On the Necessity of Losing

On The Necessity of Losing

I realized recently, after an evening at my local weekly that being good at poker is not what I thought it was.  It is not like hitting a golf ball or throwing a spiral.  There is no muscle memory involved that practice will hone, no flip of the wrist to master or perfect.  Which is not to say that there is no technique per se, only that the technique of good poker is capitalizes on other more subtle skills than I am used to recognizing in the midst of competition.  

Every beginning poker text will tell you that a basic knowledge of card and odds calculation is necessary to be successful at poker, everything else is reading and being read.  These three skills combine to make a competent poker player, but no text can tell you which of these will be the most important.  One skill may be more useful than another depending on the game that you're playing at the time, which is what intrigues me about poker: the fluctuation.  To be good at poker you must not only know the odds, read your opponents tells while mystifying them with your own, you must also be dynamic, able to float carefully on the tense surface of a room without upsetting the balance.  You must observe the motions of others carefully and master your own movements.  It is an effort of constant dynamism to float the room, observing carefully, and understanding which of your talents work best in any given situation.  

That is the beauty of the game.  You can enter any card club in the nation, or sit down at any private table and test yourself.  The doldrum and creaky joints of smoky, beat-down rounders, and the fishy smell of profligate gamblers, desperate for the attention of the cards' twelve blind faces.  It is a fascinating combination of stealth and second-guessing, manifesting an apparent inconclusiveness, all the while hoping you've left enough rope for the challenger to hang themselves with.  Striving to be the perfect mirror, reflecting the degree of the opponent's self-doubt leading them to fold or raise, and occasionally allowing you to take their money.  But only occasionally.

And that is the ultimate lesson of poker: losing; though, to say that there is one kind of losing in poker is as misleading as thinking that there is one way of being good at it.  One may variously posit that there in no losing in poker, only various ways of winning, and that would be just as true.  For me what is fascinating about poker are what I am beginning to discern as the degrees of loss that run from off-white to black.  The first major piece of putting those basic skills to work is learning that all hands are not winnable.  It is the hardest thing to learn that poker is mostly about folding, that act of glorious retreat in the face of the phantom hand, and it has been my most important, and perhaps costly, lesson.  

My first instinct when I began playing poker was to get into as much action as possible, because, as far as I was concerned, every hand is winnable if I played it right.  I had watched enough movies to know that winning big was all about the Long-Shot, so I was all about the Long-Shot, and holding a seven two off-suit is always going to be a Long-Shot.  By Poker-movie-math (From Rounders to Maverick and even Kenny Rogers' The Gambler) the more long-shots I had, the more money I should have been making, and by the number of hands I was playing, I should have been a millionaire quick, or at least a lot better off than I was.  But I wasn't.  Not that I understood any of this at the time.  It was all subliminal assumption based on what experience I'd had with cards (mostly movies), and the clenching in the pit of my stomach that came with a drastic win, usually on the river, which I knew in the movies as winning the long-shot, and have come to know at the table as the bad beat.  The more bad hands I played, the more long-shots I won, the more often I felt the feeling, and the more money I lost.  

As I began to imitate our local rounder, I began to realize how important the aborted loss becomes.  It's the little losses are important in winning in poker, which is really the art of not-losing over long periods of time.  Using the money stacked in my corner for more than drubbing opponents has become what is probably the first step in my understanding of poker.  I learned that folding on cards that didn't fall my way may initially seem cowardly (flying in the face of the Long-Shot and American Movie Logic), but it is far better than following bad money with good when it becomes an ugly, hopeless bluff in the face of heavier cards than I had.  It is a loss, but it is the prudent loss in the quest of success, the kind that experience will inevitably teach, but only realization will recognize and adopt.  Throwing good money after bad for the wrong reasons all of the time, based on repeatedly fallacious assumption, or worse merely the joy of sensation, becomes the worst kind of losing: the kind that doesn't know itself.

Poker is, in some ways, like waiting tables: if you're doing it for the money, you're in it for the wrong reasons.  If you've ever waited tables you know the eternally nagging sensation that your service was far better than the tip you've been left, and the contented server quickly comes to do the job for other reasons, or they're angry all the time.  It's the same with poker: if you're only playing for the money, if the money is the goal rather than the tool, it will consume you, because there is never ever enough, and you can never actually play it right because there is no way to win it all.  Even the satisfaction of the World Series of Poker isn't enough to keep people from coming back, it is in fact the opposite, and draws them (and growing thousands of others) back to where they started.

So now I am playing for other reasons, and the money, already an abstraction of an abstraction (they say the guy who invented money was smart, but the guy who invented chips was a genius), is only the measure of my success, not the end in itself; a tool with which to probe the defenses of others; a language, a gibberish dialect to be deciphered differently for each individual; a maker of respect, discord, self-doubt, arrogance, and embarrassment; one more cipher in a game already heavy with suspicion and mystery, in need of certainty and self control, something that I can let go of so it doesn't drag me under.