do you have friends who are obsessed with expected value?

I remember when my classmates became quant obsessed. Everything in life became an expected value game, and like my fellow students, I relished in that line of thinking. I hated losing and optimization proposed a mathematical solution to win.

However, by the end of college, I changed my mind.

When I first arrived at Penn, I played a sizable amount of poker. Freshman year, I would follow my roommates to the Quad or Hill (names of dorms), and we would play No limit Texas Hold 'em.

Different color chips sprawled out on the tables. Red. Green. Black. Black. White. 10 cents. 25 cents. 50 cents. 1 dollar, and 5 dollars. Playing poker became therapeutic, exhilarating, and painful depending on the day.

Soon, my social media turned into a flood of Poker clips, and in each clip, I could see all the cards, but perhaps more importantly, each player's probability of winning. I began counting outs and estimating probabilities. Outs * 4 for the turn. Outs * 2 for the river. I learned about ranges and blockers, and my posterior distribution changed again. I stopped smiling during games and instead played with a poker face.

After doing this for a few hands, I came to the now-obvious conclusion. I hated playing poker this way. It was monotonous, robotic, and BORING. Put simply, chasing the optimal highest dollar outcome was not fun at all.

And so I replaced my poker face with the funny trash talk. I played hands with a terrible draw. Sometimes, I would even just choose not to do the high EV play. In mathematical terms, I played with extremely high variance. In poker terms, I played extremely loose.

Ironically enough, I started winning more. I'm confident that my P&L was higher when I played as the latter than the former.

There are a million logical reasons for this outcome, but for me, it's honestly a nice reminder to not think so hard. After all, sometimes, the suboptimal may just be the most optimal.

But if you were to ask my friends who are obsessed with expected value, I bet they might say: Danny, maybe your sample size wasn’t large enough