It’s right, but ultimately it’s wrong

Growing up, a magazine arrived at our house every week. I don’t remember its name, or even what it was about. What I remember is that tucked somewhere inside each issue was a catalog of luxury wooden poker tables.

Every week, without fail, I would leaf through that catalog slowly and reverently, lingering on the tables and imagining the day I might own one. I was ten.

The tables cost thousands of dollars, an amount that weekly lawn-mowing money was never going to amount to, and even if I somehow had the cash, I certainly didn’t have the authority to rearrange the house, let alone convince anyone to sit down and play with me.

None of that mattered. I was obsessed.

I looked forward to that magazine as if one of those tables might finally look back at me the right way, like I’d recognize it and, without hesitation, pull the trigger. Maybe that’s what tangible dreams are supposed to feel like. But more on that later.

I couldn’t tell you why I wanted to play poker so badly. No one in my family gambled. I didn’t grow up watching Phil Ivey or Daniel Negreanu. There was no obvious origin story.

If pressed, I might say it was about the competition and the stakes. I didn’t realize then that it would end up teaching me far more than how to separate my friends from their cash.

It took twelve more years, and a pandemic, for the desire to finally find an outlet.

Like many things during that time, it began innocuously. My team and I played heated games of Catan for ten, twenty, sometimes thirty dollars. Eventually, I convinced them to try poker. One game turned into two. We alternated between Catan and poker, and then, quietly and inevitably, it was all poker.

We were all equally inexperienced and equally competitive. We spent months passing the same money back and forth in a closed loop. It was harmless. It was fun. I promise.

As time went on, that childhood fixation became a central fixture of my free time. The late nights became more frequent, the stakes grew exponentially, my YouTube feed filled with theory & live streams.

The competition was engaging. The money thrilling. The company stimulating. And yet, what kept me coming back wasn't any of that. It was the mental game.

Poker has a brutal truth at its core. You can make the right decision and still lose. The decision can be right (mathematically), but ultimately it’s still wrong (you lose money). And that fact either captivates you or destroys you.

Making the theoretically correct play and losing, again and again, can feel maddening. It can feel like the deck itself is conspiring against you, shuffling just to spite you. And precisely at that moment, poker reveals what it’s really testing.

If you let the bad beats seep in, you start chasing. You make increasingly irrational decisions, desperately trying to claw your way back. The people at the table, rarely fools, will see it immediately. They’ll watch you step off the cliff and happily collect your chips on the way down.

It’s a vicious loop. Bad luck feeds bad decisions, compounding, creating real damage.

The alternative though is far harder.

It’s accepting loss as a natural consequence of probability, even when unlikely. If you hold the nut flush against an opponent’s set with one card to come, you’ll win 91.3% of the time. Great odds.

And still, you’ll lose roughly one out of every twelve times you’re in that exact spot. When those moments arrive, when the world feels like it should bend in your favor but doesn’t, the loss lands like a gut punch.

What kept me in poker is the idea that probability and individual outcomes are not the same thing. As masochistic as it sounds, I’m drawn to that divergence. I’m a sucker for expected value.

Many of the decisions I make in life are guided by it.

That way of thinking can feel cold, even robotic, but it’s how I understand the world. Life often looks like a massive optimization problem, with guaranteed outcomes and smaller payouts on one side, and uncertain outcomes with wider variance on the other.

Uncertainty is hard, especially when you walk away from the sure thing. And when you choose the uncertain path and lose, you have to hope that you can walk away feeling like you still made the right decision.

In a single moment, the world can seem wildly unfair, chaotic, even hostile, punishing people who do everything right. The real challenge is learning to override that emotional response.

If the decision was sound, then a bad outcome isn’t the universe conspiring against you. It’s simply the cost of operating in an imperfect system with probabilistic outcomes.

And if you’re brave enough, you can seek out situations where you’ll lose far more often than you win, trusting that the rare successes will be large enough to justify the losses.

These are decisions with negative short-term feedback but positive long-term expectation, the kind that feel wrong in the moment even when the math is sound.

This is the posture I’m trying to adopt now. Learning to absorb loss without letting it distort my judgment. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s where the real upside lives.

You can live convinced you’re unlucky, or you can focus on making good decisions and accepting whatever follows.

If you want to know which camp you’re in, try poker. It’s an unpredictable game, and it just might help you make sense of the world.