Poker Pearl #2

"The worst type of image you could have in a deep-stack, big buy-in tournament is that of a player who only raises with pocket pairs and ace-paint."

--Daniel Negreanu, Power Hold 'em Strategy (Cardoza, 2008), 379

Poker Pearl #1

As promised, with a nod to the Poker Grump's "Poker Gems," I bring you the first of these bits of wisdom gleaned from the poker wordscape. This one is in keeping with our current theme, but ironically may be an anomalous way to kick off the feature, since it's poorly sourced and not explicitly about poker. I heard it on the radio a while back--I wanna say it was Stefan Fatsis on NPR, but anyway it was about football teams. (Please let me know if you know the correct source.) But without further ado (boy, this is going to be anticlimactic):

"You're never as bad as you look when you're losing--or as good as you look when you're winning."

How to Be the Shellackee (Part Two): "The Art of Losing Isn't Hard to Master"

Pace Elizabeth Bishop, but mastering the art of losing is an enormously demanding project, one that requires the loser to cultivate deep reserves of patience, discipline, and heart. Of course Ms. Bishop is being ironic--to lose is the easiest thing in the world--and the hard part is learning to let go of what is lost. Should we hold on less fiercely to those things the keeping of which is ultimately subject to powers beyond our control? Well, this may make it hurt less to lose them, but it may mean that our emotional distance makes us less likely to fully appreciate and benefit from them, or in fact make us only more likely to lose them in the first place, because we don't give enough thought to preserving what we have.

Lord knows you see this at the poker table, the gambler who gives so little thought to his game that he is a passive conduit for the vicissitudes of fortune, who takes his big, lucky wins and soon enough gives them right back to his opponents. He manages to maximize his good luck because he plays wide open, but he doesn't care to minimize the damage from bad luck, which means he's not playing poker so much as a kind of lottery. God bless him. He may well be jolly and imperturbable, because he sees the game as all luck, and since chance is outside his control, why fret?

Like life itself, stacks of chips, as long as we continue to truly "play the game," are subject to loss, and they can be taken from us at any time, due to causes beyond our control, and in spite of all our wisdom and care and cleverness. Certainly there are things we can do to increase our chances of preserving our lives (stop smoking, buy an elliptical machine, give up base jumping) or our chips (stop playing speculative hands, protect big hands, only play aces for all your chips before the flop), but these things won't necessarily enrich our lives or maximize our profits, and, more to the point, they can't protect us from freak accidents and bad beats. We could come as close to risk-free life or poker as possible--staying inside our houses for the rest of our lives eating quinoa and doing yoga, or proceeding only with the nuts on any given street--but this can hardly be called living or playing poker at all. And the meteorite may yet come through our roof, just as the antes could well drain the life out of our stacks before we ever look down at a premium starter, and the one-outer could, and often enough does, come down off the deck like a giant thunderbolt from Zeus.

So we're all subject to loss, no matter how tight we are in poker or in life. Loss is often unavoidable in the short term, and some degree of loss is unavoidable in the long term; indeed, in the Long Term, the ultimate loss is 100% unavoidable. In the end, we all lose, and we all lose it all.

This means that the art of losing must be a matter of losing well, of learning from our losses, of taking them in stride, of accepting their inevitability and refusing, as much as is possible, to let bad luck cause us to lose more because of bad playing. It's about emotionally and psychologically rising above our bad luck, accepting those twists of fate which are beyond our control and happen for no reason at all. It's about letting go of past defeats, however undeserved. Indeed, I'm talking more here about the bad beats than about the losses in which our mistakes, big or small, were the deciding factor in our downfall.

The reality, of course, is that it's fairly rare to lose big entirely because of bad luck. Even the best players, as Barry Greenstein says, make hundreds of mistakes, however small, every session.* And our mistakes and our bad luck get intermingled in complex ways: obviously the bad luck can tilt us and make us play stupidly, but our stupid play can also make us more subject to bad luck. A familiar example of how this happens is when we play a trash hand, hit a piece or even a lot of it, and then get deeply involved with a still-better hand (e.g. playing J5 against a raiser, flopping "lucky" trips with the crap kicker and then getting into a big pot with the guy who (of course!) holds AJ).

