← Back to context

Comment by ericd

2 days ago

Ability vastly increases your luck surface area. A single poker hand has a lot of luck, and even a game, but over long periods, ability starts to strongly differentiate peoples' results.

Except you can play hundreds of thousands of poker hands in your lifetime, but only have time/energy/money to start a handful of businesses.

  • Sure, but within running a single business, there are a huge number of individual events. Those are the hands.

    • That's where the analogy starts to fall apart then. Because the variance in those decisions is not very similar, since you're sampling very different underlying distributions. And estimating the priors for a problem like "what is the optimal arrangement of tables to maximize throughput in a cafe" is very different from a problem like "what is the current untapped/potential demand for a boardgaming cafe in this city, and how profitable would that business be".

      The main reason why professional poker players are playing the long-game, is because they're consistently playing the same game. Over and over.

      1 reply →