Recently, I entered a low-stakes poker tournament just as registration was closing.
I was short-stacked from the beginning.
For hours, I waited. I folded bad hand after bad hand and slowly found opportunities to build my stack.
Eventually, we were down to eleven players—just two away from the final table.
I was under the gun with nine big blinds remaining when I looked down at pocket aces.
There wasn't much to think about.
I shoved.
Two players called.
One had pocket queens.
The other had pocket eights.
I was nervous. I only wanted one caller—not two.
Two callers meant twice the cards I had to avoid.
More ways for something to go terribly wrong.
I needed my aces to hold.
Please hold.
The flop came 9-9-3.
Perfect.
Please hold.
The turn was a 5.
Even better.
It's going to hold.
Then came the river.
8.
It felt like I'd been kicked in the stomach by a horse.
In one moment, my tournament was over.
On the drive home, I started replaying the hand.
I started questioning my decision to shove.
What if I'd made a small raise instead?
No... they both still would have called.
If I did, though, maybe I could have shoved on the flop.
My thoughts began to spiral.
I shouldn't have gone all-in. Wait for the flop. Shove. Get the eights to fold. He definitely would have folded. Then I'm still in the tournament.
By the time I got home, I'd played the hand over in my head more times than I could count.
Every version ended the same way.
With me still in the tournament.
And eventually I realized something.
I was trying to rewrite a good decision because I didn't like the outcome.
With nine big blinds, under the gun, holding pocket aces, I made the correct decision.
And I lost.
That's the painful truth of poker.
Sometimes you can make the right decision and still watch the wrong card hit the river.
The lesson wasn't that I should have raised smaller.
And the lesson certainly wasn't that I should play pocket aces differently the next time I'm in that situation.
The lesson was to trust the quality of the decision enough to make it again.
So if I'm in the same situation next week, I'm shoving again.
Not because I know I'll win.
I don't.
I'm making the decision I believe gives me the best chance to win.
And this time, I'll try to believe in the quality of that decision more than in whatever card happens to come next.
The Problem With Results
Looking back, that drive home wasn't really about my decision anymore.
It was about the result.
My shove failed, so it must have been a bad decision.
Outcomes are persuasive. When things go badly, we look backward for the decision that caused it.
When things go well, we assume we must have done something right.
But neither is necessarily true.
A good decision can produce a bad outcome. And sometimes, a terrible decision works out just fine.
That's what makes outcomes such unreliable teachers.
Every meaningful decision contains some degree of uncertainty.
We make decisions with the information available at the time. The outcome arrives later, carrying information we couldn't possibly have known when the decision was made.
When we use that new information to judge the old decision, we're changing the rules after the hand has already been played.
Worse, we risk learning the wrong lesson from it.
Beyond the Table
Life doesn't give us the percentages that poker does.
There isn't an odds calculator when you're making a big decision in your life.
We gather the information we have. We make the best decision we can. And then we live with uncertainty—and hope.
Afterward, ask yourself:
Knowing only what I knew when I made the decision, would I make the same decision again?
Sometimes the answer will be yes—and sometimes it will be no.
Both have something to teach us.
The CheckDark Principle
It's not easy to trust a decision after watching it go badly.
We let the emotion surrounding the outcome influence how we judge the choices we make.
Examine your thinking. Learn from the result. Use what you learned the next time.
That's the part we can control.
Sometimes you'll play the hand exactly right... and still lose.
Make the right decision anyway.
Poker teaches it. Life proves it.
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