We can find motivation in almost anything. The power of the internet and the instant transmission of information it provides is so powerful that entire communities can be inspired by the plight of a people half a world away. We can marvel at engineering feats that we may never get the chance to see in person. We can see pictures of the deepest depths of our planet. What may be most important is we can now share our stories faster and more thoroughly than ever before. These stories can be used to inspire, no matter how innocuous or fleeting they may appear, and those men and women that star in these stories become legendary for their personal sacrifice and dedication to their cause.

I’ve been a diehard NFL fan since I was a very little kid and my team has always been the New England Patriots. I remember in those early days with Drew Bledsoe at the helm the knock on the Patriots was that they couldn’t run the ball consistently. So in the 1998 NFL draft they grabbed a man by the name of Robert Edwards out of the University of Georgia to fill that particular gaping wound. After a stellar rookie season, Edwards tore up his knee in a beach flag football game during the offseason. He was told by doctors at the time that he may never walk again and he came very close to needing an amputation from the knee down. Edwards just continued to rehab and to work towards getting his career back. He would eventually find his way to the Miami Dolphins where he worked his way onto the roster. It was during a preseason interview that I happened to be watching when Edwards was interviewed by a sideline reporter. The reporter said to Edwards that his coaches kept seeing, “flashes of brilliance” in his performances. For some reason, that phrase stuck with me.

I think as poker players we have an acute understanding for that phrase. We all have moments that make us love this game. Sometimes it’s lying in the weeds while your opponent bets off his or her entire stack right into your lap, others it’s about pushing your table around and completely dictating the action. Whatever the case may be, you figured it out. You got the maximum value out of your hand. Like a great chess player, you were able to calculate exactly what your opponent was going to do next and plan the perfect counter strategy to it. These are the moments we long for as players. Hell for most of us, these moments are the reasons we got into the game in the first place. We all want that Hollywood ending. That moment when we’ve “looked into our opponent’s soul” and found all the answers we needed.

It’s also easy to fall so in love with the idea of posterizing your opponent that we forget to look for the simple value that we can pick up by just playing basic poker. We get so caught up in trying to have our moment in the spotlight that we miss all the little hands that make us big winners in the long haul. Most sessions of poker are going to come down to only a handful of spots that will ultimately determine the outcome of your session, but it’s the smaller hands that will be the more numerous decisions during a typical day at the office. Yes ultimately when you get your whole stack in on a cooler hand or you get sucked out on by a 2 outer with one card to come for a several buy-in sized pot that will have the greatest effect on your bottom line. That doesn’t mean you can just go throwing away an extra bet or two paying someone off when you know you’re way behind. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be going for as much value as your hand dictates in the smaller pots. Those flashes of brilliance can blind us from our ultimate goal, winning.

I’m not suggesting don’t enjoy those flashes of brilliance when you have them. What I’m trying to say here is don’t let the fact that you just snapped off a bluff attempt or picked off someone trying to run an angle shoot on you cloud your judgment in later streets. You need to be able to put the hands in perspective almost immediately after they occur. That’s been one of my latest projects. I’ve had a few big moments lately at the tables, those hands where you start to believe the crap you’ve been saying about yourself. You start to really think you are getting very good at this game and it really is just a matter of putting the hours in before you come out on top. Just don’t suddenly forget what got you to that point in the process. Hours upon hours of hard work.

I’ve been getting shelled the past couple of weeks at the table, plain and simple. Since starting back up on the grind this is probably the worst stretch I’ve gone through. Times like these it gets hard to keep your head up and keep going. I know your told when you get into this business that you need to handle the swings and you’re not always going to get the best of it day in and day out. I understand that fact, however it’s still possible to feel like shit when it happens to you. I’m human, no matter how hard I try to get rid of that particular limitation it will always be there. It’s something none of us can ever transcend and as human beings we are ultimately emotional creatures. Some of us, like me, are certainly more emotional than others and we need to find inspiration and motivation when we get kicked in the balls. Enter stage right, Tim Tebow.

I was sitting around thumbing through the channels on my TV when I saw ESPN’s Year of the Quarterback special. The episode that was on at that time was of Time Tebow and his path from the end of college to draft night in the NFL. Personally I’m a fan of the guy. I was a fan of his while he was playing for the Gators, I like him in the NFL, yeah he’s clunky throwing the rock but I root for him all the same. During this special it showed all of the workouts that Tebow did leading up to the combine and the NFL draft. Insanity would be a good word for it. Take out your opinions of the man and just watch what was going on, watch this man chasing a dream that everyone is saying he can never get. He is busting his ass as hard as possible just for a chance to prove himself on the next level. He’s guaranteed nothing despite having won all of the awards and accolades in college that he did. I just saw a glimpse of a man that wouldn’t let someone else take his dream away from him. Like him or not, you can respect that about him.

