During college, the poker boom swept me up with countless
others who were captivated by the film Rounders and ESPN’s World Series of
Poker footage. At the time, the game of Texas Hold ‘Em—though previously
foreign to most people—gained traction through the colorful characters who
played it on television, and through the seven-figure purse for the world
champion. When the 33-year-old accountant Chris Moneymaker (a rank amateur) beat
Sam Farha—a seasoned professional whom I incidentally met years later at a
Houston restaurant—millions of people shared the same reaction: “I can do this,
too.” This notion, along with television’s successful romanticizing of the
American pastime, produced an obsession I’m ashamed to recall.
After it became obvious ***SPOILER ALERT*** that I was never going to play in the NBA, I sought a competitive outlet elsewhere. Poker appealed to me instantly. In lieu of
besting people physically, perhaps I could do so mentally?[i] In making the transition, I quickly discerned a key difference between athletic forms of competition and
sloth-like, degenerate forms of competition. Money. When it is on the line, many people lose
their minds. This is particularly the case when the game displays an utter indifference to your plight and whatever statistical advantage you may have
held when the money went into the middle.
This is not to say that I arrived at some specious
conclusion that the game does not favor the most skilled, or that many
people—undoubtedly my intellectual superiors as far as the game is concerned,
and very likely in other arenas as well—do not enjoy a profitable living from their
abilities.[ii]
Merely approaching that level of prowess is about as easy as sneezing with your
eyes open, though. To adopt the mindset
held by most professionals of this sedentary “sport,” you basically need to
shed as much of your humanity as possible. What do I mean by that? You’re
supposed to feign—and ultimately condition yourself to adopt—indifference to
the result of any given hand and
content yourself with the knowledge that you made the correct play (if that was
indeed the case). It’s a bit like telling a bespectacled adolescent that he
should feel good about being on the receiving end of a swirly because he had
the moral high ground in a spat with the school bully. The idea of justice, in
other words, needs to be entirely discarded. As poker pro Phil Laak once said, “There is no
‘deserves’ in poker.”
Rationally, though, the desired stance is beyond reproach:
If you’re a more skilled player than your peers, losing one big hand should not
raise your blood pressure[iii]—you
want people to routinely get all of
their money in the middle against you when the numbers are in your favor. You
should be willing to take AceKing (a 3:2 favorite, also known as a landslide in
poker) against KingJack forever and ever, amen. You should inwardly brim with
delight—but not outwardly, remembering that you’re striving for the visage and
emotional capacity of Tim Duncan—when you get it in with queens (4:1) against
jacks. When you lose in that first scenario, something that will occur four
times out of ten, frustration is not the correct response because it is a results-oriented reaction. I say all of
this to really say that poker requires a tremendous, almost inhuman capacity to take a beating and blithely move on as if merely dealing with a case of bedhead. Many players,
no matter how long they play or how hard they try to purge their emotions like the
zombie swine-flu, cannot shake the residue, which—for many of us—lingers and
often causes ongoing damage[iv].
Poker players call this human flaw tilt[v],
and they examine your response to devastation with a Celestron LCD Deluxe in
hopes of exploiting you.
Even if you manage to cull your emotions, become a math savant, and establish a
lasting disregard for other human life, the outward appearance needed to be a
bona fide poker pro may present other issues. That is, it may present issues if
you don’t normally wear sunglasses indoors, disregard personal hygiene for days
at a time, and generally present yourself as the world’s biggest douchebag.
If you find that a dashing look, take up poker. And maybe grow a chinstrap
beard.
Two things[vi]
ultimately drove me from pursuing a game at which I became fairly adept over
time. First is the amount of time and energy one must devote to becoming legitimately
good at the game. Josh Arieh, best known for his third place finish in the main
event of the 2004 World Series of Poker, recently captured my point perfectly: “Poker
has just evolved to a spot where you have to play really, really good to make
money, and I don’t.” Reading these words from a poker pro—winner of two WSOP
bracelets—certainly cast my own modest chip-flinging endeavors in a rather
unflattering light. Moreover, in terms of time spent and lost, I gradually
became aware of how many things fell by the wayside as I cultivated a deeper
understanding of Stack to Pot Ratio. Like anything else, poker requires practice
in order to obtain skill, and any aspiring professional spends incalculable time
merely studying the game[vii],
to say nothing of actually playing it[viii].
There’s simply too much else I want to do with this life.
Secondly, and most importantly, is the premise and goal of
poker. In the opening moments of the iconic film Rounders, Matt Damon’s narrative memorably begins with the words, “If
you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, you are the sucker.” Poker, while an
incredibly elaborate chess-match of mental and psychological acumen, is the
only competition in which other participants are routinely characterized and mentally catalogued in pejorative terms.[ix].
It’s also one of the very few endeavors in which your success arrives directly
at the expense of someone else. Your glee occurs simultaneously with someone
else’s despondency. I’ll never forget the words of yet another poker pro named Phil[x],
who said that “The goal is to find the weakest person at the table and
brutalize them over and over and over again.”
Even when I played among friends in a relatively friendly
home game, I remember being so intent on mentally accessing everything I knew
about the game and my opponents that I viewed the social component of the evening
as wholly ancillary. I not only wanted to win, but for my opponents to begrudgingly
concede to my superiority. And though it upset me at the time, a friend of mine
once unintentionally offered up a lucid commentary of me after someone else at
the table had complimented my poker play. “Yeah, and Brandon’s got QUITE the
personality,” he said with every ounce of sarcasm he possessed. I later
realized that the comment should have bothered me for completely different reasons
that it did in the initial moments after its utterance.
While it’s certainly possible to treat the game
recreationally and socially, I have seen an untold number of friends, casual
acquaintances, and complete strangers waste considerable time and energy in an abject attempt to become better than everyone at a game of cards—or simply good enough to drastically alter
their financial realities. Unfortunately, I was among this lot. In fact, the
closest I've ever been treated to an intervention occurred during college as a
result of just how thoroughly immersed—friendships and academics be damned—I
was in Texas Hold ‘Em. My devotion to becoming a skilled poker player adversely
affected my college grades, created rifts in my relationships[xi],
and absolutely brought out the worst of my personality. I have said things to
friends and strangers at a poker table that I never considered or desired to
say to anyone on a basketball court, where I spent roughly 83% of my waking
hours as an adolescent. The game provides endless opportunities to exercise
your mind, but—for me, at least—the cost outweighed the benefits. I can find cerebral stimulation elsewhere. And even
though I sort of enjoy the thought of playing a good-natured game with friends
in the future, I would much rather shoot hoops with them.
[i] Incidentally,
this is the overarching appeal to Fantasy Football.
[ii] Although
it should be noted that Tiger Woods would beat any professional poker player 100/100
times in 9 holes of golf, whereas the best poker player in the world would beat
Tiger Woods far less frequently in a heads-up match of poker.
[iii] Rather,
it should not create a dent in your cyborg armor.
[iv]
Like banishing Carol from the prison and failing to perceive the real culprit:
the budding sociopath Lizzie.
[v]
The namesake of a comically stupid television show that aired sometime amid the
poker boom.
[vi] Three
if you count my abysmal failure to adhere to the aforementioned wardrobe
standard.
[vii]
If you need some examples, simply Google “Texas Hold Em” resources. You’ll find
innumerable books, instructional videos, articles, and interviews.
[viii]
A person could watch the extended version of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in
the time devoted to a standard session of poker.
[ix] Special
thanks to Phil Hellmuth Jr. for his indelible role in sanctioning this sort of
behavior as somehow normal or acceptable.
[x]
Gordon, as it were.
[xi]
Likely some of which I’m not even aware.
