Ship It, Fish!

I had built a list of reasons that I'm winding down playing of poker. I mostly wrote them out for myself, and had planed to make proper entries and post them here. As you might guess, because my decision was more or less made that I'd wind down my poker efforts, I have been slow to roll out the posts that explore the reasons.

I've been listing the reasons in no particular order; the first I posted was regarding game selection concerns. The second is a bit more nuanced, and I'll begin explaining it by telling a brief story.

A long time ago, I was introduced to someone whom I'd been told was an avid poker player. I asked her what she liked about poker and her quick answer was: I love poker because I love money. I was taken aback. I then made my usual mistake when I'm well informed on a subject: rather than keeping my judgements appropriately to myself, I blurted out an analysis: You'll never be a good poker player if you love money that much.

Of course, this is a counter-intuitive assessment, but nonetheless correct. I first encountered this idea when reading Doyle Brunson, who has said in many fora: to be a successful poker player, you must have a complete disregard for money (or sometimes saying the value of money). Eventually I came to the realization that this was a big factor in my (albeit small-time) poker success as well.

The fact is, I never much cared about money. I have been extremely poor at times (well, “extremely” when consider in relation to my social class, upbringing, and education level — I make no assertions that at my poorest I'm always have it better than most people in the world; we don't actually live in a classless society). At times when I was “poor”, I (like anyone else would) noticed the lack of money to do basic things like rent an apartment without cockroaches, or to have enough money to afford real pasta sauce rather than buying tomato paste and adding water.

But once I had enough money that I could rent a relatively nice apartment, eat out when I wanted to, and own a nice computer (or, have my employers provide them, actually), there wasn't much left that I ever needed. I just never wanted things. I really always hated possessions. I'm known for hording junk because I hate throwing things away, but I found I was just as happy avoiding acquiring things.

When I started playing poker, it was mainly as a competitive effort with the side-effect of getting free pizza money while in college. When I started playing seriously in the early 2000's, it was as an escape of my “regular community” that I had temporarily become fed up with. But, it was never really about the money.

Money to me always seemed like a meaningless thing. In the late 1990s, while my friends ran off to cash in on the Dot.Com boom, I went back to graduate school to hide from what I saw as over-commercialization of the Internet that I loved. Now, I'm staunchly middle class, I've been lucky to get jobs that don't compromise my principles, and it probably will stay this way for the rest of my life. There's nothing I want in my life that a little more money can buy. I can imagine it would be nice to win so-called “life-changing money”, so that I wouldn't have to ask people to pay me to work on the social causes that I care about. (I'm one of these rare people who would do roughly the same job I do now even if I didn't need the money.) However, making money that doesn't instantly make me independently wealthy simply won't improve my life. I just don't have much interest in being a Ferengi.

I feel that I got into trouble when I started to think about poker as something I needed to do to make expenses. I did increase my expense footprint, and it will require some careful financial management to live without the $1,000/month I was pulling from poker. But I can surely figure out how to reduce my expenses enough to make things work.

But, that's somewhat beside the point. The point is that I didn't get into poker for the money. I did, however, get caught up in the poker boom (ironically, after I'd already explicitly avoided the Dot.Com boom). I'd started to like the fact that easy money was coming my way; I was becoming a little bit a Ferengi. But, that's not something I really wanted; I pretended I wanted it, in a way, to justify not giving up, and after a while I even believed that I wanted it. In other words, I convinced myself I wanted “easy money” to keep from throwing myself into something I valued more. I bought into the myth of EV, which assumes a person's time is only valuable to the extent to which that person produces wealth. I do believe in EV in the mathematical abstract. Yet, the quality of life EV, and the EV of world betterment, are both much more important in the equation than the pure financial EV. This belief is why I refused to take Economics in college; it's why I avoided going to work for a start-up. It's just not worth changing my core principles just to keep playing poker.

In the final analysis, I was using poker as a mechanism to avoid spending as much time in the world I really loved (the one to which my career is devoted), because I was a bit burned out, as many who devote their lives to social causes do. I'm not burned out anymore, and in such a situation, poker serves only as a financial EV calculation. Yet, as I told that avid poker player I once met: one can't possibly be good at poker anyway if it's only about the money. The people who do best at poker love the game — they want to be doing nothing else when they are playing poker. I stopped feeling that months and months ago. It just became about the money. But, no matter what my financial EV is, I can't really justify playing for only that, particularly when I know I'm not going to get financially independent from it.

