Episode 106: Nick Wealthall

13 thoughts on “Episode 106: Nick Wealthall”

1. I like that tease. A futurist looks at poker piques my interest very much.

2. During the strategy segment when you were talking about the postflop edge you can get out of calling preflop with an unsuited connector like 98o, the value that immediately jumped to mind to me was stacking opponents that will pay you off with top pair (or worse) hands. You won’t get these situations very often but the payoff will be pretty big. That’s the main reason why I will call raises with these sorts of hands in small stakes games.
   Granted I would like the stacks to be deeper but the stacks are deep enough in this hand to make it a profitable play.

   • Glad you brought this up, because this was the main point I wanted to refute in the strategy segment, and clearly I did not do such a good job. 98o will flop better than one pair something like 5% of the time, and even when it does Hero is (a) not guaranteed to get stacks in; (b) not guaranteed to be a favorite if stacks do go in; and (c) not guaranteed to win even if he puts his stack in as a favorite. AA has plenty of outs on 982, and this is one of the best case scenarios. It just isn’t that easy to outflop one pair, and a lot of people badly overestimate their implied odds with hands like this one.

     • Thanks for your reply Andrew.
       What variables do you think would need to be changed in order to make this a good preflop call? Better position, deeper stacks, etc.
       I figured that hero has about 20 times the call in his stack which is about the minimum I would want with unsuited connectors.

3. A really entertaining interview with Nick… Nice to hear more about the life and times of one of the voices the Sunday Million Highlight Show, which is always entertaining viewing…

4. I was going to go into a rant about poker players’ much vaunted greater thinking peers being a means for validation their prior opinions rather than disciplining their actual thinking, but I think I might already have had that rant on this site.

   Instead I’ll pick up on some of the discussion about education. As someone also involved in university education, we are always being told how we are not just/really teaching our subject discipline (history) but are really teaching professional skills and employability. For most non professional degrees, I think that is some cross between total nonsense and a total underselling of the transformatory experience of an experience like going to university. My undergraduate degree revolutionised how I think (as did my early periods of employment, and then again my postgraduate experiences), but im sure that the bulk of the university process wrt employability is more of a giant expensive sorting hat than it is teaching actual skills. Simultaneously, there are those who argue we should be inculcating values and ethics into our students. I’m pretty uncomfortable with that idea.

   But one thing that I’ve never heard anyone say we should be teaching is what one might call life skills, or perhaps philosophy in the sense of the pursuit of the good life, or perhaps just how to be happy. There are a whole host of heuristics I have come to over the course of my life that I think contribute a lot to my tenuous grasp of contentment, but i think none of them have come from a classroom or from formal education – they’re mostly random flashes of realisation I’ve stumbled over, and yet they’re amongst the most valuable things I have learned. I wonder if they aren’t some of the things I would want to be teaching my students, if I really thought about it.

   In the light of this, I thought Nick’s comments about short termism versus long termism in our reasoning was really interesting. Firstly I thoguht that his ideas of how to use long term goals to decide short term actions sounded like a potentially powerful tool. secondly I thought it made a good case, if not proven, that poker can be a means for learning really valuable wider lessons in life.

   Anyway, good show, count me as the first Brit you know who didnt know of Nick.

   • One of these days I’ll learn to prof read my comments here before hitting submit. ‘Thinking processes’ in the first line, fwiw.

   • Thanks for this comment–there’s a lot to think about. For whatever it’s worth, it seems pretty common in philosophy to say that what we’re trying to teach is how to live better; this is especially common for those of us who work directly in the ancient Greek tradition.

     I do think there should be more emphasis on university education as an ennobling, “transformative” (as you say) experience. It seems to me that the quality of (college) education is inversely proportional to how professionalized the students are. I’m all for professional training, of course–but viewing (say) philosophy or history as, primarily, a kind of professional or pre-professional training seems to me unfortunate and often damaging.

5. The more I feel I have gotten to know Nick, the more of a boss I think he is. After he expressed his views on certification though, really, he could have read the remarks of the defense counsel at Nuremberg. I was in the palm of his hand, is what I mean to say.

   • Yeah I like him a lot as well. +1 on Brits being awesome.

6. Thank you for the long form interview. Nick was on Jared Tendler’s podcast in March 2014, and he used the same Annie Hall anecdote. He must really like that movie.

7. thanks for this entertaining and captivating interview. The discussion about good teachers, good teaching, and transformational education was a highlight for me. Nick exemplifies the qualities of a good teacher. Critical thinking and the ability to generalize a new concept or strategy to a different situation are good skills to cultivate. An expression comes to mind as to whether a teacher wants to be the sage from the stage or the guide from the side. Credentials do count, but it’s how a teacher uses them to facilitate a student’s growth that seems most important. Enjoyable holiday listening!

8. I’ve been a fan of Nick for a few years (his UKIPT commentaries of 2010 or thereabouts were kind of my “insertion point” to the idea of “poker as entertainment”), so I greatly enjoyed this show. It seems to me that guys like Nick that have been around the block a bit ironically have a lot more to say about the future of poker than some of the younger upstarts, who seem keen to make a quick buck and then get out of the business. I hope you can find some more people to talk to whom have a bit of history. (Neil Channing, Barny Boatman, Vicky Coren and others of that ilk could teach us all a thing or two!)

   Thanks again for providing so many wonderful podcasts this year. Here’s to a happy and healthy 2015 for the extended TPP family!

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