On the eve of his 10th birthday, my son is incredibly inquisitive. He likes asking questions in school, at his martial arts class, at Cub Scouts, and at home. He also thinks his dork father is a really cool guy, which makes me question everything else he judges to be cool. Nonetheless, he loves how good I am at Guitar Hero, the fact I can do his AP math sheets in my head, and that I play poker.

Depending on what our evenings involve, I might be playing a session when he goes to bed. Most likely, I’m just starting a block of multi-table SNGs, or am an hour or two deep into a couple tournaments. Either way, there is no distinct resolution – I’m not done yet. I may be on a short stack but playing well, or have lucked my way to a stack despite my best efforts to donate chips.

Being the Lord High Inquisitor of the 4th Grade, he always asks: “So, Dad…how are you doing?”

Answering this question is unexpectedly complicated, and I know others have struggled to come up with an answer. There was a thread a good while back on PocketFives, started by a very successful player, on this very topic. $5 on PokerStars to the first person who can PM me a link to it...I stink at effective searches.

This conundrum has sat in my subconscious, waiting for a past experience to resurface and shed some light. And out of the blue, I recently heard someone mention Schrödinger’s Cat.

For those who weren’t saddled with 2+ years of college physics, forgive me a digression….

In the normal world, objects occupy a specific place at a specific time. If I throw a tennis ball up in the air, I can state mathematically, and confidently know, where it is in three-dimensional space at any given time. In the subatomic world of quantum physics, things aren’t so cut-and-dried. An electron falls into a wave of possible locations until it is observed and its location in the atom measured. Until you “look”, you don’t know where it is. Physicists spent the first three decades of the 20th century trying to wrap some logic around the mathematical dichotomy of an electron as wave and particle.

Eventually, Austrian Ernst Schrödinger proposed a scenario in a letter to Albert Einstein. Imagine a cat, in a sealed box. When you open the box and look at the cat, it will be in one of two states: alive, or dead. Until the time you observe Schrödinger’s Cat, however, it is both alive and dead.

If you’re an animal lover, picture the cat and the box behind a screen. Until you look behind the screen, the cat is both in and out of the box.

If you’re a gambler, flip a coin. When the coin lands and you look at it, it will be either heads or tails. While the coin is in the air, spinning, it is both heads and tails.

If Schrödinger’s Cat or an electron can be in two diametric states at the same time, why can’t my card game? The truth is we are never truly winning or losing a tournament until it’s over. We make smart decisions one hand only to suffer brain cramps the next. Chip stacks rise and fall. Good and bad luck vary from one card to the next.

Within this context, we are playing both good and bad. In each session, there are spots blessed by fortune – getting AA when someone else has KK, flopping monsters, and winning flips. I also play well from time to time – the right bets to extract value, good reads on light calls, and timely bluffs.

In each session, I also stink, and run like shit.

But if “good” and “bad” are the only two answers to my son’s question, I prefer being NEITHER good nor bad. After all, “good” and “bad” are determined primarily by results. Poker is a decision-oriented game, not a results-oriented one. I may do everything wrong in a hand, make hideous mistakes on every street, and scoop the pot anyway.

If we focus on what’s “right” and “wrong” for each situation, forgetting society’s never-ending emphasis on winning and losing, poker becomes a simple game. Well, simpler, anyway. It’s never essentially simple, which is probably why so many of us obsess over it. There is always another level of thought to explore, more layers of grayscale to explore between the best and worst plays to make.

Rather than attempting to explain all of this to my son, I’ve started responding, “I’m OK, buddy. Go to bed. I love you.” And the boy is perfectly content with this response. Most of the time, he really doesn’t care about the answer at all. He just likes asking questions.