[ It's been quite a while since I posted a River Street retrospective, so I decided to write one last night before bed, since I got home from work too late to play any poker. ]

That's him, I'm telling you, I said to Nick. We were standing, waiting for a seat, at one of the tiny two-table poker clubs in Boston a few weeks ago. That's not him. It can't be him; he's not acting anything like him, Nick insisted. I retorted: But, his wedding ring; it looks just like the one he had, and I remember it from when he got married while we were still playing at River Street. Remember, that girlfriend of his that he married? Remember how he left her at home with the fire alarm running while we were playing poker. She couldn't even reach the thing with the step ladder to turn it off, and was calling every ten minutes for an hour to beg for him to come home to take care of it. Then, he'd hang up and say ‘just one more hand, then I'm leaving’?

Nick was still sure it wasn't the same guy. I offered to settle it the way all poker players do: Ok, I'll make a $50 even money prop bet with you that it's him. No? $10, then. C'mon, I know it's him. Nick's doubt eventually had me doubting myself. Could I have misremembered him that completely? After all, this guy seemed pretty calm, and hadn't been stacked the whole time we'd been watching the game.

I tried to think of what he looked like in those days, but the memory that came back was how I got his name wrong at first. A number of people at the River Street game knew him from outside the game; apparently he'd come from the same undergraduate program as some of the other MIT regulars. They had always called him by his last name, which my poor hearing had picked up as “Troy”. I remembered vividly referring to him that way one night in his absence, asking Where's Troy tonight?. No one seemed to know who I was talking about.

Someone finally realized what I was saying, and argued: You think a Chinese guy is named Troy?. Well, I answered, why couldn't he be? By his accent, this “Troy” sounded like he was born and raised somewhere on the east coast. He's as much Chinese culturally as I am Polish — at least a generation or so removed.

This was an academic consideration, of course. As it turned out, all along, they'd been calling Michael (which was his first name, I'd suddenly learned) by his last name — a common Chinese surname that rhymed with Troy. (As a footnote, another River Street regular eventually showed up a few months later carrying from Canada the actual name, Troy. But he's a profile for another time.) I decided that from that point on, I was avoiding the confusion and just calling this guy, “Michael”.

Michael was probably the most excitable player ever to visit River Street. There was no question, frankly, that poker was gambling to him. He played lots of pots; he moved in with nearly every draw. I distinctly remember the first time in NL HE that I ever got bottom set (222) all-in against the nut flush draw. It was heads-up against Michael in Greg's kitchen, sitting in one of the comfy kitchen chairs I'd arrived early to reserve. A good tenth of my bankroll at the time was in that pot. I learned the meaning of “action player”, “gamble”, “redraw” and “EV” in the seconds it took Greg to deal the turn (a flush-making heart) and the river (a board-pairing 8).

But the nut flush draw was just a mild gamble for Michael. He'd play bottom pair to the river in limit HE without thinking twice. In the right mood, he'd push in with just about any ace-high if he had less than half the buy-in. Sometimes, he'd even just have king-high; that is, if it was his favorite hand — his beloved “Ko-jack”. For a number of weeks in that winter and spring of 2004, he was the action of River Street.

Then, he'd go broke. Greg would let him deal, and we'd tip him well. After all, as soon as he'd put together $50 or so, he'd buy in short with his tips, and then go broke. He'd go to the ATM, come back, and go broke. He'd win on Tuesday, take a stake of $20 bills home, bring them back on Thursday and go broke.

That spring, Michael joined a big group of River Street players who went off to Foxwoods for a long weekend. The stories that returned that Tuesday were nearly unbelievable. Michael, so that Tuesday crew was told, had discovered craps. He'd went on an amazing run. He'd been tossing dealers green chips as tokes. He was betting blacks on the pass line on ever new shooter.

Not to disappoint, Michael showed up that Thursday with a pair of red dice. In between poker hands, he'd point at someone across the table and say: You be the house; I'm the new shooter. I don't recall that anyone actually took him up on his offer to bankroll his intra-poker-hand floating craps game, but his excitement for the gamble carried over into every aspect of both games. Invariably, as he'd receive his cards, he'd move those dice from the table to his face, wedging them between his glasses and his eyes. His eyes now closed and covered, he'd squint to hold the dice in place. His head now high, he'd look back across the table, and in a robotic voice, slowly chant: What number am I? … What number am I?

In these days, I had just started learning NL HE cash play and I would often forgo the $1/$2, no max buy-in NL game in the kitchen (particularly when the field seemed tough) and continue with the $3/$6 limit game in the living room after the NL HE game “broke out” from the kitchen's $5/$10 game. It was on one of these occasions that the most unforgettable Michael incident occurred.

It was an average River Street night. We were used to shouts from the kitchen during major all-ins or other surprises in large pots. The NL HE game had been going for a while when we heard an unusually loud screech — enough to freeze up the action in the limit game. Michael came storming down the hallway, caught somewhere between shouting and muttering.

