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.
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