Poker is not a card game, and one does not win at poker by playing the best sets of cards. Poker is a game of mental challenges and strategies that just happens to use cards as the vehicle for setting up the situations that a player must navigate. We do not play poker against the cards, we play against the other players. We do not always win when we have the best hand, and we do not always lose when we have the worst hand. A good player must learn both how the cards work, and how his opponents work.  Someone who only understands one or the other is severely handicapped when playing against someone who understands both.

“Winning” at the game of poker is not about having the best hand when all the cards are on the table. Someone can win several hands of poker by showing down the best cards in a short period of time, but still be an overall loser because they continue to lose money over longer periods of play.

Making money in poker is not necessarily based on winning hands.  I, for example, average a fairly good win rate in terms of money made for hands played, but when I examine my stats I see that I normally only win in about 5% to 6% of the hands that are dealt to me.  I “lose” roughly 95% of the time that I play, but I make money.

A poker player does not earn money by winning large amounts when he wins.  Everyone at the table is going to get the same number of top hands eventually if they play long enough.  Everyone eventually will win a big all-in hand and maybe even get stacks from 2 or 3 players all at once. The difference between making money and losing money though, is that a losing player will continue to play and eventually lose it all back to another player or players. A winning player, while still losing plenty of hands, will lose less money as he continues to play, then when he wins again he will show a net profit after his series of losses.  A good player does not make money by winning more, he makes money by losing less.

These are just some of the things that go through my mind as I sit with my fist under my chin, humming along to songs I’ve heard 1000 times, waiting for the next 2 cards to fly across my screen and add a few more cents to my bankroll.

May the fish be with you…

If you happen to sit down at a table with a donkey (or more than one) who also happens to be a lucky donkey, you also have a high probability of running into a jackass as well. In the end, the jackass can be even more profitable for you than the donkey. A crazy monkey tilting jackass can throw out an amazing amount of chips in a very short period of time.

Tonight, about 2 hours ago actually, as I was picking out some tables I’d like to play, I had a few minutes of dead time while I was waiting in lines at a few tables. I’m now playing 10 tables at a time, so I don’t usually see too much of the chat that goes on at the tables while I play. While I was waiting to get seated, the chat at one of the tables where I was waiting heated up.

The first words I saw were “sand nigger”.  I thought to myself, “This is gonna be interesting.” I almost immediately thought of calling a moderator. (I don’t have a problem with general trash talk. It’s to be expected anywhere men gather to compete, and even more so online. I think resorting to racist degradation though, is over the line. ) Within a few seconds though, the donkey replied, “Say what you want, I’ve got your chips.” He didn’t seem to be offended, so I decided to just sit and watch and see what happened.

Over the next 5 minutes or so, I witnessed one of the most stupid arguements I’ve ever seen in my life, and I watched the 8 lucky players at this 9 man table collect their hourly wage as this jackass handed out two buy-ins worth of chips…all the while, spewing a mix of racist redneck trash talk and declarations of what a great poker player he is into the chat box. I was amazed by both his wide range of racist slurs, and the speed with which he handed out his money.

The 7 uninvolved players (and any other observers) stayed silent, while the donkey continued to poke and prod at an obviously open wound. The jackass was now sitting at the table with $0. “Where’s your money? Why don’t you reload? Can’t afford another $10?”, says the donkey. A few moments later, the jackass shows $10 in his stack. Still spewing garbage into the chatbox, the jackass spent the next few minutes dividing up about $20 and handing it out to the rest of the table. All the while, the donkey just continued to say the same basic thing over and over, “Where’s you’re money? Who’s got your chips?”

I’m a regular player. I’m there every day, grinding out what’s going to be a really good living. Several other people at the table I recognized as regular players as well. In the end, I forgot the name of the donkey player. But the jackass? I have notes on him. Notes that read “Super monkey tilter”. Every time I run across him at the tables, I know exactly who he is and how to get him to just hand me money.

While I sat and watched this pathetic display on the screen in front of me, I felt a bit unlucky that I was watching as an observer and couldn’t get in there to take some of the free cash this idiot was handing out. I also thought to myself that in a way, it was very lucky that this particular donkey didn’t get offended, and didn’t leave the table (or worse, the site).

While a jackass can be sometimes amusing, and sometimes profitable, he is, overall, very damaging. The jackass not only points out bad plays to bad players, the jackass both encourages the donkey to leave, and encourages the donkey to learn. Neither is good for anyone. If the donkey leaves, he takes his money with him. We can’t make money from someone who isn’t at the table anymore. If the donkey learns, it gets even worse. Not only can we not take his money so easily, but we have to worry that he might come back some day and take our money from us.

