LittleWyvern.com

Don’t worry when you are not recognized, but strive to be worthy of recognition.

- Abraham Lincoln

I spent a long, long day playing poker on Saturday. Ten hours straight is hardly a personal record, but the emotional fatigue of a long game of cards is surprisingly more taxing than anything physical. Lukas had gone to California for the weekend and my plan to spend the weekend writing code for our long overdue website release was cruelly thwarted by the faceless PayPal e-corporate machine. A software package that I had purchased (from programmers somewhere in eastern Europe) was delayed for still unknown reasons. I suspect that it was merely a basic security review that comes standard when a credit card is used to buy unknown digital goods from a former Soviet republic. Whatever, I’ve already found my way onto the No Fly List… this shouldn’t look too out of the ordinary to any Big Brother types… right?

Stuck in development limbo I felt a weird compulsion to hit the casino and take a stab at some extra income. Since my current income is ZERO and my current monthly expenses total MORE THAN ZERO, the pressure to earn/win/find money grows more strongly each and every day.

A bizarre transformation occurs every time I sit into a poker game. It is magical and necessary, but probably unhealthy to the point of potentially catastrophic. Whatever money I have in my pockets becomes otherwise worthless ammunition for the task at hand. Walking into the casino this weekend with $1500 cash in my front pocket it immediately became irrelevant that I was carrying about forty percent of my entire current net worth, and didn’t bother me in the least that I was willing to risk it all that afternoon. Of course, I almost certainly wouldn’t. I am generally good about cutting my losses before they get too severe, but given the right circumstances I know that I would put it on the table. Before I walk into the casino, and then later once I have walked out, that money has a fixed real world value. But for those few hours in between, my bankroll assumes a fluid, ethereal state. Cash becomes a borderline meaningless number, like a score in a video game. The number goes up and down depending on how well I am doing, but the number itself is only understandable as a ratio. How many buy-ins do I have at a specific limit game? How many big blinds should I start with given the quality of the competition and the amount of chips already on the table? Given the state of the current game, what is a reasonable expected win rate? At what point will my losses be too large to reasonably overcome with only one more buy-in?

For me the money is always reduced to numbers. The numbers are used in calculations – the answers to which largely dictate my behavior. What outwardly looks like discipline or basic emotional control is, to a large extent, my acceptance of a math problem that exists only inside my head. Yes, in a way it is an emotional detachment from the situation, but you might more accurately describe it is a fundamental trust in my own decision-making.

This post is getting a bit derailed so I will attempt to make my point through an example.

On Saturday I found myself in a ridiculously horrible lineup in a $1-$2 no-limit game. ‘Horrible’ is a bit confusing in this context, like ‘negative’ in medicine, but for this purpose the word is good. It is generally rare, though increasingly more common, that I will sit at a 1-2 game and say to myself, “this game is really tough.” While there are a number of fairly good players at my local casino, there are far more bad players who simply think they are good (for the purposes of this post – and all the others on this website – it is assumed that I am in all probability much worse than I personally believe, but am also somewhat better than the average for the games in which I play). Still, it is a true delight to sit down and quickly realize that the other nine seats are all occupied by complete morons.

Such was the case on Saturday.

Though I could tell at a glance that my opponents were less than competent I still hedged my bet a little bit by buying in for only half of the maximum, though that was still double the amount my recent experiments into bankroll/gameplay strategy have proven to be successful. Over the past month or two I have been buying in very short and playing very aggressively, almost to universal success. As a general rule, though, I like to buy into a game with an amount inverse to the perceived skill of my opponents. Against good players I want to risk less on decisions where I have less advantage. Against bad players I want to capitalize on their mistakes and bad decisions to maximum effect. Ideally I should be buying in for the maximum at all times in every game, but the realities of my financial situation make that somewhat imprudent. Instead I find a compromise by risking more when the advantage is in my favor and less when it is not.

At any rate, these guys were terrible so therefore I was willing to risk more.

Not too long into the game I found myself in early position in a straddled pot (a player had thrown out a third blind… look it up if you don’t understand) and looked down to find two red kings. I generally raise smaller than would most other players so with a $4 straddle I made a standard-but-small-looking raise to $15. A young kid wearing a hoodie and dark sunglasses loudly announced ‘raise to fifty’ and confidently pushed out his chips. The action folded to me and I called without much thought. The flop came ten high, I checked, he quickly and just as loudly proclaimed ‘all-in’ and pushed out several hundred dollars worth of chips. I had $150 left and casually shrugged my shoulders before making the call. Before either hand could be turned over the dealer had flipped over an ace on the turn and a jack on the river. He stared at me through his douchebag sunglasses for several moments, oblivious to the fact that I had called him and it was therefore his responsibility to show his cards first. I absolutely hate when people refuse to turn up their cards at showdown so I broke protocol and turned my hand over first. He stared at my hand for a few more moments before slamming over his own: Ace-Queen offsuit.

The table let out a collective groan, the douchebag kid congratulated himself with a fist pump, and after tapping the felt and uttering my standard “nice hand” I reached into my pocket and pulled out more money. This time I bought in for the absolute maximum.

