Phil Gordon on Adapting to Change
Phil Gordon says that with every hands comes an opportunity to pivot.
Gordon: As a poker player, you can't have a consistent style and be successful over time. Your opponents come to know how you play and they will devise a strategy to beat you, if they're any good. So, while you can have overarching tendencies, you really can't stick with one way to play and be successful, and I think that's pretty much the same for business. It's either evolve or die, and your strategy at the poker table and in tournaments has to evolve over time depending on the circumstances in that tournament and your strategy in business has to evolve. Your competitors are always trying to get the best of you, and if you don't take advantage of holes that they open up or holes that they attempt to close, then you can be pretty sure that your business isn't going to last very long. Same thing at the poker table. What strategy that may be working perfectly in the early stages of the tournament may be suicide in the middle stages of the tournament, and you always have to be both aware of your image at the table and what your opponents think of you and then try to constantly rearrange your strategy so that they are doing the wrong thing against you at the right time.
Gordon: As a poker player, you can't have a consistent style and be successful over time. Your opponents come to know how you play and they will devise a strategy to beat you, if they're any good. So, while you can have overarching tendencies, you really can't stick with one way to play and be successful, and I think that's pretty much the same for business. It's either evolve or die, and your strategy at the poker table and in tournaments has to evolve over time depending on the circumstances in that tournament and your strategy in business has to evolve. Your competitors are always trying to get the best of you, and if you don't take advantage of holes that they open up or holes that they attempt to close, then you can be pretty sure that your business isn't going to last very long. Same thing at the poker table. What strategy that may be working perfectly in the early stages of the tournament may be suicide in the middle stages of the tournament, and you always have to be both aware of your image at the table and what your opponents think of you and then try to constantly rearrange your strategy so that they are doing the wrong thing against you at the right time.