I’ve been publishing and giving gambling advice for decades. Sometimes thinking like a gambler helps in areas far removed from gambling itself. Today I want to share such a case. (If you only want discussion of video poker, perhaps you should skip this week.)
Among other interests, I participate in Toastmasters, a group dedicated to helping you speak better. My reasons for this include being a better teacher, being a better interviewer on my podcast, practicing stories that I present in various locations, and even performing better in my Improv troupe. Insofar as following the “Pathways” programs and being awarded various designations by Toastmasters, I have no interest at all in that.
Once a year, Toastmasters has speech contests. You begin at the club level, and winners go on to the area level, the division level, the district level, etc. I’m not sure how far you can go. That hasn’t been a goal of mine.
A friend of mine in our club, “Sally,” is also a friend in the Improv world. She composed a 5-7-minute speech in the “Humor” contest, and won at the club level, the area level, the division level, and recently competed at the district level. The first contest was conducted in the normal manner, before the pandemic hit. The latter ones were on Zoom. Bonnie and I have been in the audience every step of the way, cheering her on.
There were five contestants in the district level contest, and to my mind Sally and one other lady were clearly head and shoulders above the other three. Which one gave the better performance between the two of them, I can’t tell you. Sally is a friend. I’ve heard her speech several times and am clearly biased in her favor.
When they announced the top two winners, Sally’s name wasn’t either. First place went to the other lady who deserved to be in the top two, and second place went to a guy who, to my mind, gave a second-rate standup comedy routine. But he is also very, very active in Toastmasters. I don’t know if that helped him score or not. I doubt that a conscious “fix” was in place, but that could explain the result.
To my mind, Sally was somehow rooked out of winning first or second place. Okay. I don’t know all the judging criteria. I wasn’t invited to the “contestants only” meeting where ground rules were set. Possibly she offended a judge. Possibly she broke some written or unwritten rule. That happens. Nobody wins all the time.
More important to me was how my friend was holding up. An hour after the result was announced and again the day after the contest, I texted her wanting to see how she was doing. Some people take losing well. Others not so much.
Sally has a supportive husband and several friends, so it wasn’t mandatory that I check in on her. As a professional gambler, though, I have a different perspective on losing than “normal” people do. I thought I might be of help.
Most fair competitions require some combination of skill and luck. You can control your skill to some degree, but you usually can’t control how skillful your opponents are.
Sally has a comedy performance background, which allows her to mix in voices and accents that others can’t compete with. She had better comedic timing than her opponents. Her husband is an audio engineer, so she had the best sound system in the contest. I would include all of this in the skill category, which gave her a leg up on her competition.
You can put yourself in position to get lucky, but by its very nature, luck involves some randomness. The ball doesn’t always bounce your way. The judges have biases — we all do. Did Sally trigger some sort of negative bias in a judge? Who knows? Her speech was somewhat edgy and maybe the judges tend to like vanilla.
In gambling, I risk millions of dollars a year where my edge averages perhaps 1%. Over time, that’s enough of an edge to become wealthy. But over any short period of time, it’s just a coin flip and sometimes coins flip against you many times in a row.
To end up being successful, I have to endure many, many losing sessions. A 1% edge means that for every 200 competitions, I’ll win 101 times and lose 99 times. That’s a LOT of losing! I can safely predict that I’ll be ahead after enough trials, but I can’t tell you what’s going to happen over the next couple months of gambling (and I have no certainly when that will be. As this goes to press, there’s rioting in the streets. That could easily keep the casinos closed longer than originally predicted).
One thing I can’t tell you is how to put up with losing. We all have different personalities, and whatever right brain or left brain advice I give a person will fall on deaf ears some of the time. Some people die a little bit inside with every loss. I mainly shrug it off because I strongly believe that eventually I will come out ahead.
What I can tell you is that however you do it, you must put up with the losing if you want to experience the winning that will come. Sally’s skill set is remarkable. She has a great support team.
