It's a Long Time ... Or is It?

Recently I turned on the TV looking for a ballgame or movie to kill some time, and happened on a poker show. I'm not even sure whether it was the World Poker Tour or the World Series of Poker – I was that tired. But I do remember something that got me thinking. It was a hand in which one of the players called with a weak holding. I'm not sure, but A-5 offsuit comes to mind. The commentator made a statement about him playing that kind of hand because he'd been at the final table for more than five hours, and that was a long time to have sat there without getting many playable hands.

At about the same time, a graphic popped up on the screen indicating that hand No. 168 was being played. I felt as though I was being pulled in two entirely different directions. While more than five hours at the poker table does seem like a long time, 168 hands doesn't. And that got me thinking about absolute time, relative time, our perception of time, and how that all affects the way we approach poker when we're at the table.

I guess everything is driven by life expectancy. Since we can expect to live some 70-odd years, a week in our lives is generally no big thing, and when we're younger, neither is a year. And we look at events through that particular perspective. On the other hand, if we were butterflies with a life span of only a few days or weeks, we'd hardly take the same long view that we do as humans, and we don't even live all that long compared to other species. Some sea turtles live to be 250 years old, which means they were here during the Age of Enlightenment, and if they had our brains, their perception of what's long and short would be entirely different.

OK, OK; what, if anything, does this have to do with poker? I'll tell you. Our life span at the poker table is way out of sync with what's required for the cards to get into "the long run." If five hours at the poker table seems to be a long time to most of us, and playing all night and into the next day seems interminable, it's not that way to the cards.

Most of us will be griping about the unkindness of fate if we've drawn to flushes for the last six hours and haven't hit one of them, or we've not been dealt a pair of aces or kings all day while the guy to our right was dealt aces and kings four times in the last four hours. That just seems to be human nature – for better or for worse. Maybe our hero on the TV poker show was doing the same thing. He probably hadn't been dealt a good hand for most of the time he'd been at the final table. He might have felt he was due, although I'm sure if you asked him, he was probably savvy enough to tell you he knows that cards are random, with no memory of previous events, and that we are not "due" a particular hand simply because it hasn't been dealt in our direction since Monica was frolicking in the White House.

But just because he'd never tell you or me doesn't mean he didn't feel down deep in his gut that he was due for a big, winning hand. So, he made a play with A-5, caught up in the immediacy of the moment and never realizing that a longer view of his circumstances – and it's not like he was so short-stacked that he had to make a play; he could well have afforded to wait quite a while longer before desperation would have set in – would have told him he was just as likely to have been dealt A-A, K-K, or A-K on the next hand as he would have been if he'd been dealt nothing but good hands since he sat down at the table.

To the cards, five hours is nothing at all. Poker decks are sea turtles. Maybe they're even redwoods, with a Methuselah-like life span of 900 years. It takes a long, long time for enough hands to have been dealt before the cards get into that elusive "long run."

About a decade ago, I simulated two years of poker on my computer, using Wilson Software's Turbo Texas Hold'em, and sat the same player profile down in each seat at the table. Since these bots were programmed to play identically, the expectation was that each seat would break even at the end of the day. But even at the end of a simulated year, there was a significant difference between the big winner and big loser.

So, I took it a step further and simulated 30 years of poker, 30 hands per hour, eight hours a day, 50 weeks a year. And guess what? Even at the end of what's a lifetime of poker for most people, there was still a difference between the big winner and big loser, and that allowed me to conclude that over a lifetime, perhaps as much as 1 percent to 1.5 percent of a player's results might be attributable to luck.

I suppose I could have simulated 100 or even 1,000 years of poker and the differential that was attributable to luck might have been whittled down to an infinitesimal amount. But to what end? You won't live to play 100 years of poker, and neither will I. We're humans, and 30 years of poker, eight hours a day, is probably a lot more than most of us will ever play.

Where are we going with all of this? Right here. The next time you've been playing poker for five or six hours and feel like it's an eternity, stand up and take another look. You're probably on hand No. 168 right now. And if you think 168 hands is enough for all the luck to even out and all the bad beats and good catches to be bled out of the equation, thereby allowing you, the pokermeister, to achieve his just due based on your skill alone and nothing else, you've got another thing coming.

Turn yourself into a sea turtle or a redwood tree and be quick about it. Then take a look at the run of cards you've been experiencing. It's nothing but a short blip in time – not nearly enough to get concerned about. So, stay the course and play well. Make the right decisions, and down the line in the long run – whenever it comes rolling merrily along – you'll be rewarded, as indeed you should. In the meantime, just ruminate on the title of that old Bob Dylan song, Tomorrow is a Long Time. It really is.

My newest book, Internet Poker: How to Play and Beat Online Poker Games, is available at www.ConJelCo.com, and all of my books can be found at major bookstores and online at www.Amazon.com.