Frontend lessons from the Poker Table (That Have Nothing to Do with Gambling)

♥️ ♣️ Also on why I love the frontend community ♦️ ♠️

Wanna guess who started getting into Poker?!?
👉 This Guy 👈

I've been playing a lot of Red Dead Redemption 2 lately, where you can sit down and play a few rounds of Texas Hold 'em with NPCs. While I like poker, I've never been good at it. A fact that I was reminded of when I kept losing all my pretend money while playing.

I was a true noobie at the game and I wanted to get better. So I swallowed my pride and looked up some tutorials on poker strategy.

I can't begin to express how mean-spirited some of these poker terms were 😂

Here are a few of my favorites:

• Fish / Donkey: A weak player (so all beginners, me included. I'm a donkey.)

• Whale: "A particularly weak player with a very large stack or bankroll that can be targeted with minimal risk."

• A Mark: "A person at a poker table that is the focus of attention, often due to their inexperience."

• Shark: A professional player.

So there seems to be a lot of an ocean theme going on here. But more importantly, there's an implicit meaning here that beginners or inexperienced players get eaten alive.

Can you imagine if getting into frontend development were like that?

If seniors purposely strayed juniors away from getting better, and there was an actual incentive to undercut and take advantage of beginners?

What if we just called team leads sharks? How scary would working in a company be?

Thankfully, the frontend community is NOTHING like that. Everybody, no matter their skill level, is so helpful, open to leaving comments, ready to improve themselves and their skills, and always creating really cool things.

(This is probably because the biggest incentives in poker are on the giant pot you win if you "play your cards" right. It's strictly a zero-sum game where only one person wins. Software development, in a lot of ways, is the exact opposite – You win if everybody wins.

Some of the cool things I've seen people work on come from what people have written about in the Exceptional Frontend Squad on Daily.Dev.

I wanted to highlight this aspect of the frontend ecosystem and just appreciate it. The community, especially for beginners, has always been positive and inviting. At the end of the day, we're all just trying to learn and become better developers. Things can be scary nowadays, so sometimes looking at the positives can help a bit.

But also, meh, that's not a good enough takeaway for an exceptional frontend email.

So here's a small list of insights I learned about poker in just a few days that might help you personally:

• Positioning is super important. In poker, the person who bets last has the biggest advantage. (Because you can read what everybody else is willing to bet on their cards). In what areas do you have the biggest advantages, or what can you do to give yourself an advantage? Then use it.

• Poker is a game about betting. You're betting your cards are better than everybody else's. You won't win every hand. In fact, it's good to know which battles you choose to fight in and which ones are worth losing. You can lose a lot of hands, but most of the time, you just need a few choice big wins. Don't give up if you're in it to win the pot.

• Poker isn't just a game about betting. It's a game about knowing how to play "the hand you're dealt with". Accept that things are never in your control. But you can still play to the best of your ability, with what you do have.

• Poker is ultimately a game about decisions. Something I learned a long time ago was when I read a great book called "Thinking in Bets" by Annie Duke. I remembered I read this a long time ago while writing this email, and I fully recommend it.

Now, before we end this up, let me clarify:

GAMBLING IS WRONG, DUMB, AND I DON'T RECOMMEND IT AS A HOBBY IN ANY WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM. I JUST THINK POKER IS FUN, AND I HAVE ALWAYS PLAYED IT IN VIDEO GAMES WITH FAKE CURRENCY. I DO NOT CONDONE GAMBLING IN ANY WAY. YOU WILL ALSO PROBABLY LOSE. PLAY RED DEAD 2 INSTEAD.

Okay, with that out of the way...

Thank you, everybody, for the patience with the weird schedule of emails these two weeks! Had personal stuff to go through, but we'll continue with your normal Friday emails for next week.

That's it for now, and have a wonderful weekend!