DANGERLION

I just finished Ender's Game on a recommendation from Rob.  It's by Orson Scott Card and is one of the more popular sci-fi literary works.  Wikipedia comes in handy for plot description: 

Set in Earth's future, the novel presents an imperiled humankind who have barely survived two conflicts with the Formics (an insectoid alien race also known as the "Buggers").  In preparation for an anticipated third invasion, an international fleet maintains a school to find and train future fleet commanders.  The world's most talented children, including the novel's protagonist Ender Wiggin, are taken at a very young age to a training center known as the Battle School.  There, teachers train them in the arts of war through increasingly difficult games including ones undertaken in zero gravity in the Battle Room, where Ender's tactical genius is revealed.

Note the bold.  As I was reading I was struck by several passages, namely those centering around Ender's learning and understanding of the zero-G games, and their relation to strategic poker tactics.  In creating a futurist's vision of war games designed to train people for space combat, Orson Scott Card seems to have been inspired by the nature of games themselves:

Ender liked it better, though, when two boys played against each other.  Then they had to use each other's tunnels, and it quickly became clear which of them was worth anything at the strategy of it.

Within an hour or so, it began to pall.  Ender understood the regularities by then.  Understood the rules the computer was following, so that he knew he could always, once he mastered the controls, outmaneuver the enemy.  Spirals when the enemy was like this; loops when the enemy was like that...  There was no challenge to it, then, just a matter of playing until the computer got so fast that no human reflexes could overcome it.  That wasn't fun.  It was the other boys he wanted to play.  The boys who had been so trained by the computer that even when they played against each other they tried to emulate the computer.  Think like a machine instead of a boy.

I could beat them this way.

The word "balance" is used insanely liberally in poker training these days.  It seems like many people don't quite understand the implications of actually maintaining "balance."  Think of it like this:  we play poker against other humans, not machines.  Humans make mistakes, and it's your job to exploit every single one of them without leaving yourself open to attack.  "Balance" almost always exists as a way of protecting yourself, first and foremost. 

Ender's Lesson 1: Stop thinking like machines.  Question everything.  Experiment and improvise.  If you are playing like a machine, your opponents play you like you're a machine.  And then they will win.