It's a Jungle Out There
[I’ve written a little update to this post to add to some concepts below.]
This is Dan Cates
They call him Jungleman. He is within the top seven poker players in the world right now. Remember that number.
I am a very good researcher. I like to think of myself as a good poker player. I only make a living at one. And I don’t yet have a cool moniker like Texas Dolly, Kid Poker, Timex, The Mouth, or Jungleman*. It does not mean that I do not immerse myself, too much, probably, in the world of high stakes poker. Many people would say though, that poker is an excellent metaphor or teaching tool for life.
There are various books out there making the analogy between poker and life or poker and business. Two different successful female poker players, Liz Boeree and Annie Duke have leveraged their poker sucess into forms of life coaching. Here’s Ms. Boeree’s TEDX talk on thinking with probabilities as learned via poker, and here’s Ms. Duke’s book, Thinking In Bets, where she also applies lessons of the poker table to life writ large. I firmly believe that much can be learned from playing poker. Or just in reading about poker players.
I learned, like a lot of other poker geeks a week or so ago, that a “top seven” poker player was cheating. As one poker podcaster said later, it was good to be considered the eighth best. The allegation was thrown out on Twitter by someone named Bill Perkins, who exemplifies my dreams of being a successful businessman yet associated with the poker immortals. It came out a day or so later that the player in question was Dan Cates. Jungleman.
The crime, Cates was accused of, is called “ghosting”. Not the kind of ghosting where you go on a few dates and then never text back. This ghosting is when you play online poker under someone else’s account. In other words, the online avatar could say ManageRisks but the person playing would not be Rob Gardner but rather Dan Cates. The thinking would be that Cates and I would be sandbagging the crowd, that they would not expect ManageRisks to be a shark, and we’d take them for a bundle.
Which brings us to the lessons of the day. This ghosting scandal took place in a “private club”, via an app with passwords. The players had to be vetted, and there were certain controls in place specifically to protect against ghosting such as having your computer camera on—the way they got around that is that Cates and his cohort used a remote PC access program. The lead, the person named on the account, the one not supposed to be a top seven player, sat in front of the laptop and appeared to be playing. Cates hidden away, made the smart moves. See where I am going. On one hand, the game knew there were risks. They did not allow anyone to play, and they inserted controls to protect the game. The players still got duped. A concerted effort by people you trust wrecks the best of systems. Due diligence fail?
I listened to a podcast on this scandal the other day. The essential weakness exploited, they explained, was allowing Windows/PC systems to play. With just Apple/IOS there is no ability to do the remote play. It’s always easy to find the control flaw after. My only message, my whole point, way down here at the bottom of the blog post, is that it’s a jungle out there. You may think you’re playing poker with friends and it turns out you’re not. In this case, literally, you are not. In business, you may think you are doing business with friends. I’ve seen a lot of people decline business background research because they thought they were playing with friends. Most of the time they are. Yet, it’s a jungle out there and sometimes you are not. Do your due diligence.
*Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson, Daniel “Kid Poker” Negreanu, Mike “Timex” McDonald, Mike “The Mouth” Matusow, Dan “Jungleman” Cates