A middle-aged man seated to my immediate left volunteered some friendly advice. “You should have re-raised all-in preflop. He wouldn’t have called you with Ace-Queen.” When I merely responded with, “okay,” he continued by telling me that I could have just moved all-in on the flop too. “No way would he call you on the flop with only ace-high!” I briefly flirted with the notion of explaining that as far as I’m concerned I played the hand absolutely perfectly, but I have long since learned that you should never try to teach poker at a poker table. Instead I simply muttered, ‘yeah…’ while mentally taking note that not only had my opponent played his hand unbelievably badly, but the older man thought that the one who’d made the mistake was me. Good, now I can say for sure that two of the nine players are terrible. The various nods and quiet comments I picked up from around the table led me to suspect that many more of them were too.

Were my brother in my position I know for certain that he would have lost his cool and started shouting profanities at the kid and his Ace-Queen. He would rant for several minutes about how badly the guy played, how lucky he was to win, how unlucky he was to lose, and so on. Not only did I not say anything other than “nice hand” but I felt genuinely unfazed by the outcome. No, I actually felt pleased: not with the outcome, of course, but with myself. My running scoreboard had just dropped 200 points and that made me a bit concerned, but only for the sake that in order to post a win on the session I would now need to subtract 200 from any future score increases. The math had become more difficult, but so far as I was concerned I could not have possibly played the hand better. I had maneuvered my opponent into committing $50 as a three-to-one underdog, and then an additional $150 when his odds dropped to worse than eight-to-one against. That the underdog won is irrelevant. Walking to my car that night I would begin to feel the regret of not having an extra $400 with which to pay bills, but inside the casino I only appreciate the numbers as mathematical purities. That $400 is gone forever; my score has been reduced but the game continues uncaring.

Of course, as losses pileup the emotional distance between numbers and reality becomes more difficult to maintain. Though I continued to play well the cards kept falling against me and soon my pockets were short nearly half their original contents. “Minus seven hundred” is a difficult score from which to rebound, but as I allowed myself to see that number as real-world value my spirits continued to drop. It is generally at this point where I would suck up the loss, go home, and sleep off the pain. Instead I took a break by playing an hour of 2-4 limit with my brother, and refortified my crumbling wall of nonchalance with round upon round of Gin & Tonic. Sufficiently drunk I jumped back into a no-limit game, this time buying in for the table minimum. Optimal strategy or not, wasted or not, I knew that I could not emotionally suffer to lose another full buy-in.

Within fifteen minutes I ran pocket nines into my opponent’s pocket tens on a seven-high board. Okay… minus eight hundred.

I re-bought, again for the minimum.

Since I was too drunk to drive home I nursed bottled water, and a steadily growing chip stack, until I felt completely sober once again. Sometime around 1AM my brother decided that it was time to go home. Fate has a sense of humor, no doubt, because four hands from my big blind (at which point I had decided I would leave) the most interesting and controversial hand of the night occurred.

By this point I had turned my final $100 buy-in into a stack four times the size. Being up three hundred dollars on a buy-in is decent on it’s own, but when that three hundred cuts your night’s losses nearly in half… it feels like a really big win.

Because I was leaving after the next few hands I had already picked up a rack for my chips and was playing extra cautious, locking up my win while trying not to do anything too stupid. I mentally toyed with the idea of just leaving right away and not even bothering to play my last few free hands, but that sort of thing goes against my nature so I stubbornly walked into the following hand…

After several players limped into the pot I limped along from the button with As-Jc. The blinds checked and we saw the flop six-handed.

Flop: Ac – Ks – 5s

Everybody checked to me and I made a pot-sized bet of $10. Three of the five players made the call.

Turn: 4h

Once again my opponents checked and I continued with a 3/4 pot-sized bet of $35. The first two players folded, but then the third and final player did the unexpected. He raised to $130. I glanced over at his chip stack and was dismayed to see that he had me easily covered. After my $35 I still had a somewhere around $375 left. I could fold my hand and leave the game with a fair amount more than I had started. If I did something stupid and lost I would walk back to my car to find the still-ethereal “minus nine hundred” transforming itself into a brutal reality. My brain screamed to fold.

My gut screamed… to raise!

I generally think very quickly when I play cards (or maybe just in general), but facing that one raise I tanked for longer than I have ever tanked before. Two minutes can feel like an extremely long time at a poker table, and because nobody else understood the full depth of the decision at hand the other players became understandably impatient. Tired as I was, still a little bit drunk as I was, my brain was running at maximum speed… and still my decision took forever. I wanted so badly to fold. Folding was so far and away the rationally correct decision based on both my own hand strength as well as the financial implications of the looming disaster. It should have been easy. It should have been very, very easy.

But I wanted SO BADLY to raise. All my instincts were shouting at me to re-raise. An unstoppable force had met an immovable wall as my mind crashed against my will, and my body locked up with an indecision so paralyzingly raw that I cannot remember having ever experienced its equal. Honestly, I sat in silent anguish for what felt like an eternity. In the end, my instinct won over my reason.

