Ten Additional Keys to Success

Almost a decade ago, in one of my earliest columns for Card Player entitled "Ten Keys to Success," I suggested that many of the ideas and concepts appearing in self-help books also had applicability at the poker table. These books, as well as seminars aimed at teaching people how to be winners in business, in love, and in their personal lives, can go a long way toward making one a better poker player, too. These were the 10 principles I selected:

1. Be Aware of Your Own Strengths and Weaknesses: Play your best game and play within the confines of your own comfort zone. In other words, know yourself, and do what you do well.

2. You're Responsible: What you achieve is the product of your own play. Until a player accepts accountability for the results he achieves, he won't have sufficient self-discipline to guarantee success.

3. Think About the Game: Keep up with the poker literature, and think about the game at the table and when you're away from it. Analyze hands you've seen and decide if you would have played them differently. Think, analyze, modify your game, and repeat as needed.

4. Have a Plan: What is your goal as a poker player? How much are you willing to risk? You need a definitive plan for your poker play. Remember, if you don't have your own agenda, you are likely to wind up a part of someone else's!

5. Set Deadlines: If you don't place your goals and objectives in a time frame, they'll seldom, if ever, be achieved.

6. Be Realistic: Start with challenging but reachable goals. Once you achieve them, you can set the next, more difficult, goal. You can't count on winning the World Series of Poker right out of the box, but you can set achievable goals that make you stretch to reach them.

7. Expect Difficulties: You will succumb to all of your flaws as a poker player during the period you are struggling, growing, and reaching for a higher skill level. Every top-notch player struggled to reach the level of success he achieved, and you're going to have to do the same. Golf videos won't turn you into Tiger Woods, chess monographs won't turn you into Gary Kasparov, and Super/System will not turn you into Doyle Brunson. The best poker books will teach you how to talk the talk. You'll have to learn to walk the walk on your own!

8. Build on Small Accomplishments: If you're not a winning player today, but you study hard, put into practice what you read, and integrate these strategies into your own style of play, you'll find yourself improving. Success builds upon itself, so don't let small setbacks put you on tilt. If you play poorly today, correct it next time, and keep moving forward.

9. Persist: You must sustain. The saying "Ninety percent of success is just showing up" has a lot of validity. You need to keep playing, practicing, and building on each small success. Each time you reach one of your goals, savor the moment, but only briefly. Then, set new goals. If you do not consistently move forward with your own game, you are probably moving backward in relation to your opponents.

10. Have Fun: Enjoy yourself. After all, your poker time is discretionary. If you cannot enjoy yourself when you play, perhaps you should find another outlet for your time and money.

Those 10 principles are pretty much evergreens, as they say in the journalism biz, as good today as they were yesterday, and as good tomorrow as they are right now. But instead of picking 10 more examples from self-help books, I went to the poetry of William Butler Yeats to find 10 quotes that fit quite well in the world of poker. They're numbered 11-20.

11. "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" Among School Children (1928) - Gold chains, cool sunglasses, and the ability to neatly riffle 20 chips without any effort whatsoever does not a poker player make. It may make one look like a poker player, but talking the talk and walking the walk are entirely different things. If you're relatively new to casino poker, be sure the players you choose as role models know their stuff. It's admittedly tough to assess someone's competence when even the pretenders may know more than you do at this juncture, but you have to learn to separate wheat from chaff, and then begin to model the play of the best cardsmiths you can find. One way to accomplish this is to read and study, then look for players whose games seem built on the principles you've learned in books from credible authors. There's a "picking yourself up by your bootstraps" quality to this sort of thing, but people do it all the time - inside and outside of poker.

12. "Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart." The Circus Animals' Desertion (1939) - Yeats was an old man when he wrote these words, and may even have sensed that his death was imminent. Although he struggled with writers' block toward the end of his career, he never gave up. Instead of going quietly into the night, he forced his mind through years of work to the very roots of his beliefs. Once there, he was able to produce poetry again, and kept at it until the very end. The same is true in poker. If you play long enough, you will have protracted losing streaks, times when nothing you do goes right, and a crisis of confidence that's almost sure to follow. This is the time to go back to basics. Play big hands and play them strongly; fold weak ones and get away from potentially big hands that are reduced to rubble by a bad flop. Play correctly, stay the course, and at the end of the day, you'll find that your results will approximate your expectation. Going back to basics is not always fun and is seldom easy. But in poetry, as in poker and in life itself, journeys to the "… foul rag and bone shop of the heart" are often necessary and frequently recuperative.