As he approached the front door, which was directly adjacent to the living room, he started to stumble. He had stepped into the mass of removed shoes — a kindness to Greg's neighbors to avoid the noise of 20 people stomping around that top floor River Street apartment. Michael looked down at the piles of shoes, and the muttering continued. He was close enough that I could hear it now: King-Jack. It had to be King-Jack. It had to be my hand. Tears were beginning to swell in Michael's eyes. His gaze narrowed on a lone shoe, separated from the others; he picked it up — examining it, ostensibly to see if it was his. Establishing that it wasn't, he simply hurled it at the front door. King-Jack, King-Jack. Another shoe picked up and thrown. Another, and another. Shouting now: King-Jack; Why did he have my hand!?! Sidney, Greg's loyal canine, ran from the kitchen, barking quietly. The $3/$6 players ceased all movement, the current pot conceded to the confusion.

The situation was escalating quickly, and sitting in the three seat, I was the closest to Michael's current position. I approached, a bit fearful, and asked the rather pointless and already-answered question: What happened?, followed by a quick and almost as pointless Are you alright?, and finally with something marginally useful: Would you like me to help you find your shoes?

By then, the noise had roused Greg. Within seconds, mayhem had ensued. The $3/$6 players were moving about; the $1/$2 NL players were crowding in from the back. Greg quickly shuffled through the now disorganized mess of shoes to find Michael's, as the man himself had collapsed against the wall, his tantrum spent. Greg handed him his shoes, and Michael was out the door before they were on his feet. Michael lingered briefly in the hallway, banging slightly on the door; Greg opened the door briefly, shouting that he should go home. Michael eventually complied.

The details of the hand were never clear but hardly mattered: a sharp player named Josh had called Michael's bet on the flop with on a lark with a running straight draw while holding KJ. It got there and Josh stacked Michael on the river.

As I retell the story, I'm not all that surprised that Nick didn't recognize Michael. The man we saw last month was clearly a different poker player. Sure, when we saw him, he seemed like he was playing a little too loose, and I don't know how many times he rebought. But, he did cash out something, which is certainly better than the old days.

I was cleaning out my email drafts folder recently, as I switched MUAs from mutt to Gnus. I saw a message from mid-2004 drafted to Greg, which read: I am really worried about Michael. After what happened last night and from his behavior after the Foxwoods trip, I think that he might have a gambling problem. I was wondering if. It ended there. I never finished the message.

I hope that Michael has turned over a new leaf. He's not the last person — not even at River Street — whom I've watched descend into something truly ugly because of poker. Had I been a better poker player at the time, I probably would have won hundreds, rather than mere dozens, of dollars from Michael. Somehow, though, I am glad that I was still a pretty bad player back then. I wish you the best, Michael, and I hope you fold KJ preflop most of the time these days.

Back in March, I mentioned that I was hoping to write up various cognitive biases and how they relate to poker. I'd first like to cover the trait ascription bias, because I think it drives at the heart of one of the first things poker books teach us.

All introductory poker books tell us to profile players at our table. Generally, there are four categories: tight-weak, tight-aggressive, loose-passive, and loose-aggressive. We are often encouraged to make these assessments quickly.

However, the trait ascription bias indicates that people are more complicated than that. For new players, these four categories are a way to begin to learn how to classify the play of others. But, if you are finding, as you advance, that you still have only six words you use to describe someone's play, you have fallen into the trait ascription bias.

The answer, of course, is right there in the “other half” of the bias' definition. If you monitor your own play carefully, you'll see that you have probably fallen into every single one of those categories from time to time. Of course, your natural tendency is in one specific place. (Schoonmaker's Psychology of Poker helps you fill out nice charts to understand yours and others natural tendencies.) But, you have the ability to move around in tendencies based on your mood, the game conditions, or even how much sleep you've had.

Other people are like this, too. Greg (of River Street) once told me that he doesn't like to take notes on players online, but rather focus on “session reads” to see where the players are at the given moment. There is some serious value in this, because it helps Greg avoid the trait ascription bias by not stereotyping players.

I have done reasonably well avoiding it, but in a different way. My online notes usually say things like this: I've seen this player do X in situation Y. In other words, I keep track of what I've seen, but don't ascribe to it any particular classification. You begin to understand tendencies when you observe similar behavior over long periods of time, but at each given moment, you have to assume that it is not necessarily a predictor of future behavior until it is observable as a pattern.

Another piece of this trait attribution puzzle is that people learn. I mentioned a while back that I recently played W.D. heads up. I played my usual hyper-aggressive heads-up style against him which failed to work. He's learned a lot of poker since the last time we sat down. I fell into the trait ascription bias by assuming that his skill had stayed static, when of course it hadn't. It had been months since we played heads-up, and I had actually been a witness to his improvement, as we talk about poker almost daily! Trait attribution bias can be quite strong if it can cause someone to hold the bias in a situation that they have personally witnessed change.

