For those of us who only play everyone once in a while this is a damn good analogy to make the abstract concepts a bit more concrete and approachable. He shouldn’t need to consult Sklansky to get his point across…..

One reason I quit playing cards was that I looked at the Iveys and Negreanus of the poker world and said to myself “if the top players in this field 1) make 7 figures a year tops and 2) are frequently broke” why the heck would I pursue such a stressful occupation.

Money-wise the stakes are incomparably higher in business.

Just one of a million possible comments on poker and business (or life for that matter).

I know you meant well with this post, but you don’t know anything about poker. I think there’s some hidden meta in this post; if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, know the topic you’re talking about and be near the best of your field. Figuring out when you need to fold a big hand is only big in deep cash games, not in tournament play. Calculating equities and knowing when to push all/in or fold preflop, as well as knowing how to play according to your stack and position are the most valuable. Each small edge in every hand makes the difference. Of course, TV poker will tell you different, its marketing an idea, that poker is about big folds. Maybe thats another meta point; what something is hyped to be is not necessarily what it is. Peter Eastgate, winner last year, is probably the best player ever to win the tournament. Skill wise he’s the most sound and in tune with the modern game than any other past winner.

>> “no professional has won the Main Event in seven years.”

yes and no. just because they arent tv pros doesnt mean they arent known in the poker world. some of them arent as random as youd like to think.

>>Similarly, given enough amateurs in the field, the law of large numbers means that at least some of them will get lucky enough times to outperform even the best pros

EVERYONE, including pros needs to run extremely well to make it through a field that deep. however, luck can only take you so far. really what you need to focus on is the ratio of amateurs to professionals. its actually a reasonably proportional number when you calculate it.

>>Entrepreneurship is similar. So much of what makes a startup successful is totally out of our control: the timing of the market, the behavior of competitors, the IPO or M&A window, underlying technology trends and, of course, the human factors of investors, co-founders and employees. Truly successful startup methodologies like customer development or the lean startup can only hope to increase our odds of success — they can’t guarantee it. The converse is also true: even entrepreneurs who do everything wrong sometimes get lucky and make a lot of money anyway. Some even do it repeatedly.

this is the most important paragraph. i wrote a deep post on this topic (see above comment).

>> It’s called a disciplined laydown. In poker, winning requires that your hand beats your opponents hand. The problem is that you don’t know what your opponent has.

yes, you dont know what your opponent has but the rest of this paragraph is misleading. a good player plays his hand against an opponents range of hands. a pro will often play his range against his opponents range. that skews the expected value numbers significantly. given odds, the combination of hands, prior data, position, etc, you would be surprised how accurate you can be. good players are good readers. great players are good readers but have the ability to make their opponents guess wrong. a lot of what you see on tv is very misleading. most of the people are short stacked and the decisions are fairly straight forward.

>>In fact, once you realize that this is the most important skill in poker, it becomes clear that when professional players bet, they are really probing for information

again, its not instinct. if you read my post on the emotion economy, youll see that the best players are lucky enough to learn as they go. its a combination of skills and gut. not gut. i flat out think that probing for information is wrong. this only works with the theory of leverage. outside of this, you are mainly playing the style i said above.

poker-business-startup analogies always fail: http://bit.ly/2cq0b6

you are really hitting on an important point with this paragraph (http://bit.ly/vtyQp)

Entrepreneurship is similar. So much of what makes a startup successful is totally out of our control: the timing of the market, the behavior of competitors, the IPO or M&A window, underlying technology trends and, of course, the human factors of investors, co-founders and employees. Truly successful startup methodologies like customer development or the lean startup can only hope to increase our odds of success — they can’t guarantee it. The converse is also true: even entrepreneurs who do everything wrong sometimes get lucky and make a lot of money anyway. Some even do it repeatedly.