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EXPERT VIEW - Poker Players And Money
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30 October 2005
The relationship between professional poker players and money is demented, twisted, and endlessly fascinating. As a pro on the bottom rung of the ladder I am starting to see how poker players simultaneously become successful and live in constant danger of throwing it all away precisely because of their careless attitude towards money.
I`m going to use my own petty experience as an example, and then extrapolate to include the big guns, whom I think are all operating with a similar mindset but obviously in a different league. 6 months ago it was a huge deal for me to lose $500 in a night of poker at the card rooms in Seattle. It represented enough of my total poker bankroll to disturb my equilibrium. Then I won a few decent tournaments, and now I know what it is like to win $10,000 in a single session of cards. Last week I went to a local card room and calmly dropped $1,200 playing $30/$60 limit, a game at which I felt like the sucker and played accordingly. Not only did everyone know each other, but I wasn`t prepared for the fact that these guys all played like it was $3/$6. Instead of having $200 in front of them they had $2,000 but they played their draws and bottom pairs to the end.
The point was that I stood up and shrugged it off. The $1200 didn`t really matter to me because I know I can win that and much more in a single tournament. That`s the first step towards a blog along the lines of Daniel`s infamous posts where he can shrug off a loss of $150,000 in a single night. Actually, that does Negreanu a disservice - he claimed that the loss was a good result based on the size of the game and what others dropped.
His last post details another night at the big game in Bobby`s room, where he faced Jennifer Harman (I wonder if he even bets into her, such is the admiration), Chau, Eli, and the other maniacal cash game experts. He dropped $94,000 but spent most of the blog explaining how he won $11,000 (and it could have been $14,000) on prop bets. This childish delight in catching a lucky card, and concentrating on the $11k won and not the $94k lost can only be ascribed to a top poker pro. Their understanding of money is not dissimilar to that of a three-year old. Give a toddler a million dollars and he`s likely to trade it all for something super-shiny. Give a poker player a million dollars and a lot of them will wager it on the putting green or on the color of the next card.
And now I find that my attitude towards poker games is already starting to get unbalanced, once again with the caveat that my blase attitude is on a Lilliputian scale. I entered a $200 sit and go tournament tonight - it would have been a special event a few months ago. Now I`m bored and looking for a little fun. I played accordingly, throwing in big preflop raises with AJ suited and trying to trap all the time when I did have a hand. It was a poor display from me. Fortunately the opposition was equally dire and I managed to scrape into 3rd and show a small profit on the night. But I can see how celebrity and the ability to make a fortune can easily sway you into dropping a small fortune, and that your only memory of the session is that you saw A-Rod (poseur, fool, and a phony human being) stumble into the room for a second.
Posted by: Marc at 09:43
1 Comments
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