In the piece Tim said something that I thought was rather profound. When asked about his training workouts he said, “At the end of the day, was I the hardest working player in the country today and did I get better? If the answer’s yes then it was a good day.” Simple idea, a little cliché, but the point is still very valid. Watching this coming off of a session where I got my ass kicked, I wondered if I could honestly say the same about myself. Could I claim that I did everything I could to get better at the table that day? Was I the hardest working playing in the country today? It’s a tough question to ask yourself, because often the answer is going to be no. No, you lost your cool a little bit and opened up your calling range after taking that big beat. No, you splashed around a little too much after you got tired of folding for the past 4 dealers. No, you made that crying call when you were certain you were beat.

I’ve been carrying that thought with me since my channel surfing lead me to Time Tebow smashing tractor tires with sledgehammers and working out from 7AM to 7PM on a daily basis. For the majority of my personal history I can’t say I was the hardest working player, student, son, brother, boyfriend, or any other demographic that I’ve fit in at one point during my 24 years on this planet. That thought bothers me a great deal. I feel like I’ve wasted a lot of great opportunities in this life and I don’t want to add poker to that list. Win, lose, or draw I just want to say that I was the hardest working playing in the country each and every day that I’m out on the felt or studying the game in my off days. We as players can’t totally control our fate, the turn of a card can still corrupt even our best sessions. All we can do is bust our asses to get better, so that’s what I’m going to do.

So this past week I found myself in an interesting situation. It was the first time in a little while I had encountered something completely new to me at the tables. Therefore I reacted without really considering my options as carefully as I should have. I reflected on what went down later that night and decided that not only did I feel like I handled the situation as best I could, but I was also completely justified in what I did. I don't think the entire poker community is going to agree with me on this one but I'll tell my side of the story here today and let you be the judge as to whether or not what I did was justified and ethical.

So I'm playing in a 1/2NL game down at Foxwoods. The game has been pretty soft for most of my time there. One such villain has been chatting up a storm. He's in his early 40s and has been frequenting the casino since it opened 20 years ago, or at the very least that's the story he was going with on this particular day. Anyway, he did seem to have a basic knowledge of the game but I wouldn't call him a threat to me at the table by any means. He was sitting three seats to my left so he wasn't really someone I was expecting to get a whole lot of value from in this game. We both for the most part just stayed out of each other's way. For whatever reason though, we got involved in one of the more interesting pots of last week's sessions for me.

Action is folded around to me and I raise to $11 in the HJ with KhQd. Our villain in question is the only caller in the SB and we see a flop of Th4d2h. Our villain checks to me and I decided to check behind. This guy was the the type of player to not fold if he has any piece of this board. Bottom pair is worth seeing one more card over so I decided to take my free card option. The turn comes the 4h giving me two overs and a K-high flush draw. Our villain wakes up suddenly and bets $10 into the $20 dollar pot. I think there is a reasonable chance I still have the best hand, plus I have plenty of outs to see one more card turn. I call and the river peels off the 8d, what appears to me to be a total blank. Our villain fires out a $20 bet this time. I start to really think about my decision here. I really didn't want to fold my hand because this player had been getting a little splashy over the past few orbits and this could easily just be another example of that. My only problem here is he could be getting splashy with A-high and still have me crushed. I glance over at our villain, he looks like he wants nothing to do with this hand anymore. He's sitting perfectly still as though a cheetah just spotted him and he really doesn't want to get into a foot race. I grab my cards to looks at them again, more to kill time while I think than anything else. As I do this my opponent grabs his cards very sloppily, and in doing show partially flashes them to me. I see two black cards and one of them is a face card. Given this new information and coupled with my villain's disdain for his holding I make the call. He rolls over Ks9s and I take down the pot.

I thought about this later on. Was what I did ethical as a poker player? While I was pondering this at the table the villain in question was just kind of in shock. He finally said to me, "I couldn't get you off that hand for $20 huh?" At this point I felt like if I mentioned to him that he flashed his cards at me he would have thrown an angry fit. So I just calmly said to him, "Nope." I've been thinking about this hand for a few days now and I've told the story to a few poker buddies of mine. Each time the reaction has been the same, "Sick call down with K-high." I'll be honest here, I don't feel particularly achieved having made this call. I imagine this is what a slight of hand magician feels like after pulling off a trick. He or she knows the only reason it looks amazing is because you are standing at a certain angle or you just missed one or two moves in the process. I don't feel like I had a soul read on this guy by any means. He just freely gave me a ton of information and I took it.

Upon reflection I can say this for certain, I have absolutely no remorse for this guy. Yes I did call because I saw what he had, but I wasn't the one who made him reach for his cards. I wasn't shooting an angle to make him fumble with his holding and let me sneak a glance. I wasn't ducking my head down to try and sneak a peak at the answers in the back of the textbook. I simply sat there, observed my opponent, and played my hand accordingly. I feel completely justified in my actions. If you don't protect your cards, you deserve to be posterized like this. Plain and simple.

Let me know what you think. Am I just some angle shooting donkey or is there some merit to my argument? Leave a comment or contact me via any of the following platforms.

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