Poker and Life - Lessons in both.

A rule that all good poker players live by:
Always try and make the best decision possible with the information you have attained. This makes a good poker player, it may not necessarily mean you will win the hand, or lose the least amount of money, but it's what all good poker players live by.

There is a concept known as the "Sklansky Dollar" named after the mathematical/poker genius of the same name. It is an imaginary amount of money that you earn every time you make a good decision mathematically.

If you get all-in with a hand that will win 80% of the time you will take 80% of that pot and add it to your "Sklansky Dollar" total, no matter the outcome of the hand. For example, you get all in with a hand that has a 70% chance of winning, and the pot total is 100 dollars, no matter if you get sucked out or if you win the hand, you have earned 70 Sklansky Dollars.

Now don't go out and start calculating this figure for all of your poker games, the math will overwhelm you and you won't have enough time to think about the game and will probably start playing worse. It's the concept that is important here. Essentially in the long run after playing thousands if not millions of games of poker you should expect your *actual* earnings to equal your Sklansky Dollars.

This concept helps people realize that the longer you play good poker, the more money you should earn. It also illustrates that you *will* and *should* have your pocket aces cracked from time to time, Sklansky Dollars wouldn't equal out in the long run if this didn't happen.

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So what on earth does this concept have to do with life in general?

Life is an ongoing poker game, filled with many easy and tough decisions every day. Life is also predicated by luck in many instances, in many cases no matter how good of a decision you make you feel like life just crapped on you. In life we often go on "tilt" where we let our emotions take control of our actions, and it often leads to the making of bad decisions.

We can apply the idea of "Sklansky Dollars" to this concept as well. I'll call it "Applebury Dollars" (after my last name). You however can't refer to this quite so much in terms of cash or money, but it helps us monetize and conceptualize the concept.

When we are going through our daily lives we try to think that we make good decisions. Whenever we do we expect good things to happen to us for making such good decisions, they often happen, but they sometimes don't. A good decision will depend on the person, and often when faced with difficult situations we don't know what a good decision will be. But generally you can think of a good decision of a case where you have a better chance of something good happening to you than bad or a case where your decision creates less pain or bad to you than the alternative.

Whenever a good decision is made, you essentially add to your "Applebury Dollar" total no matter the outcome of the decision. This teaches us the same concept in poker, but as it deals with life. We should do two things, make good decisions, and live life to the fullest.

Live life to the fullest? How does that pertain here? As with poker, you will find yourself with more profit if you play more and more poker, as long as you make good decisions. This same concept pertains to life, you must go out and live life, take risks, make decisions. If life craps on you some of the times, then so be it, but we must move forward because if we stop making decisions and stop living we will never be able to to make the most of our lives and we will never overcome the sinister "luck factor".

How do we know if we make good decisions?

This is a much trickier question. In poker, we must discern from luck and skill when playing poker. Mathematics helps us with this, we can calculate the odds and the expected gain/loss from a decision.

We can't do this in terms of life. Some people will make bad decisions and continue to make bad decisions until luck catches up with them and they realize that what they have done is wrong. Some people will make many good decisions and continue to make good decisions only to be crapped on and made to feel that they have made bad decisions their whole life.

This is probably the best reason for having a good education. Being well educated is probably one of the few for sure good decisions that one can make. Education allows us to examine the decisions made by many people throughout the world and time and the theories and thoughts of those thinking about decisions we are making today and in the future. Education allows us to think more clearly about the decisions we have to make, much like the education of a poker player except life takes much longer to learn. As we begin to view the world differently because of our education, we begin to make hard decisions more easy. And often times it takes experience to truly understand the difference between wrong and right.

I hope you enjoy my little philosophical babble. In poker and in life you must first educate yourself, play and live as much as possible, and finally make good decisions. If you follow this creed you will become not only more successful at the poker table, but also at life.

- Justin "Tireur" Applebury

Poker cash spend

(Tue Mar 6th, 2007, by Morgan Collins)

Where does poker fit in terms of expenditure per household compared to other forms of gambling within the UK?

Gambling spend per household in the UK is on the up, particularly in the online sector and more so with online poker. Since the recent launch of Sky Poker TV channels, coupled with the list of high profile names now playing the game, the profile of the poker game itself has been raised along with expenditure. Online gambling has increased in general, and with the influx of online poker sites, poker gambling has become part of many people's lifestyles, and indeed many people currently earn their living playing poker all year around.

Currently there are 4 poker channels that can be viewed by UK Sky subscribers and over 200 poker sites that can be played around the globe, making online gambling a form of entertainment and recreation that ranks alongside the cinema and bowling in terms of visits.

People in the UK love to gamble. The UK has one of the highest populations with the propensity to gamble (some 62%) only just behind Australia and Sweden, though surprisingly slightly less per population than the US where only 62% of the population gamble.

The Gambling Commission which was set up in 2005 following the UK Gambling Act of that year (the most significant change in gambling law in over 50 years) reports that the UK also has one of the biggest gambling spend per capita of any other country in Europe. A figure of �1266 per capita, collectively �76 billion a year, and 7.7% of GDP has been quoted in some press releases, compared to that of �600 per capita in 2004.

So of the 33 million people in the UK that gamble, what types of gambling are people spending their money on and where does poker fit in that list.

Well let us look first at the forms of gambling that are considered. You have betting on sports like dog racing and horse racing. You also have bingo, national lotteries, pools and scratch cards. There is also casino gambling and slot machine gambling, and then you have online gambling

The National lottery is the most popular form of gambling in the UK with 65% of the population buying lottery tickets. The next most popular is scratch cards which 22% of UK residents buy each week. Slot machine gambling comes in next with 14%, followed by horse/dog racing 13%, and pools, 9%.

It may come as a surprise that still only 3% of the population actually gamble online in online casinos or online poker rooms . However, this just proves that there is still room for growth in the UK market. In general more men than women gamble online, except in the bingo sector where the percentage is 70% female to 30% male.

How much is being spent?

Average figures, provided by the Gambling Commission, show around 3.80 per household is spent each week on the National Lottery and some 4.00 per week spent on pools, scratch cards and other lotteries. 7.20 each week is spent on bingo, 5.00 for sports betting, and approximately 20 in land-based casinos. Approximately 10 per week is spent on online gambling and 5.00 on slot machines.

It is clear the online gambling is one of the major gambling expenditures in the UK. It is not clear how much is actually spent on online Poker, but considering poker sites makes up 75% of online gambling visits the amount is likely to be around �7.00 per household.

What is clear is that people love playing poker and it is not only men who have taken up this pastime. High profile female figures have begun to enjoy poker and the BBC reported one woman helping to support her family by playing poker at home.

With changes to the UK Gambling Act coming into force in September 2007, the government are suggesting that the Act will help reduce people propensity to gamble and will also protect children and problems gamblers. I will be a long time before proof of this is seen, but one thing is for sure, the profits raked in by the government on gambling taxes are set to grow alongside people's desire to play their favorite game of online poker.

About the Author

Written by Morgan Collins for VIP Poker Club an online poker games site for UK players. Resource links must be retained in reproduction of this article.