Annie Duke: observation

Transcript context

…Let’s say you take a player who plays regularly at a local casino, does pretty well. Maybe he’s in the top 5 or 10 percent of that group and has played for 10 years. You put that person down at a table with a top-20, top-30 poker player. What’s the difference? What do the very top players have that that individual would not? How would they beat him? It’s such a combination of things. The way that I would think about it is if I took some really successful trading options in 1982, and I put them into the environment that exists now, where the market is super, super tight, I wouldn’t actually expect them to be able to win. And the reason is that when the markets are really wide, your ability to be leaving basis points on the table — you just have so much more room for not getting it just right, because the difference between you and the people that you’re trading against is so wide. So yeah, could you be, if you were really concentrating and you were really working on getting better at modeling your opponent, really understanding bet size, understanding that you always want to be trying to get on the primary line of play as opposed to the secondary line of play, that gets forced on you as the markets tighten. But that person who’s sitting in that game where they might be in the top 10 percent of their local casino — they can be choosing the secondary line of play a lot and still be crushing the game. Once you get against the people who are real experts, who have really come up the ranks, those people are — at just such a higher percent of the time — they’re choosing the primary line. And when you’re butting up against that on the secondary line . . . You’re good. You’re coming up with a pretty good option, but you’re just not coming up with the best option enough. Or you might be on the tertiary line. That might be okay if the market’s wide enough. And how you’re sort of figuring out what’s the right choice in any given time — it’s like so many things go into that. So you’re just going to butt up against ooh, that market just got really tight on you. Is playing poker different when you’re nine months pregnant?…

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