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It Is Time To Redefine Poker
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26 October 2007
"Poker is a 50/50 game played by people who think they`re 2:1 favorites to win."
If I have to read one more analagous explanation from a "poker pro" that poker is like playing heads or tails where you get paid $200 every time you win and only pay out $100 every time you lose then I may well succumb to nausea.
Basically you now have thousands of these well-meaning, intelligent young men all challenging one another to what they believe to be games of heads and tails played with loaded coins. Those coins are loaded, in favor of the online poker card rooms. Why does none of this trenchant, sometimes moving analysis ever refer to the rake?
In fact for most players the game will never come close to being a 50/50 game. You have to be an excellent player to get it to a break-even level like that. To think that it`s 60/40 in your favor is to dwell on the moon, or to inhabit a rarefied atmosphere occupied by a handful of players in the world, and they`re mostly transient visitors.
That dashing Scandinavian who raked in $5 mil one year moves to Vegas and loses all of it the next year. The guy who makes it to the final of one WPT event and then writes a book about how proficient he was at Maths when he went to Yale follows the pro circuit for two years without threatening another final table.
Now we have thousands of new pros who have all read the same six books, played 50,000 hands of online poker, and love to multi-table pressing hands in exactly the same way. They`ll eventually graduate to a level where they beat up on one another, trying to grind out a profit based on some exquisitely complex nerdish calculation, while the card rooms rake in $2 million a day. Spare me your Estimated Value and Hands Won Per Hour white noise, and I`ll spare you the cynical outlook about the game`s real winners.
You can win at poker, at times, and at other times you can get outplayed by a guy with a 50 IQ and a 100 word vocab. The idea that you`re getting 2:1 on your money in the long run is deeply flawed and will result in a very disappointing "career".
Poker isn`t roulette but don`t go thinking that it therefore must be chess. The best player doesn`t win all the time or even 60% of the time. It`s a blend of luck and skill that can only be beaten by money management - and by that I mean the next time you take down a big score in a huge MTT thank your lucky stars and invest the bulk in something that pays an annual return like company stock. Please don`t use it as a "bankroll" to follow the pro tour and play in every WSOP event. Treat it more like a lottery win and less like a sign and you`ll look back and thank me.
Posted by: Marc at 16:20
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