I have always loved games. Card games of all sorts — gin rummy, rummy 500 (the “old lady” version of gin rummy), canasta, hearts, pinochle — I played every last one of them. I could once recite verbatim the rules of every known card game in According to Hoyle.

In high school and college, I got serious about other types of games. I am enough of a geek to admit I played an awful lot of Dungeons and Dragons and similar role playing games. Those have helped my poker immensely, because they are so much more about the psychology of your fellow players and how they are likely to react to your actions.

Games were always a huge part of my life. Even though I admit it's a bit pathetic, the phrase, “it's only a game”, never had any meaning to me. Nothing was ever only a game to me. Games mattered. Playing them correctly and determining the proper way of playing mattered. Winning mattered some, but I never minded if I thought I did the right thing. (I was destine, in other words, to be comfortable with bad beats.)

Of course, by late high school, even though chess was still a big part of my life (admittedly, I was never very good at any game where complete information was available to all players), poker was my preferred game. C.M. (my college poker and chess friend) and I ran the weekly poker games in my college dorm. I (retroactively) call them “$5 buy-in pot limit dealer's choice mixed games&rquo;, but at the time it was just “poker”. I payed for most of my pizza in college with money won in those games; a usual good take was about $15 for an evening — honestly a lot of money for college students in those days.

In graduate school, I got interested some in Diplomacy. Of all the games I've ever played, I think it is most similar to poker. Diplomacy is a board game where the winner is determined by who negotiates best with the other players. There are bluffs (usually called “stabs” in Diplomacy-speak), where you make promises to support another player's armies and then don't. There are moves similar to defensive bets, and over-bets, and slow-plays. Someday, I had actually thought I'd write up a comparison between Diplomacy and poker, but I don't think I ever will. My love for Diplomacy doesn't seem sustainable.

When I took a break from poker recently, I got pretty serious about Diplomacy again. I signed up for a few Internet games. They take a long time to play (usually live games take 7 hours and Internet games, since all communication happens in writing rather than verbal, can take months). I'm still in the two games, but I have all but given up on trying anymore.

I have noticed an old frustration of mine. When there is no external reward (i.e., the money in poker), I find that people don't take the game seriously. And, it has the side-effect of making me want to quit playing. In both my Diplomacy games, two players have quit mid-game. Others had some early losses and gave up rather than play their best. (Comebacks happen often in Diplomacy, so you should never give up.) Others simply lost interest and aren't playing the game fully. Either way, the games turned sour because there was no real competition.

I started to think about why I don't feel this way about poker. The answer is quite obvious, actually. When people don't take poker seriously, I get free money (or, at least, situations with wonderfully positive EV). One of two things happen when you play poker: you are challenged by opponents that you have to work hard to outplay, or you are presented with lots of great EV situations. Either way, you win.

Meanwhile, if you play a game where nothing of value is on the line against opponents who don't take it seriously, what's the point? You get frustrated; well, at least I do. I remember a time in my life when I would get so angry at such a thing — people didn't see the games as important as I did and I couldn't stand it. Since then, two things have happened: (a) I am more likely to realize that I don't have control of other people's actions, so I just quit the game, and (b) I'm usually playing a game (namely, poker) that rewards me no matter what others do. I either get an enjoyable, serious, challenge game, or I get really good EV.

Other games could be like this, I guess. I can imagine a Diplomacy game where the seven players put up money to make a prize pool. Diplomacy even has, as part of its tradition, negotiated settlements (where people agree to end the game with a certain number of players remaining). Those negotiations would be very interesting if there were money to be won. Indeed, I can imagine that people would rediscover the game and how amazing it is if there was serious money in it.

I have to admit, though, a twinge of sadness that games are about money for me now. I guess the truth is that almost all people don't love games the way I do. I'd guess around 1% of the population feels as I do about games. So, odds are that my opponents won't ever have that same love for it, and they won't ever take it as seriously. So, I will usually have to “settle for” playing against players who just don't love the game like I do, and who want to give their money away to better players. It's a nice thing to settle for, but it still leaves some sense of loss.

Going back to Diplomacy reminded me, though, that poker is truly unique. It's an almost magical game of psychology, played for money with cards and chips. No other game really compares to it, because no other game has all these aspects. No other game digs at the deep psychological roots of how people feel about losing and winning money. I could imagine Diplomacy getting the job done in this regard, but I don't think there any high stakes Diplomacy clubs sprouting up soon. It certainly won't be a casino attraction.

