Time - A guide to often overlooked aspects of poker

Introduction

In this article

• Luck balances out, right? Right?
• Look after Number 1

Happy Days

I talk with a lot of poker players, and on occasion the topic moves to that of a magical online kingdom, that only existed in years gone by, where every player was terrible and you only had to read one book to be able to win at poker. This long forgotten land, buried deep in the annals of history is nothing more than a memory, a myth and a legend. If only we could go back in time to how it was.

This is the attitude of a player who does not want to move with the times. He is happier thinking about how he used to beat the games, but isn’t prepared to put in the increased effort that’s required today. Momma always said to me ‘you get out of life what you put in’. Computer programmers refer to it as the acronym ‘GIGO’, meaning Garbage In, Garbage Out.

To use another computing term, it is definitely a constant. Poker epitomises life, you create situations, attempting to maximise your potential gain. These potential prospects won’t always go your way, but ultimately those who make the most effort have a significantly higher success rate.

Elbow Grease

Over the years, I’ve coached people who loved poker with a passion, but the one determining factor as to whether they developed into long term winners, was not their natural talent, but instead mental fortitude. The ability to knuckle down and work hard at understanding the concepts of poker far outweigh any natural affinity to card games a person may possess.

There is no replacement for hard work if you want to get stuff done and as everyone else improves, so must you. My father always told me to use some elbow grease to get things done.

Sharks Eat Fish

Charles Darwin needed look no further than the poker table for survival of the fittest. As much as people might think otherwise, the biggest winners always ended up being those who spent their days getting into ‘poker shape’. There is however one big difference with how your body handles physical shortcomings to that of mental shortcomings.

If you put weight on, you gradually lose your mobility, becoming less agile and less successful at catching the daily meal. Your body tells you this by rumbling with hunger as the rabbit you are hunting dashes under the nearest thicket to freedom. There are no equivalent warning signs for poker. Nothing in your body is there to give you hints that you’re playing badly.

Luck balances out, right? Right?

The correlation between winning or losing pots and establishing whether you’re a winning poker player takes a long time. Wait, scratch that, it takes a VERY long time and it’s quite possible you will never reach the long term.

A player with a win rate of just 0.1BB/100 can be losing for over 3,000,000 hands in Limit Hold’em to 2 standard deviations if he has bad luck. In fact it takes 12 million hands for your chart to converge to the ‘true’ win rate (by which time it’s changed anyway!)

So the only really powerful tool we have is to garner the opinions of others, and this is where most people fall down in their quest for self-improvement. You see poker is about making money. If you’re practicing poker in a fashion that will lose you money it would certainly be beneficial to be told something to that effect.

However, not everyone is fantastic when it comes to this. Some people take great delight in telling the world how bad you are and at the same time, those on the receiving end can be super sensitive to criticism, constructive or otherwise, and rather than acknowledge a shortcoming, will curl up into a ball and deny it completely.

So my favorite internet meme pokes its ugly head again, namely ‘DEAL WITH IT’ (insert smiling face wearing shades here). If you really are serious about getting better at poker, you’re going to have to work hard, and deal with a lot of criticism along the way. Some of this will be justified, some not. A thick skin and more importantly, learning not to take things personally (even though it is personal advice), will go a long way towards a successful career.

I did suck, once...

When I started playing, I would have loved someone to point at me and say ‘you suck!’ because he might have saved some of the $1200 in a year I lost learning the game. It’s harsh but really the guy is trying to do a favour by making you aware of a need to improve. Sure, he could be nicer about it, but I’d prefer to be told rudely than not at all.

I like the idea of being in possession of money. If keeping hold of some of those sweet dollars involves taking a few intellectual knocks on the chin when it comes to advice, my ego is prepared to take one for the team. I can recover emotionally within a few minutes for sure, but my bankroll won’t manage a recovery so quickly.

Equality in the workplace

Remember that analysing your winning sessions is as important as your losing ones. It’s possible to play badly and win and never be aware of the fact. When you’re winning due to running hot, you don’t think there is a leak with your game (winning is everything after all!).

A good poker mindset is not just about dedication to the cause or having a serious case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder for those 15 hour poker marathons, but also about accepting you will always have to improve as a player. Pink Floyd said it best in their quintessential album Dark Side of the Moon:

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

Look after Number 1

Stay focused with your goals; ultimately no one else is going to do it for you. You will get a friendly or not-so-friendly nudge in the right direction from time to time by others, but this is nothing more than a catalyst for your own drive and vision. As Pink Floyd laments, when you do nothing, life is going to carry on without you, life in this case being everyone else’s poker career.

Occasionally we see a brief return to those Halcyon Days of poker, such as when Rush Poker was introduced at Full Tilt. For 2 months the internet poker community collectively flipped out and gambled it up. It didn’t last. It never will last. In a few years time people will be talking about the first month of Rush Poker in much the same way I talk about poker sites like Planet Poker and Poker.com

That isn’t to say it won’t happen again. Some site might introduce Double Rush Poker (twice as fast as regular Rush Poker!) and the poker players of the world get crazy-go-nuts again for a month. If this happens, then you need to be ready to dive right in at the start. If you wait a couple of weeks because you’re not up to date on strategy, it could all be over as you jump in the water, at which point all that’s left is the shark with its mouth open wide as you dive in head first. Life is cruel like that, but you’ll only have yourself to blame.

Time to go listen to some Pink Floyd I think, so long as it’s not ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part II’… ‘We don’t need no education’, err yes, yes we do!