Are You A Chess Player or A Poker Player?

Hitting the last two days of August and welcoming September real soon. This is the transitional month for me as I will be moving to a new chapter and start something anew, trying things out and of course redefine myself, upgrading myself. This is of course an exciting journey ahead to look forward too but also comes with certain worries too. Nonetheless, keeping the worries aside, I would like to focus on how to succeed rather than what if I can’t make it. That would bring me into a battle mode that is more fearless and optimistic in some sense.

Turning Point

Currently, I am in the midst of putting down my profession and dive into a whole new realm of knowledge which is agritech that involves agriculture, system planning, engineering, geology, economics and more. I would foresee myself to be in between these two professions which are design and agriculture to come out with a unique positioning in the market. Strangely, I had this in my mind since I am taking my Master of Architecture whereby all my project (except for semester 1) revolved around the combination of agriculture, food and also architecture. I see this as a permanence which people will definitely need good quality of food and good living environment to live in. With such constant demand and endless upgrade of demand in terms of quality, we could do a lot more in this realm.

Again, I was asked is it worth it to abandon architecture practice and go into this agritecture whereby I would not be doing works that are done by professional architect but a mixture. To me, I follow my guts whereby I do think myself as someone who love to engage more with people and sharing the knowledge that I had with the people I love to be around. This is what my instinct told me to. Well, definitely I would still need to be planning it in a more rational way which is by writing things down and brainstorm in terms of the probability of success venturing into the unknown.

Life Changing Mindset

I read about an article which talks about life. There are two modes to face our life challenges, one is a chess player mode and the other one is poker player mode. In a chess game, it is definitely a more complex game compared to poker with quite a lot of skills to pick up. However, in a chess game, there is a definite amount of possibility whereby each set of moves can be calculated and learned through situational learning. If you have some experience learning chess play, you know that each opening, middle game and end game have its own styles and certain counter measures. As long as we are well verse with the moves progression, we could minimize the probability of losing and let the opponent to make a mistake in order to strike a checkmate. This is how a grandmaster plays and that is why now AI is dominating the game as AI does not make mistake but only bug issue. On the other hand, if we are playing poker game, it is relatively easier to play as you just need to know how to read the card and play it to your favor. The challenging part is the unknown components in the game like the cards on your opponents hand, the next card that will be on the table and what combination you will get. It is just like our life which is full of uncertainty. Therefore, as a professional poker player, they play with skill through probability calculation and also bit of luck. In certain manner, you could calculate your winning probability by looking at the cards on the table and also the cards on your hand. With that probability, you could make a call and hope for the best. At the very least, u know there is high chance of winning than losing. This is something that I am lacking to be honest as I do not like poker game and love chess game which indirectly reflect how I treat my life which is embracing only the certainty.

In order to be successful, earning an amount of wealth and of course to be financially independent, I will need to embrace the art of managing probability. Usually good investors love poker game which says a lot about how they master probability. Without such risk, there will be very minimum profit to make which is the same with any financial product out there and also business. Thus, it is the reason why entrepreneur has to be equipped with capability to rationalize the risk and decide whether the risk is manageable with the resources available so far. Nevertheless, this is not about getting us to addict in poker (gambling) as poker game can be very professional and the pool money won was like millions of dollars for a international champion. It is a serious game that makes a leverage between luck and skill. There is a golden advice from the article whereby we should take every victory as a lucky moment and taking every failure for our lack of skill. By having the right skill, we could minimize our failure and loss to the minimum as we are playing with the probability. We know very well that if we fail, how much will we loss in terms of money, time, energy and other resources. Thus, looking at the professional poker player all in does not mean they are playing with their guts but a combination of skill like psychology, calculation of winning probability as well as strong believe in his or her luck.

So, I would need to brush up myself in terms of understanding risk and how to come out with a system to calculate the probability before proceed to decision and implementation. It is fundamental for me to get this right before I go further into something bigger. As I progress, I will share my lesson learned here and this would be my diary of my growth.

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