More on the crazy asian gambler

The other day I made some comments about a book I've been reading. Among other things, I said that the Chinese tendency to look at the world as tending towards change (versus the Western tendency to look at the world as tending towards staying static) has some implications for how the different cultures looked at poker strategy.

Anything But Hold'em commented on that and said

The Crazy Asian Gambler, in my experience, tends to believe that luck is a predictable quantity.

Yes, they do. That's consistent with the world view of a world undergoing change.

The asian tendency is to view the future as knowable. Changing, but knowable. They think they can predict the future and that future involves a change, but a predicable change that moves first away from the current state then will return to the current state. Luck and fate are part of a regularity of movement in the state of the world.

The westerner tends to think the future is unknowable. But the westerner also tends to think that future states will resemble the status quo. The westerner thinks thinks tend to stay the same but random forces will push things around so much that too much noise in any attempts at prediction.

The Asian thinks of the future as moving in a smooth, wavy line. The Westerner thinks of the future as being Brownian Motion.

When playing the table versus playing individual players you need to think like an asian. You need to think of the world as moving with everything in unison, following a rythm. It works. Trust me on this.