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Monday, January 6, 2014

A Chasing After the Wind: The Things I Always Knew, But Found a Way to Justify About Poker


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. 

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