I remember the day when PartyPoker.com was a nationwide fad - before it was effectively criminalized in 2006 for being an offshore unregulated gambling operation.
Back then I spent some hours playing Texas Holdem in the practice area where people prepped for the challenge of playing with real money, or more likely sat around in retirement playing cards on their laptops just for kicks.
Several traits of this gaming environment were striking, and I thought it was particularly illustrative of the way the real world works in other areas.
For these games, PartyPoker would give starting players an initial investment of $200 in chips & sent them off to earn their fortune. The buy-in was usually $5 per round. And the game was not rigged at all - in theory it should have been a good place to learn poker. But human nature and the laws of probability made for a killing-field for first-time players. Here's how.
For each table of 7-10 players, there would invariably be.. the millionaires.. The 1 or 2 players who had been there since the inception of PartyPoker, who had at least hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more - who still played these low-stakes games. They sat like full-grown alligators in a pool of small hatchlings, irking the other players with unmatchable bets & eventually driving them away from the table, broke.
The question might be - how did such a millionaire arrive? Answer - longevity. And consuming the young hatchling newbies trying to learn how to play. More importantly, they came into a system without the presence of other millionaires. So the system over time had put them in a catbird seat and their growth was almost a certainty as new $ was always arriving & was then consumed. Most would find this a waste of time, but these guys had time to kill - and it did keep them out of real casinos so I'm sure their families preferred it this way.
One question:
Were they better poker-players than anyone else?
Answer. No. They had only to be average.
They simply had more money to start with.
So with equal luck for all players, they had advantages.
1) They could make bets that could not be matched by newbies who would then have to drop out of the hand.
2) Even when not over-betting, they could survive bad luck because they had enough to continue playing after a big loss.
3) Their cost-to-continue was a negligable % of their net worth.
The newbies had $200 - which with a $5 cover meant 40 attempted hands and maybe 10 active hands, one of which they would have to win to continue in the game. This is a significant pressure, but the millionaires could play forever. They thus had much more discretion to simply fold the hand after receiving bad cards & were never forced to play.
The only way a new player could ever become established as a millionaire after the start of the game would be extraordinary talent - far above the millionaires' level, as well as a run of good luck.
This seemed to me to be analogous to the real world. & it sort of explains how a few people get a fleet of sports cars while most of us live with small old clunkers- the whole wealth-distribution question.
The millionaires have an advantage in $'s which is magnified by the nature of the environment. They can take more risk., or they don't need as much talent. This is the pure state-of-nature, and it's a cruel and largely arbitrary place where luck dictate outcomes much of the time. And I don't mean the luck of the playing - I refer to the luck of the arrangements before the game is even started. Almost nothing can ever match the advantage of arriving early on the ground floor.
One could say .. stop your class warfare - it's none of your business etc. But I think it is. If the premise of the game is that everyone has to buy in and participate - that there's no 'out'. And so the state-of-nature argument is not really true because something has to be done to support the young sprogs as they begin the game and prevent the millionaires from devouring them as they arrive.
But if you tell a very wealthy person that luck played a big part in their ascendance, they can become very offended. You are sniping at the premise through which they live their lives and legitimizes all of their consumptions.
Some large % of them will not accept your criticism. They will in fact form a party to celebrate their own greatness & work to legitimate their positions. I call these people
...
Republicans.
And so.. I'm a Democrat. For all their faults, they supposedly represent the little guy.
Let's hope for their success in November - even as Citizen United has put them at a permanent disadvantage.. Time will tell.
