Poker on the Mind

by Mike O Malley | Published: Apr 23, 2004

Some people's minds are like information filters, taking in the good stuff and removing the garbage. My mind is more of a junkyard, retaining useless information, which would explain why I know that Doyle Brunson won both of his World Series of Poker titles with 10-2. If you were to remove the top of my head, you would find a myriad of useless information: hand rankings, tournament winners, political mumbo jumbo, sports statistics, and computer lingo. It's all tossed around my brain in a cluttered mess that sometimes resembles my ex-girlfriend's bedroom.

I can't begin to explain Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation, but I can tell you in detail Doyle Brunson's theory on playing suited connectors in no-limit hold'em. A very enlightening song I have memorized is Who Let the Dogs Out, meaning my brain has made some terrible choices, and those choices now define me as a cesspool of useless information.

If all poker players could have a brain wash each year, cleaning out the clutter that exists, we might be able to make some room for more important things. I'm sure most of us would like to be able to recite Shakespeare. But knowing Shakespeare would not enable me to have room to store the words of wisdom of Phil Hellmuth after 2000 WSOP Champion Robert Varkonyi beat him in a big pot with Q-10: "If he wins this tournament, I will shave my head." Of course, I also had to store the image of Phil having his head shaved. What would the story be without the picture?

There are many Phil Hellmuth quotes in my brain, mixed up with a list of all the World Series of Poker, World Poker Tour, and Tournament of Champions winners, the proper pronunciation of Cloutier, and the real name (Thomas) of Amarillo Slim. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address takes 30 seconds to recite, but I don't know a single sentence of it. Eminem's Lose Yourself takes more than three minutes to recite, and I can recite it, word for word.

Poker trivia occupies my time as well as my mind. I can list from 1 to 10 the all-time leading money winners at the World Series of Poker: Johnny Chan (1), T.J. Cloutier (2), Phil Hellmuth Jr. (3), Chris Moneymaker (4), Chris Ferguson (5), Erik Seidel (6), Stu Ungar (7), Robert Varkonyi (8), Dewey Tomko (9), and Berry Johnston (10). And then, as if memorizing lists of players isn't enough, I can find deep within the recesses of my mind the years that Las Vegas poker rooms closed: Dunes (1993), Treasure Island (1996), Harrah's (2000), and MGM Grand (2001).

Sometimes I assemble a dream team of poker players in my sleep, consisting of players from different tournaments. My dream team of World Poker Tour winners includes Gus Hansen, Scotty Nguyen, Carlos Mortensen, "Freddy" Deeb, and Kirill Gerasimov. Of course, my overload of information would not be complete without knowing that this dream team hails from Denmark, Vietnam, Spain, Lebanon, and Russia, respectively. Other nights, I pit this international dream team against my USA dream team: Layne Flack, Ted Forrest, Hoyt Corkins, Phil Ivey, and Howard Lederer.

If I could delete these files and free up memory for other things, I would. I've never forgotten, since starting to play poker, that Berry Johnston has 43 money finishes in the WSOP, or that Stu Ungar won 10 no-limit hold'em tournaments with buy-ins of $10,000 or more. But I did forget, when on the WPT final-table stage recently, to tie my shoe.

There's a scene in Terminator in which Arnold Schwarzenegger turns into a pile of twisted metal, wires, and junk. That twisted wreck of junk is my brain, which never allows me to remember my own cell phone number but is rife with random refuse that won't go away: the final-table lineup of the last TOC (2001), the exact two cards Matt Damon was holding when he was busted by Doyle Brunson in the 1998 WSOP, the address of my childhood home, and who won the 1988 Masters. I have only to reach in and retrieve these things, although why on earth would I ever need to?

In the past, I have been accused of knowing a little bit about everything and a lot about nothing. Thanks to Sports Illustrated's Steve Rushin and his ideas about brain drain, I now know why my junkyard is so useful.