So, I'll stick to poker. It's a wonderful game, and while I have a twinge of regret that I won't sit for hours figuring the best opening moves when I've been drawn Austria against an aggressive Turkey, I will still have plenty of game strategy to think about against a nice array of opponents. That is, until the poker bubble bursts.

I am sitting here slowly recovering from the “bad beat” W.D. put on me — not a poker one, but a plane-caught cold he brought back from Asia and shared with the office. The coughing is annoying, so to distract myself, I'm playing micro-limit online poker (so I don't abuse my bankroll while sick) and watching television.

Of course, nearly every hour of the day there's another poker show on televison. Most of them are pointless. Producers have not completely figured out yet: people don't want to watch amatuers play, as if poker were some sort of game show!

Perhaps the worst of these shows is YES Network and Party Poker's Boston vs. New York Poker Challenge. I suppose the worst part about this game to me is that I have played with at least half of the players. As someone who spent a lot of time playing poker in both Boston and NYC during the poker boom, I've run into just about everyone who has spent more than a few weeks at poker games in either city.

And, for about fifteen seconds, my reaction to the show was: “Wow, people I know on TV”. Then, I realized that I didn't really like hanging out with nearly any of them when I played regularly in the home games and clubs of Boston and NYC! Of the half I know, there is only one person on the whole show who has extremely strong poker skills (he's a Boston player previously mentioned in this journal years back, for those who want to hunt). And, while he's not a bad guy, he's not the friendliest of folks — he plays poker to take people's money, not to make friends. The rest, well, their company is not the most high quality out there.

Truth is, sitting here, coughing and watching this awful show like it's a train wreck I can't turn my head from, I am reminded that, in poker, I spend a lot of time with unlikeable people. There's a meme going around the NYC poker blogs that states if you want to be a winning poker player, you have to hang around with losers. It's a fact that is difficult to argue; good players choose good games with weak competition. Weak players are, by definition, losers.

On the other hand, it is not that simple. I was a fish in my River Street NL days. While I might have been a loser (per se) in the game, I was working hard to get better at the game and learn more. I was able to keep even by the final days, because I simply passed chips from the truely terrible players to the very good ones.

I wonder if I felt so strongly and positively about that game and the people in it because I was a little bit the fish. When I play now, and find tables with only two or three strong players out of ten, and the rest mostly jerks who I wouldn't think to spend time with otherwise, I wonder why I am playing. If it's for the money merely, I have to consider if I would stay in a job with a mix of co-workers identical to the nightly line up at your average NYC, Foxwoods, or AC poker game. And online? Heck, I can barely stand to have the chat boxes on at all. The level of homophobic remarks alone are enough to make any reasonable person ill.

Ironically, I had been thinking lately that I want to see if the New York clubs are still as bad in this respect as they were the last few times I went. Of course, I won't discover another River Street hiding under a subway station in downtown Manhattan. But, perhaps there is a community of players that has a good mix, where the losers aren't insufferable. Or, maybe the games will be so lucrative again that I won't care so much.

Whatever the NYC poker scene is now or becomes, I'm sure that I don't want to watch it on TV. If I am in a game myself, I have to watch the other players as I try to think as they do and learn as much as I can about their psychology. But, if they aren't the best players in the world, it's going to be downright boring to do that as a mere spectator. If it wasn't for the coughing fits drowning out weak players explaining how they are “in it to win it”, I am sure I'd have changed the channel by now. Oh, wait, I have a High Stakes Poker episode on TiVo.

One of my readers whom I know in Real Life urged me not to start posting again by making the stereotypical blog apologies for a hiatus. So, as a compromise, I'll keep it short: I apologize to my readers for my (effectively) two month disappearance.

I've learned that once-a-day isn't a sustainable post rate for me. I made it work through March, but as I had a busy April and May, I was left with the feeling of “Well, I can't possibly post every day this week, so why post at all?”. I'll try to be more realistic about what and when I can write.

Besides my non-poker life, which intruded quite a bit the last two months, I also made a big change in the last three months. I made a decision to add an additional major monthly financial expense (about $1,100 each month), and I decided to fund that major expense out of poker.

I did this for a few reasons. First, this expense was very important, and I couldn't really find an easy way to fund it from my regular work income. But, second and more importantly to my poker content readers, I wanted to experiment with having to rely on poker income for something. This is a step toward learning to be a professional in more of a full-time capacity; I have to take these steps if I'm going to be a full-time professional by February 2016.

I have to be honest, however. I have not really enjoyed the experience. Once before in my life, I converted my hobby into a career. While I wouldn't change that, because I like my current career much better than what I used to do, I do recall that my excitement, interest, and focus in the area was greatly reduced when I switched. It became “just a job”. The past few months have been a taste of reliving that experience.

