Plato, Pain and Poker

Pain and pleasure are funny things. No one likes pain and everyone (as far as I know) likes pleasure, but you really can't have one without the other. Think about your right ankle for a minute. It feels fine (hopefully), but its not really giving you pleasure. However, if it was shackled for days with a metal chain that was digging into your skin you'd be feeling pain. When the shackle was taken off you'd feel incredible pleasure. This situation is how Plato starts out his famous work known as The Last Days of Socrates. Socrates makes a very convincing case that pleasure can not really exist without pain. Its the contrast, not the state itself that creates pleasure and its brother, happiness.

It seems to me that Plato must have played poker (or the Greek equivalent). We poker players feel a lot of pain - especially in tournaments. We get so close only to lose to a weak player who makes a bad play so many times. We enter a tournament and lose. We enter another tournament and lose again. But if you play well and don't give up, sooner or later you're going to go deep and eventually win. When that happens, the pleasure is far greater than all that pain we experienced up to that point. Its ecstasy. Its like the gods love us. We feel at one with the universe. OK, maybe that's a bit much. But the point is that all that hardship allows us to feel this high degree of happiness we couldn't otherwise experience.

The same thing occurs with entrepreneurs. You fork out lots of money for a long time to create and build a business. For the longest time you get nothing in return. Roadblocks. Fighting entrenched competition. Fear of losing everything. It ain't for everyone. Its tough. Its stressful. But when you finally get those first customers. You get some positive feedback. You keep improving your product or service, flashes of success suddenly appear. Its a great feeling. I've known one successful entrepreneur who told me, the most important thing in starting a business is persistence. Don't give up. Keep trying to improve your product or service and in the end, you'll be successful. Too many people throw in the towel too early. Don't be afraid of pain. In the end, it's the only way you can feel the triumph of success on a whole other plane.

Stick with it, my friend, and everything will be alright.

Making the Final Table

There is no greater feeling than making the final table of a poker tournament. Its the result of hours and hours of play. Usually you've played in numerous other tournaments struggling to make the money and more often getting eliminated on some bad beat of some kind. But when you've finally made a final table, all that pain is transformed into a wonderful bliss of the spirit.

So now that you've made it, what is the best course of action. The first thing I'd say to keep in mind is forget about all those televised final tables that you've seen on TV. Players are making herculean calls with A4 or 33 and sucking out. Others are making gigantic bluffs against big stacks. etc. Remember that they are only showing selective (usually wild) hands that are not the bread and butter of success.

The key things that I cover in my courses on playing the final table are (1) your chip stack, (2) your relative position, (3) the blind structure, (4) your goals, and (5) your opponents profile.

On top of these factors, you must keep in mind that the cards are going to dictate much (not all) of the action and you must continue to let the tournament come to you. The exception to this rule is if you are playing a short stack. If you only have 7 big blinds or less, be ready to gamble. So lets talk about short stack play first.

Before you sit down be sure to carefully analyze the chip stack situation. If you are ninth (last) in chips, think in terms of having nothing to lose. Most of the time the final results closely mirror the chip stack proportions. That is, the chip leader is most likely to win and the ninth place player (you in this case) is most likely to finish 9th. Realize that if you are able to move up three or four notches, you did a great job.

As a consequence, you do not have the luxury of sitting back and waiting for AA or KK. You gotta play hard while you still have some fold equity. If you win without a caller you can add as much as 25% to your stack and that gets leveraged substantially if you double up in subsequent hands. So you are not only looking to get a playable hand, you are also looking to find a good opportunity to get your money in.

Here are the basics. Don't look to do battle with anyone who has raised ahead of you, unless you have a premium hand. The only exception to this is if you are in the blinds or on the button and you have an ace or king and a loose player raises in late position. There is a good chance that you are ahead. If he decides to gamble and call and you are indeed ahead, that's fine. But there is a good chance that he'll fold and give you a nice pot uncontested - and that's even better.

But mostly you are looking to move in - all in - if you are folded around to and there are four or less players left to act. In this case you may not even choose to look at your cards at all (just pretend to) because if you do get called, the most likely scenario is that your cards are live and you're only a 60/40 dog. You're going to have to gamble. Get that into your head. The absolute worst thing you could do is to get blinded off. The number one rule of short stack play is: Thou shalt not get blinded off. Remember that your opponents don't know what you have and a big bet to them immediately means strength. It might surprise you to see what people will fold in these situations. After all, they want to move up the pay scale as well. Amateurs will tend to tighten up and experienced players are not going to want to risk flop, turn and river.

So these are the very basics. In my course, I get into the nitty gritty in detail. But whatever happens, enjoy the experience. It may be a long time before you make another final table.

I'll talk about playing larger stacks in later posts. I now you can't wait for that.

LIVE and FREE Poker Course Previews

An important announcement regarding my poker courses at PokerSlamU.com.

Drum roll please . . . . . . . . . . . You can now access any or all of our courses for FREE! Not the whole course of course, but a free preview. It took a lot of quality programming from my webmaster, but its done and up and running.

I'd greatly appreciate feedback as to any aspect of the courses, the web site or the registration system. That's how you improve. Keep taking advice and making it better and better, just like poker skills.

That's all. Just a quick announcement to those who are interested. Peace.

Poker Skills/Life Skills

I know poker is just a card game to most people, but to the real enthusiast, poker skills are some of the most useful skills one can attain. I'm not really sure why this particular game mirrors the skills one needs in life better than all the others, but it does.

First of all, to be a fine poker player you can't worry about the last hand. No matter how bad that beat was, just as no matter how unfairly you were treated in the office. That was then and it, in a sense, no longer matters. If you dwell on the past. If you let the past effect your judgment going forward, you will be weakened. We call it "tilting." And it happens all the time. One bad beat. Another bad call. Leads to an overaggressive play. Before you know it, ipso facto, your broke or felted as we say in the biz.

At the same time, you can't be thinking about future hands. You may be down and you want to get back to, at least even, but if you force the action, you'll lose that ephemeral feel for the table. You acted before you developed the proper table image. Unless you get lucky, and sometimes you do get rewarded for making a bad play, you are going to lose. Its all about patience (especially in tournaments). Its all about picking the precisely best moment to do the precisely correct play. Its a surer bet and, in the long run, will lead to success.

In poker, you are forced to consider the present over all other time phases. It isn't easy. You want to get that win. You want to be in the mix, not on the sidelines. But your time will come. As the old joke goes; "Patience, Jackass, patience."

The other overwhelming concept about poker that I love is that it boils down our economic life to the bare essentials. I know something you don't know. You know something I don't know. I need to try to figure out what you know, before you do it to me. The overriding key situation is when we both got ziltch. In that case, the one who shows some testicular fortitude, some, but not too much, well thought out aggression, will win. You win those pots, or at least win most of those pots, and you'll make a lot of money playing poker. You better be one confident son of a bitch to play my game.

The game is me against you. Mano a mano. Bjorn against Utah. Bring on the cards. I'm gonna kick your ass.