Poker Articles

Even after countless articles and a lot of time spent playing, a lot of people don’t understand the basic concept of rationing. Perhaps this is due to the nature of the typical poker player. With the rare exception, most avid poker players are not starving. Even those few players who have ever been “busto” have still had a roof over their head and some kind of food to eat. So, even though true empathy may be hard to come by, let’s imagine the kind of situation where real rationing needs to happen.

I like to tell stories about my Grandpa Hy. His family came over to the USA from Europe during relatively peaceful times, and by the time WW2 started he was a soldier in the US army. Like most families I have another Grandfather too. The reason that I don’t write about him as much is that his is not a happy story. In fact, my Grandpa Henry nearly didn’t make it to America at all.

As far as he knew, Henry’s family had always lived in Germany. They were merchants and they had a small clothing store that all the members of his family worked in. Henry’s father, Chaim, was a stubborn and traditional man. Even after Hitler came into power, rather than leave with most of his Jewish friends and customers, he did his best to keep the store running as it had always been. But eventually they came for him like they did for every Jew in Germany.

Because he was a kind man, Chaim had made many friends even among some of the sympathetic Germans. One night he and his family got an urgent warning that the German army was coming to arrest them. There was no time to even grab their possessions so they hid in the crawlspace of their house with only the clothes on their backs and one small package of matzoh to eat.

Soon the army arrived and took all their things and broke up the house looking for them. Though they were lucky they weren’t found, they were unlucky that the army left a guard to watch the house in case they came back so they couldn’t leave. For eight days they were trapped in silence and with nothing but the small package of matzoh. By the time the guard finally left and they were able to sneak out, they were all tired and hungry but still alive thanks to a puddle of water and eating one small square of matzoh a day. That was rationing.

Nobody ever thinks that bad things will happen to them. Over the years I have watched many players go broke and most of the time, if they did see it coming, they were stuck in denial. And in many cases it was at least partially their own fault. With some planning and forethought, most of these players would have been able to weather the variance and still be in the game.

One problem is that the act of “saving something for a rainy day” seems weak. To be a great poker player you have to have a lot of self confidence. Admitting to the fact that you may lose goes against this self confidence. For many players the word “lose” doesn’t even exist. Yet, it is possible to reconcile this. If you truly believe that you have a skill advantage over the rest of the field, then it follows that the more you play, the more often you should win. So playing ten fifty dollar games gives you more chances to prove your skill than playing one five hundred dollar game. And by doing this you still are taking a big risk compared to the guys who follow a money management system to the letter. Those guys would probably only play five dollar games.

The truth is that, at best, only one player out of twenty will be a lifetime winner at poker. And, of those winners, there is a percentage who lost for a while and only later started to win. Even accounting for great skill, the math of simple variance alone dictates that the cards will sometimes defeat the greatest skill. Doyle Brunson admitted to going about a year without a win once due to a lot of bad beats.

So believe in yourself. Have the confidence to play your best poker game all the time. Know in your heart that you will wreck the game. But give yourself every chance you can to prove it. Check your resources and use them as wisely as possible so you can take the bad beats and still be in there swinging. That next pitch may just be your home run ball.