skills from all these different people. Look at what works and what doesn't, and then formulate like you know, a game plan that way.”

“And when I started playing it, I wasn't playing For money. Money was a tool. I wanted to play in bigger games. I wanted to play with the best, right? So the only way to do that was money. So money wasn't the end goal, right?”

“Cause with poker, alcohol can lower your inhibition a little bit. So you're gonna just go, trust your instinct. And when I, you know, whenever I've done that, I feel like it's almost like a superpower because It allows you to sort of get past the fear and the …”

“Sleep in general for poker is the most important thing. It's like, it's the, it's like if our mind is a computer, it's the time where it shuts down and it reboots and, you know, you download all the information so that you're ready to do it the next day.”

“The downswings are probably the most important part of like how you deal with them is the most important part of becoming a professional poker player.”

“Basically, when you're playing, like, the zero-sum games, like, poker, Game Theory Optimal works really well. When you're playing a game like Diplomacy, where there's, like, you need to collaborate and compete, and you need, there's room for collaboration, the…”

“I think of it as roulette. And I think like this period that we're talking about was about me learning how to play poker, right? Poker has way better odds than roulette. If you're good at poker, you can actually win. You've got, you know, a 60% odds. When you …”

“No one bets on chess because it's so obvious who's going to win. There's like a very precise rating system and so in poker, the poker is very different because you can have players at the same table and you know, who are the great players who are not the great…”

“I think kids having access, you know, or young adults having access to sports, batting poker is kind of a good thing because I, you know, if controlled, because they're learning about odds and, Gambling and framing it.”

“There is no competitive game that doesn't involve some deception. The same thing is broadly true in business too, because like which product am I going to launch? Which partnership am I going to use to do that? What do I think is the right way to compete with …”

“It's not like, because you're good at chess, you'll be good at poker, but it's more like the kind of people who are good at chess tend to be good at poker.”

“And that planning algorithm that's used in AlphaGo, Monte Carlo Tree Search, is very domain specific. I think people don't appreciate just how domain specific it is because it works in chess, it works in Go, and these have been like the classic domains that pe…”

“I kind of describe poker as essentially high dimensional chess. It's chess. It's like chess where you have to reason about like a probability distribution over actions instead of just like discrete actions.”

“Ultimately, what matters is over the long run. That's all you should really care about, because you can't control what the cards do. You can just control the quality of decisions you make around them, and how you react to what happens.”

“I think that the offline world needs to sort of learn more from the gaming world about anti-cheat, because there's these companies that are quite big that are anti-cheat providers to all games, because each game individually can't build the security system tha…”

“In fact, I would argue that most of the skill would go out of poker if you didn't have the option to quit and couldn't get good at exercising. That option.”

“Now, poker is meaningfully more complicated than chess, as it turns out, because again, you have, you're not playing against one player, you're playing against some umpteen number of players.”

“I think it's the most incredible game and training ground for business, because in any given moment, you are forced to deal with the spectrum of good information to moderate information to bad information.”

“In poker is basically like, you know, three states, right? Super rich, somewhat rich, and dead broke, like not a lot in between.”

“The founders of Susquehanna were in college together. And they studied an array of subjects, but what really brought them together was that they played poker together and were able to talk about the decision process in their poker game in, in a really nice way…”

“The biggest difference though, between poker and venture investing is that you get very few decisions that you end up making in the venture world and is very small and in poker and is very large.”

“In poker, there's game theory optimal play, and there's exploitative play, and the biggest winners are the ones who exploit.”

“So the gap between the people who like understood the game and knew the game and everybody else was so wide that as a professional, you didn't need to be nearly as good then as you would need to be now in order to win.”

“In the hedge fund world, you have famous fund managers like David Einhorn, Steve Cohen, and Vanessa Selbst, who attribute their business acumen to the casino game.”

“Fundamentals of poker should be a required class at every business school. You learn statistics in real life. You learn how to weigh risk reward. You get a crash course in human behavior, and you learn how to act when money is on the line.”

“I think it was a huge mistake for me to leave academia and become a poker player.”

“Poker actually, no limit hold him is still unsolved.”

“The lack of outside noise makes you able to question your decision process in a way that you can't in real life.”

“That people say that poker can really help you in the stock market, and I think that that's true, and the reason it can help you become a better investor and make better decisions is the stock market is so damn noisy that when you make bad decisions, there's a…”

“What tilt means is that you've let emotion into your thought process, irrelevant emotion into your thought process. Usually it's negative. So, and by negative, I mean the negative emotion. So for instance, you lose a really big pot. So you lose a lot of money …”

“Over the long term, skill does emerge triumphant as long as you never got incredibly unlucky to begin with. So I think that there are probably a lot of people who could have been brilliant poker players who had a horrible run of luck at the beginning and just …”

“So the way I think about the difference between complicated and complex would actually be the difference between chess and poker. So a complicated decision is one that's hard. It's got a lot of levels. It's very deep, but there is a solution. So whatever groun…”

“And that's why you'll see the really good players try to kick up the stakes constantly because at a certain point, people's brains, you know, like kind of tick over and break and they're like, oh my God, this is a lot of money. And once you have somebody think…”

“And that's why I've always loved to play well below my means and not have the amount of money Change the way I play, and I opt out of, like, very big games.”

“Poker has all the same principles that I think make a good investor, except what's amazing about poker is you learn them much faster. The concepts of pot odds, And money management, and basically process over outcome.”

“And despite the fact that when I was in graduate school, I was taught that learning occurs when there's lots of feedback tied closely in time to decisions and actions, I realized, well, poker really tells you that's not true, because people don't play poker ve…”

“The things that I think have taught me a lot about, like, Business are poker and angel investing. So I recommend both of those.”

“It did not fund my startup, but it funded my, like, living expenses as a college student.”

“So as you get better and better at the game, you realize you know less and less about the game in the, in terms of the percentage of the things that you, there are to know about the game.”

“Outcomes and decisions are so loosely linked in that game. I mean, you know, you have the best hand, you get crushed, you have the worst hand, you win sometimes, and there's so much hidden information, the cards are face down”

“Strategies that might work for Eric Seidel might not work for me because I'm a woman and he's a man, and so the perceptions of us were very different at the table. So, for example, his ability to bluff in a situation might be really different than my ability t…”

“So one of the things that you want to try to do in poker is to separate the chips from the money. You want to view the chips as tools to accomplish a particular goal in a hand and not view it as money at all.”

“What I'd been doing in graduate school actually had been incredibly helpful for me in poker and could be helpful in general to understanding how do you make decisions, you know, particularly under conditions of uncertainty.”

“I was making mid-six figures and working three hours a day.”

“The best player at the poker table is the one that makes all the money. The second, so it's like, it's a logarithmic scale. It's like, the best player makes, you know, twice as much as the second best player who makes twice as much as the third best player, an…”

“And so there are some investment organizations, for instance, that teach their employees how to play poker, right? To think about probabilities, to think about pot odds, right?”