Annie Duke: evaluation

Transcript context

…Do you think they could have done other wonderful things and there’s some kind of potential social loss? Or being a poker player is the highest advocation, and they have some kind of strange personality asymmetry where, say, they wouldn’t have made a great CEO. They couldn’t have been an inventor, couldn’t have done this or that. And like chess players, they ended up as poker players. Or are they multifaceted, and it’s some kind of shame that they were not out there being great in some other role? I think that there’s certainly some significant portion of them that that’s true of, that they could be doing great things out in the world. But I also think that there are quirks about people who are attracted to poker because, given how brilliant they are and particularly how brilliant they are at game theory and expressing that and instantiating that in a real-time, high-stakes decision-making problem, I think that most of the people who are playing poker could be making more money doing something else, could be creating more productivity for the world as you said, moving out of this zero-sum situation into something that’s more win-win. But I think that there is something in general about who’s attracted and willing to take a haircut to go play poker, in order to do that, that has to do with a sense of independence and not necessarily fitting in with what the norms of society are. There’s a very famous story about a poker player, a really good poker player, who decided that they wanted to actually try trading instead. So they got a job with a firm to go trade. And the first day, they didn’t show up, and they called in at, I think, 11 in the morning or something and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t take this job. It’s just too early.” [laughs] They just didn’t want to get up that early. So, they went back to playing poker. And I do feel like that encapsulates something about a certain group of poker players. You probably know the case of the famous economist, Steve Levitt. He decided he would become a top poker player. Within a fairly short period of time, he did. Do you think most very smart people could do that? Or are they, in turn, lacking something that these top 500 poker players have?…

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