You Choose Your Own Path

"I shall be telling this with a sigh,

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference."

- Robert Frost

It's all one long session, this game of poker. Yeah, you can divide it into segments of time, some good and some bad. I often see players take a period of losses and then try to compartmentalize them so that they can present things in the worst possible light as a way of pleading for sympathy. Of course, sympathy is a tough commodity to come by in a poker room. Chances are that if other players feign concern about your bad fortune, you are the livest player in the game and they're trying to keep you there by pretending to be sympathetic.

A poker session is an arbitrary and somewhat fluid unit of time. I have known many players who regulated their games by the hours they played. One ex-Vegas pro I remember used to put in a 40-hour work week – four 10-hour days. He always left on the blind right at the end of the 10th hour, no matter what. I know another player who gets up at noon, does a one-hour workout, and comes in for a five-hour session. There's a whole raft of morning players who come in between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m., hoping to catch the late-night players who are stuck and miss the morning rush hour, and play until noon or 1 p.m. and then head to the golf course. They use time as a way of controlling their games. More commonly, though, I see players who sit at the table with the intention of not leaving until they have won a certain amount of money. And I see many, many players who, once stuck, won't leave until they are unstuck, or have lost all of the money they brought with them.

Poker is a lifelong journey, where you choose your own road. My friend John from Florida says he won't know whether he won or lost until he dies, and then he won't care. (Of course he's one of those who's been known to sit for 40 or 50 hours straight trying to dig out.) Once they've tossed dirt on your sorry bones, it won't matter to you how you did. Even if you decide to quit poker, it may not be over – as you still may decide to come back. Most who leave the game do come back. So, you need to think of the game as a journey that began when you first sat down to play a hand for real money and will end with all of your other life's endeavors.

You want to make your walk through life's woods a pleasant and profitable one. You want your beneficiaries and creditors to say nice things about you at your funeral, telling everyone what a great player you were and that you were a wonderful guy on top of it. Maybe if you are really smart, you will have spent your winnings before checking out. That said, how do we make the journey a blissful one? We do it by visualizing the game as a lifelong endeavor and choosing the paths that serve the entirety of our lives well.

Quitting as a winner or quitting as a loser is fallacious. Quitting when you reach a certain number, whether winning or losing, is just plain wrong. Having a winning session is no more relevant than having a winning minute, hour, or day – or even a winning month or year. Tracking your results and relating them to your play is important, of course. If you find that you're a regular loser, you need to re-evaluate your play and perhaps even decide whether you should give up the game. But the game itself is a decision matrix based on the random distribution of 52 cards, combined with other variables ranging from position to whether your opponent has a headache. I have often said that every hand is unique and every decision is unique, and that is true, but the permutations are indeed something less than infinite. They do, however, tend to exceed the scope of the kind of instantaneous analysis generally required in the heat of battle.

Whether you win or lose this hand, this hour, this session, this day, this month, or even this year is based partially on the quality of your decisions and partially on the innumerable factors that are beyond your control. Your job is to make the best possible decisions in the time frame allowed, in order to maximize the possibility that you will end up a winner.

Deciding whether to stay and play or get up and go should be based on how you feel, how well you are playing, how good the game is (or may become), and your personal life's needs. (Did you promise your daughter you'd take her to the movies this afternoon? If you play another two hours, will that leave you so drained that it will hurt tomorrow's play? Do you have a business or personal appointment? Will you miss your scheduled exercise session?) In short, whether you should stay or not should depend only upon what your edge is in the game and how staying in it will affect your life in other areas. Whether you are stuck or ahead just isn't very relevant. (However, leaving on an up note can be psychologically uplifting, which can affect both your next session and other aspects of your life – but don't use this as an excuse to make a bad decision to stay.)

If you are a favorite, you should stay and play, assuming that it is not creating other problems in your life. If you are a statistical favorite and are winning, chances are that you will win more. If you are a statistical favorite and are losing, chances are that you will win from your present chip position, although not necessarily for the session. If you are outclassed, playing poorly, on tilt, stressed by how you've been running, or a statistical underdog, chances are that you are going to lose from your present chip position. If over the course of your life you keep playing when you're a favorite and quit when you're an underdog, nice things will be said about you at your funeral.

How you are doing in any given session – that is, whether you are winning or losing – is immaterial. How you are playing and the quality of your decisions is material. John from Florida often says to me, "There are two kinds of problems – those you can do something about and those you can't." You cannot do anything about which card the dealer turns, but you can do something about what decisions you make as a player. And those decisions are what will determine whether your life's journey is going to be a profitable one.

Too many players waste their mental energy focusing on the cards that came, how they are doing today, whether they are stuck for the week or the month, and so on. Yes, the cards affect how you are doing in a particular session. In reality, though, they are irrelevant for the lifelong journey. Yes, luck is a major short-term factor in poker. Yes, major breaks can direct a player's career. No, you can't control them. Forget about them and focus on what you can do something about. The road along your life's journey will have its share of potholes and torturous uphill struggles, and sometimes it will be like a smoothly paved superhighway. You'll have lucky streaks and horrible runs. You need to take the bad with the good and not let results change your focus.

You get to choose the path you will travel, and that will, as Robert Frost so eloquently wrote, make all the difference.

Editor's note: Roy Cooke played winning professional poker for 16 years. He is a successful real estate broker/salesperson in Las Vegas – please see his ad below.