With the pressure to pull in a grand a month, I've found that I can't take a lackadaisical attitude toward poker play. It needs to be scheduled, and I have to think hard about when and where to play games. This means, for example, that live (in person) play is generally a financially bad decision! The collapse of the NYC poker scene (that's a bit of a “Chicken Little exaggeration” there, but I'll write later this week on why I call it that), means that there are virtually no good public games going and the private games are either very small (enthusiasts getting together for small stakes) or very big (famous and infamous local games for very wealthy people and local pros). Plus, the overhead of playing live — be it in Atlantic City, Foxwoods, or even in NYC — is extremely high compared to the easy-to-schedule, great and quick game selection, no-tipping online games.

I also have found myself seeking and playing in games that are much below my level because of the ease (and therefore low-variance) of play. For example, sitting in three $0.50/$1 blind games can easily yield me a few hundred each evening when I win, and the losses usually aren't too terrible (in the $50-$100 range for an evening) when I lose. Since I have this specific target of “a grand a month”, this is much safer way to play than seeking the biggest games that (a) my bankroll can handle and (b) I can beat with my best play. But, playing one table like that is generally higher variance and requires more concentration, leaving me not multi-tabling. The choice quickly becomes a no-brainer: multi-tabling against the truly clueless.

I've also found that my frustration level at losses has gone up more when I am relying on the money with a deadline. I find myself annoyed by a mere $100 of loss, which is so little compared to “normal” session variance that I'm accustom to. (Indeed, it's truly nothing compared to what my limit variance used to be — I'll be writing more about NL vs. limit variance soon). When I started experience this “easy annoyance”, I became worried that it would have a negative impact my ability to play well. Any annoyance with a loss can yield problems in one's game. However, with this monthly goal-focused attitude, that annoyance actually leads me play harder. I was pleasantly surprised by my own reaction here, frankly. But, the fact that I've been playing my best game with minimal mistakes for months straight is probably the only real benefit that I'm getting from this goal.

Poker done this way can really feel a bit empty. It's like playing in a holding pattern, where I am confident I'll scrape together that thousand by the end of the month, but my bankroll will stay at about the same level and I'll just keep grinding it out at the same level. I also hate the fact that live play doesn't make economic and scheduling sense in this scenario. I've always enjoyed playing live, focusing on reads and psychology, than being a pure grinder. But, people grind for a reason: it makes easy, solid cash.

The other negative is that my focus on direct monthly profit has made me feel like journaling time is all but wasted. I enjoy writing here, but from a poker-profit point of view, it's mostly dead time. There's no question that discussing poker here has improved my game, but, if I am able to stick to my best game, there's not much more I need to learn to beat a couple of $0.50/$1 NL HE tables for a grand a month.

Just as they have at every step, these facts makes me question whether I really want to do this professionally. I have years to think about that question, and, of course, at the end of those years, the worst case scenario is that I've spent time getting really good at a life-long hobby that has interested me since childhood. Still, I have to wonder if my first instinct about working toward primarily a poker profession was right: “Do I really want to turn my beloved hobby into ‘just another job’ for the second time in my life?“

I have an interested lay-person's understanding of an area of social psychology known as attribution theory. I took a near-minor in Psychology in college (I left off a few courses due to laziness and over-obsession with taking all the Computer Science electives offered), so I don't have that advanced nor complicated understanding of this sub-field. However, social psychology and addiction were the two areas of psychology that interested me most. Now that I play so much poker, I'm glad I took those courses. Some of the basic principles, particularly those related to cognitive bias and attribution theory, can be applied pretty directly to poker without too deep of an understanding. (Indeed, rereading Shoonmaker's Psychology of Poker is helping me see how these social psychology principles apply to poker. He avoids technical terms to make his work accessible to those who haven't taken an introductory course in social psychology. However, if you get a working understanding of the technical terms before reading his book, you can see where he's applying the principles.)

It's actually kind of amazing how quickly and easily you can start to apply these principles to poker. The wikipedia entry that lists some common cognitive biases reads almost like a laundry list of problems we all have and witness when we play poker! I stumbled across the page doing some poker research this past weekend, and I got inspired to make a journal plan. I'm going to go through each of these cognitive biases and consider carefully how I might have each of these biases in my attitudes toward poker. I'll also consider how I can look for these cognitive biases in others to improve my edge against them. I may even be able to pull out some examples from previous posts, and consider them in light of particular cognitive biases.

Of course, by linking to the page, I've already spoiled some of the thunder. Those of you that click through will read the list and the short descriptions and begin to see quickly how they apply to poker easily. Poker is just one of those contrived, confined social settings that let these psychological concepts play out without too much complexity.

