I played the unlimited texas hold thems at the Empire casino in London and won 150+ bbs a few days ago at 1/3gbp.

This was the first time I felt alive in 8ish months. I'm coming for all you SoCal degens in a week... assuming you're not in Vegas.

Maybe, although I think I meant it in the context of the 90%+ of jobs where outcome isn't primarily dictated by chance. It'd be like saying to a poker horse, "It sucks that you ran bad, now you're going to have to put in extra hours next month to make it up."

Definitely not a nice thing to say and overused it's going to sap morale. But a nonzero amount of time it needs to be said, and people who don't say it when it needs to be said won't succeed.

I forgot to keep the bottom part about Costco/Starbucks but I agree. I think "fair" and "nice" are different, though. I'm mostly pointing out that there are times where being "not nice" is required.

I'll give an example. I'm a chemist, and recently we requested that an external vendor do some chemistry for us. They quoted 8 weeks and we agreed that was reasonable. We sent them procedures we had worked out, but they thought they had a better plan. They worked on it for 4 weeks and got nowhere, I politely asked them to reconsider the procedure we sent, another 2 weeks passed and they were still nowhere, I straight up told them to use our procedure, another 2 weeks passed, and I just told them rather impolitely to deliver the compounds in 4 weeks or we were going to cancel the contract and give it to another vendor.

It was doubly mean because at the end of those 4 weeks was a big national holiday where everyone would get two weeks off, the equivalent of someone saying to an American in December, "get this done by Christmas or else you're fired."

Fair? I think so. Nice? I freely admit it was not.

NOTE: I drank a lot after work with a coworker hard so my opinion may be heavily biased.

callipygian, I think that is well played. Capitalism at its finest. Those who manage the chemist / etc with the plan are the true reason for success. Regardless of if you phrase chemists/programmers/engineers/traders/etc as reason for success, its not possible without an individual such as callipygian or management with the idea in my opinion

There are all different ways to view "nice." If you kept the contract even though they weren't delivering and weren't acting competently, you'd be doing no one any favors in the long run. Maybe in the short run they'd enjoy the revenue. But eventually it would catch up with them, and certainly would do no favors to you, your employees, your clients, their employees, etc.

If that vendor cleaned up their act, great! You did them a huge favor by issuing clear, actionable feedback.

If they didn't fix things, that's said but will work out OK. Now those resources can be reallocated to more productive endeavors. I know that sounds like Ultra Capitalist logic and believe me, often I'm skeptical of the invisible hand, but I also have no patience for people screwing around and expecting to get paid for it. Let them find a market they're better at serving.

I would never characterize holding someone to a contract they made as being "not nice".

Science doesn't always follow a timeline. Sometimes you think something will take a week and it takes infinity. Sometimes you think it's impossible but it works on the first try.

Sure, but they were not doing their best and actively refused to improve, so you had every right and even obligation to protect your interest and give them an ultimatum.

Just think about it in gto terms. You could have done "the nice thing" and let things slide even longer. But then you would lose to a competitor who didn't do that kind of thing.

So I guess my point is that being nice (i.e. too lenient) shouldn't be a consideration in business because its easily exploited.

Did you send them a procedure to produce a particular compound? And you both agreed that it could be reasonably done within the timeline? And then they chose to not follow the procedure and ended up not being able to produce?

Unless the procedure you sent them completely didn't work... But it sounds like they went off script and then never got back on it.

They were definitely doing their best and the "script" (recipe would be more accurate) wasn't great. It wasn't an unreasonable try on their part. If it had worked out they would have finished in 4 weeks instead of 8.

Not sure what you guys are trying to do, I freely admit it wasn't nice. I know this is the Internet where there has to be one Hero and one Villain in every story, but I'm comfortable being neither the Hero nor the Villain here. I don't feel bad about telling them to get it done, but I also don't feel great about making them work double shifts to get 8 weeks worth of work done in 4.

I don't think anyone is suggesting they weren't doing their best. They tried, and they failed.

I don't think there's a villain and a hero. I think this is just business. But probably it's this:

I'm not sure that it's nice or not nice when you have a contract and they don't complete it. Extending their contract beyond 8 weeks would be "nice." Setting up an 8 week contract and terminating it at the end of 8 weeks if they don't deliver isn't "not nice."

This is what I was trying to say.

You shouldn't feel bad about what you did imo. No more than if you win a bunch of money from someone in poker. They sat down to play and you played the game fairly.

Extending the contract is neither nice nor not nice, but pure self-interest. I could have canceled the contract but then I wouldn't have the deliverable product - in fact, I'd just have to go back to the rejected bids and probably wait another 8 weeks.

Oh, I think I see the confusion here.

