CHAPTER 3
Bet to Learn: Fielding the
Unfolding Future
Nick the Greek, and other lessons from the
Crystal Lounge
When I first started playing poker, I lived in Columbus, Montana, population 1,200. The nearest poker game was forty miles away in downtown Billings, in the basement of a bar called the Crystal Lounge.
Every day, I drove those forty miles, arriving by early afternoon. I would play until the evening, and drive home.
The game was filled with characters out of a clichéd vision of Montana: ranchers and farmers killing time in the off-season, filling the basement room with smoke wafting over the brims of their cowboy hats. It was 1992 but it could have just as easily been 1952 from the décor and the grizzled countenances of the locals. The only thing suggesting that John Wayne wasn’t going to mosey on in was a handful of misfits, including me (a woman and the youngest player by a few decades, on the lam from defending my dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania) and a player named “Nick the Greek.”
If your name is Nick, you come from Greece, and you gamble, they’re going to call you Nick the Greek, as sure as they’ll call you Tiny if you weigh more than 350 pounds. (And, yes, there was a guy named Tiny, real name Elwood, who regularly played in the game.) This Nick the Greek was of the small-time Billings variety. He was the general manager of the hotel
across the street, having gotten transferred from Greece by the hotel chain.
He left work for a couple of hours every afternoon like clockwork to play in the game.
Nick the Greek had formed an unusual set of beliefs that guided his poker decisions. I knew this because he described them to me and the other players, at length, using the results of particular hands to punctuate his points. He fixated on the relatively common belief that the element of surprise was important in poker. (Don’t be predictable, mix up your play— that sort of stuff.) Then he jacked it up on steroids. To him, a starting pair of aces, the mathematically best two cards you can get dealt, was the worst hand because everyone predictably played it.
“They always expect you to have aces. You get killed with that hand.”
By that logic, he explained, the very best two starting cards to play were the mathematically weakest two cards you could receive, a seven and a deuce of different suits—a hand almost any player avoids.
“I bet you never saw it coming,” he would say when he turned over that hand and won a pot. And because he played seven-deuce all the time, occasionally the stars would line up and he’d win. I also remember times when he threw away a pair of aces, faceup, at the first sign of a bet. (Never mind that he was compromising a vital element of his strategy of subterfuge by constantly showing and telling us he was doing this. Given that he had such an entrenched set of beliefs, it’s not surprising that he didn’t see the incongruity.) Nick the Greek, needless to say, rarely came out ahead. Yet he never changed his strategy, often complaining about his bad luck when he lost, though never in a bitter way. He was a friendly guy, pleasant to play with— the perfect poker opponent. I tried to time my daily arrivals so I’d be in the game when he made his afternoon appearance.
One day, Nick the Greek didn’t show up to the game. When I asked where he was, another player muttered, confidentially (though it seemed everyone in the game already knew about this), “Oh, he got sent back.”
“Sent back?”
“Yeah, to Greece. They deported him.”
I can’t say that Nick the Greek’s deportation was the result of his wacky poker beliefs, but I have my suspicions. Other players speculated
that he went broke, or dipped into the till at the hotel, or lost his work visa because he was playing poker every day on company time.
I can say that Nick the Greek lost a lot of money based on his beliefs— or, more accurately, because he ignored lots of feedback that his strategy was a losing one. He eventually went broke because he didn’t recognize learning opportunities as they arose.
If Nick the Greek were unique in his resistance to learning from the outcomes he was having at the poker table, I suppose he would just be a footnote for me, a funny story of a guy unique in his ability to hold tight to his strategy despite that strategy resulting in a lot of losing. But, while an extreme case to be sure, Nick the Greek wasn’t all that unique. And that was a puzzle for me. I was taught, as all psychology students are, that learning occurs when you get lots of feedback tied closely in time to decisions and actions. If we took that at face value, poker would be an ideal learning environment. You make a bet, get an immediate response from opponents, and win or lose the hand (with real-money consequences), all within minutes.
So why was Nick the Greek, who had been playing for years, unable to learn from his mistakes? Why was a novice like me cleaning up in the game? The answer is that while experience is necessary to becoming an expert, it’s not sufficient.
Experience can be an effective teacher. But, clearly, only some students listen to their teachers. The people who learn from experience improve, advance, and (with a little bit of luck) become experts and leaders in their fields. I benefited from adopting the learning habits of some of the phenomenal poker players I was exposed to along the way. We can all benefit from those practical strategies to become better decision-makers.
Thinking in bets can help us get there.
But before getting to the solutions, we must first understand the problem. What are the obstacles in our way that make learning from experience so difficult? We all clearly have a desire to reach our long-term goals. Listening to what our outcomes have to teach us is necessary to do that. So what is systematically getting in the way?