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The Parable Of The Dentist Investor


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Warning: The following is quite long and probably not all that interesting. I don't profess to be a very good poker player or a Tommy Angelo esqe tilt controller, because I'm really not. This is just something I read in a book (excellent book btw, would reccomend it to everyone) that I thought related a lot to poker and would possibly be worthwhile posting on here. Let us manufacture a happily retired dentist, living in a pleasant sunny town. We know a priori that he is an excellent investor and the he will be expected to ear a return of 15% in excess of Treasury Bills, with a 10% error rate per annum(What we call volatility). It means that out of 100 sample paths, we expect close to 69 of them to fall within a band of plus and minus 10% around the 15% excess return, i.e., between 5% and 25%(to be technical the bell shaped normal distribution has a 68% of all observations falling between -1 an 1 standard deviation). It also means that 95 sample paths would fall between -5% and 35%.Clearly, we are dealing with a very optimistic situation. The dentist builds for himself a nice trading desk in his attic, aiming to spend ever business day there watching the market, while sipping decaffeinated cappuccino. He has an adventurous temperament, so he finds this activity more attractive than drilling the teeth of reluctant little old Park Avenue ladies. He subscribes to a web-based service that supplies him with continuous prices, now to be obtained for a fraction of what he pays for his coffee He puts his inventory of securities in his spreadsheet and can thus instantaneously monitor the value of his speculative portfolio. A 15% return with a 10% volatility (or uncertainty) per annum translates into a 93% probability of success in any given year. But seen at a narrow time scale, this translates into a mere 50.02% probability of success over any given second. Over the very narrow time increment, the observation will reveal close to nothing. Yet the dentist’s heart will not tell him that. Being emotional, he feels a pang with every loss, as it shows in red on his screen. He feels some pleasure when the performance is positive, but not in equivalent amount as the pain experienced when the performance is negative. At the end of the day the dentist will be emotionally drained. A minute by minute examination of his performance means that each day he will have 241 pleasurable minutes against 239 un-pleasurable ones. Now, consider that the pain felt when incurring loss is generally greater than the joy received after gaining something of a similar magnitude, and you can see that the dentist would end each day with a large emotional deficit. Given that he has a 67% chance of being positive over a month time period, the dentist would be considerably better of – from an emotional standpoint - checking his portfolio every thirty days. Taken to the extreme, if he were to only look at his performance every year, he would have 19 happy years for every twenty lived!From Fooled By Randomness byt Nassim Nicholas talebDespite being illogical, reading too much into meaningless results is something that is hard wired into the human psyche. However much we try it’s unlikely that you will ever be able to throw away the negative and positive feelings attached to meaningless results, but if you work hard at it you can reduce the effect they have on you(reducing proneness to tilt as well).I realise this is an incredibly round about way of dealing with a fairly simple point, but I really think the above passage relates a lot to poker and the meaningless nature of short term results. More specifically, the message here is that you should stop looking at your cashier/results tracker/graphs so regularly. I don’t think I am alone in this, but up until a few days ago I was a cashier addict, I would literally check every 5 minutes or so, and like the dentist, I received a pang of disappointment when I was down and a shot of happiness when I was up. Even at the time I realised how stupid that was, and how totally inconsequential the reading on my cashier was to anything, but I didn’t stop checking. Now, I can finally say that I am a reformed cashier addict; I rarely ever click on the shiny red button at any point before, during, or even after my sessions. Despite feeling slightly odd that I can no longer recount my account balance to the last digit, I feel it’s been a massive improvement in my mental approach to the game and I think it would probably help a large % of poker players if they were affected less by short term results.Cliff Notes: Blah blah blah

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This may be why I delay tallying losing session results. I generally track and record each time I add money or take money off of a table, but I typically avoid summing everything until the end of the session...and sometimes I'll procrastinate further if it was a losing session. I'm not sure if it reduces my strain or not, but after a week, I can go back and see, "Hmm...I lost $2157 that session...that sucks...but oh well." If I added it and put it in the spreadsheet on the spot, that number would likely gnaw at me for a while.

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This may be why I delay tallying losing session results. I generally track and record each time I add money or take money off of a table, but I typically avoid summing everything until the end of the session...and sometimes I'll procrastinate further if it was a losing session. I'm not sure if it reduces my strain or not, but after a week, I can go back and see, "Hmm...I lost $2157 that session...that sucks...but oh well." If I added it and put it in the spreadsheet on the spot, that number would likely gnaw at me for a while.
You're doing it manually? Why don't you get tracker?
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You're doing it manually? Why don't you get tracker?
I don't play much cash outside of Bodog. I used to have a HandGrabber for it, but it's not a particularly Tracker-friendly site....which is fine by me. Keeps the site somewhat fishy. Also, they have a nice thing where you can see a log of every time you add chips or take chips off a table...so if you don't keep close track, you can go back and see.Speaking more generally, I did play cash outside of the site and used PT for a while, but I hated having to load a bunch of stuff every time I wanted to play. HUD also made my screen messy and sort of overwhelmed/tilted me with info. It also made me lazier about reads and notes. The one big benefit that I found was datamining while I wasn't playing...so that I could game select a lot better.
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Pretty good read. I admit that I'm also a cashier button whore while I'm playing, and I'm trying to work on that by just recording results at the end of a session and focusing on my overall winrate and the number of hours I'm putting in.

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Pretty good read. I admit that I'm also a cashier button whore while I'm playing, and I'm trying to work on that by just recording results at the end of a session and focusing on my overall winrate and the number of hours I'm putting in.
I stopped being a cashier button whore in the beginning of June. Since then, I have rattled off 2 straight 15k+ months and I'm looking to finish August strong (up around 7-8k so far, haven't tallied the numbers). My game is a lot better when I'm not worrying about whether I'm in the black or red.
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Good read, thanks. I am awful for looking at graphs; If I stack someone or win a big pot, I'll regularly open PT while I'm still playing, just to see the graph spike up. I am going to not try looking at a graph for the rest of the month, see how it goes. Unfortunately on iPoker/Bet365, where I play almost exclusively, my balance is shown on the lobby screen, so it is more difficult to ignore that.

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I wish I could ignore the cashier button but it's impossible to do when you play tourneys. When you register for one the window automatically pops up that shows you how much you have in your account. I have to figure out how to put my hand over the right part of the screen so I can register without seeing how much I have.

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I wish I could ignore the cashier button but it's impossible to do when you play tourneys. When you register for one the window automatically pops up that shows you how much you have in your account. I have to figure out how to put my hand over the right part of the screen so I can register without seeing how much I have.
Well, I thought of this, and I think it's not neccesary to try and avoid catching your balance, it's just that you shouldn't actively recognise it or take any notice of it. It takes effort if your like me, but if you try and condition yourself to not noticing or caring I think it really does help.
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