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“Envy has no holidays.”
-- Francis Bacon
Envy will always be a part of poker. Someone wins a pot with two jacks, and you wish you had those jacks. But even more
than that basic desire, dealing with the politics of envy is an important part of being a winning poker player.
The most obvious envy issues grow from the same root as greed. It’s not going to be very helpful to you as a player to want
more than it is reasonable to want. Envying those players playing in the biggest game in the casino won’t bring you anything
of value, but it can easily provide the motivation for you to play above your
bankroll. There are a lot of good reasons
to aspire to play in bigger games than you currently are, but just the fact that others are playing these games isn’t one.
Winning poker (as opposed to just gamb00ling at poker) is about personal management, patience,
self-control and sensible
risk-versus-reward. It isn’t about doing
what somebody else is doing, or wanting the same car someone else drives.
Beyond resisting greedy impulses, successful players must face envy-rooted issues. While most people play poker because
it is a fun something-to-do, there are a significant number of players whose game regularly falls victim to the pitfalls
of envy. They hate to see a winning player win. They spend a lot of time obsessing over their object of envy rather than
their own game. They may reraise a winning player merely because they are annoyed by the other player’s success. They check
hands they should bet just because they want to get some thrill from checkraising a winning player. They take hands too far
just because they want to lay a bad beat on their envy-enemy.
They burn a huge amount of brain cells strategizing around things that are either just a waste of time, or that have an actual negative
expectation.
Of course, all this conniving benefits the winning players. The winning players don’t just gain because the envious players
are making negative expectation bets, the real benefit comes from the fact that so many of the envious players are just
a tier below the level of being winners. Envy likely isn’t the only thing holding them back, but it surely contributes.
While winning a great deal at poker does require much skill, winning a moderate amount isn’t all that hard. But, it does
require you to spend a lot of time on your own game. There is a bottomless pit of very small things that taken together
equal a large chunk of profit (or loss) for every player: where should you sit at a table; which game should you play in;
what does that tell mean that the player in seat three has; maybe I should eliminate (or play more) the group of my most
marginal hands in this particular game; maybe I should call out of the small blind more (or less) today, and so on. Dozens
of small things directly impact your results on a day-to-day basis, and monitoring them well takes a significant
amount of mental effort -- effort that you sure shouldn’t be wasting obsessing over someone else’s good fortune.
Winning players have enough to deal with, enough problems and challenges, that they don’t have time to waste on the results
of other players. Many weaker players are too mentally sloppy or just too lazy to do the work to be winning players, so they
do have time to fixate on trivial concerns. Instead of doing the hard work of becoming better players, they focus on trying
to hurt the winning players.
In the grand scheme of things, winning players love this. Players who could be adequate adversaries end up being
self-destructive weaklings. But, if you want to win at poker, you have to be able to take the desperate actions and bad
vibes hurled at you by the envious. When you beat 95% of the players out of a pot, it’s just that, one pot, part of the
game, no big deal. But to maybe 5% of the players it’s another brick on their wagon of obsession. It’s personal. It’s
passionate. It’s silly as can be, but it is their primary motivation in playing. But, thankfully, that is their business.
We don’t care if they have foolish motivations. Our business is to know it’s going on, and squeeze a little more profit
out of it. That’s what winner’s do -- find a few coins of profit in all the situations they face. Envy takes no holidays,
and winners don’t take side-trips down Envy Lane.
Also see: Poker Ego,
Poker Greed and
Stubborn Poker Players
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