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“You must lose a fly to catch a trout.”
-- George Herbert
According to Inspector Clouseau, even the most absurd setbacks and defeats are all just a part of life’s rich pageant.
Sometimes when we play poker we sure wish our lives didn’t have so much rich pageantry. Several years ago, playing Holdem,
I lost with JJ against T2 on a JT4 flop, when it came two running tens. The very next hand I again lost to T2,
this time holding AT on a 44T flop, when it came two running deuces. It wasn’t bad enough to lose the 1000 to 1 first hand,
I had to follow that up by losing the 330 to 1 second hand, and add even more pageantry by losing both of these situations
to the improbable hand of T2!
I’m about as likely to have lunch with a reincarnated Marilyn Monroe on Mars as I am to have this set of events happen again.
But the point is not to focus on the bad luck, the notorious bad beats, but merely to say: stuff happens. If you play enough
poker, your life is an endless cabaret of spectacularly bizarre events.
AQ might face A9, in the most important hand ever
for either player, and it may come a nine. It happens.
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This column isn’t about bad or weird luck, though. If you are to succeed at playing poker, you have to handle the ups,
downs and plateaus of the game. Sometimes in Holdem you get AA two hands in a row; sometimes you go 25 hands without
seeing one ace. Sometimes after struggling all day to win a few bets, as you rack your chips ready to leave, you are
dealt AAA in stud and your aces full lose to a hidden four of a kind. Sometimes when you flop an underset in Holdem you
end up making quads. And sometimes, nothing remotely interesting happens to you for hours at a time.
 Not all, but a lot of what
happens to you at a poker table is merely the pageantry of the game, and you can’t do anything about it. Sniveling about bad beats,
gloating about sucking out, crying about accidental errors, all these things are like cursing the wind. It’s still going to blow.
A lot of poker players spend much of their time raging at the heavens. Calm down. Take a pill. Chill out. Sometimes it comes
a spade on the river. Sure, there is nothing wrong with being disappointed when it comes a spade one hand, but if that ever
affects the way you play the next hand, you are just cursing the wind.
Poker is a brain game, and let’s face it,
as a species, we don’t have a lot of brain cells to waste.
As players, there are a lot of things we can completely control at a poker table. Then there are a lot of things we can partially
control. And finally there are the things we
have absolutely zero control over. Every second you spend obsessing over the third group, you are not spending your brain time on the
first group -- or the critical second group.
It’s kind of mind-boggling to realize that at most every poker table in the world, some player is on tilt at this very moment,
letting the events of hands completed two minutes or three hours or even ten years ago dictate actions now. It makes no sense
to raise this pot just because it came a spade five minutes ago (unless you do it because you are consciously hoping people
will think you are on tilt when you actually have a great hand). But players do precisely that, every day, in every game.
Stop it. Losing pots is a part of poker’s rich pageant. Losing pots in bizarre, fluky, disappointing, and unlucky ways
is the stuff of what makes poker worth playing. Poker is a fun, incredible, rich game because anything and everything
does happen constantly. That means part of what makes poker so wonderful to play is the fact that it totally sucks sometimes!
Next time you find yourself obsessing over something that you had absolutely zero control over, ask yourself why. Next time
you feel like tossing in a raise with J9 because your set of Kings just got beat by a lunatic who thought his idiot-end gutshot
draw was worth calling three bets cold, just think about Inspector Clouseau getting his hand stuck in a spittoon. These things
happen. It’s all just part of life’s rich pageant.
More on Poker Bad Beats,
Suckouts,
Poker Humor and
You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet
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