To start, I'll focus on the list available on wikipedia, since the definitions seem reasonable and are easily linkable. I hope that you'll find this series useful and educational to consider. I'll probably go slowly, interspersing these over the coming weeks with my regular types of posts, so that this doesn't become the “cognitive theory poker journal”.

And, after all, I don't want to suddenly “anchor” all of my poker thinking to cognitive bias and attribution theory. That might lead to a choice-supportive bias that I've made a good decision to focus so much on this issue. :)

I read that Barry Greenstein, in his book, has the following quote from Kierkegaard:

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

It's true that so many times, it's clear to everyone who considers a hand after it is done knows how it should have been played. When we disagree, they are almost always marginal decisions. In the moment, though, things aren't so straight forward and it's hard to tell the marginal decision (that's ok either way) from the one that has a clear path. We have to plod through in those moments and make the best decisions we can. The important thing is learning from those decisions for the next time you live a hand forwards. In a meta-game consideration, it too often becomes obvious after the fact that the game was too tough, or that we weren't in the best state of mind when we played, but in the moment it's hard to realize.

I had wanted to read his book anyway, but seeing this in a review of it made me consider getting to it sooner.

My post beginning my series for introductory players got two (1, 2) surprising responses. The basic argument is that educating people about poker draws them into a dangerous world of addictive gambling, populated by seedy people, and that such an introduction can ruin people's lives. My commentators indicate that I should consider the unintended consequences. Indeed, they argue that one might have a duty to divert people away from the poker world.

I think the argument is a seductive one, but is flawed. In fact, there are a dozen other things I could make this same argument about, using the same evidence. So many things in life which are acceptable in moderation have the same sorts of addictive qualities as poker.

I have spent a lot of time (my whole career in fact) around computer programmers and computer networking experts. I've known a few who are addicted — truly addicted in the sense my commentators talk about — to programming, or to cracking network security, or to some other sub-genre of the computer 3l33te world. They have let all relationships in collapse. They have left spouses, or spouses have left them, because they couldn't not help but stay in front of the computer for 20 hours straight out of every 30.

Sex can be the same way. Indeed, there is even Sex Addicts Anonymous, just like there is Gamblers Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. Of course, many people do engage in sex, gambling, drugs, and alcohol and don't become addicted in the DSM-IV sense. As one commenter points out, most people who do these things, in fact, aren't addicted. But, we still have to draw some distinctions between these activities. Introducing a person to any of them is not necessarily the same type of act. Let's consider in this post some very rough distinctions.

The first distinction sets aside substances that have a proven element of direct physical addiction. That's one class in itself. I would say that likely cocaine, heroin, and nicotine are three common substances to go in this class. The body becomes truly dependent, sometimes after the first introduction of the chemical. Another distinction is the group of substances that are a less physically addictive, but do cause serious changes to body chemistry. Some examples here might be alcohol, marijuana, and maybe sex. This class is different still from activities that, while they may generate some physiological responses, do not interact directly with the body chemistry. Of course, these lines aren't fine, nor are there only three classes, but let's just take a rough cut here for the moment.

Now, I agree in regard to the first class of substances, for sure. I think it's wrong to offer people cocaine and heroin. However, even in this class, is it wrong to tell people about its existence, and that it feels amazing? Probably not. It's just information — data about an activity. That in itself can't be wrong. Indeed, if it were wrong, the course I took toward at my Psychology department in college, The Biology and Psychology of Substance Abuse was chock full of information that was “wrong” in this sense.

Now, consider that middle layer in my classification. Well, I have to say, somewhere in there I stop believing that it is wrong to encourage people to engage in the activity. If a waiter offers me a glass of wine, or a website tells me how to brew my own beer, are they harming me? Would they do better to keep me from harm by not giving such information? That seems ludicrous. Indeed, I had a drinking problem in college and have shied away from alcohol ever since then, but imbibe maybe once a year. My co-workers invite me out for drinks much more often than that. Should they stop offering, just in case I fall into a drinking problem again and ruin my life? Would it be there fault if I did?

And, consider sex as another example. It's the example that analogizes nicely with comments about how seedy the poker world is and the caliber of people who sometimes occupy it. Wandering over to the “Casual Encounters” section of Craig's List, you'll find some really seedy people in the sex world, but does that mean “Craig” is culpable for introducing harm and should stop? And should he discontinue the “Women Seeking Men” section too, just in case? What about the people who wrote Joy of Sex? Are they to be shamed because they boosted their egos by writing the book and thereby introduced some people to seedy underworld of sex addiction?

