Held each year, The World Series of Poker is a big deal, in 2009 there were over 60,000 people competing for $174 million.
Now, poker, like security and business in general is a game of imperfect information and limited visibility. Also, like the other domains, winning is good.
Here is the thing though- professional poker players, who presumably understand the game the best, have not won the WSOP since 2001. And its not just that they don't win, they typically don't even make the final table of nine players. This year there was one pro, Phil Ivey, who made the final table of nine; Phil Ivey is generally regarded as the pro's pro, the best poker player in the world. He lost. Should we be surprised by this?
Item: "Safe Moves Don't Win Tournaments" by Phil Hellmuth (emphasis added)
"This year's World Series of Poker was a great event. I played roughly 10 hours of poker per day for six weeks straight. At the end, I was disappointed with my game, although my friends tell me that my six cashes and deep run in the Main Event made for a successful run. ...
I constantly questioned my own game: What plays worked that I could use the next day? How could I improve my play tomorrow? In one no-limit Hold'em tournament, I lost two coin flips and missed a few opportunities along the way; I was both unlucky and disappointed in my play.
Late in Day 2, with the blinds at $6,000/$12,000, I folded hands more than a few times on the button. In retrospect, a better strategy would have been to play more aggressively, raising when in position to try to steal the blinds, like when the player in the big blind had only $70,000 in chips and I had $250,000. Instead of making a big raise, say $50,000 from the button, I folded my hand. That's not how you win tournaments!
Another time, I found myself making a big raise with pocket sixes when I was one off the button, and then calling when the $70,000 man, now in the small blind, moved all-in with A-10. It was torture when an ace came on the river and I lost the hand.
Only an hour later, in the big blind, I was again dealt pocket sixes when the player in the small blind moved me all-in. The blinds were 8,000/$16,000 and I had only $80,000 remaining. I called. He showed J-10 and the cards came down Q-4-2-K-A. Another ace on the river to beat me! Ultimately, I was eliminated in 30th place at 1:45 a.m. with only five hands left to play in Day Two.
Playing only when you have a strong hand, also known as being a slave to the cards, is simply not the way to win tournaments. True, this super-tight strategy does give you a great chance to go deep, and that's just what I did.
My goal, however, was to win. I should have tried a few more creative moves along the way, perhaps adding one additional tricky maneuver out of every 25 hands I played."So the pros who understand the game mechanics and how value bets the best, and have the most experience, are actually at a disadvantage to amateurs who are happy to take on risk that either they don't know or don't care exists.
The parallels to information security are pretty obvious in that information security professionals spend the bulk of their time thinking about where the risk is and are generally advocating for more risk averse strategies versus say their peers in development and operations who like the non-pro poker player are happier to bet big on weaker hands.
In related news over 70% of mutual funds (actively managed by financial pros) underperform the S&P 500 index (which is a free floated index). So the majority of people are literally paying their mutual fund manger to underperform a passive index.
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