Considerations of Titles

Why Stochastically Suited?

It sounded like a clever name for a blog. But I worry about clever. I think this worry comes from always thinking of the scene from Fight Club when describing or hearing something described as “clever”. It’s the scene where Edward Norton “meets” Brad Pitt in the airplane and describes him as his most interesting single-serving friend. Ed tries to explain and Brad says “No, I get it. It’s very clever. How’s that working out for you, being clever?”

So some other justification beyond clever is needed. The fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia describes the issue as follows:

Stochastic, from the Greek "stochos" or "aim, guess", means of, relating to, or characterized by conjecture and randomness.

A stochastic process is one whose behavior is non-deterministic in that a state does not fully determine its next state. Classical examples of this are medicine and rhetoric. While a doctor can perfectly perform his or her craft, a patient may nevertheless still succumb to illness. This makes medicine a stochastic process. (See the link here)

So a stochastic process embraces the possibility of performing a task perfectly and still failing. Now we’re getting somewhere. Because what is life but a never-ending series of opportunities to work hard doing the right thing perfectly only for some unforeseen or unlikely outcome to complete screw the whole damn thing?

Of course this applies with even more accuracy to poker. A poker player knows well the experience of doing exactly the correct thing and watching all of his chips being stacked in front of someone else. In fact, often times the correct decision will see the chips being stacked in front of someone else nine out of ten times. This doesn’t make the decision wrong, just difficult to embrace.

Most decisions, whether in poker or in life, are characterized by conjecture and randomness. So stochastic fits.