Poker Thoughts

I play a very important role in the poker ecosystem. I'm good enough to win at the local level, gathering up thousands of dollars which I then lose to real poker players on my periodic trips to big  tournaments. I've never gone back through my yearly spreadsheets to do this calculation, but I think I am down lifetime despite being up at least 20 grand when I play within 20 miles of my house. I won the Washington State No-Limit Hold 'Em championship one year, but I have failed to cash in either of my 2 World Poker Tour events. I win way more than my fair share of the Sunday morning tournaments at Diamond Lil's, but the only cash I've won in World Series bracelet events is $1000 from a save when I was heads-up at the first table of a shoot-out event. Last year I got a nice bonus from work so I treated myself to a seat in the Main Event, but I only lasted 5 hands because my pocket aces got cracked by pocket sixes and I accidentally got myself pot-stuck before I could figure it out.

Malcolm Gladwell's latest book (which is quite good) is called Outliers and in it he offers up the theory that to be truly good at something, you need to put in 10,000 hours to learn it. While there are certainly some elements of luck and raw skill required for success, he's pretty squarely on the nurture / hard-work side of the spectrum and he defends his position well (better than the mediocre logic of Blink and esp. Tipping Point, anyway). I have not played 10,000 hours of poker and I'm not sure I want to. I do think I have the raw skills required to be at least good and maybe even very good at the game. However, I get bored by endless cash games and I also get frustrated by the high amount of variance in poker. In Magic, good players have a bigger edge over bad ones. I think the randomness, and thus the balance between skill and luck, is dialed in to a perfect spot and that's why to this day I still think Magic is the best strategy game in the world. You can't win as much money at Magic as you can at poker, but if we all got together and wanted to crown the King Thinking Gamer, we wouldn't play Hold Em ... we'd draft.

Anyway, I play poker probably once or twice a month and usually in tournaments of some kind. The extra structure and the inevitable crowning of one winner appeals to my competitive side way more than trying to eke out a few more big blinds. Between watching this season of High Stakes poker and following Dave Williams on Twitter, I've started eyeing this years WSOP schedule. They've got a $1,000 "Stimulus Special" scheduled for the first weekend (May 30-June 2) that should draw like 5000 people. I'm certainly not going to play the Main Event in my current unemployed condition, but $1,000 is much more manageable (also known as win-able locally). Tonight did not help matters, though. I played some $2 / $5 No Limit at the new Snowqualmie casino and I correctly identified and picked off the action player's all-in semi-bluff on the flop. However, his flush got there on the river to win the $700 pot and I ended the night down about that much. I try to tell myself that all I can control is whether I make good decisions, but it's tough emotionally when I also know I simply don't play enough hands to actually get to the long run.

I do watch a fair amount of poker on TV, which I find to be a more compelling, more gamer-friendly version of reality TV. It's got a recurring cast of characters and it's got interesting conflicts between them. Add in the rooting interest and the smug feeling of superiority that comes from always being able to see everyone's hole cards and that's enough to make it onto my DVR. I stopped watching the World Poker Tour once the final tables started filling up with almost entirely random players, but I find High Stakes Poker to be must-see TV. Tom Dwan has been extremely impressive this season. This hand in particular is worth 5 minutes if you enjoy poker at all. Not only does he win the hand, but he also wins a side-bet on which of his opponents actually had the best hand! In a later show he gets Greenstein to go all-in as a 3 to 1 dog. Greenstein sucks out to win over $500k, but Dwan just shrugs it off, rebuys, and later takes a $900,000 pot off of Greenstein.

Ok, I think I'm done steaming. Time to go to bed now ...
 

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