Great Expectations

A few days after Christmas, I was sitting in a stud game when a hand came down in which the player sitting next to me called a bet on seventh street with a pair of aces. He made the call against a single opponent whose two pair on board were available for all the world to see. Considering that his head had been buried in a book throughout much of the hand (and most of his session), the oversight wasn't all that surprising, but there was a certain element of irony to the fact that the book distracting him from the business at hand was The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.



Although I've never read the book, I strongly suspect that highly effective people, finding themselves in poker games, make it one of their habits to take a peek at the cards. But enough from the peanut gallery. As his opponent stacked his chips, my page-turning neighbor casually remarked – without any irony whatsoever – that the book had been a Christmas gift, and one he'd been happy to receive, as it was his fervent hope that the ideas it contained would assist him in the pursuit of his primary resolution for the New Year – that's right, you guessed it, the improvement of his poker game.



A weaker man, upon hearing this, might have yielded to temptation and dryly observed that the seventh-street payoff was actually less in keeping with New Year tradition than with the Christmas sentiment that it's better to give than to receive, but strong-willed fellow that I am, I simply nodded and smiled, thereby getting the jump on a New Year's resolution of my own.



A little while later, I took a seat in a hold'em game at which the resolution theme would come up once more. A player who'd been running hot, amassing a mountain of chips in the process, had pocket kings and pocket aces cracked by rags on consecutive hands, prompting a short circuit that would reduce his mountain to a molehill in stunningly quick fashion. For the next half-hour, he found reasons to play any two cards he was dealt, and the hills were alive with every variation of "Hey, I can't win with good cards," ever sounded by man. When a dealer change finally produced a momentary lull in the action, and he was forced to survey the damage, he shook his head sadly and muttered: "Three more days. Three more days until the new year, and then I can stop doing this."



I wish him luck with his resolution, and extend best wishes to the book-loving stud player, as well. That said, I frankly don't think much of their chances. Reading books to improve your game is a splendid idea, but the book won't do the work for you. And while behavioral tendencies such as going on tilt can be altered, it will never happen by itself. Hanging a new calendar on the wall is not going to get the job done.



Going on tilt is a self-destructive behavior; if it comes with any silver lining at all, it's that its causes, unlike those of many destructive patterns, are hardly subtle or elusive. They're right there in plain sight, easily recognized at the moment of occurrence, even by the tilter himself. Indeed, it's not the least bit uncommon for a player suffering a brutal beat to come right out and announce to the table that he's now "officially on tilt," – as if the impending meltdown could be rationalized simply by being the first to acknowledge it.



For all their recognizability, however, these triggers nevertheless manage much of the time to do their dastardly work. Trying to white-knuckle your way through such moments offers a lower chance of success than learning to think of them in different terms. Thus, we come to the term for today: "Expectation."



Winning players view cards and situations with various expectations. Nonwinners do too, but with a fundamental difference. The winner values the hands he does not because of conventional wisdom or because they're aesthetically pleasing, but because analysis and experience have taught him which hands, in which situations, have positive expectations, and which don't. Some hands have so-so expectations, some have lousy ones, and some are downright terrific. But lousy, good, or great, the expectation is measured in the long term, because even those hands we think of as monsters will fail a substantial percentage of the time.



The nonwinning player knows all of this, at least on some level, but that knowledge is trumped by the emotional expectation he projects onto each individual incarnation of these positive-expectation hands. This emotional attachment is all about the here and now: these pocket aces, now, at 4:30, here on table 11. No consolation is derived from the bigger picture; the attachment is too immediate and intense for that. It's a dangerous mindset to have when those aces crash and burn (as inevitably they sometimes will), for it turns minor setbacks into crushing blows, punches to the gut that severely weaken the ability to resist the self-destructive impulses that may follow.



Many poker players invest quite a bit of time and money in the cardroom. Unfortunately, it's an investment too often undermined by the emotional one that accompanies it. How much healthier (and more profitable) might it be to approach the cards – along with the time and money invested in playing them – with the same respect and mindset with which you'd approach any other investment. Suppose, for example, you were to think of your big starting hands as the blue-chip stocks that essentially they are. To do so would be to understand that when you get your money in with pocket aces, you're not merely investing in the value of those two aces, but the value of pocket aces in general, a minicorporation with excellent earnings potential, a good P/E ratio, and a proven track record. Do blue-chip stocks go up every day? Of course not, not even in a bull market; but the security of your investment doesn't require them to do so, any more than the overall profitability of your pocket aces will be negated by individual negative outcomes. In fact, those negative outcomes are baked into the share price; they're part of the positive equation. What will reduce their profitability – and threaten the security of your investment – is to respond to those individual negative outcomes by stuffing your portfolio with every J-6, 10-7, and ace-rag you can get your hands on – in a emotionally misguided effort to get even right now, before the closing bell sounds on today's session.



The average poker player is a lifetime loser. And yet, the average player is neither a maniac nor a fool. His biggest enemy may not be his game, but the tendency to get off his game in moments of adversity. Learn to think of those moments in different terms and you'll have taken the first step toward making 2006 the year to finally join the ranks of the winners.