Good Decisions, Bad Outcomes
People keep asking me why poker. The short answer is one word: resulting.
Think about the biggest mistake you’ve made in the last couple of years. Why do you call it a mistake? My guess is the outcome was bad. But what if the decision was good and the cards just didn’t fall your way? Flip it. What’s a great call you made that was really just luck?
Resulting is a poker term. Annie Duke, a former professional player, popularized it in Thinking in Bets. It means judging the quality of a decision by how it turned out.
Two things, crushed into one
Every outcome is a mix of two things: the quality of the decision and luck. Resulting crushes them into one number. Good result, good decision. Bad result, bad decision. It’s simple, it’s fast, and it’s wrong often enough to be dangerous.
Picture a guy who has six drinks and drives home. He makes it. Nothing happens. On the scoreboard of outcomes, that was a fine decision, and if he grades himself that way, he’ll do it again.
Now picture someone who leaves a good job for a better one at a company that folds a year later. On the same scoreboard, that was a terrible decision. With everything they knew at the time, it may have been exactly the right call.
The first person learns the wrong lesson from a win. The second learns the wrong lesson from a loss. Both walk away more certain and less correct.
We don’t even do it fairly
It gets worse. We don’t make the mistake evenly.
When things go wrong, we blame luck. Not my fault. When things go right, we credit our skill. That’s self-serving bias, and it feels good in both directions. That’s the problem. The comfort costs you an accurate picture of reality, and over time you collect the wrong lessons from your wins and your losses.
Knowing this won’t make you immune. I know it, and I still catch myself doing it. What awareness gives you is a process.
The two questions
After any outcome that matters, I ask two questions:
- Given what I knew at the time, was this a good decision?
- How much did luck shape the result?
The answer is almost always somewhere in the middle. Very little is all skill or all luck. The point isn’t to land on an exact percentage. The point is to stop letting the outcome answer the first question for you.
Why poker
Poker trains exactly this. You can play a hand perfectly and lose. You can play it badly and win. Judge yourself hand by hand and you’ll drive yourself crazy, or worse, you’ll start repeating your lucky mistakes. The only scoreboard that means anything is the quality of your decisions over thousands of hands.
Life works the same way, with more hands and higher stakes. We make countless decisions, and each one compounds into the next. A career, a portfolio, a house: none of them is a single hand. Each is a long run of decisions. Over a long enough run, luck evens out. Decision quality doesn’t.
That’s why I’m committing $20,000 to a year of poker in 2027. If I lose all of it, I’ll count it as tuition. Not because I’m guaranteed to win it back. Believing that would be resulting too. It’s because better decisions over a lifetime are the highest-return investment I know of.
The ledger will be public, every session, wins and losses. But the money isn’t the scorecard. Every session gets graded on the decisions, not the result, because that’s the whole lesson.
I’ve spent money on worse things.