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RE: Luck vs. Skill - Why steemit and poker have a lot in common and luck is a predictable driver.
I agree that poker is a game of skills, but I think you ruled out luck just a little to easy. There is still a lot of luck involved, and I have seen a lot of good players failing to win just because oh bad luck. Those bad runs also affects players confidence, so in a long run it migh hurt even more.
There is definitely luck involved, however, skills are more important. The difference between good and great is that great players feel when they have no luck and just don't play on that period.
Ya oh well the luck factor.
I do agree with Marly that a game is either a skill game or a luck game. I play poker very regularly and I can definitely attest to what you are describing about luck destroying players. I have had a 6 months stretch of break even results and losses recently and this is very toxic to self confidence as well as to my wallet and bankroll. However in the long run I have the same amount of positive outliers. Even this year I had a stretch of almost 20 winning sessions in a row. If I just say this is luck then I have failed as a player, because it is part of the game. It is my job to understand that such variance is part of the game and needs to be handled and managed.
But in my mind this is not luck. While every day I get lucky or not, wether I make sure I can handle the swings is a matter of strategy. If I win over the long run or the game brakes me is not about being lucky, but playing right and this includes how I let losses affect me, how I handle them and how I plan for them.
I think Marly has experienced something similar on this site. She had a very slow start, but kept working on her game and now consistently delivers post that yield rewards. There is also lots of variance in her results as well. There are still many post where she almost makes nothing. I am sure lot's of these result are governed by the quality of her work, but it seems very clear to me that a large part of it is due to variance.
Yup, totally agree on all of the above! However, I got to experience that sometimes you just know that you will lose, and on other times you are sure that you gonna win, even though, you are playing the same poker. Its like univers just has those limits set on each person on how much they can win with cards. But that's just my speculations and conspiracy theories lol.
As for Steemit part, I totally agree with you as well. One thing is clear - you can still lose when you have skills, but you will never win if you have no skills. So whatever that luck thing is, we just have to take care of being skilled and expect for the best :)
Thank you my friend @knircky! Who else could talk about playing poker? :-)
You said that it´s part of the 'job to understand that such variance is part of the game and needs to be handled and managed.' Do you think the variance on steemit could be handled and managed in a similar way?
Getting back to your example (my 'steemit career'): I guess you are right, while I have had a lot of successful publications lately, some of my articles still don´t comply with the quality demands of a certain target group and die poorly. But how could we minimize variance? There is few information we do have about circumstances like active users and their profile. If we knew better the target group it would be easier to deliver... But well it´s also part of the game to not have these details :-)
I think some of the variance just has to be accepted.
All we can do is play our cards as best we can. In steem this means all we can do is write content as best as possible and then we need to accept that sometimes the content won't get noticed.
Likewise we must be careful not to overreact to our successes, because just like our misses are often likely negative outliers the last big hit might represent a positive lucky hit.
We cannot control when big whales login and read our articles and we cannot control what they like or don't. So I think there has to be variance in how we will be rewarded.
That sounds absolutely logical to me.
I guess that a constant improvement of skills will help us to keep the variance low, but it will be always part of the game. We can learn both from failure and success, trying to not overrate extreme outliers on both extremities.
Talking so much about poker, I would love to drive to the casino RIGHT NOW! :-))
I have to play 15 more h to hit my 500h per year goal and also have a $ goal I am very close to that I want to hit.
Still have a few days :-)
Thanks for your detailed comment @writingamigo! Maybe I ruled out luck quickly just because I liked the idea of not giving it too much importance :-)
The feeling that you mentioned is also a feeling which could be developed on steemit, I guess. The more you learn, the better you know what works and what doesn´t. The problem is that we don´t have sufficient information to perfectly predict our content´s success, thus the variation is always a big part of the game.
Lucky or not - it´s exciting to be here! :)
That is true! I agree that sometimes it is better just to rule out the factors, which you cannot influence just to focus on the importnat stuff a little easier. I hope we will figure out the rest of the information in future to be even more successful!
Nontheless, steemit is for sure a superb place to be!
It definitely is!
Following you now for future posts :)
Thanks @surfermarly! Will make sure to work on my game to produce more quality with every day :)
Me too!! :))