Recent wins by Kyna England and Monica Vaka in lesser-publicized poker tournaments point to a bright future for the game. [Image: Shutterstock.com] The future is bright for poker
The future is bright for poker. Online poker just had its biggest 18 months post-Black Friday and wherever live poker has been allowed to return, it is being met with enormous demand. This renewed hunger for poker is, perhaps, most clearly in evidence not by the latest hyped-up Pokerstars Series, nor by the size of the huge fields in Vegas, but rather by looking at the turnouts in the more off the beaten track locations.
Case in point, the Mid-States Poker Tour (MSPT) Winter Poker Classic Main Event in Minnesota just obliterated the venue’s previous highest attendance with 1,042 entries generating a record prizepool of $1,009,240. After two days of play, the breakout star of 2021, Poker Power’s Kyna England, emerged victorious to claim the top prize of $186,709.
Meanwhile, on the online felt, the iPoker IPF €500,000 ($563,073) Main Event attracted 2,431 players across 13 starting flights. The tournament was taken down by Unibet Poker’s Norwegian ambassador Monica Vaka who won €98,570 ($111,347). The law of small numbers
Another indication that poker’s future is bright is that these tournaments were won by women. In fact, social media has responded to these results with tweets suggesting “women are on fire.” Of course, only a curmudgeon would begrudge such celebratory exclamations, but is important to remember that achievements by women in poker are unfortunately always subject to the law of small numbers.
The law of small numbers is a form of cognitive bias that says that people underestimate the variability in small samples. A term coined by Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, it refers to the tendency to draw broad conclusions based on small data. In their paper “Belief in the Law of Small Numbers,” they stated: people view a sample randomly drawn from a population as highly representative” “We submit that people view a sample randomly drawn from a population as highly representative, that is, similar to the population in […]
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