We call them donkies, we call them fish, we call them suckers, we call them all kinds of things. In the end though, they are where the money in the pockets of a winning poker player comes from. No matter what we call them, we call them affectionately.  They provide us with our winnings…our earnings.

The jackass not only doesn’t understand the very game he claims to be a “pro” at, the jackass doesn’t even understand the most basic concept of economics, give and take. While I will not actively hunt a donkey to try to exploit them personally…It’s open season on jackasses. I will gladly take stack after stack from any jackass that I run across. I will do my best to bust them, to humiliate them, and to get them out of the games I play.

May the fish be with you…

Book tilt happens when you find what you think is a good bit of advice, and then, maybe subconsciously, you want to take advantage of this advice so badly that it screws up your game completely.

For example, maybe you read somewhere that during an SNG tournament, when the blinds get up over $100, it’s a good idea to start trying to raise more pre-flop and steal the blinds. You load up a few games, and every time the blinds hit $100, you start raising like a madman hoping to steal, and end up donking off your entire stack in a few minutes and losing several buy-ins in record time. You’ve stopped thinking. You’ve stopped playing YOUR game. You’re trying to play someone else’s game, and you’ve got a bad case of book tilt.

I find that after I learn something new I have to consciously remind myself to just go into my next game as if it were any other game and play the way I would always play. Advice from a book or a forum is only good in certain situations, and that’s the key. You have to let those situations come to you, you can’t make them happen. I think that’s a big part of poker itself, waiting for things to happen, not trying to make them happen. The cards determine the situation, not the player.

You have to let new ideas become a part of your game,  not let them take over your game. There will be a time to use your super sneaky new trick, but it won’t be every time you load up a game. Sometimes it won’t work because of the cards. Sometimes it won’t work because of the level of your opponent(s). That’s where the skill comes in…figuring out when it will work, and more importantly, when it won’t work.

It’s also very important to determine where the advice you like is coming from. Tips meant for a cash game don’t work very well in an SNG game. Tips for playing against experienced, high-stakes, players don’t work very well against low-stakes newbies who aren’t thinking on the same level.

You should always be thinking about the particular situation you are in, and the players involved. Many poker players will say that the two worst words to describe anything in poker are “always” and “never”.

You should never always do anything…

But the only thing you should always do, is never make a move without thinking.

May the fish be with you…

When I was a kid, poker was introduced to me as a tough and dangerous game, played only by the most manly of men. If you were going to play, you had to be willing to put up, and lose, everything. If you were going to cheat, you had to be willing to include your life in the stakes. The cheats and those who didn’t pay their debts were dealt with harshly. The winners won big, got the girl, and got the respect of every man in town. In my mind I wanted to be one of those cowboys just as much as I once wanted to be a fireman, police man, or astronaut.

As I got older, I played the same every-now-and-then home games that everyone plays. Sometimes for pennies, sometimes for more, sometimes for nothing. But I never took poker all too seriously. I never tried to learn anything about it. I never thought anyone could actually make a living at it.

Eventually I stumbled across some of the first World Series Of Poker shows that were aired. I was so naive at the time, that when I saw my first no-limit Hold ‘em tournament on TV, I thought the chips represented real money. I was even more stunned when I first learned the actual dollar amounts these guys were winning for top 10 finishes. I thought the money in the pots was a lot, when I figured out how much the money in the prize pool was, I was simply astounded.

Slowly, as I watched more tournaments on TV, I started to think that I was understanding more and more of the game. I went from saying, “What’s this guy gonna do?”, to saying, “Is this guy gonna do what I think?”, and even sometimes, “Even I know that was stupid, why’d he do that?”. I was interested, I enjoyed following along, but I still had no real desire to learn anything, or play myself. Poker was played only in casinos, it didn’t yet exist online, and if I were to play in a casino, I’d have to risk a lot more money than I was comfortable with, even though I lived just an hour from Atlantic City, NJ. As the game started to pop up on the internet, I still wasn’t that interested, and still assumed I’d need to risk more money than I could afford.

But then one day something happened. I was flipping through the channels, there was nothing on, and I stumbled across a poker tournament, and decided to watch for a few minutes. As the camera moved around the table, there he was, sitting emotionless like a rock, dressed in black, his long hair down his back from under his black cowboy hat, thin slick black sunglasses hiding his eyes, his hands in a fist under his chin. The cowboys were still alive. There sat Chris Ferguson, looking like a modern version of everything I remember from those Sunday morning westerns with my Dad. I thought to myself, “I want to meet that guy. I want to sit at a table and play this game, against that guy.”

I hope to one day to at least meet Chris, just to say thank you for unknowingly inspiring a dream. I’m not sure yet if I’ll ever reach a position that will put me face to face with him at a table, but I’m hoping that if I do, his cowboy image stops short of the gun at his side, because I plan on taking all his chips any way I can.