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.