The poker challenge
The first rule of successful gambling, says Pearson, is to not gamble (in the strictest sense of the word) at all.
No, he’s not condemning all games of chance as hopeless. Instead, he means that you should only bet when the odds are clearly in your favor. Or, as he puts it, “You got to know when you have the best of it. A little bit or a lot. I like a lot.”
If your odds are too good, of course, no one will take your bet. So even the best situations afford only a small advantage—at best, by Pearson’s reckoning, a 60 percent chance of winning vs. a 40 percent chance of losing (thus the name of the rule).
You won’t win every time. But if you are disciplined enough to wager only on advantageous odds, and you do so repeatedly over the long haul, the chances are very good that you’ll come out ahead in the long run.
Finally, there’s the right way to play poker, the way poker is played by successful pros. These players go into pots only with strong hands, and bet a lot when they do. They’ll also stay in with a mediocre hand, if they can do so cheaply. Inevitably they still lose some hands on which they bet big. But ultimately the odds work in their favor, and over time they minimize losses and maximize gains.