My advice to her is to do it again next year. She did well in the competition last year as well, under slightly different rules. Maybe the judges, whether intentional or not, want to rotate the winners over time. But with her skill set, she will definitely succeed if she lets herself compete. Her edge over the other contestants is much more than the 1% I regularly fade.
If she gets too down and out and decides she never wants to compete again, I can guarantee she’ll never win. You must be in the game in order to win the game.
To be sure, my suggestion is based on my experience of having hundreds of thousands of hands to play every year. I don’t know what I would advise an Olympic athlete who can only compete on that stage every four years. If that event is cancelled for this Olympiad, many, many athletes will have missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Political elections fall into the same category.
For Sally, her once-a-year opportunity is certainly more manageable than every four years. Likely she’ll still be “in her prime,” competition-wise, for some time to come. Plus, winning a Toastmasters contest will probably not appear on her Wikipedia page — if she ever gets one.
Still, she spent hundreds of hours preparing for this competition. It’s easy to see that some might view that as wasted time. While I wouldn’t agree with such an assessment, many people would.
My advice ends up very similar to what cowboys say. If a horse bucks you off, the very best thing for you to do is to get back in the saddle and try it again. That’s what I suggest for Sally. And that’s what I suggest for you.
This is one of my favorite posts from you, sir. It’s a great long-view perspective on how to to handle the short-term setbacks, understand and expect them so your perspective and motivation don’t get skewed too far negatively or falsely optimistically when they temporarily disappear.
Thank you!
Bob, I have read/listened to most everything you write/broadcast. Today’s message is one of sensitivity, insight and maybe most of all maturity. I too strive for the one percent edge, and as elusive as it sometimes is your message
is definitely encouraging for me as a video poker player but just as much as a player on the stage of life.
Thanks for sharing.
Dr. Z
I enjoyed reading that! Well done!
Excellent post. Dealing with losing was a huge hurdle for me. I took losing personally for a while. Next to learning the games, I think learning the math and what it really means is the most important thing for a serious player to understand.
Once again, thanks for the post.
Excellent !
I know that 1% edge as you say and result in a gain of 100+1. However, with just a little bad luck, the best player on earth you included, can and do go broke. You make your money, not from gaming, but from all those folks you sell to.
Variance is a part of the 1% edge. That’s why you are required to have a bankroll to cover negative variance. Software is out there to tell you how much of a bankroll you need to have to weather negative variance at a given denom or betspread.
If you go broke while executing a proper strategy with a proper bankroll on a game in which you have an edge either the game is not fair (highly unlikely), you’ve miscalculated your edge (highly likely) and/or you are actually not playing a proper strategy for the game being played (also highly likely). And/or you’re leaking money on games you don’t have an edge in.
I learned that last item the hard way.
“You make your money, not from gaming, but from all those folks you sell to.”
Not really — or rather, not entirely. My gambling income dwarfs my “other” income, which comes from writing, teaching, and the podcast. From non-gambling sources, I also have social security and a small bit of pension from a company I worked at for six years. One reason for a decent sized social security check is that I paid considerable amounts on significant gambling wins from 1999-2015.
for the stakes i play, frequently the edge on the game itself is less than 1%. I’m including the “other income” to turn it into 1%.
Yes I do have that other income. I also have some wealth, which is invested. Every player has his own mix of income and/or wealth. It is always easier to survive at gambling or other endeavor if you have some sort of financial cushion. And I do. As do some, not all, other players. I have a larger cushion than some players. Some have many millions more than I have.
But if you believe that I’m not a winning player without this other income, you’re mistaken.
The double-edged truth of Bob’s post is ironic.
Casinos believe in the house edge. Players win now and then, but it is only a matter of time.
An important skill of a successful gambler is patience and an important skill of a successful casino is patience.
If you have done your homework and if you have the proper bankroll, you will not go broke playing VP. I have 25 years of experience with this formula.
If I’m going to run millions of dollars through for 1%, I might as well go back to counting cards. Hell will freeze over 100 times before I ever do that.