Muddy Road Redux

Not all the time, but every now and then when I’m playing poker, someone will recognize me as that Killer Poker guy and ask me some question or another about poker, life, writing, or just “the isness of it all.” Sometimes these questions can get quite cheeky, like, “If you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich?” or, “Say, JV, where did all your chips go?” Occasionally, though, the discussion will turn thoughtful, as it did recently, when someone asked me, “From a poker perspective, what’s the most important thing you know?”

I may have answered glibly, something from my standard repertoire like, “Don’t play garbage hands” or “Slow-play aces, go to hell.” But the question stayed with me, and today I combed my poker mind, and poker archives, seeking a better answer than just, “Good cards good, bad cards bad.” After some musing and searching, I arrived at a familiar place: the koan of the muddy road. It has been, and continues to be, the single most useful piece of poker wisdom, and antidote to tilt, that has ever crossed my path.

Koans, if you don’t know, are Zen stories or parables. They’re designed not to spell things out for us, but to give a focus to our thoughts or meditations. (That’s why the Zen Buddhists keep asking what’s the sound of one hand clapping; you’re always intended to wonder and never intended to know.) This koan comes to us from Tanzan, a 19th-century Japanese Buddhist monk and professor of philosophy at the Imperial University. I have written about it and reprinted it many times, and if you’ve encountered it before, please accept my apologies for the repetition. Yet even if you’ve read it before, I encourage you to read it again, for as another philosopher, Heraclitus, said, “You could not step in the same river twice,” which I understand to mean that the poker player you are is not the player you once were, and even familiar information will have new meaning, based on the changes you’ve been through since you encountered it last.

Herewith, then, and lightly paraphrased, The Muddy Road.

Tanzan and Ekido were walking together down a muddy road in the rain. Coming around a bend in the road, they arrived at a small, swift stream, where a lovely young girl in full dress kimono stood crying.

“Why are you crying?” asked Tanzan.

In between tears, the girl explained that she was due at a wedding in a village on the far side of the stream, but to cross the stream meant to ruin her kimono and, needless to say, her entrance.

“Come on, girl,” said Tanzan. With that, he hoisted the girl on his back, waded across the stream, and deposited her on the far side — high, dry, and happy. She went off to the wedding, presumably to catch the bouquet and/or get drunk. Tanzan and Ekido continued on down the road.

Ekido held his tongue until that night, when they reached a lodging temple. Then, he could no longer restrain himself. “We monks don’t go near women,” he told Tanzan, “especially not young and lovely ones. It’s dangerous, and our order forbids it. Yet, you carried that girl across the stream. Why did you carry that girl?”

“I left the girl at the stream,” replied Tanzan.”Why do you carry her still?”

This koan teaches us the vital poker strategy of letting go. When bad luck or bad beats happen, we face a critical choice: We can hold on to the bad feelings that those outcomes engender, or we can just … move … on. Tanzan shows us that moving on is a simple matter of letting go of that which ain’t important. If we don’t, if we cling to bad feelings, we must necessarily skew our perception, degrade our decision-making, and move away from perfect play.

You flop top pair, top kicker and drive hard against a solo opponent, who hits a two-outer to beat you. You commence to harangue your foe, ruining your peace, your patience, and your performance.

Put the girl down!

You’ve played perfect poker for 10 hours of this tournament, and now get your money in as a 4-1 favorite — the one time in five that the hand doesn’t hold up. You still have chips; do you still have poise?

Let her go!

After hours of slogging through the card desert, you finally pick up a pair of aces, only to be run down by a flopped set, setting you up for an all-night pity party.

Why do you carry her still?

Look, everyone encounters bad outcomes, and everyone has bad feelings. Smart, self-aware players acknowledge those feelings and carry on. Weak players, players enslaved to their emotions, never let go, and they pay and pay and pay the price for this emotional addiction. So, the next time you have a bad outcome, there are two things you might consider doing. First, contemplate why someone would cling to a negative mental state. I’m not saying this is you, but for many players, there’s a certain perverse pleasure in getting beat over and over again. It fuels their fatalistic streak: Of course they don’t win; the universe hates them. That’s called wallowing in pain, my friends. I suggest that you wallow not.

Next, having set aside your negative feelings — having stopped carrying the girl, as Tanzan would put it — take a moment to re-examine your play of the hand and see what you might have done better, for there’s a difference between letting go of bad feelings and ignoring useful information. If you made a mistake — let’s say that you didn’t bet big enough to protect those dad-blasted aces — you need to study the mistake, learn from it, and then move on. Let go of the feelings, in other words, but don’t let go of the lesson.

Years ago, in a periodical now long defunct, I gave the following advice: Cut out the koan of the muddy road. Stick it in your wallet. Keep it with you and reread it frequently until you memorize it. I took my own advice, and take it still; mug me in the parking lot and you’ll find a tattered copy of Muddy Road where my money ought to be. I suggest that you take it, too. Learn the meaning of the muddy road. Meditate upon it. Use it as intended (not by Tanzan, but certainly by me), as stalwart defense against tilt. Tanzan left the girl at the river. I see no reason why we should have to carry her still.

John Vorhaus is the author of the Killer Poker book series and the poker novel Under the Gun. He resides in cyberspace at radarenterprizes.com. Photo: Gerard Brewer.