The Rules Guy: How To Conduct Yourself at the Poker Table

Most players learn poker’s explicit rules pretty quickly: the “one-chip rule,” for example, or “verbal declarations are binding.” But not everyone seems to have digested the game’s vast book of unwritten rules, admonitions like “don’t berate other players (particularly bad ones)” or “say ‘nice hand’ even when you mean something entirely different.”

Enter “The Rules Guy.” TRG believes that civility and sportsmanship are never wrong, and that bad behavior (even when you’re simply trying to get an edge) is bad for the game. Have you got a question about how to conduct yourself at the poker table? Email TRG at [email protected].

Dear The Rules Guy,

I play online and I play live. At the casino, I have no problem being polite. (I don’t call the fish “fish”; I call them “friends.”) But online….well, online, I am, to put it mildly, a jerk. I can’t seem to stop myself from commenting on bad plays, making snide remarks, and sometimes launching rage-fueled tirades at other players. Please believe me when I say no one who knows me in real life would think I was capable of this kind of behavior. Why do I do it? And what do I do about it?

— Agitated in Agincourt

Dear Agitated,

The Rules Guy has played with you, right? Not you, actually, but “you” meaning one of the million or so online players who are perfectly normal in real life and turn into absolutely monstrous asshats when they play online. TRG has trouble fathoming this phenomenon, but it’s not just confined to poker. Check out any unmoderated online forum, and you’ll see the same sort of trollish bad behavior, usually sparked by the most trivial disagreements. No matter what the topic — poker or politics, sports or Lindsay Lohan — the phrase “constructive discourse” seems to have left the (virtual) building.
And something about online poker — and TRG senses it has to do with the velocity of bad beats and frustration that comes with a game that’s dealt at 100 hands per hour — brings out not just the bad in people. It brings out the worst.

The scenario typically runs: It’s a $3.30 sit-n-go (the smaller the stakes, the bigger the fight). Hero open shoves with A-K; Villain makes a “terrible” call with A-J offsuit and binks a knave on the river. Hero types: “Idiot/Luckbox/Tool” (or worse). Villain replies “FU” or one of its many colorful variants, at times in the language of his native country. Hero escalates with a disparaging remark about the Villain’s mother, his nationality, or his sexuality (come to think of it, sexuality usually comes first). Villain responds by encouraging the Hero “to be fruitful and multiply” (but not in those words) or “play me heads up for 100 big blinds.”

Many sites are attentive to these wars of words, of course, and impose chat bans and other forms of censure against repeat violators. Naturally, TRG, a benevolent, and kind-hearted sort, thinks verbal abuse is wildly inappropriate in any context.

Being a jerk is bad, not just because it’s immoral and bad for the game as a whole, but also because it’s bad for your game. When you behave like a jerk, you are focused on the past, trying to right something that cannot be righted. You’re angry, frustrated, and stressed — and none of those things help you make decisions about the hand you’re in now or the tournament you’re going to play next. And responding to jerks is just as bad, for pretty much all the same reasons. Which is why this issue’s TRG column includes the lead-in from the psychologists Sommer and Yoon: If you’re tilting, you’re not “conserving regulatory resources.”

For competent players, tilt is the biggest leak there is.

So what can you do, Agitated? TRG advises practicing a version of cognitive behavior therapy: Write yourself a note that says “If I suffer a beat, I will say nothing or I will say ‘Nice hand.’” Repeat it like a mantra, and practice that until it becomes a reflex. You can teach yourself to take beats better — to conserve your regulatory resources.

In other words, it’s in your own self-interest to police your tendency to attack — but never forget that, bots aside, there’s a person on the other end of your tirade. TRG is not saying “don’t get angry.” For 99.9 percent of poker players, that’s impossible. TRG is saying, “don’t let your anger surface at the table, virtual or otherwise.”

“That is so…at odds with variance.”

Dear The Rules Guy,

I am sick of hearing “that is so sick” at the poker table. Is there anything we can do to eliminate this phrase from the poker world?

— Bob, Cleveland

Dear Bob,

The Rules Guy finds the expression “so sick” to be, you know, like, so, so sick. TRG also dislikes (well, loathes): “One time, dealer!” “Hold! HOLD!” “I hate pocket jacks.” “A chip and a chair.” “Ace magnets.” And the worst of all — the “sickest” of the sick — saying “Pasadena” when you want to check.

There’s good reason to have a shorthand, a vernacular, an argot (look up that word; it’s a good one) for poker, or for any subculture. It makes it easier to communicate, and as long as everyone has roughly the same vocabulary, communication is accelerated. (Plus it’s fun having a slightly secret language that is almost incomprehensible to the wider world.)

But catchphrases like “so sick” actually erode communication because they are cliché: “an expression…which has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning…to the point of being trite or irritating,” as Wikipedia puts it.

“So sick” does have a place in the poker world, however — when a beat is really, truly, mind-blowingly sick. This is not sick: Big slick against pocket fives (and no matter who wins, that is most definitely not “sick.” This is not sick: Top pair/top kicker (or, to use the never-to-be-used-again Jamie Gold locution, “top/top”) losing to anything.

But this hand, played by TRG’s friend Dutch, is truly sick: Dutch gets it in on the bubble with pocket kings to find himself squaring off against aces. Flop is king-king-rag. Jubilation! Turn: Ace. River: Ace. That, dear reader, is sick. So, so sick, that he didn’t play for nearly a whole day afterwards!

A question for you, dear readers: What’s acceptable to say in a heads-up situation? Email me with your thoughts or post them as a comment to this article online at [email protected].