What’s Money Worth? Part II

Last column was a discussion about money and what it’s worth, a topic sufficiently complex to warrant another look. The key idea here is that winning and losing are asymmetrical. Losing money produces psychological pain that is greater than winning a comparable amount produces psychological happiness. This asymmetry gives us a foundation to get a deeper understanding of some aspects of our game that often have experts scratching their heads, specifically bad beat jackpots, the popularity of tournaments, bankroll variance and nosebleed level games.

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What’s Money Worth? Part I

Money is funny stuff. Everybody wants it, most of us don’t have enough of it (or don’t think we do) and, oddly, when people suddenly manage to get a lot of it, they typically do not grasp what they have, do not understand it and don’t know what to do with it.

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Memory: A Few Surprises

Ah, memory, our precious capacity. We recall past events, relive them, summon anew the emotions linked with them —- and, of course, conveniently edit them for future needs. Memory makes us human. No other creature can, with the flick of a neuron, revive the past, reignite old passions, reconvene special moments and treat these ephemeral visions as though they were real, palpable and not fleeting phantasms or illusions. Without a past, there could be no present.

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Problems Handling Winning

I love titles that look like silly statements. Problems handling winning? How can this be? Isn’t like wondering whether one could deal with falling in love, hitting the lottery, finding a diamond under a bush on the lawn? How can there be problems here?

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Monsters Under the Bed

It occurred to me the other day that I rarely write about “good” things in these columns. In fact, without doing any careful analysis, my sense is that I write about “bad” stuff about ten times as often as I write about “good” stuff.

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