Balance

Before a big game, professional athletes generally try to avoid fueling their opponents' fires. NFL players and coaches may inwardly despise their division rivals (especially those with a recent history of running up scores and taking cheap shots at star players), but you'll rarely hear much harsh language in public these days - or at least more rarely than you used to. Notwithstanding some generally good-natured trash talking, they know that anything unusually inflammatory is liable to do more to motivate their opponents than their own team.

The danger of provoking an aggressive response is probably more of a concern for some sports than others, and for some positions than others. You may want your linebackers and defensive linemen fired up (be wary of trap blocking!), but you probably want your cornerbacks and safeties to be a bit more levelheaded. It's not hard to imagine a bit of an adrenaline rush helping with weightlifting, but it may be of less benefit if you're playing chess.

Part of what determines when this kind of extrinsic motivation is helpful is the extent to which unfettered aggression turns out to be a reasonable (if perhaps risky) strategy. Some activities reward a strong emotional response, while others reward levelheadedness. It should be fairly obvious where poker falls on this scale. While directed aggression can occasionally work out, especially in big-bet poker, you don't want to enter a hand with the idea that you're really going to stick it to that dirty so-and-so across the table. Winning players have to avoid going on tilt and making emotional rather than profitable decisions. The best players do tend to be aggressive, but selectively so. You may know whose chips you'd like to win, but you can't will a confrontation with a particular player in a full game. While there is danger in simply playing your cards, the dangers in playing your emotions are certainly greater.

For this reason, one of the most important qualities in a poker player is equanimity - a calm evenness that falls just short of indifference, even under the worst of circumstances. It's balance. While I would never advocate a completely cool, disconnected approach to any game, a player who can react to poker's ups and downs (within a session, month, year, or career) with equanimity has a huge advantage over players who are more ruled by their emotions.

It's easiest to see the advantages of a calm sense of balance when thinking about tells. We would all prefer that our bodies didn't give away information. But part of the reason it's difficult is that our bodies respond to our emotions, which are notoriously hard to control. Pulsating veins and shaky hands announce your excitement, and there's little you can do about that, short of wearing concealing clothing. If you approach the game with a proper sense of balance, you're liable to be genuinely less excited, and that will help a great deal. But you can't just wake up one morning and say to yourself, "Today, I won't let my heartbeat increase when I flop a straight flush." The best solution to that problem is probably just experience. Novice players get excited when winning a pot. More experienced players probably still get excited when they win unusually large pots. But it's a fair guess that if you lived long enough, even winning a major tournament would eventually fail to stir a dramatic response.

Balance figures into poker in other ways, not just emotional balance. Poker involves frequent decisions, at every level, that force you to balance competing considerations. Consider how an intermediate player might allocate time to different tables. One table might offer the best opportunity for profit. Another table might offer a good opportunity to hone skills at a new game. A third table might offer a chance to improve one's skills against more advanced competition. Each of these is a legitimate goal. Neglecting the first will be harmful to one's bankroll. Neglecting the second will leave you one-dimensional. Neglecting the third will keep your game mired at a low level. Maintaining some balance in how you allocate your playing time may help you meet your goals more effectively. That doesn't mean allocating your time evenly among the three. It does mean that although each may proceed at the expense of the others, none of your goals should suffer more than the others (as long as your goals are collectively reasonable).

At a level closer to playing cards, there's a more technical sense in which balance is good. Poor balance is exploitable, especially if you play against relatively astute opponents. If you refuse to play anything but premium starting hands, your opponents will find your hands much easier to read. The pots you win will be smaller and those you lose will be larger. If you fail to balance your legitimate check-raises with bluff check-raises, your opponents will eventually learn to save a few bets. Finding the appropriate balance is, in the abstract, a game theoretical problem that may not be easily solvable. In practice, however, your first-order goal is to make it difficult for your opponents to take advantage. Doing so is mostly a matter of correcting those immediately exploitable failures of balance that may be giving your opponent more help than you'd like.

But all that dry decision-making is a subject for another column. In the meantime, what about trash talk? If an emotional response is less helpful in poker than in football, perhaps we should want to goad our opponents into emotional responses. If equanimity is such a great asset, perhaps we should exploit those players who are a little more emotional. Should we as poker players practice the kind of sniping and needling that football coaches avoid? To be sure, many poker players do, and see it simply as a part of their arsenal. I personally think that being a jerk at the table crosses the line that defines what I'm willing to do for a few chips. On a practical level, I also hate to see the game's popularity suffer when new players are driven away by an antagonistic atmosphere. In that sense, although I consider some measure of equanimity one of my advantages at the table, I'd rather play in an environment where it wasn't a factor. And although someone has to lose in order for me to win (and most likely on some horrendous bad beat, for which I'll feel mildly guilty), I'd still rather no one leave the table unhappy.