Multiple Choice

If you're a consistent winning player, read no further – this column is for the other guys, the ones who make your pleasant existence possible. If you're uncertain which category you fall into, I can only say that if you don't know, you must not keep records, and if you don't keep records, the odds that you're an overall winner are pretty short – so all you bookkeeping-avoiders listen up, too, unless of course you're content with your nonwinning ways, in which case you are hereby dismissed with my warmest wishes to go forth and multiply.

The main subject of this column is a quiz, but before I get to that, let me digress for a moment and talk about a perfectly commonplace thing you see at the poker table that has more relevance to players' results than might at first appear. It's an exchange that sometimes occurs when a player with a big hand gets run down by either (A) an opponent with multiway possibilities who ends up hitting his secondary draw (an open-end straight draw, say, that makes a backdoor flush), or (B) a player whose draw is thin but to whom the pot is offering the right price. In either case, the person who gets run down can respond to the turning over of the winning hand in one of two ways – either he will recognize, despite his disappointment, the value of his opponent's hand … or his emotional involvement will prevent him from viewing it from his opponent's perspective, blinding him from processing it with any sense of objectivity.

We all know how this latter scene goes, having witnessed it so many times. Here are a couple of common variations: "Nice play, genius – runner – runner to hit the flush!" "Whoa, pal, look again, I flopped an open-ender." "Yeah, sure, give me a break!" Or: "Man oh man, didn't your daddy teach you not to draw to an inside straight?" "Hey, pal, you ever hear of pot odds?" "Pot odds, shmot odds – it's an inside straight!" Although ungracious, the first lines of these exchanges are at least psychologically understandable; the dismissive endings that conclude them, however, are pure, unadulterated dysfunction. It's one thing, after all, to momentarily overlook something because of dashed hopes, and quite another to patently refuse to accept what's faceup on the table and staring you square in the kisser.

OK, that said, it's now time for the quiz. It's very brief, only a single question: What's the worst thing you can do at a poker table?

Before you answer, let me clarify that when I say worst thing, I'm not talking about punching out the dealer, or taking the seat next to mine and humming the soundtrack to How Stella Got Her Groove Back – I'm talking about the most costly mistake in terms of dollars and cents. Since the possibilities are extensive, let's limit the choices to a reasonable number. Here we go, then: The most costly mistake you can make at a poker table is:

(A) Be too liberal with your starting-hand requirements;

(B) Fail to sufficiently vary your play;

© Decline to take enough stands against blind and ante stealers;

(D) Make too many stands against blind and ante stealers;

(E) Bluff too much;

(F) Bluff too little; or

(G) None of the above.

Think about it for a minute while I watch the end of my Patriots-Rams Super Bowl video. (What can I say, like straight flushes, there are some things a guy never tires of.) OK, ready with your answer? If you answered (G) None of the above, you are, for my money, absolutely correct, since I sneakily failed to include the worst thing in the menu of choices I gave you. No, the most costly thing you can do at a poker table is be the guy I was talking about a minute ago – the one who, when drawn out on, fails to see his opponent's hand for what it really is. If you think that's overstating it – if you think that such a reaction is just an unfortunate but relatively inconsequential response that takes a back seat to other more expensive errors – allow me to explain why it undeniably, unquestionably, irrefutably deserves the crown. It has nothing whatsoever to do with etiquette or bad manners, or any of the other things sometimes tackled in this column – no, no, this is strictly a bottom-line-balance-sheet affair. The reason it's a worse mistake than any of the others is that you can be guilty, to some degree, of any of the profit-reducing errors mentioned above and still emerge an overall winning player – but it is absolutely impossible to live in denial and be anything but a consistent loser.

This leads us to the ironic fact that the biggest factor in most losing players' inability to win is, quite simply, their inability to lose – that is to say, their emotional inability to successfully process losing. Like it or not, it's virtually impossible to be a consistent winner without a firm understanding of the hows and whys of losing, a process that involves identifying its many forms and causes, and anticipating their occurrence. This is vitally important, because if you can't differentiate between garden variety "form losses" and the truly brutal beats, your vision of reality will be skewed and you'll respond to perfectly normal statistical events by casting yourself in the role of victim. It's precisely the sort of denial manifested in the exchanges cited above, in which players literally turn away from the hands that beat them, refusing to see any legitimate value that would contradict their personal myth of unluckiness. If you have this tendency – if you're more concerned with confirming your script of woe than processing information that's right in front of you – perspective will continue to elude you, and you'll never come to grips with the fact that the emotional challenges eating you up are the very same challenges everyone else at the table has to confront as well. Unfortunately, for many people this democratic truth is a very unsettling idea, suggesting as it does that the difference between the winners and the losers is not merely the endless run of bad luck to which the latter continually attribute their losses, but that the game involves emotional challenges and discipline for which their competition may be better equipped than they are. And who wants to face the fact that their opponents are playing smarter and tougher – when it's so emotionally convenient to believe they're just luckier?

I'll answer that question: people with the internal fortitude to start seeing things as they really are, and the determination to do whatever it takes to make the transition from losing to winning – that's who. Are you one of them? I hope so, because when I said at the top that this column wasn't for winners, I didn't mean to suggest it was for losers, but for future winners – like you.