Maybe some poker-playing friend of mine will have a collapse like is suggested in this comment. Maybe no one will. Maybe I'll go out drinking with my co-workers one night and become a serious alcoholic and ruin my life. Maybe someone who didn't know about Craig's List's “Casual Encounters” section will read this post, find it for the first time, and descend into sex addiction. Maybe his wife will call me up to tell me how he caught HIV, ruined their marriage and is almost dead now. Sure, I would feel awful about it if it happened! I'm a human being who doesn't want to see people suffer. But, it's not fair nor necessary to blame myself for those consequences, and the fellow's wife would be wrong to do so. She'd just be looking for somewhere to hang her pain and picking the wrong place.

Yes, the friends I help learn play poker will probably be losing players. But, that doesn't mean it was wrong to give them information. The epistemology of whether or not generally useful technical information should be made available is a field of study where I have some experience. In fact, I studied with a MacArthur award winner who (more or less) invented the idea that information with a didactic component should always by freely available for all who wish to learn. It was even my job once to educate people about that very issue. So, I would say I'm surely prepped to enter this debate about the ethical correctness of the idea that “information wants to be free”. But, the arguments on the other side seem so ludicrous, I don't know if it is worth it.

Finally, there is some truth that sharing information in a pedagogical way is sometimes about the ego of the teacher. Having studied a large sociological culture built around making information available, I can speak with some experience — there is no denying that hubris and ego drives some of it. But, humans are complex beings. There's a bit of ego in being the teacher, but there's also the joy in sharing something you love — something that, might I remind you, a noted psychologist told me would be helpful to make me feel better about my own obsession with my job and the world that surrounded it.

And it did help me. I met one of my best friends (nick_marden) hanging around that seedy poker world. I do believe the poker world can be good for others, too, even if, like so many things in life, it might be bad for others.

My last post discussed a terribly played hand of NL HE at a local NYC club. As I've mentioned, “bad beats” just don't get to me anymore, and I feel fine as soon as I know my money went in correctly and as a favorite. However, I feel awful when I lose a big stack or pot due to my own terrible mistake (or series of them). That's how I felt all night after playing that pot, and even into the next morning as I commuted to work.

I tried to put it out of my mind. I carried out my normal commuting ritual of listening to recorded books on my portable audio player. And, what did I come upon somewhere in Midtown, but the following quote from the Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell:

My motto in any situation is “It could be worse!” “It could be worse!” is how I meet every setback. Though, nothing all that bad has ever happened to me, every time I've ever had my heart broken, or gotten fired or watched an audience member at one of my book signings have a seizure as I stand at the podium trying not to cry, I remind myself: “It could be worse!” In my self-help universe, when things go wrong, I whisper mantras to myself; mantras like “Andersonville”, or “Texas school book depository”.

“Andersonville” is a code-word for “you could be one of the prisoners of war, dying of disease and malnutrition in the worst confederate prison, so just calm down about the movie you wanted to go to being sold out”.

“Texas school book depository” means that having the delivery guy forget the guacamole isn't nearly as bad as being assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald as the blood from your head stains your wife's pink suit.

Though, ever since I went to Salem, I'm keen on “Gallows Hill”. As in, “being stuck in the Boise airport for ten hours, while getting hit on by a divorced man with ‘major financial problems’, on his way to his to his twentieth high school reunion, is irksome but not as dire as swinging by the neck on Salem's Gallows Hill”.

So, if I have gleaned anything useful from reading and day-tripping through the tribulations of the long dead, it's to count my blessings — to try and quit bellyaching — to buck up. Can't you just hear the children's song?

I began to think a lot about how worse it could be. Yes, I know I played the hand that way because my recent legitimate poker losses have left me impatiently looking for a spot to have a big winning session. I probably overplayed my hand because I thought prematurely that this was my moment. I made the classic reading mistake of putting my opponent on the one hand I could beat of many possible hands that fit the betting pattern and tells.

My bankroll sits at near a half of what it was in December, but it is still a full $3,000 more than it was a year ago at this time. I still have enough that I don't need to drop down limits. As Sarah says, “It could be worse!”

As I pondered this, the next track after the quote above started. I was treated to a song by what is probably my favorite band, They Might Be Giants. This wasn't a shuffle accident; I was playing sequentially. TMBG did music for Sarah's audio book. This was They Might Be Giants' rendition of Sarah's “It Could Be Worse!” mantra; their interpretation of the “children's song” she mentioned. (Give a listen.)

So, I'm going to keep those mantras, and this song, in my head at the poker table. I even wrote another stanza of it of my own:

You flopped trips with ten-seven,
And paid off sixes-full.
But, your stack was less than those lost accounts,
in the 80's S&L scandal.

“Gallows Hill”, and “Andersonville”, it could be ...
It could be worse!

My new mantra for bad beats and bad plays: “80's S&L scandal!”!