More Thoughts on titles

The choice of a blog title is a big deal in this age of global information and insight as to the choice potentially discloses much about the author. Fred’s Blog, for example (and to no one’s real great surprise) describes the life of Fred (who seems to be into cats). Tales of an Emergency Room Nurse is equally descriptive, but at least has the benefit of suggesting a topic that might make for interesting reading (to be fair to Fred, I actually enjoyed his discussion of Oracle error messages).

Given the importance of a title, you might ask yourself what the deal is with the “suited” part of Stochastically Suited? Again, there is the obvious answer – that the author (in this case me) feels they are suited to discussions stochastic. But it is more the use of the word suited as a justification around the poker table that attracted me. For many players the concept of suited cards is used as some kind of expression to suggest they have carte blanche to play stupidly because their starting cards where the same color. I’ve lost track of the times a horrendous play was explained with “What could I do? they were suited”.

This search for a an excuse to avoid taking responsibility for what, on any objective measure is just plain stupidity, is at the heart of what makes poker so potentially profitable and the world such a silly place.

I remember the sign off I saw on one of the popular poker forums sometime back (it’s probably still being used and I do not mean to suggest it is original to me, just that I can’t be bothered to look it up and credit the author) “Yeah, penguins are suited too – it doesn’t mean they aren’t great shark food”.

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.