The Joy of Losing

Poker players will tell you that losing makes you miserable, and I’ve certainly been guilty on occasion of expressing this very sentiment. But losing is such a huge part of poker that if you don’t ever derive enjoyment from getting beat out of a pot, then you should probably look elsewhere for your entertainment, let alone your profession.

In the spirit of Nick “the Greek” Dandolos, who is rumored to have said “the next best thing to gambling and winning is gambling and losing,” I offer three anecdotes as evidence that poker can sometimes be worth playing even when the chips are disappearing from your stack.

Anecdote 1: One of my first friends on the tournament circuit was a guy who went by the moniker Dangerous Dan. He played a loose-aggressive style with small, pot-building raises and he called off big bets with pair-plus-draw hands at a time when virtually no one else was doing that. Dan played the new school version of poker before anyone knew about the new school of poker — and his game plan included three-betting light. One day, during a break at a major no-limit tournament, I ran into Dan on the rail, distraught about a play he had just made. “This guy two to my right had been raising non-stop,” Dan said. “Whenever it folded to him in middle or late position he opened, and of course when it folded to him on the button he raised my big blind every time. It started to piss me off, so the next time he raised his button I didn’t even check my cards. I reached for a bunch of chips without counting them and threw out a big three-bet.”

“You can’t regret that play too much,” I said, “if he was as aggressive as you describe.”

“Except that I after I threw out the bet, I glared at him. I looked him right in the eye. It was a different guy.”

Dan then realized he could only laugh — so that’s what he did.

Anecdote 2: Another friend of mine, one of the “math-based” poker players, was on the bubble of a World Series of Poker (WSOP) event when the guy to his left started waxing poetic about how great it would be if the bubble burst. “Just imagine,” the man said, “for the rest of your life you can say, ‘I cashed at the World Series of Poker.’ No one would ever be able to take that away from you. Wouldn’t that be amazing?” My friend had been playing with this man for hours, and it was no act. He was an amateur player who didn’t have a clear conception of how to think about poker, and all his romanticizing of cashing was very real. Needless to say, when the action folded around to my friend in the small blind he moved all-in, not caring for a second that he only held deuce-three offsuit. And then the strangest thing happened. The player in the big blind, the guy for whom cashing would fulfill a lifelong dream, said, “I knew you were going to do that! I call dark!” He rolled over an offsuit J-2, and my friend bubbled by losing to jack-high unimproved. To sum up, a player who wanted nothing more than to cash called for almost all his chips, on the bubble, with a hand that no one else in the tournament — even people who didn’t care about cashing — would’ve called with, and that he himself wouldn’t have called with if he’d looked at his hand. Even at the time my friend was pretty amused. If you can’t laugh at that bustout, what can you laugh it? And don’t feel too bad — my friend went on to win a bracelet in a different event, and later became one of the winningest players of the online era.

Anecdote 3: I’ve mentioned this particular hand of mine in a column before, briefly, but it’s worth telling in more detail. Playing limit hold’em in a tournament setting, I checked the river on a board of 8-6-3-5-7 when my opponent announced, “I bet the pot.” Needless to say, a pot-sized bet is not allowed in limit hold’em. Based on his demeanor, it seemed almost impossible that my opponent was angling, but my limit brain works so stubbornly that, getting 8-to-1, I still wanted to call with my A-8. Then I took my warped thinking a step further and said to myself, “well, if he thinks it’s pot-limit, he should be more inclined to bluff, not less — so how can I possibly fold?” Using this sound-yet-insane logic, I called the bet and, of course, got shown A-4 for a straight.

My opponent had essentially told me what he had, I understood that he’d told me what he had, and I decided to call anyway because of…math, I guess? I made fun of myself, aloud, for the next hour. I would’ve stopped, as I usually don’t talk that much when I play, except that other people at the table seemed to be enjoying my self-mockery.

All three “losers” in the above hands made plays that turned out to be completely terrible, and yet they found humor in their own awful decisions. Call me crazy, but I think such a character trait is important in poker. It’s worth mentioning that the “losers” in the first two hands are great players, and I’ve done OK too. Turns out it’s not whether you win or lose — because, trust me, you’re going to lose — it’s how you handle losing that’ll make all the difference in your poker career. ♠

Matt Matros is the author of The Making of a Poker Player. He is also a featured coach for cardrunners.com.