Would you gamble 1 million?

Let’s imagine you won a million dollars in the lottery. Now assume that Donald Trump comes to you and challenges you to flip a coin, heads you win, tails he wins. If you win, he will give you 10 million dollar; however, if you loose you give him your one million dollar. Would you accept this challenge?

From a probabilities point of view you should accept the challenge since you get a 10:1 for the money with a 50% success, that is, you get 10 times the money you bet for a challenge that you would win half the time.

However, from a psychological point of view, should you accept it? It depends on the person. How many million dollars you have? How long does it take you to make one million? Are you willing to lose your one million? Everyone has a different perspective of life therefore we would see some people accepting the challenge (Type A), and some won’t (Type B).

In poker, we run into both types of people, from my personal experience, I never seen successful type B poker players. There is a saying, it takes money to make money and I completely believe it is true in poker. Saving your chips and never risking it is just going to shrink your stack by the hour. However, type A players are the players that you see having a huge stack in front of them or stands up and leaves the game very early. One good example of a type A poker player is Phil Ivey; in tournaments you either see him with a huge stack early in the tournament or you see him out the game in a couple of hours or even minutes!

Even though, type A is the way to go in poker. Sometimes, players (especially me) become type B for a moment. A good example was summer 2005 where an old experiences player went all-in(~$1,000), I knew he had pocket jacks or lower (I had a tell on him therefore I knew he didn’t have anything bigger), I had AKs, so if my assumption was correct it was a coin flip. The pot had $500 before he went all-in; therefore I was getting 1.5:1 for a 50% success. Probabilities-wise, I should have played, but emotional-wise I was too attached to my winnings.

p.s. He showed pocket tens.