The Poker Game of Science

A little more than a year ago I wrote a post dealing with the stark differences between poker and other forms of competition such as basketball. I made the point that nobody would ever bet $10,000 thinking that they could beat Michael Jordan in a heads up game of basketball without a handicap, but there are plenty of fools willing to put up $10k for a chance to win the main event of the World Series of Poker, which is perhaps the most poker-pro-infested event known to man. There are two reasons for this. First, in basketball it is easy to recognize good strategy and mastery of technical skills. Everybody knows that Jordan kicked serious ass. In contrast, basic poker strategy is far from intuitive to most people and even when they have learned it they may still have trouble applying it in the heat of battle. Therefore, most poker players have no clue of how bad they are, nor do they have any appreciation for just how good the best players can be. Second, there is a lot of luck in poker. Even if a player has taken the time to familiarize himself with the game sufficiently to understand the gigantic gulf between his skill level and that of an expert, he may still be tempted into a game with the experts in the hope that the deck will hit him over the head and he will take home the money. For this reason, luck is an important element in making poker so profitable for good players. However, the luck factor is large enough that it takes a long, long time to know whether or not you are any good. I know of several experienced pros who are huge life-long winners at Party Poker, yet have suffered through income plateaus spanning 50,000 hands or more. To put that into perspective, I have played around 130,000 hands since April of last year. Does this make poker sound like any other activity you know?

The other day I was talking to a friend who was upset because few of her experiments have been working lately. I said it sounded like science had been dealing her a lot of bad beats. She acknowledged that bad luck was likely to be the culprit, but pointed out that it's hard to maintain much confidence as a scientist after getting cold decked so many times. I assured her that she is the shit when it comes to lab, and that her luck would turn around soon. But it made me realize how much science is like poker in this regard. There are tons of intelligent, hard working people putting in the effort but not getting results. Sometimes this is because they are doing technically challenging experiments, and sometimes it's because shit just doesn't work and that's all you can say. On the flip side, there are plenty of ignorant twits who get assigned to fast track projects and end up publishing in Science without ever knowing which end of a pipetman is up. Obviously, luck plays a role in any job or activity you can think of. But science comes closer to poker in the degree of luck involved. There is voodoo and witchcraft and wizardry at work in this business. Today a student in the lab presented her work, and her first slide showed a cartoon with a scientist spinning around on his head next to a lab bench surrounded by candles. Another scientist is staring at this spectacle in disbelief. The caption reads "the protocol said this is the only way to get it to work, so I'm doing it!!" Sounds about right.