This all gives me the idea for a taxonomy of bad beats, which will be part 3 of this series on losing. But before that, let me share this quotation from a The Raw, Rowdy World of Poker, a book of poker anecdotes and observations from the old days when all the serious poker players were playing 5-card stud poker, limit of corurse. The author, Allen Dowling, was a New Orleans newspaperman of the old school.

Rocky [Marciano] could dish it out all night, but he could also take it, which maybe was the real reason he got to be champion in the first place. No matter how hard a fighter can hit, he figures to stop some wallops with his chin, so unless he can weather a few storms along the way he will not get the chance to show how good he is at dishing it out. The same is true of other champions, no matter what their field....

The business of absorbing punishment is a standout requirement of successful poker playing. Not running out of money is, of course, elemental, but you also cannot run out of control--which a series of thumpings can produce--unless you have the ability to take it going for you.

You are never in a position to judge a poker player until you see him losing. A player can look so good when he is getting the breaks that you can easily come up with the wrong line on him, so it is a mistake to tab him for keeps until you see how he reacts to a few shellackings.

Race horse players will tell you that some horses are terrific if they manage to jump out on top and get to the wire unchallenged. They may even set a new track record. However, if another horse gets close enough to breathe on them, these same horses are likely to quit cold. They just do not have it in them to keep trying when the going gets tough, or in other words they cannot take it.

Keeping a strangle hold on yourself when bucking a bad losing streak is the acid test of the poker player. You are not only put to the strain of avoiding the sucker route when you are getting the best hand knocked off about ninety-eight percent of the time, but you also have to worry about staying healthy in case you let some ape needle you into coming up with tough wisecracks.
--A.S. Barnes & Co. (1973), p. 143

The best all-around poker players lose well, and don't fall apart when the competition heats up and the coolers and suckouts start piling up. Tomorrow: Part 3.


*See Greenstein's interview with Bart Hanson on "Cash Plays" on PokerRoad, dated 11/18/08, at about 9:50 and after.

How to Be the Shellackee (Part One): Busted

God, this game can be brutal. I haven't put anything up here since my inaugural post. I've been busy playing...and losing. Looks like this blogging enterprise is going to start out with more of the "agony" than the "glory" of the game--but maybe that's appropriate. Let's just say that since not long before the inception of this blog a couple of weeks ago, I have been on the biggest losing streak of my life.

As always for us poker mortals, this has been a combination of bad luck and bad-luck-induced tilt. As a recreational player who nonetheless puts in a lot of table/screen time, I still have not mastered, not nearly, the literally invaluable skill of tiltless poker, of being able to take a string of bad beats while continuing to play smart, sensitive, rational, A-game poker. Part Two of this post will include ruminations about that skill--about the art of losing--about why downswings are maybe the most important test of poker ability, and about how facing short term bad luck at the tables--brutal, crushing, relentless bad luck--can be a surprisingly profound test of character, not to mention of one's view of the world and his place in it.

Before we begin, shall I treat you to an example of what we've been talking about?

• Two hours ago, I'm up to about 150% of my original 100BB buy-in, 6-handed. Every one but UTG limps around to me in the BB, I check my Ts3s powerhouse.
  
• Flop comes a lovely 9h-3h-3d, SB checks. Normally I'd go ahead and bet out here, but given my position and the increased likelihood of holding a 3 in the BB in a limped pot, plus the presence of a lot of players behind me, I opt for the check. The button puts out a little 1/3 pot bet, which I promptly raise 3.5x. Folds around to him, he calls. He's got me covered. At this point I'm putting him on a heart draw, and I'm not willing to play a big pot if the heart comes.
  
