Freakonomics Blog » The value of commitment — reflections on my 10 year wedding anniversary (as it relates to poker):
Anyway, back to my 10 year anniversary. My wife wanted to spend our last hours in Las Vegas together playing in a poker tournament. Because I am a loyal husband, I agreed to do it. It was a $430 buy-in tournament at the Mirage and 20 players were entered. It started at 5 pm and we figured there was plenty of time to catch a flight at midnight. Since neither of us had ever played in a live tournament, we had no idea how long these take to complete. It took about three hours to narrow it down to a final table of ten players. I was still in the tournament at this point, although Jeannette got knocked out on a bad beat relatively early. Two hours later, there were still five players left, including me. I had about an average number of chips among the remaining players. I also had a dilemma. My flight left in two hours. It was the last flight of the night. I really wanted to catch it. On the other hand, having just played this tournament for five hours, I was hoping to get a nice payoff and maybe some bragging rights.
So it was 10:15 pm and I figured the latest I could leave for the airport and comfortably make my flight was 10:30 pm. I decided that I would go “all in” with any hand that was decent at all. This would give me a chance to either lose quickly or maybe win quickly. I didn’t announce this strategy to the table, I just adopted it. Over the next 12 hands I was “all in” about 6 times. Four times everyone else folded. I won one of the other two hands, and lost one against someone with fewer chips. That left me with a lot more chips than before, but no one had been knocked out.
8:41 PM
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