Does this affect the outcome of the game?

[ALawPoker]

lol, I really like this post. I think about things like this a lot, but laying it out in words always sounds so silly. Like NIGE said, ya it is basically chaos theory. There is some chance Jeter would have had a different result if he hadn't heard your horn, but there's no way to know for sure, so it's pointless to think about events in any way other than what we can logically attribute them to.

I still remember when I was young, before I understood variance and all that, and I thought say whoever won the NBA championship was "supposed" to win it. They were the champs. The winners. I'd look at things leading up to it as like WOWWWW imagine if that didn't happen, they may have never won. As if it was some big deal, and that sports championships aren't largely a crapshoot anyways. Then during some big game I remember someone threw a balloon on the field, and it delayed the tip off. And it really got my young head spinning, about whether or not that fan changed the entire game.

It feels weird to us to affect such IMPORTANT things, that seemingly should be entirely out of our control. And for the most part they are. I mean, over our evolutionary journey, we've naturally learned to have some sort of "feeling" when our actions affected some important result (cause that result would often be life or death). So I think it's natural to feel strange and curious about things like this. Did *I* have something to do with it?? But the logical truth is that it just doesn't matter one way or the other.

Something else that's fun to consider is that if you ever played in any satellite to any WSOP main event, you can say you effectively changed "poker history." Your involvement in that tournament shifts the stack sizes (depending who you lose chips to) and seating arrangements, etc., near certainly resulting in a different winner than if you hadn't played. And then the same carries over when said winner plays in the tournament or the next rung of satellite. So it's sort of weird to think "If I didn't exist, Jamie Gold would not have won" and that you're watching an ESPN broadcast that would have been entirely different if it weren't for your involvement in the event.

But, the further detached you are (say a super satellite vs. making it deep into day 3), the less it feels like what you're observing has anything to do with "you" (even though on some level it certainly still does).