Poker is Such a Dickish Game

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Entertainment, Humor, Iowa, life in the meadow, Poker

I love poker. I discovered it, or rather the Contrarian discovered Texas Holdem some years ago when they started showing games on TV. I became an avid fan, and started reading poker books by the score.

We signed up at one of the online casinos and placed $50 on deposit. I played at the micro limits (between 5¢-10¢ and 25¢-50¢) for about three years.

My intent was to make enough so that I could move up to the higher table levels. I dreamed of actually making real money.

This didn’t happen. I made money–a few hundred dollars, but hardly enough to move up. The problem was not that the books lied, they did not, but they were not written in view of the explosion of micro-level play.

Making money at poker depends on there being a couple of really awful players, a large middle ground of poor to mediocre players, and one and hopefully no more than two “good” players. Unfortunately at the micro level, there are thousands of people who can afford to lose say $40 a month playing. It’s pure entertainment. They want to play hands, and they don’t care about odds. They want to play.

When there are six people at the table who play this way–chasing every longshot, a good player gets eaten up. Let’s say it’s the difference between making say $85 on a good day, and instead making only $25. When you add in unlucky days, you end up making over time paltry amounts that don’t allow you to move up to higher tables, and when you do, finding the play hasn’t improved much.

See, I’m not a gambler. I don’t like to lose. So poker is a perfect game for me. While luck plays a part in poker, it’s a relatively small part. Poker is simply math. It used to be that old-time players intuitively learned that certain hands won more than others, certain “draws” won more often. With the advent of computers and all that computing power, this has been proved out mathematically. Millions of computer simulations have developed what are called “hand odds” and “pot odds.” Charts are developed that show you what hands to play in what position on the table.

Good players play odds. Over time, you win. Quite simple. Never draw to inside straights they say. This is true. If you have Jack, ten and what is on the table is eight and seven, you would have a straight with a nine. But there are only 4 nines out of the remaining 47 cards in the deck. The odds are not favorable. If somebody bets, you fold your hand, and live to see another hand.

Except the bad players never fold. They chase everything.

Odds being odds, bad players hit bad draws here and there. They call this luck. They call your careful, mathematical game which seems to win more than them, very lucky. They have no clue.

Bad players are called “fish”. You are there to hook ’em and take their money.

Telling a bad player that he is a bad player is called “tapping on the glass.” In other words, don’t disturb the stupid fish, I’m fishing. Tapping on the glass causes them to swim away.

So instead of yelling at the imbecile, “You jackass, don’t you know that you have only a 1 in 22 chance of catching that card?” you fold your beautiful two-pair Ace and King pairs, and smile, as the idiot rakes in all your chips and others because on the river his hand of 2’s found another two, giving him three of a kind. Worse, you don’t just smile, you say, “Nice hand!”

The fish grins, feeling and looking like he knows he’s the best poker player on the planet. He’s the worst of course.

So we are, us good players, mean liars who prey upon the stupid. We tell them they are smart, lucky, courageous and talented. Poker would not be poker unless there were fish, we know. Yet inside we are seething.

Except I don’t seeth well. I tap the glass.

I play internet free poker. I play the odds. Rarely do I even meet a player who knows what odds are let alone plays by them. They are there to have fun. It’s only “PLAY” money.

I tap the glass. And you would be surprised at just how many people do not like being told they are horses asses. Shocking I know, but they resent my “poker lessons.”

I, on the other hand, want it clearly understood, that I was playing correctly, and you may have beaten me on this hand, but it’s because you’re a JACKASS IDIOT!!!

You see, I am not suited to poker. My temperament is just not what it should be. I have always had trouble smiling and lying to stupid people. Fair warning: you are stupid and I am not. So if I take you to the cleaners, know that you were warned. I did not take advantage of you.

It’s such a dickish game. It encourages people to be dishonest. Fancy that in gambling! Hard to believe in such an honorable sport.

So if you are ever at a table in a casino somewhere, and you do something stupid, and an aging woman yells, “You IDIOT!” Well, it could be me.

