Movies and popular media about poker lionize the one big hand. This is not how the game is actually played, at least not by people who know what they're doing. The game is won or lost in the long run by the hundreds of boring hands which happen between the big hands.
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I feel like "The person who makes the most money at the poker table doesn't play poker... they own the poker table" is a useful insight except that it's probably misleading as stated, since the poker table is generally a loss leader for the rest of the casino.
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You could also think of it as less of a loss leader and more of an expenditure of rent on preferred social outcomes. Every university runs a business doing credentialing and occasionally teaches some classes; the Bellagio uses slots winnings to keep independent poker artists fed.
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(I mean, you could call them "independent entertainment consultants with variable compensation", but a portion of the service offering *is* performance art.)
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It's a useful skill to have to have an explicit mental model of how your counterparty thinks about things, to update that mental model over one's relationship as you gain more information, and to understand ways in which their mental model is different than yours.
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Perhaps surprisingly for a game with a relatively clear objective function, it's almost impossible for non-experts to distinguish between good play and great play, and for that matter between good play and abominable play, but the non-experts are convinced they can do so, easily.
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(Oh I've got *so* many thoughts on how the tech industry would probably interview for poker playing skill... let's say that the *savviest companies* would land on "Play one hand of poker on a whiteboard with me.")
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(If you come for the software and stay for the poker, and not the other way around, the implication is that the variance of a single hand of poker swamps most of the variance in the candidate pool, assuming you've FizzBuzz filtered first.)
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FizzBuzz: No lie, if you were to ask "Before I let you go to that table, first: tell me any five cards which would form a flush" that would prevent at least some people from sitting down at the 1/2 tables. Sometimes they win a hand. Sometimes they even end positive on a session.
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Continuing the analogy: there are many more people that can talk at substantial length about strategy, sometimes at substantial levels of theoretical sophistication, than are capable of executing that strategy, or a markedly less sophisticated strategy, at a given bar.
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