13. "The intellect of man is forced to choose, perfection of the life, or of the work." Coole Park and Ballylee, 1932 (1933) - How much of a normal life are you willing to give up to become an excellent poker player? The very best live, eat, breathe, and sleep poker in spite of some disastrous ramifications on their lives outside of the cardroom. That's not to say you can't have a normal life and play poker, too; it's just that it's difficult, and for many, it's impossible. How much of yourself you decide to give to the game is your choice, of course. No one else can make it for you. But a poker lifestyle is not an easy one. Be forewarned.

14. "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart." Easter, 1916 (1921) - These lines were written following the failed and oft romanticized Easter Rebellion of 1916, and immediately prior to the successful war in 1922 that led to Ireland's independence from England and propelled Yeats into a second career as a senator. The poker application is direct and obvious. While there are many regular players who never seem to enjoy themselves, those who do well seem to follow that old admonition of Roy West: "Play happy, or don't play at all."

15. "The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time." In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markiewicz (1933) - Every year, it seems, there are players who seem to set the poker world ablaze. Their successes dazzle the casual viewer and we rush to emulate them, but just as we do, they fade into primordial mists. The only results that matter in poker are those we achieve in the long run. And the long run is a very long time coming.

16. "I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore … I hear it in the deep heart's core." The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1893) - This is one of many Yeats poems that's been set to music and recorded by a number of artists. Like the "Now that my ladder's gone … " quote, this is another admonition in which Yeats tells us to dig deep, listen carefully, go back to basics, and return to our roots to find our way to the heart and the core of the matter. Just like golfers and baseball players who tear their swings apart periodically and build them back up again, successful poker players don't just add building blocks of know-how to their game. Sometimes it's necessary to tear the entire house down and reconstruct it brick by brick. And that's true regardless of whether it's done at a green felt table or on the lake isle of Innisfree.

17. "We had fed the heart on fantasies. The heart's grown brutal from the fare." Meditations in Time of Civil War (1928) - Your heart will grow brutal from fantasy fare, too, if you don't put forth the effort required to separate myth from reality at the poker table. This shouldn't be such a big deal, not really, but it is. Look at all the players around you who blame the dealer for their bad luck, who ask for a deck change as though those little plastic playing cards were infused with intelligence, and who have a vendetta mentality aimed at extracting revenge on you and you only. If you waste your time worrying about stuff like this, or spend your time thinking about why none of your flush draws materialized the last time you played, you're thinking about the wrong things - and any efforts you expend in this area will just give you a false sense of security. And when none of it works - and it won't, at least in the long run - your heart, your game, and your bankroll will have grown brutal, too.

18. "A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love." The Pity of Love (1893) - Sometimes we care too much, both in life and in poker, and when it all runs straight down, we hurt. This is "the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat" all over again. It's one of the reasons we play the game. Winning is wonderful. Losing hurts. And although every credible expert tells you to just make good decisions and forget about the results - they'll take care of themselves in the long run - every credible expert experiences the same elation and the same pain you do. We just don't give in to it - or we try not to.

19. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." The Second Coming (1921) - If Yeats was writing these words today, he might have had gaming authors in mind. Yes, even among my esteemed colleagues, false prophets abound. Be careful whom you believe. The road to success is not easy and there are no magic bullets you can take that will make you an expert poker player overnight. And if you're thinking of playing casino table games like craps and baccarat instead of poker, there's nothing you can ever do to make yourself a winning player. Some games just can't be beaten. And while there are some wagers available at these games that are better than others, there is nothing you can do, outside of getting lucky, to overcome the built-in house edge. If anyone tells you otherwise, the con job isn't far behind. The next time someone wants to sell you a "guaranteed system," you might want to think of another applicable line taken from this same poem: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?"

20. "In dreams begins responsibility." Responsibilities (1914) - The next time you're thinking seriously about blaming the cards, the dealer, or anyone but yourself for your results at the poker table, think about this instead. 'Nuff said.

Visit my web site at www.loukrieger.com. Poker for Dummies and my newest book, Gambling for Dummies, are available at major bookstores everywhere, and all of my books are available online at www.ConJelCo.com and www.Amazon.com.