Pyerian Spring

I have been trying to get the old skull porridge moving again. Basically, I haven’t read anything of any worth in an age. Poker books are the worst. I love it when the most famous publisher actually has a disclaimer that they are not good reads — magnificent! And they are not wrong. Most poker books are terrible. They are either painfully boring or tedious to read, or they are so full of padding, assumptions, and woolly thinking that you are sifting the excrement looking for tiny kernels of truth. In general, if a poker book gives me an idea or two, I’m happy with the investment.

As an aside, if someone asked me to recommend a book I would really struggle. Knowledge can become so outdated so quickly that classics, like the original SuperSystem, for example, now have many chapters that are next to pointless. If pushed, I would suggest Elements of Poker by Tommy Angelo, which is as far from a How to book as you can find, unless you consider How to Think as a category.

Thinking is a pretty novel thing. It’s seems clear, that as a species, we were not really designed to do a lot of deep, novel thinking. If our ancestors were thinkers and not doers, they would have become sabre tooth tiger fodder.

Pattern matching and working within a narrow set of expectations is what we do best. There is a whole theory of socio-economic thought devoted to this area, where catastrophic, unpredictable events shake the status quo. These are termed Black Swans, as in the notion that every swan was white, a view confirmed through the millennia until that first pesky black cousin was spotted in Australia. We are living through a Black Swan event now — the current credit crunch. Easy to predict in retrospect, beyond any conventional predictive model before it happened, and devastating in its unexpectedness.

What has this to do with poker, you may ask (again)? Well the closing off of the U.S. for Internet gambling was certainly a Black Swan, both for poker sites and their investors, as well as players themselves.

In the heyday, it was rumoured that a few players were winning $2 million plus per annum grinding at $10-$20. This is almost an impossible figure. Today you would have to be playing nearly $200-$400 to have that kind of result. Mass murdering bad players, shooting fish in a barrel, full of fish, without water, at $10-$20 is a very different proposition from playing Phil, Patrick, and David in the biggest games in the world. I am 100 percent certain that many players from that era are either retired or broke now. No-one ever thought gravity would be turned off, but there it is, suddenly you’re floating.

So how do you protect yourself from the unpredictable? If an event is beyond the easy view of the easy models, then how do you hedge yourself, without devoting the time to becoming a poker/philosopher/theorist?

There are two obvious, clear strategies. Firstly, have an enormous bankroll, huge chunks of which are not devoted to poker at all. Diversification is cool, and means that you put the money you won into other potential money-making ventures. But still keep an enormous playing bankroll as well.

Then the key is to play many games, and learn to play them well. Specialists suffer when their specialism becomes extinct. It’s not just juicy no-limit hold’em that has suffered such a fate, but also games like limit Omaha eight-or-better. For a while, that was the action game at limit, unless you wanted to play high-stakes heads-up versus “King of Ding”. Now you would struggle to get action above $10-$20. Devote some time in every month to playing a new game, on a new site and just getting a feel for the action. Also, although it may be unpleasant, dedicate some time reviewing poker forums for a while, trying to see what the masses are saying about the action. Sometimes a game will blink in and out of existence, and your ability to spot these, and compete in them, will be a significant edge.

“A turkey is fed for 1,000 days — every day confirms to its statistical department that the human race cares about its welfare “with increased statistical significance”. On the 1,001st day, the turkey has a surprise.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Fourth Quadrant.

David has played poker all over the UK for the better part of a decade. Originally a tournament player, now focused on cash play and almost entirely on the Internet for the last three years, he makes a healthy second income playing a wide range of games. David is also an Omaha instructor for CardRunners.com, a leading source of online poker instructional videos.