Fun Players

I got into a discussion away from the table recently about what to call bad players when you talk about them. The person I was talking to always called them fish and I took issue with that. Let’s talk about where that comes from. Good players have always been called sharks and bad players fish because sharks eat fish like good players eat the bankrolls of bad players. Seems clear enough, but it’s probably a little disrespectful, even when talking in that context. Of course, in poker, there have to be winners and losers. Unless you’re the house, you don’t win every time, so sometimes the shark gets eaten by the fish. It’s not a perfect metaphor.

In addition to not being a perfect metaphor, it creates an attitude that I think is unacceptable and, to be perfectly honest, detrimental to winning players. Considering the players who come in and generally lose to the better players fish puts them in a different class. It makes you, a winning player, think of them as inferior to you. How could a fish be superior to a shark? Sure, there are some fish that have symbiotic relationships with sharks and therefore don’t get eaten, but overall the shark/fish relationship is an adversarial one. Instead of thinking of the relationship of good player to bad player to be one of superior to inferior, there should be more equality there, but we’ll get to that later.

I mentioned that the superior/inferior attitude can be detrimental to a winning player. This isn’t clear right off the bat, but it just takes a little thought to get to that point. In his book, The Mental Game of Poker, Jared Tendler discusses some reasons that people go on tilt. The reasons are many and varied, but injustice is one of the ones he mentions and the one that applies here. Players, even good ones, can sometimes think that they deserve to win every time they go out. In addition, they think that they deserve to win more than a player who doesn’t play as well as they do. When they see someone they consider to be a fish winning during a session, they get upset, especially if they themselves are losing because they deserve to win more than the fish does. If, however, you remove the superior/inferior relationship between sharks and fish, you wouldn’t even be thinking of it as an inferior player winning; it would just be another player who is having a better day than you. Of course, this wouldn’t immediately cure everybody of their injustice tilt immediately. Perhaps you are incredibly self-centered (poker players may lean this way naturally) and it wouldn’t matter if you think of them as inferior or equal, thus leading you to tilt just because you’re not the one winning. This won’t help you. If, however, you think of better players as more deserving to win, this simple change in how you approach the game might make a difference in your tilt control and your overall attitude at the table.

So, we’ve decided that the superior/inferior model is damaging to your game. How should you change your approach to better represent the reality of the poker world? I suggest two things. First, realize that not everybody has the same motivation to play poker. Winning players play poker to make money, but that’s not everybody’s main goal. In fact, some people would rank that pretty low on their list of goals when they head to the poker room. Some other reasons for playing poker: social interaction, gambling, challenging your brain, getting out of the house, seeing friends you haven’t seen in a while, or letting off some steam from a bad day. All of these reasons for playing poker are valid and in no way better or worse than playing to win money and plenty of the people who have different motivations for playing could become winning players if they dedicated some time and energy to becoming better. Instead of using the superior/inferior model of poker players, you should use the different goals model. Everyone in this model is equal to each other because they are all there to play poker, regardless of their motivation, and when you show up to play poker, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. This would diminish the entitlement that many good poker players have when they talk about players who aren’t as good as them. And when we do talk about them, let’s call them recreational players, or recs for short. Another term I’ve heard that I like is “fun player.” This can have several different meanings: fun to play with, having fun, fun to talk to, etc. If we soften the terms we use when we talk about players that aren’t as good or are less likely to win money as us, it should put us on more equal footing. It will make those players who lose more often have a little more fun and come back more often and it might have the added benefit of making things easier on yourself by controlling your tilt. Finally, take a little tip from the “fun players” and have a little more fun when you’re playing yourself. You might be surprised at the difference it makes in your bottom line. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG