JV Meets a Genie

As I got out of my car in the parking lot of Commerce Casino recently, I noticed an unopened can of energy drink sitting on the ground. It was a type I'd never seen before - Djinn Brand - but being an "always take cookies when cookies are passed" type, I decided to give it a try. No sooner had I popped it open than a plume of blue smoke poured out and resolved itself into the floating shape of - I kid you not - a genie. "You have rescued me from my prison," he intoned in a weary voice, as if reading from an overly familiar script (or a phone book). "For this act of kindness, you shall be granted one wish."

"One?" I asked. "Isn't three the standard?"

"Hard times," said the genie. "We're downsizing."

"But … "

The genie's eyes flashed. "Look, bub," he said, "do you want the wish or not?"

"Fine," I said. "One wish. I wish for … "

"Hang on, I haven't finished yet." Again, he dropped into his presentation monotone. "For your wish, you must select one, and only one, poker skill."

"What, you mean like the ability to reraise-bluff on the river?"

"If that's what you want, dude. Me, I'd think a little more broadly."

"Ah," I said, getting it. "Something that would globally help my game."

"Oh, intuitive grasp of the obvious, Brain Boy." The genie tapped his watch impatiently. "Look, what's it gonna be? I haven't got all day, you know. They've got me booked wall to wall."

"All right," I said, "just give me a minute." And in my logical fashion, I started to sort out the question and break it down. If I could have just one poker skill, and really have it, which one would I choose?

My first thought was memory, because wouldn't it be useful to be able to recall how a given foe played A-Q suited, like, a year ago when we last met? Or even whether the endomorph in seat three ever bluff-raises out of the blind? But then I realized that no matter how good a memory I had, that would still just be pattern recognition, and pattern recognition is nothing without pattern execution. So, I forgot about memory and turned my attention to plays.

It's quite a skill, the ability to make plays. It's the difference between getting good value and great value out of your made hands, or between losing the minimum or stacking off when you're beat. Using my advanced, genie-granted playbook, I could control pot size, price opponents in or out, raise appropriately for information, minimize the risk to fragile holdings, and pull the trigger on all the right bets at all the right times. But isn't pulling the trigger often a matter of will? There's a world of difference, God knows, between recognizing a bluff and having the courage to call it down and snap it off. Thus, I asked myself, "Is will a skill?"

If it is, it'd sure be a handy one to have. I could run the table with my bully bets and massive chip moves. "To win in poker," it has often been said, "you must not be afraid to lose." Courage, then. Stones the size of English sheepdogs. That'd put me in boss command - until, that is, someone woke up with a real hand. Because, courage is worthless without attentiveness. So what if I can step on a land mine without flinching? It's still a land mine, and it still goes, "Bang." Screw courage, then. What I really need is reads.

Reads: The ability to put opponents on a range of holdings, and then narrow that range as the hand plays out. The ability to make the best possible decision based on the best available information. With magic hand-reading skills, I could always know where I'm at. I could detect the difference between a call to draw and a call to trap. But would that be enough? After all, how many times have we seen someone put chips in the pot, saying, "I know you've got me beat, but I have to pay you off"? And they're right. They are beat. But they pay just the same. Even if you have great reads, I reckon, you still have to be sensible. You have to see things as they are.

Of course, players spend a lot of time and energy on deception, just to keep you from seeing things as they are. We call this effort image, and skill in this area would enable you to manipulate reality, such that your foes would routinely see things as they aren't. If image were my magic power, I could always get them leaning the wrong way, and wouldn't that be great? Sure … if I always knew what the wrong way was.

This brought me around to math. Any modestly skilled poker player can calculate card odds and pot odds, at least to a rough approximation. But if the math really lived in my head (like it lives in, say, Chris Ferguson's), I'd be able to play every situation with utter confidence that my play was, at minimum, mathematically correct. Then again, the math of poker is really fairly rote - your odds of getting dealt pocket aces never change - so if I can learn the key numbers by heart, or absorb some critical rules of thumb, I probably don't need to spend my wish on math.

So, what should I spend it on? So many choices …

The genie snapped his fingers and stirred me from my reverie. "Come on, JV," he said. "What's it gonna be?"

Damn, I thought, not pausing to wonder how he knew my name. Memory, plays, courage, reads, image, math … I don't know which one to pick. And I hadn't even considered psychology, stamina, self-awareness, discipline, patience … Damn!

So, I picked … I picked … I picked …

Well, which would you pick? Or, is trying to choose just one poker skill ultimately a fool's paradigm? (As foolish, perhaps, as opening unattended energy drinks in the parking lot of local casinos.) For just as there's no such thing as a free lunch, there's no such thing as magic in poker. You have to have all these skills, all the time, and constantly be working at improving them across the board. Like the man said, "If you're not slowly getting better, you're slowly getting worse."

Instead of wishing for wishes, why not invest some energy in improving your game? Break it down into all these component parts - and as many more as you can think of. Then, figure out where you're strong and where you're weak. Where you're strong, stay strong. Where you're weak, work to get strong. That's how you grow your game of poker. And then the next time a genie offers you a wish, you can tell him you don't need it.

John Vorhaus is the author of the Killer Poker book series. He resides in cyberspace at vorza.com, and in the blogosphere at somnifer.typepad.com. John Vorhaus' photo: Gerard Brewer.