Poker Articles

I spent last weekend in Tokyo, Japan, having finished a business trip a day early, and was stuck with two days to see what I could see in a country that has always fascinated me.  On top of general tourist stuff and drinking a lot of sake, I learned what I could about the culture and society.

One sight struck me harder than any other.  My hotel, the Keio Plaza, was hosting a job fair run by Fujitsu.  They had a large conference room on the third floor, just off the lobby, with a number of hotel rooms booked to do follow-up interviews.  I saw a steady stream of serious young men and women, hundreds of them, obviously just out of college and trying to start careers.  They all wore the same black business suits; coat & tie for men, jacket & skirt for women.  Being Japanese, almost all had the same hair color, facial features, and build.

I was overwhelmed by the sameness of it all.  Each of these applicants was just a face in a throng of competitors, trapped in a societal norm preventing them from making a unique or interesting first impression.  How would you stand out in a crowd when your upbringing and heritage discourages doing just that?

Riding the subways around Tokyo, I saw billboards and advertisements for hip, young actors and music groups.  The artists staring back at me dressed a certain way, had their hair colored or spiked a certain way…the classic act of defiance; wearing, doing, listening to exactly what your parents hate.  These people were definitely not wearing black suits and going to interview for entry-level technology jobs.

The fans of these artists weren’t going to job fairs either.  No, sir.  They have no interest in working for the oyadama.  They are far more interested in expressing themselves…by dressing EXACTLY like the actors or singers on the billboard.  I saw a guy get on the Marunouchi Line wearing a black velvet jacket, leather pants, red cowboy boots and hair going off like he just licked a short circuit.  I thought, “hey, that’s interesting”…until I saw an ad at the next stop for a concert at Tokyo Dome next month.  One of the band’s singers was wearing an identical outfit, down to the semi-bored sneer on his face.  Even when they were trying to be different, they were the same.  How do you truly define uniqueness?

Online poker places many of the same impositions on those of us looking to find our way out of the dense forest of competitors, be they talent or donkey.  You pick a name, but it's in small text on the screen, next to everyone else's small text in an identical font.  You can pick a picture avatar to represent you, but again...it's small, and very probably has nothing to do with who you actually are.

The structure of the game you're playing is often stifling - creative play and 4th-level thinking are sub-optimal when the average stack deep in a tournament is 12 big blinds.  How can you be yourself when the mathematics of 16-tabling turbo SNGs dictates exactly what you (and everyone else at the table) should do?

If you are making money with A-B-C, mechanical poker at your current level, I don’t blame you if your first instinct is to stay with what works.  But you’re also ingraining strategies and habits that will cause you heartache and grief when you look to move up.  If it’s obvious what you’re going to do in a certain spot, good players will take advantage.  Your robotic strength is now a glaring weakness.  You have to learn creativity to make each jump to higher stakes.

Poker as an art form, a means of personal expression, is far better suited to cash games than tournament play.  Playing 200 BB deep in a big-bet cash game gives you the implied odds to play any two cards in search of a jackpot flop, or the stack sizes to make bluffs large enough where your opponents have room to fold.  Give yourself room to create, and you’ll be surprised at what you come up with.

You can also find a hidden reserve of ingenuity by learning a new game.  We all know how to play No Limit Texas Hold’em because there are billions of hands of experience documented in dozens of books, hundreds of educational videos, and thousands of online forum posts.  When sitting down at a table off the beaten path, be it Razz, Triple Draw, Stud Hi-Lo or Badugi, you’re forced to figure things out on your own, rather than rely on what you’ve been programmed to do.  

Don’t think about No Limit Hold’em…think about poker.  Free yourself from any pre-conceived notions.  Try the Ted Forrest Experiment, where he claimed to have seen every flop for a year playing Omaha Hi-Lo.  You don’t have to do it for a full year, and your bankroll will thank you if you try it at micro-stakes (or even play money).

The differences between break-even, good and the best players are about who can find the strategic gaps in everyone’s play.  You have to think outside any pre-defined box to take the most advantage of every opportunity.  It may be risky to truly be yourself.  But the risk is worth the reward.

Isn’t it easier to be yourself than work hard to pretend to be somebody you’re not?