• The turn: Th. Gorgeous. I go ahead and bet half the pot, like I'm scared of the flush but not wanting to check and be bluffed off two pair or trips. Villain tanks for a bit before calling; now I'm like 80% sure he's got the flush, maybe the nut flush, and is Hollywooding like he's worried about me having the flush or an overflush. That's perfect for me.
• The river comes 8h. Great. Now I'm hoping that he was holding a lone A or K of hearts. I put out another scared 1/2-pot bet. He thinks for about ten seconds before shoving, putting me in for the rest of my chips, about 2x the pot. Now he could have 99, in which case, more power to him, he gets my stack, and "nh" to you, sir. But I'm now 100% that he has the flush, about 95% it's the nut flush. Anyway, of course it's a trivial snap call for me.
• Well--*rueful laugh*--at least I allowed that 5% uncertainty about which flush he had. It was a flush, but not the the nut flush. He tables 7h6h for the (idiot end--the donkey!) of the straight flush. Lord, to have been able to flip over QhJh. Instead, there I was, felted for a full buy-in-plus, for probably the 15th time in as many days (oh yeah, it's been bad).
  
• Yup, that's a one-outer, in case you didn't notice. I can't even console myself with the thought that his straight flush draw was open-ended. God, this game can be brutal. I think I played the hand very well, and the slowplay was justified. I think a shove on the turn there is bad 100% of the time. Even a min-raise is probably a mistake. You can't worry about straight flushes. Oh well. Just last week I had the nut flush with the Ace in my hand, no pairs on board, and that time the villain turned over the straight flush to the King. Stacked again? Obviously.

So. Let's get it all out there--I've just lost the last 150 dollars of my nominal poker bankroll. It was never that much money, but at its high point it was about 96% won money--which, as we all know, is far sweeter than earned money--though of course, I feel like I earned just about every cent of it, through careful, creative play. But the past few weeks have been disastrous. (If I were a professional playing NL hold 'em, I probably would have been a bit under-rolled. But as a recreational player, bankroll talk is always a bit of pretending, because poker is not your only source of income, and your "bankroll" does not, let's hope, represent your entire investable assets. It's just the money you've set aside to gamble with.)

In any case, I still burned through many a buy-in in my long slide to broke. It will take some time to process and analyze my downfall--maybe I'll do some of that here--but first I thought I'd write in general terms about losing, what it means and what it's like. See you in Part Two.

It may be the wrong foot, but they both look like this right now

I planned to start this blog today. I didn't plan to start off by griping about bad beats, BUT: There are days, weeks, months even when it just feels like the poker cosmos is conspiring against you, like the game is ALL luck, like poker is too unjust to be fun. Busted out of two NLHE tourneys today, both times via a bad beat. The first time was in the very first hand: I have 5s3c in the big blind, I check my option after a whole host of limpers. Flop comes 764, two diamonds. I lead out for 2/3 pot, player in middle position shoves, another follows suit, and I pretty much snap-overcall because I know how many idiots there are in these donkfests who go all-in-crazy in the first few hands, hoping to double-up or bust and be done with it. First shover shows T7, no diamonds; second guy shows Ad3d. Fine, no surprise there, but of course a diamond hits the turn and I'm done. I was a favorite, but not a huge one. Oh well.

Second tourney, we're about half way through the field. I've worked a couple of skillfull/lucky double-ups after a few uninteresting beats early on, and I have 2637 in chips on the button, blinds 100/200. Folds around to me, I look down at two black tens; I know the sb is loose and stubborn, so I raise to 1000, fully expecting him to call and hoping to isolate. He complies, the bb folds. Flop comes Th5s4c. Perfect. He very quickly overshove-donks his 3472 into the pot of 2200, and I instacall. He turns over Ah5h. What am I, 95% to win this hand? Oh, but then the turn and river proceed to spit out running hearts, and I'm done.

