Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Poker gems, #149

Kevin Conley, in "The Players," article in The New Yorker magazine, July 11/18, 2005, p. 55.


Still, math is at the core of poker's basic strategies, and [Daniel] Negreanu believes that these can be quickly and profitably learned.

"I went to speak at Ohio State and I ended up jokingly saying that I'm starting my Stay Out of School program," he said. "I was totally kidding, but, realistically, it's not that far-fetched an idea. For kids that are eighteen, nineteen years old, that are going to go to college, get a dead-end job where they make fifty or sixty thousand dollars a year, I can take that same kid, teach him how to play poker, and in three months show him how to make more money than he would ever make in that dead-end job.

"The stock market is gambling, right?" he continued. "This kid studies and he makes money in the stock market, and this is considered by society O.K. A poker player, a kid, sees all these idiots making poor investments on these poker hands and says, 'Wow, I could do a better job than they're doing,' and he studies, and he makes it. How is that different, realistically, than a stockbroker? I mean, I don't see the difference."

"Well," [Erick] Lindgren said, "there's more cheating and collusion in the stock market."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well," [Erick] Lindgren said, "there's more cheating and collusion in the stock market."


That's a great quote, and true. There is so much insider trading, and although illegal, they get away with it because it's hard to prove.

gr7070 said...

There's a lot of foolishness in Negreanu's quote.

For starters, anyone "gambling" in the stock market is a fool. If one applies the proper math and strategy involved in *investing* in the market it's not gambling.

Buying stocks, one should really be buying mutual funds, one should be buying index funds as no one can beat the market, and all this should be done on a long-term plan (5 yrs min) as the market has *never* lost money on a long-term view.

There's really not that much insider trading going on either. Certainly not by the masses. The market is said to be efficient which in large part does away with most so called insider trading.

Now if one wants to talk about the scum salesmen who are out for themselves and not their clients, fine, we can talk all day long about them.

I don't have a problem with poker or poker players, but let's not make it something it isn't. Also in poker one is not creating anything for anyone. It's a zero sum game. In the stock market it's far, far from a zero sum game.