All Poker Players Can Solve This Puzzle
Apologies for the clickbaitish title
A hypothetical about risk:
Imagine you are on a highway out west in the U.S. This is a long stretch of road with very few towns along it much less areas to enter or exit the highway.
You find yourself driving very near just one other driver as there is little traffic on this highway. It is highly apparent this driver is distracted and/or not a good driver. They drift and then swerve back into their lane. They radically speed up only to slow down “maintaining” an inconsistent speed.
In short you do not feel safe.
Due to the nature of the road you really don’t feel safe pulling over and waiting for them to get far far ahead. You also don’t see it as safe or reasonable to try to out run them.
Basically you’re stuck driving near them for many miles. But you can choose to either get some distance and always maintain it in front of them or drift behind them making sure that you’re always a quarter-mile or so back. So the question is where do you want to be. Would you rather be ahead of them or behind them?
Before answering, let me tell you how I came to first think about this type of situation—it is one I think about often when I am in situations like this on the road.1
At the beginning of Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor the premise for the plot is established with a tragic car wreck. Leading up to it is this paragraph (emphasis added):
Pierce Denton turned his head in annoyance. It was another Cresta, the sporty CQQ version that they made only in Japan so far, this one black with a red stripe down the side that whizzed past, at eighty or a little over, his trained eye estimated. In Greeneville that would have been a hundred-dollar ticket and a stern lecture from Judge Tom Anders. Where had those two kids come from? He hadn't even noticed their approach in his mirror. Temporary tag. Two young girls, probably one had just got her license and her new car from Daddy to go with it and was taking her friend out to demonstrate what real freedom was in America, Officer Denton thought, freedom to be a damned fool and get a ticket your first day on the road. But this wasn't his jurisdiction, and that was a job for the state boys. Typical, he thought with a shake of the head. Chattering away, hardly watching the road, but it was better to have them in front than behind.
As a young driver at the time of reading it, this struck me as backwards at first. I was naively thinking: “let the bad driver have their wreck behind you rather than having to dodge it”. <spoiler alert> Officer Denton ends up in this exact problem a few miles up the road in a multi-fatality wreck.
While it seems the story confirmed my poor instinct, the car wreck was because of other mistakes made. Indeed it is better to be behind rather than ahead of poor, erratic decision makers—drivers, et al. This is where poker comes in.
The progress (aka, action) at a poker table proceeds clockwise. Whoever sits to your right generally goes before you at every step. Exceptions to this come when the dealer button or blinds are to your right. But the general rule holds. Therefore, your decisions can be influenced by the known information revealed by the players to your right and the assumed/guessed decisions not yet revealed by the players to your left.
Thus, experienced poker players know they want to be behind or to the left of an erratic or aggressive player. Let them tip their hand before you commit to a decision including putting more money at risk.
So the answer to the question is clear: slow down enough to put distance between you and the poor driver. Yes, this means you’ll have to keep an eye on him, but that was actually necessary in either case. And it is a lot easier to watch him if he is in front of you.
You’ll also have to slow down from time to time to maintain the safe trailing distance. This is annoying but much safer than needing to occasionally accelerate away from him.
The poor driver is the source of uncertainty in this scenario. You need as much information as easily obtained as frequently as you can get it about him. Further, you are reacting to him, and you have little confidence that he is in a position of awareness or good judgement to react to you.
Your best move is to be behind.
The much more common thing I come across is being on a relatively crowded road where there are many erratic drivers. Add to that if I am pressed for time or otherwise not in a situation where I can take an exit to avoid a bad driver(s). In these cases my best bet is to be behind the pack and finding ways to stay there.