Killer Poker

Here’s the good news about revelation. When it hits, it hits with the force of, I’m gonna say, revelation. And while it lasts, it changes everything. The first time I told myself, “You’re born broke, you die broke, everything else is just fluctuation,” it was a revelation of perspective. It taught me to take the long view of poker, and while it lasted, it anchored my defense against tilt. But here’s the bad news about revelation. It fades. Revolution fades, and the words or concepts that seemed so profound eventually devolve into cliché. “You’re born broke —” I try to tell myself, but before the words are even formed in my brain, I’m answering back, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever,” and going right ahead and going on tilt. At that point I recognize that I need a new strategy, or at least a new set of words, so now I start citing the Twenty-Year Rule: If it won’t matter in twenty years it doesn’t matter now. And for awhile, it’s a steady defense against tilt. But eventually it becomes just words, too, and now I need a new revelation. I have to keep don’t tilt alive in my mind and make its practice a key component of my game. I need a new revelation. I’ve needed them all along.

Here’s one I used for awhile: There are no bad beats, only temporary setbacks. I used this one a lot about the time that I learned what it meant to get my money in good. At that time it infuriated me — I mean just bloody pissed me off — that I could lose pots to people who got their money in bad. It seemed an affront to the natural order of things. It didn’t seem fair. I mean I’m a good person, I thought.

Why does this bad beat happen to me? For a while I even renamed bad beats. I literally called them temporary setbacks, as in, “Wow, when you hit that three-outer, you really put a temporary setback on me.” The whimsy of that kept my spirit light, and kept tilt at bay for a spell.

But it came back. It always comes back, like shower mold that you can hit with some stuff that’s banned in 43 states and still not knock it out completely. I always need another way to say don’t tilt.

Well, that happens, I sometimes say, adopting the fatalistic equanimity of the best Buddhist monks. That’s mostly when I have pocket kings and the flop kills me with an ace. “Well, that happens,” I tell myself. It seems better than railing against the awful unfair unfairness of it all. It keeps me from losing my mind.

My dad taught me a great trick against tilt a thousand years ago, and he didn’t even know he was doing it. We were playing golf, a game I abhor and suck at in equal measure. I was clouting the ball all over the damn place and getting more and more infuriated with every tense and ridiculous swing. So the old man says, “How’s that screenplay going?” Well, he knew it was going well — I had started the round yattering about how well it was going — so in raising the subject he moved my mind from something I found frustrating to something I found fun. That relaxed and distracted me, and pretty soon I was whacking the ball with more tranquility if not more skill. Many’s the time I use that strategy at the poker table, reminding myself that, yes, I just got bad beat, or outplayed, or just made a mistake, but I don’t have to go on tilt because I’m still a pretty good writer and people still pay me to sling words on the page. And that’s not nothing, and it’s better than going on tilt, but it, too, soon wears out. One thing I’ve learned in my personal quarter-century of poker is that for me, don’t tilt is a lesson that never stays learned.

How about you? Where are the recurring holes in your game, the ones you just can’t plug? Over-defense of blinds? Late-position reckless adventures? Playing too long or staying too late? What strategies do you have for filling these holes? Having just one strategy is just not enough. With the pernicious deficits in your poker play, you need lots of different strategies, lots of different ways of saying the same thing, lots of different ways of walking yourself back from whatever particular ledge you like to walk out on.

I have a friend who has trouble getting away from the game when he’s stuck. He’s used the fluctuation thing and he’s used the Twenty-Year Rule, and both have helped for awhile. But his problem remains: the psychological burden of absorbing a loss, especially a big loss, is more than he can bear. Lately he’s had in mind Annie Duke’s thoughts about “don’t lose more in one session than you can reasonably expect to win in the next.” This protects him from dropping into the deepest of holes — it gives him a strategy for leaving a game he can’t beat — but I know it won’t last. He also reminds himself that life is one long poker game and individual sessions don’t matter much, but that won’t last, either. When the pain of losing gets to be too much, he’ll simply forget the guidelines he established for himself. And then I hope he has a backup plan, because if not, he’s in for a big loss.

Inspect your game. Keep inspecting your game. Keep thinking about the things you wish you did better. Keep thinking about different ways of closing the gap between the player you are and the player you wish to become. Recognize that whatever tools for improvement you adopt will only last so long. At first they — the best ones at least — always feel like magic. The bad news is that the magic wears off, but the good news is there’s plenty more magic where that came from.

I will never stop needing new ways of instructing myself not to tilt. Good thing for me I will also never run out. ♠

John Vorhaus is author of the Killer Poker series and co-author of Decide to Play Great Poker, plus many mystery novels including World Series of Murder, available exclusively on Kindle. He tweets for no apparent reason @TrueFactBarFact and secretly controls the world from johnvorhaus.com.