Youth is Wasted on the Young

When I first started playing live poker, I was the youngest player by a generation. Several players were old enough to be my dad, many my granddad. I was 25 at the time, and it was before the TV and Internet booms. Then, suddenly, bursting onto the scene like a supernova was Julian Gardner, and suddenly I was old before my time. It was the sign of things to come. Now, at the ripe old age of 35, I feel very, very old.



And I wish I were young again.



It's not for the usual sex, drugs, and rock and roll reasons, but because I think being young in itself gives many players on the Internet a big edge over old-timers like myself. To explain why, I have to backtrack a little. When people ask me how they can make more money playing poker on the Internet, I tell them there is a very simple key to success. In fact, the biggest improvement any player could make to his bottom line profitability could be summarised in just three words: play more hands.



It really is that straightforward. Unless you are a losing player, in which case playing fewer hands would be best and trying tournaments better still, there is no addition to your game that could be more powerful than simply playing more hands. If you play only one cash table at a time, learn to play two – then three – then more. As long as the addition of tables doesn't detract too much from your win rate, the much greater volume of hands will more than compensate for it.



There was a recent survey that showed that small children were not learning their alphabet as early as they used to, but were able to use a mouse to perform simple tasks on a computer. The current crop of Internet players has a similar computer-indoctrinated background. The very best of them, not coincidentally, often come from an online-gaming background. For people such as them, playing multiple tables online is much easier than for those not born into the computer boom. I am probably fortunate to be right on the cusp of that age, but even I struggle with my concentration levels when I have too many tables open. Yet, it is not uncommon for some players to be playing eight tables or more at once. With such volume, it would be easy to play more than one million hands in a year. This leads to a virtuous circle. Firstly, even weaker poker pros can make a very substantial living by churning through such a volume of hands.

Secondly, playing one million hands is going to teach you a few things if you keep your eyes open.



Moreover, these players often have the ability to concentrate for huge periods of time. Now, I could easily play live poker for the better part of 24 hours nonstop, but I doubt in two years that I have managed a continuous session of much more than four hours online. I just can't concentrate on a screen for that long. But a key skill, especially in big-bet games, is being able to play and play and play. This is because if you have a big stack, and the game is good, you are in a very profitable situation and want to maximise it. I would not be surprised if the best win rates a no-limit or pot-limit player achieves are when he is wielding a big stack at a table. Also, if you are seated with a very poor player, you want to be able to stay with him as long as he plays. It's similar to how smaller wild cats kill their prey; they bite into the soft flesh and hold on tightly, dragging their prey down over time as the beast tires. And sometimes you need to hold on to your poker prey just as long.



And it's not only the ability of being able to handle a huge amount of information all at once that is so valuable. Because younger players fundamentally treat online poker as just a game, they get over one of the biggest hurdles that cripple many brick-and-mortar players. That is, disassociating the value of poker from the value of money. In the games in which I used to play, the bulk of the play was cash and not chips. Unlike the movies, you could not just throw a bundle of cash into a pot; you had to count out the notes as you made the bet. Now, if you had trouble counting out the price of a nice TV as a bluff, you were going to face serious problems. This "physicality" of poker really limited players of my generation and earlier, and I suspect that even online, some of today's era still sees too much real-life value in the pixels on the screen. But the game players see it perfectly. It is just a game, and the pixels are just pixels.



So, if you can't be young, play young.