I love playing poker. It is a super fun game, combining human psychology, game theory, and a component of luck.
Since stopping my professional chess career, I allowed myself to dabble in this card game, went to play tournaments, and traveled all the way to Las Vegas to play in the famous World Series of Poker. But recently, I discovered that all the adrenaline and the hope for a big tournament score had a negative impact on my daily life and work.
Here is how hoping for a lucky break diminished my drive, work ethic, and the quality of my work. And, most importantly, how this ties into your chess improvement.
A Game Of Skill – With Luck Involved
Poker is a game of skill. There are clear strategies that are better than others. Players who study have a higher possibility of winning than those who just gamble.
Here is the big but: it takes an incredible amount of hands played to account for the luck factor. This is especially true in tournament poker. The winner gets a massive piece of the pie, and you really only make serious money if you reach the top 1%. In a single tournament, the luck factor is extremely high.
Professional players, especially those playing online, play thousands of tournaments to make sure they can turn their theoretical edge into a nearly guaranteed payday (at some point!). Even the best players can go several months, sometimes more than a year, playing very good poker and still losing money.
With proper tilt management and bankroll management, the best players will be winners… eventually.
For someone like me, far from the best in the world, but a winning player compared to the guys I usually play with, this reality turns poker more into a game of luck rather than a skill-based game.
The Fewer Tournaments, The More Luck
I sometimes played at home, but mostly I played IRL tournaments. Traveling to a nice place, having a good time, and trying my best at the table. If I played a lot, that would mean maybe 100 tournaments a year. That’s nothing compared to a really serious professional player.
I started realizing that I was heavily relying on luck with such a small sample size. And once I realized this, a few “aha moments” happened. One of those moments was when I played two huge online tournaments—two of the biggest of the year. After the first day, I was chip-leading one tournament that had ~$600,000 as a first prize. And I was close to the leaders in a second tournament with ~$300,000 on top.
Combined, that is close to a million dollars.
With just some luck (or rather an insane amount, because those fields had 1,000+ and 10,000+ runners), I’d be a millionaire within a few days. While exciting, this thought derailed me quite a bit.
Our Brains Are Bad At Math
Our brains are not made to calculate these extremely unlikely scenarios. That’s why lotteries still work. It is incredibly unlikely to get the huge win, but the brain just sees it as an option. And that’s enough to get us excited. Once I saw these opportunities, my brain went:
“Why work hard on a daily basis if I could just get lucky and become a millionaire in three days?”
Based on the facts, this is an incredibly bad way of thinking. Even though I was aware of the risk, I realized that the more I played poker, the less ready I was to do the daily, dry, and hard work in my business.
But this business is what I really care about. It is not only the way I earn a living, but what I find truly meaningful. It is how I have a positive impact on the world while helping others.
Easy And Quick Is Too Tempting
That’s when I had my second “aha” moment. If you look around, the world is constantly bombarded with messages of quick and easy successes:
- In chess improvement
- In finance
- In business
- For your health
All areas of our lives are filled with these promises. Even though I am super against it in chess, I slightly fell for it in poker.
Because these are usually trillion-dollar markets, with huge companies hiring the best psychologists to hook us on these promises, simply being exposed to them often means you’ve already lost.
Radical Simplicity
That’s why I often end up with a drastic solution. I haven’t played a hand of poker since early November, and I don’t plan to play one in the coming months, maybe years. When I get the taste that success could be easy, fun, and quick, the real way—which is difficult, boring, and slow—becomes so much less appealing.
What does that mean for your chess?
It is exactly like hoping for that million-dollar poker score. Many players chase the illusion of quick hacks. They rely on “hope chess” or try to memorize tricky opening traps instead of learning the fundamentals. They buy a course hoping to gain 300 rating points in a month, looking for that one secret magic pill that will make the whole journey smooth.
Doing the hard work becomes much more feasible if you give up the hope that it could be easy. Give up the idea that there is a secret waiting for you that will instantly change your chess journey. That’s only a dream companies sell. The reality is different. Real improvement is slow, difficult, and sometimes boring.
For me, the decision is clear.
I prefer giving up the dream of “quick, easy, and fun” to instead have meaningful success in the real world. What about you?
Keep improving,
GM Noël Studer
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