Mike Caro

• By Mike Caro | Exit

This is the original manuscript for a two-part series that was featured in Casino Player magazine about 1994. I spend a lot of time teaching life strategy, and there are many similarities between using correct tactics everyday and making winning decisions gambling.

But, remember, in gambling you can’t beat many games, because the odds are fixed against you. So, you need to stick to the ones for which your skill is sufficient to win – such as poker, private wagers, gin rummy, and sometimes blackjack. Avoid roulette and craps. These are games with odds that are permanently on the casino’s side. There is no way you can overcome this disadvantage, so you shouldn’t play. But life’s different. You’re in that game, even if you sometimes wish you weren’t – and your decisions always matter.

The original two-part series has been merged below and appears a single article. – Mike Caro

Caro’s Most Powerful Gambling Advice Tackles Real-Life: Part I
“America’s Mad Genius” Mike Caro

Suddenly you’re awake. But where are you? Everywhere you look there’s white. White walls hug and confine you, stretching deeper and deeper, marking the boundaries of a straight, narrow, featureless hallway. You’re bewildered, but who wouldn’t be? Finally you stand and look behind you. All white, everything, going back to where it all vanishes.

You push against the hard white floor, swaying and almost losing your balance because you’ve been asleep so long. Looking ahead, you realize the hallway is not exactly like it was behind you. Almost the same, but not quite. Way, way in the distance you can see some specks. And, reasoning that specks are better than nothing, you begin walking toward them.

It takes a long time, but then the specks grow and define themselves. They have become signs, gold in color and arrow-shaped. They hang at the end of the hallway, and you can see lettering on them. Closer and closer you walk, until you can see that there’s a second hallway perpendicular to the this one. One arrow points left and reads: “Casino.” The other points right and reads: “Life.”

It’s decisions like this that make you cry out for your mommy. Let me help. Turn right toward the real world, and I’ll give you some advice as you’re walking. In the future I’ll provide plenty of strategy for winning at formal gambling, including some tips that will help you fare better inside the casino.

But there’s something you have to understand today. Gambling games are merely formalized, simplified ways of experiencing exactly the same risks we experience in everyday life. If you’re alive–as most of my readers are–you gamble. Formally or informally, you gamble.

Not surprisingly, many of the same strategies I’ve lectured about and analyzed with computers apply just as powerfully to everyday life as they do to formalized gambling. Somewhere down the list of my next 20 books, which I’ve announced but failed to deliver so far, is one called Poker Without Cards.

By the way, I absolutely never use any manipulative tactics that I teach against people I respect. Why? Because, having heard me lecture about these strategies, people would feel uncomfortable dealing with me. So, I deal with all friendly associates in a completely straightforward manner. I have to. You don’t. Now here are some useful examples of gambling tips and philosophies I hope you’ll successfully be able to adapt to the world around you.

1. The cards probably won’t break even–not in gin rummy, not in poker, and not in real life. There’s a common misconception that if you play poker long enough the cards will break even. Fat chance! Maybe, if you could play forever, never stopping, never sleeping, eventually you’d break even on luck. But not in just one lifetime! Early on you’d probably break even on, say, the number of full houses you were dealt, but it would take much longer to break even on circumstances surrounding those full houses.

You might lose more hands than you should lose on average. On the other hand, sometimes opponents might have nothing to oppose you with, and you’ll win nothing. You might get many full houses when you’re sitting in big-limit games, or you may receive most in smaller games. You might be against weak opponents, you might not. On and on. And the more factors you consider, the broader the range of luck, and the longer it will take for you to break even.

Does this mean some people are luckier than others for their lifetimes? You bet! But there’s good news. You can still win, year after year, in gambling games requiring skill, even if you’re not lucky. How? Simply by making the best decisions again and again without fail. Then, instead of being a break-even big-money player who may win $100,000 one year and lose $100,000 the next, you might win $250,000 in a lucky year and win $50,000 in an unlucky year. In this over-simplified example, the $200,000 swing from lucky year to unlucky year isn’t enough to cause you to lose. At seminars, I teach that you should go to the poker table day after day on a simple mission. That mission is to make the best decisions always, and never worry about whether you’re lucky or unlucky. You can’t control your luck, but you can control your decisions.

Same in life. Some people spend half their lives in hospitals. Others are healthy. All your belongings might be swept up in a tornado. You might discover a million dollar painting in you attic. Stop expecting life to be equal for everyone. It won’t be. Your mission is simply to make the best decisions with the “hands” you’re dealt.

2. If you’re a winner–in formal gambling or in life–you should never try to get even “for the night.” By doing this, you’re perverting your practice of making meaningful decisions while pursuing a meaningless goal. The mistake is in looking at each gambling session, or each financial venture, as a game to be won or lost. Don’t! In poker, it’s better to win $10,000, lose $2000, and lose $500 than to win $4,000, win $998 and win $2. In the first case, you won $7,500, but you only had one win and two losses. In the second case, you won only $5,000, but you won all three times. Oddly, most gamblers and most people in real life unconsciously feel better about the second scenario than the first. Such feelings are natural, but they’re also dangerous.

If you agree with me that $7,500 is better than $5,000, then you should clearly see that it doesn’t matter where the profits come from. The next two points are closely related, and they demonstrate how most people diminish their overall success.

3. Never make anything worse. Sure, it sounds obvious? But guess what? I’ve never met anyone who didn’t make things worse sometimes, including myself. People get angry, and they make things worse. They lose at business or at romance, and they make things worse. It’s because they’re feeling so miserable that those extra losses don’t seem to register. In gambling, I call this dangerous practice crossing the threshold of misery. Here’s how it works.

A player sits down at blackjack thinking that the worst that can happen is he’ll lose $500. Everything goes wrong and suddenly he’s losing $1,000. He has now crossed the threshold of misery and maximized his ability to register pain. Losing $1,114 doesn’t feel any worse than losing $1,000. That extra $114 doesn’t matter, and so he concentrates less and plays worse. It happens all the time in life. Romance does this to you. Unexpected misfortune does this to you. Decisions that would normally matter (like that extra $114 in blackjack) don’t seem to matter by comparison. But these decisions all add up. In life people who are heartbroken sometimes make the worst business decisions imaginable. Those decisions don’t seem to matter much compared to the heartbreak. And those decisions all add up, and eventually they will matter.

In poker, many lifelong losing players would actually be lifelong winners if they simply never made things worse. Worse out of anger, worse out of exasperation, worse out of apathy, worse out of self-pity, worse out of temper. If it doesn’t matter now, it will matter tomorrow. So from now on, promise yourself you will never make things worse. You will never make things worse.

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