"Your success at poker depends not on how well you play, but on how well you play in relation to your opponents. … This presents a significant problem … almost all players put themselves closer to the front of the pack than they deserve to be." (Roy Cooke, "A Great Game?"
Card Player, May 10, 2002)
Obviously, to get the best results, you should be as realistic as possible. Although many players accept this principle in theory, they do
not apply it. Instead, they deny reality about:
• Themselves
• Their opponents
• Our game
Realism About Yourself
If you aren't realistic about your abilities, motivation, discipline, and so on, nothing else matters much. You will play against better players or keep playing when your game is off, and you eventually must lose. Unfortunately, most of us are not realistic about ourselves for two reasons:
• Luck has huge short-term effects.
• We want to think well of ourselves.
Both factors resulted in absurd replies to a statement about the
World Series of Poker championship: "If I get heads up at the final table and am even in chips with a top pro, I believe I have just as good a chance to win as he does." Forty-four percent of the respondent's agreed. (Nolan Dalla, "Chasing Dreams: Player Goals and Expectations at the
World Series of Poker - Poll Results,"
Card Player, July 16, 2004). Because luck has such huge short-term effects, they would have some chance to win, but certainly less than 50-50.
Both luck and the desire to think well of ourselves affect players at all levels. Bad players can win for an hour, a session, a tournament, or even a few weeks. Instead of realizing that they have been extremely lucky, they congratulate themselves on their skill, keep playing, and end up losing.
The desire to think well of ourselves causes us to overestimate virtually all of our abilities. As I wrote in a previous column, "Students, even failing ones, think they deserve good grades. Nearly all workers think they do a good job, even ones who are fired for incompetence. Tone-deaf people insist on singing at parties, and terrible speakers have ruined countless meetings. In fact, if you ask people to rate themselves on almost any ability, most of them will rate themselves above average or higher, a statistical impossibility." ("Overestimating Our Abilities,"
Card Player, Nov. 7, 2003)
Many people don't admit that their losses are caused by their own weaknesses. They blame bad luck, refuse to work on their game, keep trying to beat superior players, and continue to lose. Some losers continue this pattern for decades, hoping their "luck will change."
Even good players deny their limitations. They can beat most games, but insist on playing against better players. For example, hundreds of hometown champions build a bankroll and challenge Las Vegas. Many of them go home broke, but they may try again and again. Other good players are often broke because they play in games that are too tough for them. They could win steadily at, say, $10-$20, but insist on playing $20-$40, even though they aren't good enough. So, they go broke, move down, build up a bankroll, move up, and go broke again.
In fact, you
don't have to be an excellent player to win. If you are realistic about your abilities and carefully select your games, you can be a consistent winner - even with limited skills. Just realistically assess your abilities and play against weaker players.
Realism About Your Opponents
Many people underestimate their opponents and insist that they are just lucky. They may regard an occasional bad play as being typical, or just misunderstand how their opponents play. This delusion is the "flip side" of overestimating your own abilities, and it has the same results: You challenge and lose to superior players.
All forms of prejudice are destructive, because they prevent you from accurately assessing other people. Political correctness is just another form of prejudice, and it has the same destructive results. Denying the evidence about differences between males and females, younger and older players, and so on is as stupid and destructive as seeing nonexistent differences. For example, older people are usually tighter than younger ones; women are generally less aggressive than men.
Winners consider all of the available information, including stereotypes, but they also try to determine how
this individual plays. They may expect an older woman to be weak-tight, but if they see her gambling aggressively, they adjust their strategy. They don't let their prejudice cause them to deny evidence, even if they are surprised by what they see.
More generally, you must accept and adjust to the fact that everyone - including you - is a complex mixture of intelligence and stupidity, greed and generosity, impulsiveness and caution. You must realistically assess how
this specific player thinks and plays, and then adjust to that reality.
Realism About Our Game
Many players don't really understand poker. They may think they do, but their conception of poker is a confused mixture of genuine insights, silly misunderstandings, and wishful thinking. It's a very complicated, subtle game that takes a lifetime to master, but its apparent simplicity enables people to delude themselves, not just about how well they play, but about what the game really is.
They may say that it's a game of skill and that cards are random, but - in their innermost hearts - they don't really believe it. They waste time and energy trying to predict and control their cards. They slowly squeeze their cards, even though the distraction costs them valuable information. They demand new decks or a different kind of shuffle, or change seats, or won't play with a certain dealer, or use lucky charms. They can't accept that cards are completely random.
Countless players also ignore the fact that poker is based upon probabilities, and all successful poker strategies put the odds in your favor. Many losers don't know or respect the odds. The most common poker errors are playing too many hands and going too far with them, and both are caused by denying reality about the odds.
Final Remarks
Realism and denial affect virtually every aspect of poker. Your critical tasks are to resist your own desire to deny reality while understanding and exploiting your opponents' denial. My next column will suggest ways to accomplish both tasks.
To learn more about yourself and other players, get Dr. Schoonmaker's book, Your Worst Poker Enemy, at CardPlayer.com.
