We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us - Part II

At the poker table, we are usually our own worst enemy, and we've been called on it by Pogo the Possum, that well-known philosopher and denizen of the Okefenokee Swamp, the primary character of the late Walt Kelly's classic comic strip that bore his name. In the first installment of this two-part series, I talked about the perils of falling in love with a hand, getting lucky with it, and being forever seduced into playing this same hand by a combination of one's own blind, dumb luck and penchant for seeing only what we want to see instead of what's really there. Here, we'll wind it up by looking at how some players will copy anyone who manages to win a hand, regardless of the hand he wins with, as well as the penchant many players have for lashing out at everyone except themselves in a desperate unwillingness to accept responsibility for their own flawed decisions.

If He Did it, So Can I: To some people, bad plays are an incredibly powerful advertisement for themselves. I can't count the number of times I've seen someone win a pot with a trashy hand like 10-3, and then see another player put his money on similar cards because he saw someone else win with it. Thinking players realize that the result of any given hand is no way to assess whether it was played correctly or not. You can do everything right and someone can still draw out on you. But that's poker, and in the end, better players benefit from poor decisions made by those who have a tendency to gear their style to whatever occurred recently, regardless of whether it was just some fluky outcome determined by the random turn of a card.

Another manifestation of this sort of thing happens when a player gets a big pair snapped off and says something like, "I can't win with aces, so I'm gonna play 9-7." And, he does. For about five or six hands, this player is on tilt in a big way, and he's ready, willing, able, and eager to toss his money into the pot on any two cards that come along.

These sorts of failings seem to befuddle players who take an inordinately short view of poker. They are swayed, moved, and even manipulated by what's happened lately. But poker is a long game, and results can be both skewed and deceiving when viewed in the short run. If this shortcoming hits home, you'll probably have to muster up the willpower never to stray from what you know to be appropriate starting standards regardless of how many players are winning pots with hands like J-6.

Not Me, Not Me: "I am justified." "I am not guilty." "It was not my fault." "Change the deck." "Blame the dealer." "These games are fixed." "This imbecile always wins; why can't I?" "Why, dear God, does this always happen to me?" "If not for bad luck, I wouldn't have any luck at all." "I just can't win with aces; from now on, I'm gonna start raising with hands like J-9 and 7-6."

Does this sound like you? Have you ever thrown cards, pounded the table and shouted out something like that, or even turned inward and said it to yourself? You know what you're doing here, don't you? Whenever you utter any of these or dozens of other similar statements that reflect your frustration, you're abandoning your locus of control over the very game you're playing. You are, in essence, walking away from whatever ability you have to take the right steps and make the right plays – the kinds of things you have to do to be a winning poker player in the long run.

It's tough making do in life or in poker when our first instinct is to deny accountability and blame others for anything and everything we don't like. It's all too easily done, and all too many of us do it in poker and in life. When we look outside ourselves for a place to point the finger, blaming forces beyond our control is often easier than taking responsibility for our own actions and holding ourselves accountable for the results we achieve.

You flopped a flush draw that didn't pan out? You flopped six or seven of them in a row that never came to fruition? Whom should you blame? The dealer, the cards, the casino itself? All of them make good targets. After all, they can't prove they didn't do it.

But that's inconsequential. You're the poker player, the man at the switch, the engineer driving the train, the pilot, the guy with the compass plotting the course. And if you wind up somewhere you'd rather not be, there are only two things that could have gone wrong. You might have screwed things up, or it might not be anyone's fault at all. And where the turn of a card is concerned, neither you nor anyone else has any control over that as long as the game is on the up and up.

If you've made all the right decisions, you can absolve yourself of blame. After all, whenever the pot odds exceed the odds against making your hand, calling – or even raising – is the right decision regardless of whether you win or lose that particular hand. If you play that same hand over and over again, thousands of times, and you will if you play poker long enough, you'll come out ahead. The simple truth is that it doesn't matter at all whether you win or lose any particular encounter. After all, you'll win some and lose others. What does matter is that whenever the ratio of pot size to the bet you've been asked to call exceeds the odds against making your hand, taking a card off the deck is invariably the right thing to do and will pay off in the long run.

If you lose this particular time, or even the next five or six times in a row, it's not anyone's fault. Poker has an element of chance ingrained in every part of the game, and neither you nor I can change that, and it does no good to blame anyone for the momentary bad fortune dictated by the turn of a card.

What if you play a weak hand but flop two pair and think you hold a winner, only to find out that your opponent flopped a set, or made a straight or flush on a later betting round and beat you out of a pretty good-sized pot? What do you do then? It's still not the dealer's fault. Tearing the cards into little pieces won't do any good, either. Cards are just paper or plastic; they don't think, they don't make friends, and they seldom make enemies. They don't have minds of their own and they aren't conspiring to get you. Railing against randomness does about as much good as whistling by a graveyard. The casino has no interest in whether you win or lose, either; its only concern is that you have a good experience and continue playing, so that you'll contribute your share of the rake or time collection charges.

When you deny responsibility for the results you achieve, it's not just a case of placing blame where it does not belong; it's more insidious than that. If you blame forces outside yourself for your bad luck, you won't go through the process of self-examination that's so critical in correcting any flaws or leaks in your poker game. In addition, you'll waste energy in anger directed at innocent sources, energy you could have put to better use by analyzing and correcting errors in your play.

This is so critical, it's surprising that so many players miss the point entirely. Blaming forces outside yourself is a way of blinding yourself to the possibilities that you might have something to do with your poor results. If you refuse to look at yourself as a possible source of error or leakage in your game, how can you possibly correct any flaws in your game when you've turned a blind eye to them?

You can't. As a result, you have a leak in your game that you refuse to see. If you don't see your own flaws, if you refuse to engage in self-analysis, you'll never improve. You will persist in making the same errors day after day, week after week, and year after miserable year. You'll also persist in parting with money you really don't have to lose, and what's worse, you'll have no idea why. The best you'll be able to come up with is a dealer or deck of cards as the scapegoat. You might feel better for the moment, but your wallet won't feel better at all.

Shrug Like Atlas: If you don't know what to do, and can't decide whether you're the one to blame or it's only the randomness of cards falling, do yourself a favor and assume that you're the problem. Even if you're uncertain about the identity of the guilty party, at least this assumption leads down the path to corrective action. You can start examining your own game, breaking it down and tearing it apart where necessary in order to take steps to make changes and improve your play. Any other assumption leaves you twisting in the wind, blaming everybody but yourself for your own shortcomings.

Poker's not rocket science. It's a game that can be taught and it can be learned, and if you don't know enough to make yourself a long-term winning player, there are really only two choices open to you: You can always decide that playing is so much fun that it doesn't make a difference whether you win or lose as long as your losses are within tolerable limits. But if losing leaves a dusty, bitter aftertaste in your mouth, and it won't go away regardless of how you try to rationalize it, it's time to cowboy up and learn to play better. There are books, teachers, tapes, and a variety of Internet resources that you can use to improve your poker game. Even reading a collection of old Pogo cartoons will improve your outlook. After all, when we're our own worst enemy, all we have to do is decide not to put up with our shortcomings and foibles any longer, and make some changes. It's that simple – really.

Raise your game with Lou Krieger at www.loukrieger.com. His book Winning Omaha/8 Poker is available at www.CardPlayer.com. To read Part I of this series, go to www.CardPlayer.com.