As I pushed my last remaining chips towards the middle of the table, and watched as the dealer slid them over to my opponent, I realized two things: poker is a game of pure skill, and I was a losing player. I sought help in the form of a poker coach and two years later, with his help, was able to amass a sample size of 500 table-time hours winning at $9 per hour. Even before the great monetary expansion event of the COVID Relief Act, $9 an hour was no reason to quit your day job. But even to this day, earning $9 an hour at a poker table over any meaningful sample size is a difficult task and one that requires a tremendous amount of discipline and learning. In poker, we constantly make decisions with limited information. It is a closed-information game after all. And life is not so different in this regard. We must always weigh what information has been given to us and act accordingly, even if the information we have is incomplete. Navigating your decision making at the poker table is similar in execution to our everyday life. Critical thinking skills, self-reflection, risk-adjusted decisions with limited information, and reflecting on the world around you are important tools to improve your decision making. But where are these tools to be acquired? An optimistic answer would be the classroom which presents an issue. I’d wager that many educated Americans would be hard-pressed to think of a time in their scholastic past where improving critical thinking skills was the main goal of the day, class, or school year. It’s so normalized, and now thought of as commonplace, to simply receive information and as a student be able to reproduce it as a measure of success. Paulo Freire, Author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is worried about this style of education and the world it may lead to. In chapter two of his book Freire introduces the concept of “banking” in education. He sheds light on a plague in the scholastic system that turns students into receptacles and teachers into an assembly line full of factoids and dates. In this system, you do not question, and you certainly do not challenge. You record. When the time is right you had better be prepared to regurgitate those factoids, or else. Or else you are stupid. Or else you are unfit for society. Or else you will be poor and unsuccessful. If you cannot conform to this system, you will not be able to conform to the world–a plague indeed. He says “The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads women and men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power.” (Freire 77) It’s clear Freire is worried about oppression in the classroom where the goal of “banking education” is to shape us as students while being stripped of the ability or privilege to shape ourselves.

In poker, absolute truths are difficult to find. We are constantly making decisions in the grey and we deal with the consequences afterwards. Life is similar, all we can do is make the best decision possible given the information we have available to us. Shortly after putting together that winning 500-hour sample, despite years of study and effort, I developed a crippling mindset at the poker table that completely crushed my confidence and my profits: entitlement. At the table I could quickly recognize in my opponents the lack of work I had done in their play, and I could tell they were making decisions with a deep misunderstanding of their actions. Relative to my grounded focus and intent–they had their heads in the sand. Even though, despite my skill in the game, my own actions grew to be illogical and emotionally based. With feelings of entitlement, I began to over aggress, involve myself in too many spots, and I would make passive financial commitments in places I had no business being a part of. I did these things with a false premise of deserving. Every hand I involved myself in I felt I deserved to win, and it would cause me to make misguided overreaching decisions that went against the grain of reality. The reality is that No Limit Texas Holdem is a zero-sum math problem, and it does not/cannot care about my or anyone's emotional whims. If you are vindictive and act accordingly, you will underperform. If you are entitled and act accordingly, you will underperform. If you do not work on yourself outside of the actual game of poker, you will underperform.

So, 3 years into treating poker very seriously, I pursued a mental game coach. Uri was a professional online poker player living in Israel and he was also a psychologist. He built a good reputation for himself in the poker community at the time for getting players with various mental blocks back on the road to optimal performance. After a few sessions, Uri was able to portray poker to me in a way that calmed my entitled tendencies, and my game started to improve again. His main plan for me was not to improve the quality of my decisions but rather to improve the process I was using to make them. Each decision point in poker is heavy with nuance, with endless variables that all need to be considered, and if you are blinded by emotion and bias you likely won’t reach a sound logical conclusion. Additionally, he helped me understand that to win at poker I needed to stop trying to win. Hello?! I understand this sounds counterintuitive but what Uri is getting at is I need to put my desire and feelings of entitlement to the side and simply solve the problem in front of me at any given time. Results of the poker hand be damned, when you make your decision after considering the information you had available to you without bias, you’ve done all that can be done.

Equipped with this new process of critically evaluating my decisions I was able to quickly apply it at the table. Uri is the type of educator Freire wants our scholastic system to represent. His role as an educator was absolutely fulfilled--he had taught me how to think critically, confront my personal biases and emotions, and figure out the complex issue in front of me. I have never felt the need to revisit Uri after our last session because the navigational tools given to me will never expire. We need more Uri’s in the world. We need our educators to inspire learning and cultivate the desire to improve, learn, and question. Not to adhere to an absolute structure of memorization for memorization’s sake. Without a teacher guiding us through this process, how are we ever supposed to learn to do it? Freire wants us–all of us–to be similarly equipped and he feels that if a student is to be able to confront him/herself then that is exactly the practice that should be happening in the classroom.

He writes: “In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation.” (Freire 83) Freire wants us to see the world as ever-changing, nuanced, and complex and he wants our scholastic system to prepare us to deal with it. In contrast to problem-posing education, “banking education” limits the critical thinker. Banking education teaches us to simply accept fact for fact when facts are given. Freire understands the dangers of “banking” education. He knows that learning in an environment in which you cannot question or challenge authority will inevitably produce a people without the ability to question or challenge themselves or the world around them. Perhaps this is by design, perhaps not. But what is obvious to me is that there’s an endless amount of nuance to the world and if we aren’t careful in our perception of it, we are doomed as individuals. Through discourse, perspective, discussion, honesty, transparency, and acceptance, we can together gain real understanding of life around us and us around life. This is what the teacher’s obligation is, according to Freire. Create a space where the student, living up to his or her own obligations in the classroom, can safely express or explore any curiosity or outlandish thought they may have. Allow the challenges and the questions. Consider the why’s of the information given to us. Challenge even the reason for any particular piece of information being presented. Teach people to teach themselves and you have a strong, independent, sovereign individual.

In one tiny niche way, Uri gave me this. I have never stopped being a student of the game of poker and today, with Uri’s help, I literally have been able to quit my day job. He taught me how to approach the mental game of poker–arguably the most important part–with honesty and transparency. He solidified the importance of self-reflection and self-correction relative to the environment I’m in at any given time. I often recognize in my opponents these days the consequences of “banking education.” They take actions based on what they saw on Youtube or perhaps what a friend has told them to do. There’s no adjustment to the ever-changing table dynamics, no self-adjustment or emotional control, simply actions that were given to them from someone else labeled as “correct”. Uri was the educator Freire wants to see and I am the product that our current scholastic system does not want to produce. There are many parallels between the game of No Limit Texas Holdem and life but a glaring opposite is in poker, it’s you against the world. Every man for himself. In life however, we are a part of something grand–a collective. Improvement of self, skills to seek understanding, and navigating through life with critical thinking are of utmost importance and we should be given those skills in the classroom. When we strengthen each individual, we strengthen the collective. We strengthen humanity itself.