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I met Max Chiswick in June of 2024 because I wrote something wrong on the internet. He tracked me down at Manifest to tell me so—I had written about the shortcomings of poker as a teaching tool, but I had made several wrong assumptions about how one would play poker differently with the goal of learning instead of recreation.

First, you'd play with two players instead of eight. We nearly always play with eight-ish players because we want a relaxing game, where large gaps in the action are considered a feature. With two players, though, not only is it your turn four times as often, but more of your decisions are "live" because it's correct to play more (initial) hands and there are fewer that you should fold on sight.

Second, you'd play a game with fewer chips—meaning that you'd make bets in coarser increments and with a smaller ratio of largest-possible bet to smallest-possible bet. This makes the decision tree shallower and more amenable to explicit case-by-case reasoning, and it also has the nice effect of making the highest-stakes decisions less terrifying (while keeping the stakes of bread-and-butter decisions suitably meaningful).

But most importantly, if you're playing poker as an exercise for training your mind, you should focus less on becoming a theoretically-optimal robot. You can read books and blogs about "game theory optimal" play (e.g., Nash equilibrium) and drill yourself to get arbitrarily accurate at executing it, but that's simply not the useful part.

The part of poker that makes you smarter—Max explained to me—is observing the non-optimal patterns in your opponents' play, and

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, 
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, 
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, 
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; 
                         But O heart! heart! heart! 
                            O the bleeding drops of red, 
                               Where on the deck my Captain lies, 
                                  Fallen cold and dead. 

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; 
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills, 
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding, 
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; 
                         Here Captain! dear father! 
                            This arm beneath your head! 
                               It is some dream that on the deck, 
                                 You’ve fallen cold and dead. 

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, 
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, 
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, 
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; 
                         Exult O shores, and ring O bells! 
                            But I with mournful tread, 
                               Walk the deck my Captain lies, 
                                  Fallen cold and dead.

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Our grandfather, Man-Hyong Yoo, died about a week ago, two months after his eightieth birthday.

He had been diagnosed with colon cancer, which, since March, had progressed rapidly from Stage II to Stage IV. On August 11th, he was admitted to surgery. His post-operative condition was nominal at first, but degenerated over the next day. When his kidneys failed and he was no longer breathing independently, my grandmother made the decision to withdraw life support, in accordance with his expressed wishes. He did not suffer, as so many do. He ended a life of eighty years with a few months of terrible sickness, but he died under anesthesia before he had begun to lose his mental facilities, and that was no small mercy.

Family and friends gathered for a funeral on Saturday; he was cremated on Tuesday. I was with my family in Philadelphia until Thursday.

I haven't told many of my friends until now, because I haven't yet figured out what to say. I've made efforts to write, but they haven't been very good. I've been reading a lot, trying to make sense of things, and that helped more. In particular, I've been reading some about the horrors of death in the modern medical system, from those who know more of it than I:

• Who By Very Slow Decay, Scott Alexander
• How Doctors Die, Ken Murray
• I Hope My Father Dies Soon, Scott Adams
• You Can't Save Them All, Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg

...and some philosophy, from some people I