The payment schedule is milestone based. We don't pay them on time spent, we pay for the deliverable. So extending the contract doesn't cost us money, only the opportunity to start over with someone else.

I feel bad when a guy sits down and loses a bunch of money when it obviously is going to have a big negative impact on his/her life.

Today, a guy wearing a Sherwin-Williams shirt, white pants with paint all over them, and paint all over his hands walked by the 80-160 table. He asked how much the buy-in was, obviously was not good at poker, and lost about $6k in 3 hours. Considering that's probably a couple of months wages, that's a pretty bad day.

I battle everyone my hardest at the table, but I'm not unaware I am hurting other people by taking their money. I've seen a lot of people's lives completely destroyed by poker, and it's a sad thing.

That's to your credit, of course, despite the rationalizations and posturing one sees on a site like this.

The rationalization that probably is valid in my mind is that someone determined to gamble is going to do so whether they're losing to me or to someone else. But it still makes me feel icky, and I'd hope I'm harder to beat than a replacement-level player.

I've always figured that, if I knew someone was in way over their head, first I'd do everything possible to subtly persuade the person not to play. (I have asked floors to do something about severely drunk players; I don't want make my money from abusing people's addictions.) Knowing subtle persuasion is unlikely to work, I also figure I could offer to help them out away from the table, where the money isn't keeping score. But of course people aren't usually very up-front about their need, and it's really hard in our culture to go around offering help to strangers.

That's one of the things I hate most about playing. When I see someone that looks like they are playing on their Social Security checks, it makes me sick.

Yeah poker is fun, but poker would be better if everyone who played had a $250k a year job and like $3m in assets to their name.

I think a lot more than poker would be better if everyone had these things.

Since I started playing live again, this is something that has really bothered me. The backbone of the small/medium stakes economy is the people who come in and lose daily when they often times can't afford to come in and lose more than once every week or two, and I honestly have 0 desire to win their money. Once in a while someone will text me about so and so player in like a 5/10 NL or 40/80 LHE game and be like "here he is to blow off another (insert inappropriately large sized loss for the game here), wish me luck" and my response is always basically "I hope he beats you all for a couple thousand, goes home and enjoys his day away from you vultures" and I really mean it.

The nice thing about playing bigger is that I'm usually the least financially successful person at the table.

To be honest with you guys, especially Californians, I've voted against every expansion of gambling that I've been asked to vote on. If/when an online bill/Proposition comes up, I'd probably vote against that as well (basically I would unless there were a waiting period on deposits so people couldn't impulsively gamble, or equivalent protections).

This may vary on location, but I always assumed the backbone of almost all games are "bad regs" who can afford to lose at whatever interval they play (daily, weekly, monthly) and don't really mind that they do. Of course there are folks who lose more than they can afford, but it seems that almost by definition, in a time where there are not a lot of new faces in poker, people who do not have the money to support their poker habit cannot have enough money to support the games.

I think that the community can definitely do more to protect vulnerable people who are clearly being self-destructive, although this is pretty thorny, especially when it is not always obvious in one direction or the other (i.e. Mr. Sherwin-Williams could own his business, which is booming; the well-to-do-looking player could be totally underwater and behind on child support).

What drives me the most nuts is when I politely try to convince someone to go home and other players start to shoot daggers at me for doing so. I get that I'm hurting your win-rate, but I really don't care.

One of the scruffiest, most obviously working-class people in some of my games (which are a lot smaller than 80/160) once won millions in the California lottery and owns his own auto repair business. He plays like he's literally throwing chips around with no regard for the money, which is probably accurate. I didn't know that for months and years but apparently it's common knowledge among the regs in the Seattle poker scene.

It's a genuinely tough ethical issue. If everyone with a conscience left poker, even if they're somewhat better than average players, I think the situation would be even worse.

If you're trying to win you can't feel sympathy. That's a cold-hearted take but it's the truth.

When I played home games, the two poorest people in the room were me and the host/dealer. Those games were also super pleasant, because the couples who came and played literally didn't mind dropping their $X a week. If one of them won, the other one was certain to lose enough make up for it. Also, the financial advice from these people was golden, though sometimes out of a reasonable person's financial outlook. Take real estate investing, apartment buildings are good to own. You'd rather have them than a bunch of duplexes, which are better than individual rental houses. Still, every rich person who came in to play had multiple rentals. Owning businesses turns out to be good, as well.

Maybe so, but you absolutely need empathy. People confuse the two all the time. Empathy is understanding why my opponent plays, what motivates her, why her 1/3 pot bet on the turn means she's scared her hand is no good, etc.

At that point it's an optimization problem and I play to optimize, so it doesn't really matter if I have or express sympathy away from the table.