Some Champions Fear Going Broke

"I've got so much honey, the bees envy me … "

In a recent Card Player column (Vol. 17/No. 4, Feb. 13, 2004), Greg Dinkin provided a wonderful analysis about the difference between succeeding because of something and succeeding in spite of it. I really enjoyed his column, and was having a great time reading it. I especially liked the part where he mentions Mike Kryzewski, the legendary basketball coach at my alma mater, Duke. Coach K has always been a hero of mine, not only for his winning teams, but also (up until recently) for his ability to see to it that all of his players graduated.

Anyway, I was cruising along through the column, and then I got to the last couple of paragraphs and had to throw the brakes on, because Dinkin wrote:

Of course, if you don't have whatever that intangible is that makes you unafraid of going broke, you probably don't have that intangible that will make you a champion.

OK, Greg, we gotta talk. I totally disagree with this. First, I suppose it depends on your definition of "champion." Do you mean somebody who has won a high-profile big-money tournament, or simply somebody who is at the top of his craft? Actually, either way, I still disagree with you. Consider Noel Furlong. In 1999, Noel won the $10,000 buy-in championship event at the World Series of Poker – and he's a feared competitor anytime he plays. OK, that's a pretty good description of a champion. But I don't know a thing about Noel's financial risk tolerance. After all, he lives not on his poker winnings, but on income from a carpet manufacturing business – not a profession known for its high-flying risk-takers. The $10,000 he used to buy in to the 1999 WSOP did not represent a huge financial risk for him, so maybe he does have a huge fear of going broke. I assert that we don't know.

But the preceding paragraph was pretty much off the top of my head. The main meat of my argument follows:

Let's stipulate that a champion is simply, as I said above, a gambler who is at the top of his craft. Then, there's a much stronger argument against the notion that you have to be willing to go broke to be a champion. I will point to two groups of people who prove my point.

First, let's leave the poker room for a moment and walk out into the pit. "Yikes!" cry the poker players. "The pit – doom to bankrolls, land of free booze and negative expected value (EV) games – take me back, take me back!" Ah, but you know where we're going, really, don't you? Yes, the blackjack table. We all know people (or know of people) who make very good money playing blackjack as a positive EV game. They are locked in a battle of wits and tactics with the casinos, and some make their living doing it. Is it gambling? Well, there's a deck of playing cards involved, so I'm going to say yes, it's gambling.

Ever been around serious blackjack players talking about their craft? They worry constantly about going broke, because if they do, the game is over. They talk about "risk of ruin" (a statistical measure of the chance that you will, indeed, go broke). They pore over the Kelly criterion – a technique that tells you how much you should bet, given your bankroll and the advantage you have in a particular bet. The whole reason that you worry about things like risk of ruin and Kelly betting is so you can gamble successfully and not go broke. But there are people who make a very good (in some cases, luxurious) living gambling at blackjack. I think they're champions.

OK, for Exhibit B, we're going back to the poker room (the assembled retinue breathes a collective sigh of relief). Let's go over to the medium-high-limit tables. It doesn't matter if we're at Bellagio, Commerce Casino, Foxwoods, wherever. Look at the $30-$60 games, the $80-$160 games, and the $200-$400 games. Sure, there are some fish at the tables, but it's likely that at every one of those tables, there are one or more people making a very good living doing just what they're doing right now, winning one big bet per hour, day in and day out. Will they be on the cover of Card Player? Unlikely. In fact, I expect they want their photo on the magazine cover about as much as your average spy wants her photo on the cover of Intelligence Quarterly.

But these mid-high-limit pros are making a living gambling (that deck of cards thing again). And you can be sure they think carefully about their bankroll requirements, because just like the blackjack players, if they play $100-$200 poker regularly on a $15,000 bankroll, they're going to go broke – and it's back to square one. The guys who do this all the time, who don't overbet their bankrolls, who don't tilt, and who don't spew the money off in the pit are champions in every sense of the word. But I'm sure many (probably most) of them would blanch at the thought of going broke.

So, Greg, it was a great column, right up until those last couple of paragraphs. Thanks for reading my dissenting view.

"I got all the riches, baby, one man can claim."