“I’m all in,” I said in a voice I wasn’t sure was actually out loud or still inside my head. I said it again just to make sure. “I’m all in.”

Before I could touch my chips to move them towards the pot my opponent’s cards were already in the muck.

“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST! YOU TANKED THAT LONG FOR… FOR THAT!”

Several of the other players quickly and loudly began to complain, all of them full of anger and rage and all of it directed at me.

“How much fucking Hollywood do you need to do, bro?!” one player moaned. It took me a moment to realize that all of them thought I must have had a monster hand and had been putting on a show. It made sense. I actually don’t think I have ever seen someone think for that long and then raise with anything other than the stone nuts. A player who tanks for a long time will almost always fold, and only occasionally call. They will very rarely raise, and like I said, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it done lightly.

I don’t like people to be mad at me so I turned my cards over and showed the Ace-Jack.

“Aces and the nut flush draw, eh? Jesus Christ!”

They still didn’t understand.

I pulled the two cards completely apart so they could see that the jack was a club. I didn’t have a flush draw. I had one pair… bad kicker.

Not in the mood to defend myself I scooped in the pile of chips and placed them into my rack before standing up and bidding the table goodnight. I walked up to the cashier and called over to my brother at a nearby table, “Well, my entire table hates my guts… so I guess it’s time to leave.”

I could still hear the muttering from the table as I walked away, now with an even larger win (well, smaller loss) than only minutes before. As I stood near my brother’s table and waited for him to rack his own chips I was curious to see my opponent from the previous hand come running across the room in my direction. I didn’t want to make the situation any worse so I pretended not to notice him. However, rather than walk past he instead walked right up to me and very politely said, “Hey, I was just wondering if you would mind telling me about your thought process on that hand.”

What the… ? Is this guy serious? Is he looking for a fight?

“Ummm… look, man, I’m sorry that I tanked so long. I wasn’t trying to be rude or put a move on you or…”

“No, it’s cool,” he interrupted. I obviously didn’t understand his intent. “I just want to know what you were thinking about. How did you possibly decide to re-raise? Did I do something wrong, or…”

I think I actually stuttered as I tried to answer him. My brain was struggling to appreciate this completely unexpected, completely unprecedented moment. Unlike the rest of the table, this guy wasn’t mad at me. He was… impressed by me?! I almost laughed at the absurdity. Nobody ever, and I mean ever, openly admits to being a worse player than anyone else in a poker room. Sit in any poker game in Vegas and you will encounter endless examples of someone volunteering to teach another player how they should play poker. You will absolutely never find someone who earnestly asks to be taught.

One of the brutal truths of playing poker is that it never provides any real sense of accomplishment and never provides any source of recognition. The only pride and satisfaction to be had must come from within, which is no doubt why the game is ripe to the brim with raging egomaniacs. Just as you must accept that the best hand will occasionally lose you must understand that the worst hand will occasionally win. Because of that you can’t give too much weight to winning or losing any one pot, and if money won or lost can’t provide joy or pain… well what else is there? The total absence of external recognition is so profound that I felt staggered when it walked across the Green Valley Ranch poker room and tapped me on the shoulder.

I could go into several paragraphs of detail as to why I decided to re-raise that particular hand. My gut knew instinctively what my brain took two minutes to rationally deduce to be a near certainty, and I could lay out the thought process that culminated in a belief strong enough that I was willing to risk significant ruin. It took two minutes to think through, and would take longer to write out, so the best I could offer the man at the time was little more than I will bother wasting the time to explain to you. “There just wasn’t any hand that you could have that beat me. I wanted to fold, but I just couldn’t come up with anything that you could possibly be holding to beat me.” It wasn’t necessary, but the man confirmed to me that he had in fact been holding total air.

“I had nothing,” he explained, “but I still don’t get how you did that.”

Saturday had been a grueling exercise in pain and frustration. At no point during the day was I ever ahead, and while I continued to play well I just couldn’t dig myself out of a hole that only seemed to grow deeper. And yet, somehow, in the most unexpected of ways, the day ended with raw triumph.

1. I made one of the best reads I have ever made at a poker table, under some of the most intense pressure (though all of it was pressure I had placed upon myself).

2. I summoned the will to follow my instincts though every part of my brain wailed like a banshee against it. It is one thing to know the right move, but quite another to actually make it.

3. I received wholly unsolicited recognition for a triumph I expected to only be recognizable to myself.

Sure I left the casino down a few hundred dollars, but just as the first $400 had been (now) painfully stolen away forever, the $800 that I had NOT LOST in that final pot weighed heavily in my front pocket. Of course, one way or another it would have just been money. Sitting here a few days later my life would be nearly the same had I won or lost a thousand dollars. The numbers on my account balances obviously matter when I write a check or pay a bill, but for the 99.9999 percent of my life that isn’t spent actively spending money there is much more value to having learned something about myself.

This weekend I learned that I am capable of something, though pathetically insignificant as a single raise undoubtedly is, that I previously only suspected. And with that knowledge I found genuine pride in having done something difficult. It doesn’t matter that the difficulty is invisible to the rest of the universe, but even so, the sense of accomplishment is all the greater when it is acknowledged by another.