I went back and looked at my recent tourney history, which has not been good, and in every one of the past seven tournaments, I have been busted on hands where I got my money in as a favorite--three of those times with a pair against overcards, so not always a massive favorite, but a favorite nonetheless. Every poker player gets drawn out on with some regularity, and a good player learns early on to roll with it, to expect just this outcome something less than 50% of the time over the long term. Indeed, you remind yourself of the longview--that by making the correct decision or having your opponent make the wrong decision, you have made a play that will show a profit over time.

Nonetheless, when you get a string of these bad beats one after the other, that smug mathematician's insistence on your "long-term postive expected value" can be cold comfort. It can feel like it's you against the cruel universe, like this is how it "always" is, like poker is a crapshoot, like all your hard work is futile in the face of ultimate randomness. It can really feel like you're being cheated, and PokerStars is fixed, and some evil deity, somewhere, is cackling while sipping ambrosia, having dialed you up on the Cosmotron viewer and pressed the buttons and pulled the levers that enabled the table's most obnoxious LAggtard to crack your aces with 9-5-offsuit. It's not the angst that comes from the world feeling random and orderless, it's the gut-level sense that the world is specifically ordered against you. It feels like the beats are not random, but inevitable and designed to crush you. If this feeling is unfamiliar, then either (1) you haven't played very much poker, or (2) you are a robot.

This gets us into some deeper philosophical territory, which is in fact one of the ideas behind this blog. I'm interested in how poker impinges on, reflects, and alters life--how it is more than some insulated arena of play, as both a legitimate part of life, and, more interestingly, is a metaphor for life, a stage for a ritual activity that dramatizes and intensifies life. I want to think about the psychological aspects of the game, and the way the game invites and instantiates philosophical thinking. I think that the standard analogies between poker and life, such as frequently find expression in a whole stable of earthy, if stale, idioms (Calling someone's bluff, Throwing good money after bad, Upping the ante, Ace in the hole, etc--even this collection is itself a cliche of poker writing)--these analogies, however worn, could still use some fleshing out. I've done a fair amount of poker reading in the two or three years since I became interested in the game (my wife can attest to the obsessive nature of my interests--as soon as I become intrigued by something I tend to read absolutely everything I can find on the subject--but more on poker literature later). Needless to say, much ink has been spilled on the subject of poker. But the majority of it is, frankly, bad: unimaginative, boring, poorly written, and usually now outdated. A lot of the old stuff is limit-centric and designed for the novice, with the writer feeling the need to spend a high percentage of his pages on starting hand guidelines. When I say "poorly written," it's not because I'm a style snob--I can appreciate the, um, "workmanlike" prose of a Doyle Brunson for its unpretentious directness, or the dry, technical (not too say slightly neurotic) voice of a David Sklansky. All of this writing--except for the real garbage--has its place, and usually every poker book has at least one or two good ideas to be gleaned by the patient reader.

What I'm getting at, the problem I really see with the extant body of poker lit, is a problem of incompleteness. There is plenty of technical advice, and plenty of poker lifestyle "color" content, but there is not enough intelligent discussion of the connections between the two, and of the reasons that poker continues to capture the devotion and imagination of sporting folk everywhere. There is not enough about how the game can both exult and crush, how when you're in the middle of it it can absorb all your attention and channel all your appetites, how it can be as intellectually stimulating as Shakespeare (never mind Turing or von Neumann or some other science god the math-based types drool over), or how it is a subject so complex and profound that it will always reward deeper engagement. For these reasons poker is one of those games that becomes an art in the hands of the best players.

It's this stuff that I always find myself looking for and rarely finding in the poker books, blogs and forums. The romance of the game. So here's where I get off my metaphorical tuches (cuz in actuality I'll do most of this while remaining on it) and make my own small contribution to the poker chatter. I'm envisioning a fair amount of quotation here, where I'll be logging maxims, observations and advice from poker books, blogs, articles and radio shows, much in the style of the Poker Grump's "Poker Gems," which I can never get enough of. There'll be some insight from my own specific experiences at the tables, online and live, but I promise to keep the bad beat moaning to a min. And, when I have the time to really write, I hope to share my own musings on this deep, thrilling, befuddling, beautiful game.