**Mostly the Contrarian, I admit, but I play too–between us we have acquired some 10.7 million chips at an online gaming site. I have written to the site inquiring as to whether they might convert say $10 per million for transfer to their monied tables. They would get their money back in rake anyway. Sad to say, they have ignored me. And of course Americans are now barred from monied tables at most of the online sites because of pending law suits. So I continue to be the Phil Helmuth of free online poker (look it up! lol)

Related articles

• How to play to your strengths in online poker (onlinepokerlowdown.com)
• Draw or Fold: Shut Out of Sites, U.S. Poker Pros Mull Move Abroad (time.com)
• The Tao of Poker (onlinepokerlowdown.com)

You Just Thought You Knew Me

Tags

hold em, Poker

Okay, I freely admit it. I’m a poker player, a professional player, defined as one who has played for money. I am now recovering, sort of.

For three years, I pretty much ate, slept and well, played poker. A lot of poker. I won because I was good. But I never won a lot, not even a little lot. The reason took a long time to untangle from all the possibilities.

I read perhaps 10-12 poker books. Most of them on low level hold-em, mostly fixed as opposed to no limit. I confess to not being very good at no limit, and that may be partly because I would leave the practice quickly when I lost.

I played odds, I knew the combinations, I knew all the lingo and all the rules and exceptions. I studied. I practiced. And I played, day in and day out. Often, I played multiple tables, four at a time. I played everything from .01/.02 up to $1/2 level poker. And I found that in the end, you can’t win.

Oh, I can say I won more than I lost. I certainly did that. I have the deposits in our bank to prove it. But my dream, of moving up with an initial ante of $50 to the big tables and real money never materialized.

I was told it would. The books, mostly written by poker champions, said that I would. And I believed them. Yes, I know, that’s why books are written, to get you to fall for the promise of getting something for next to nothing. I don’t fall for all the gimmicks in magazines, “make 20,000/month in only three months with our proven sales technique!” No I don’t fall for that, but I fell for this.

I had charts and odds lists taped to the computer. I knew them by heart in a short time. I knew that losing days happened, even to the best players. I bought the “scientific logic” that would win out in the end. And in truth I suspect when written, the books were accurate.

They did not anticipate the floodgates of poker players that would descend once poker became a TV event. Being told again and again that even you can do this, does tend to bring forth the lazy but hungry among us. Hungry for fame and fortune. I dreamed of being at the final table at the WPC, bluffing off all the big names. I would do it, because I was a student of the game–I deserved it.

Deserving anything  means about zero in poker. It’s an ugly game of guts and patience, and extreme discipline. I could do that, but what the poker writers and I obviously missed is that none of this works but in a logical world where people act rationally. And at small stakes poker, most people don’t act rationally.

The reason is simple. The book writers usually called low stakes poker the vicinity of $5-10 or $30-60 antes. The presumed, correctly mostly, that at a table of 8, 5 people would be rational in their decisions pretty much, while two would be  real idiots, and one, you, would be the killer player.

The problem is as you invite a few tens of millions more into the mix of player, you invite a whole slew of people who have a lot of disposable income to use for “entertainment” purposes. Thus at the baby tables, such as the $.05/.10, and certainly at my main table $.25/.50, there are simply too many people who can afford and happily spend $10-30 bucks a day having fun.

Sure, they win some days, and that’s the fun for them. But they are going to play pretty much every hand, which they shouldn’t and pretty much too far into every hand, which they definitely shouldn’t. So they are taking way too many pots from me, usually on the ubiquitous river card. On a table of 8, I’m playing against fully 5 people at least who are just playing stupid. The trouble is when that many are being stupid, the odds you had are gone.

I agonized for months about all this. I read more books, changed my style a dozen times, played other games like Omaha hi/lo and so forth. To no avail. I had weeks on end of blissful winning, but every time I attempted to use that to catapult me to the next level, I still ran into too many who don’t care about odds and that, but just want the thrill of making the upsetting win. At the higher levels, my stack of chips was soon depleted and I was back down in the basement again.

So I quit playing poker. The Contrarian still plays at Poker Stars. He’s amassed $6 million in play chips. I started playing again at Facebook, at a place called Poker Madness. It’s even worse than the poker sites. Everybody was raising to the max, “going  all in” it’s called, even with putrid hands like a 4-2 off-suit. They call it “having fun.” I call it denigrating a great game of skill to a childish “rush” on taking a useless hand and lucking out against much better ones.

I went back to Poker Stars yesterday, and played a bit of Omaha. I had fun. There is some sense of trying there, at least more than I was getting at FB. I don’t have any desire to play professionally again, though. I’ve learned my lesson. You don’t get something for nothing. Mostly that’s a rule you can count on.

What hidden vice lurks behind your oh so perfect facade? I’d like to hear.