In poker, the winner is not the one who is dealt the best cards, but the one who manages them best. Much like in Eastern philosophy, composure is highly valued here. A player must control their emotions and be like a Zen monk: calm, focused, and unruffled. The ability to conceal one’s feelings is key to victory, just as the ability to read the emotions of others is.
I think it's a very good way to describe poker. You rarely have complete information, so you have to make decisions based on probabilities, patterns and the information available to you. What makes poker interesting is that eventually the hand has to be completed and the uncertainty disappears. In a way, that's also what makes poker different from many decisions in real life. In poker, you eventually find out whether your decision worked or not, even though the result doesn't necessarily tell you whether the decision itself was good. That's why I think focusing on the quality of the decision, rather than only the outcome, is so important.
