Incidentally: Chamath plays a fair amount of high stakes poker recreationally, including on various streams and/or filmed poker content. I forget if it was on twitter or a Reddit AMA or what, but he once gave a blurb about what he had learned playing the game for some time, and he said something to the effect of "Poker is a fundamentally defensive game", which is an absurd statement. There is no strategic bias towards offense or defense in poker, there is only EV maximization, which you would think a VC would be able to wrap their head around, but he has managed to fundamentally misunderstand the game.
With investing you can make 1000x your money if you bet right. Your returns are determined by your best bets. You can be spewy and it doesn't matter much. Or you can wait for aces and then bet big. It's up to you.
With poker it's not like that. Blinds force you to play mediocre hands and make bets when you're weak. Minimizing your losses with correct play is essential, otherwise you'll bleed out. You can only make money in poker when your opponent makes mistakes (good opponents don't make many) but you can lose money in every hand you play. That's why it's a defensive game.
Minimizing your losses is essential; so is maximizing your gains. TBF, in a tournament there is something to be said for biasing towards loss minimization because of the need to preserve your tournament life resulting in chip value being non-linear. But, in cash games (which ironically is what Chamath mostly plays), there is no such bias. Most amateur players arrive incorrectly at that bias over time because frequently miss thin value themselves, and also miss on value when they have the nuts because they don't bluff enough, while also often giving up value incorrectly to better players who are exploiting them, so their experiential bias tells them to err on the side of playing it safe and waiting for a set up in their favor to realize most of their EV, not realizing they are bleeding it away on the margins in countless other spots.
