'Deserving' Not a Very Deserving Poker Concept

Last issue, while working my way through a mea culpa about how, after three days of superb play, I self-destructed in two hands, I mentioned that while stuck in a tough preflop spot (A-10 vs. A-K and 10-10), I almost escaped when three spades flopped and I was holding the A.

I then wrote, "I'd jumped from just under 5 percent equity in the pot (including the value of splits and side pots) to about 38 percent, but I neither deserved a miracle nor caught one, and I was out."

In one innocent little sentence, I later realized, I had run the gamut from some of the very worst possible ways to think about poker to some of the very best ways to think about poker. It was so obvious to me, I didn't even need a reader e-mail to kick me in the pants; I'm writing this only a day later.

If you think of yourself as poker hot stuff, you should be able to go back, take another look at that sentence, ask yourself, "What's very promising in here, and what's very deadly in here?" and come up with some answers. If you can't, welcome to one very large club: that group of poker players that still has a thing or three to learn.

There are some partial credits available on the "What's good about it?" side. It's good (although hardly praiseworthy) that I was able to recognize that while I was practically dead in the hand before the flop, I shouldn't have, if an "insurance" offer had come from the sidelines, performed the poker equivalent of selling my birthright for a mess of pottage. As bad as A-10 vs. A-K and 10-10 seems, straights and flushes do happen, side pots do happen, and boards so strong that everyone gets stuck playing the board do happen.

I think lots of players would have estimated themselves to have about 0.2 percent chances in that pot, but it wasn't that bad. Still, that's not the good news. The good news is tied in much closer to the bad news.

No, the good news isn't that because I saw a couple more cards than one usually sees in a flush-draw situation, I was able to make a more precise calculation than "a one-third chance with my A."

No, the good news is that I hadn't focused on how unlucky I was to fail to connect on the nut-flush draw with so many chips (and hence so much money) on the line. I didn't sit there and bemoan my fate and say something like, "Come on, I've had players draw out on me so many times in so many worse situations, why can't I win one three-way pot with 38 percent winning chances?"

Instead, I focused on what a player determined to improve focuses on: that I had made a correctable error in the pot, that I had made a mistake that with proper attention shouldn't happen again (that doesn't mean it can't or won't happen again, but it does mean I'm pretty determined that it won't happen again).

It means I'm not one of those players who thinks he knows everything and who therefore can't improve, and who therefore is likely to get run down from behind by poker's "Next Generation," the kids who are studying literature and software I never had as a kid, and who are gaining experience at 10 and 20 times the rate I gained it as a youth, because they can play as often as they want against the world's best players, often two, three, or four games at a time.

It's all very nice to rest on one's laurels, but I beg to differ with Satchel Paige's immortal wisdom: "Don't look back, because someone might be gaining on you." I think the modern poker player must indeed look back, precisely because someone might be gaining on him, and as soon as a player convinces himself that he knows poker, you can pretty much stick a fork in him, because he's done. Like a chicken with its head cut off, his body might keep running around for a while, but he's done, and if that's true for the poker superstar, just imagine how true it is for the average player. Keep improving or get used to losing, one or the other.

As good as all that news is, I think it's entirely possible that it all gets drowned out by one key word in that humble-sounding "but I neither deserved a miracle nor caught one" line.

Just where did this notion of deserving anything come from, anyway? More to the point, have you ever heard a word more likely to make its author/speaker likely to head off on tilt? "I was a 90 percent favorite, I deserved to win," or, "I've been playing 10 times as long as that kid, I've paid my dues, I deserved to win," or, "I trapped him by slow-playing my aces against his queens, I deserved to win … " All of these statements share one crucial flaw, one crucial weakness: the idea that there is "justice" in poker.

If you let yourself get caught up in the notion of justice in poker, you're heading down a path from which the return will be difficult at best. It's hard enough to find justice in the world, much less in poker, and one of the problems with "justice" as a concept is that most of us have different definitions of it – and quite often we select the definition that makes success the most difficult for us.

For example, if you start a hold'em hand with the A K, and raise four limpers from the button (all of whom call, of course, as does the big blind) and find yourself staring at a flop of 10 9 4, you might make the unwise decision to call after the big blind checks, the first limper bets, and the other limpers also call. Now, an ace comes off on the turn, and the first thing you think is, "Ah, justice." It gets checked to you, you bet, get a couple of callers, and then someone raises. You know the drill from there. You're up against either 10-9 or perhaps a set, and the "justice" you got after hanging around with a weak draw (hitting your king is no bargain, because that gives a straight to anyone who correctly called on the flop with Q-J) is a chain saw adjustment to your chip stack.

Hitting your hand on the flop is neither just nor unjust. It's just poker, it's just probability. It's not a reward because you live your life as a good person or a tight-aggressive player. Missing your hand on the flop isn't a sign that you should have given more to charity last year. Players who hang around with A-K on "swing and a miss" flops like 10-9-4 are just throwing money away, in large part because they think it was unjust that they didn't hit their drawing hand on the flop.

Much more dangerous than the chips you might lose by hanging around and hitting or missing your draw, though, is the tilt factor you risk by thinking in terms of "justice." Once you start thinking in terms of what's right and what's wrong (fair/unfair), it becomes easy to start thinking you're being treated unfairly.

Some people, when they believe themselves to have been treated unfairly, will proceed while expecting fairness to win out. The cards were unfair last hand/last round, so they will be "fair" this round … so they throw more chips into pots they don't belong in, which leads to more bad results, which lead to still more tilt factor.

Other people, when they believe themselves to have been treated unfairly, will proceed while expecting the unfairness to continue, and this means they will make all kinds of poor decisions, from playing too tight to quitting good games.

Let's look back at my key hand. Suppose that I'd been in rough shape, not because of an earlier questionable play, but because four hands in a row I'd gotten my money in with the best of it and someone had drawn out on me in situations in which he should have thrown his hand away. Now, let's say my miracle spade had arrived. Justice! Where would that feeling of justice have left me, though? Would I have been expecting more "payback" hands? Would I later have grown irritated by the seemingly whimsical nature of poker justice? ("They took them away, then they gave them back, and now they're taking them away again." Who is "they," anyway?)

Justice is an extraordinarily slippery concept that is highly personal in nature. If you spend your time thinking about what's fair or not fair, instead of what is or isn't, or what's probable or improbable, you'll probably be able to depart feeling that you played OK but just didn't receive any justice … but the key word there is that you'll be departing

If you focus on what can be analyzed or understood, and not on what you or your opponents deserve or is just, your play will stay on a more even keel, you'll avoid going on tilt, and you just might be thinking clearly enough to improve as a poker player. Understanding what is, rather than what you think ought to be, leads to measurably better results.

Andrew N.S. Glazer, "The Poker Pundit," is Card Player's tournament editor, and he writes a weekly gambling column for The Detroit Free Press. He is the author of Casino Gambling the Smart Way (Career Press, 1999), The Complete Idiot's Guide to Poker (Alpha Books, fall 2004), and Tournament Poker With the Champions (Huntington Press, spring 2005). He also is a consultant to www.PartyPoker.com, and welcomes your questions.