… invest the money in something really safe, and then get out. Lines from the real world of lots of skill and lots of chance:
The vast sums of money shuttled among the accounts of these young professionals — and the shocking aggressiveness and recklessness with which they played — deepened the divide between the young online players and the older guard who earned their millions when poker was still a game played by men sitting around a table. Since the rise of online poker in the early 2000s, every principle of the game, every lesson learned over hundreds of thousands of hours of play, every simple credo uttered in some old Western gambling movie — all those tersely stated, manly things that made up the legend of poker — has been picked apart and, for the most part, discarded.
The game was revolutionized in this way by video game addicts, one of who explains,
“ … because we’re all competitive, we want to have the highest score. But really, we don’t know what making $400,000 or losing $800,000 means, because we don’t have families or whatever. This blind spot gives us the freedom to always make the right move, regardless of the amount at stake, because our judgment isn’t clouded by any possible ramifications.”It is unclear whether Cates actually does understand that the money is real.
Look, I kid you not, Cates couldn’t figure out why a restaurant would be more crowded on Valentine’s Day.
I guess it’s possible to win and lose at the same time.
Note: My best guess is that the kids’ success stems largely from the fact that they are rather alike in many ways, so they can guess what to expect more accurately than most of us. But the failures occur because no such system works well indefinitely.