Tight and Aggressive

In poker there’s an ideal called “tight and aggressive”. The idea is to play a very small selection of hands, but to then play those hands very aggressively.

You play a small selection because many hands are statistical underdogs no matter how well you play them. You’ll get lucky here and there, but in the long run you’ll lose money on those hands because they’re too weak compared to what others are likely to have.

You play aggressively because you need to extract as much value as possible out of the few hands you play. Besides giving your opponent more opportunities to give up, playing aggressively lets you milk the most out of each hand. You’re betting and raising, not checking and calling.

It occurred to me today that, like many things in poker, tight and aggressive is a good parallel to real life. You feel like a champion when you play tight and aggressive in poker, and you also feel that way in real life.

Just as you have high standards for which cards to play in poker, you must have high standards for engagement in real life. Playing tight in poker is playing only premium hands. What if you only spent your time on premium activities? What if the people you gave your time to were the best people you knew? What if you only dated amazing people?

And with each of those things, you would tackle them aggressively. You would have fewer projects to work on, but you would give them one hundred percent. You’d date fewer people, but you’d be willing to invest yourself and commit when the time was right. You might have fewer friends, but you’d have deeper bonds. When you decided to learn something, you would push yourself to your limits.

In poker, the decision to play most of the hands is obvious once you know the basics. You know you shouldn’t play that jack-six suited, even though those diamonds match so perfectly. If you adopt this idea of living life tight and aggressive, I think those decisions become very easy, too. Maybe you want to spend a few days on a project that won’t go anywhere, but your discipline to stay tight prevents you from doing it. Instead you aggressively attack your main project.

Poker is sometimes seen by outsiders as a reckless game of chance. It can be played that way, of course, but at its essence, it is a deep game that teaches fundamentals of discipline and decision making that translates into normal life. You can get lucky and win at poker playing any way you can think of, but to win consistently you have to play tight and aggressive. Maybe the same is true of real life.

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Photo is inside the big room in the Met where the Temple of Dendur is housed. You’d think I’d have some poker photos for this post, but I haven’t been to Vegas in a wihle.

Sett was moved from one server to multiple bigger servers yesterday. We’ve been having some stability issues lately, and it looks like they’re fixed now. Looking forward to refocusing on getting our new design out.