I’m cooler (or less cool) now
I was just walking back to my car in the parking lot when I was approached by a group of four 10 year old boys. I heard one of them say, "pound it before you get in." Looking up, I came to realize he was talking to me.
The boy, sporting a backwards baseball cap and droopy jeans, held out his fist and repeated, "pound it before you get in." I quickly looked around to see if I was being setup for a mugging but no one else was close to me.
"It is going to explode?" I asked.
"Um, maybe, I don't know," he responded.
"Well," I continued, "I'm only in if it explodes."
He nodes his head and the exploding fist bump resulted in he and his friends laughing hysterically and walking away.
As I got into my car, I couldn't help but wonder: did I just provide to those kids that I was cooler than they thought? Or did I prove that I'm less cool than they thought?
What I’ve learned from poker
A couple of years ago, my buddy Aaron introduced me to poker, specifically Texas Hold 'em. Being a good friend, he did it in the most appropriate way possible: by taking all of my money repeatedly. I remember sitting and marveling at his ability to win hand after hand, without breaking a sweat. Every time I thought I had him, he had something better. It drove me nuts. How could he possibly know what I had each time? The problem, of course, was that I had no real idea how the game was played. I made several mistakes that beginning poker players make. Since then, I've learned a lot, and found that there's a bunch of life lessons hidden within the game of poker.
It's not all about chance. The first mistake I made as a beginner was that I assumed poker was all about chance. When playing cards, it's easy to group it into the category of "gambling" along with playing the lottery. There is, of course, the element of chance to poker. But even more important is the strategy you employ. You cannot control the hand you are dealt (legally) but you can control how you use the hand you're dealt. Good life lesson there. Good players can win with almost any two cards; bad players can barely win with good ones.
It's not all about me. My second mistake was playing the game only from my point of view. I was playing my cards and wasn't paying attention to the other players. You need to understand what you have, yes, but you also need to try and figure out what everyone else has. Are they actually playing from a position of power or bluffing? Do they have any idea what they're doing? Will they fold if you bet hard? In these respects, poker is all about observing your opponents to determine their patterns, their strengths, and their weaknesses. This is a really important lesson that applies in all facets of life. As The Art of War says:
So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will fight without danger in battles.
If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.
If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.
Having the best hand and bluffing aren't the only options. I believe this is the most common misconception about poker and life. A lot of people believe that you either have the best hand that round or you're bluffing. In reality, you don't always know that you have the best hand. You may have an idea about the relative strength of weakness of your hand in the deck, but a winning hand one round can be a losing hand the next. Often times you're playing to see if your hand can improve, and if the cost is worth the risk of waiting for that improvement. So really, you need to understand if your opponent has a better hand than (but maybe not necessarily the best), the same as you, worse than you, or is bluffing. Your opponent isn't black or white, so you must be more perceptive
You can play correctly and still lose. Seriously. You can do absolutely everything by the book, call when you're supposed to, raise when you're supposed to, and still end up losing. Just like life. You play the cards you're dealt but you have no control over the other cards that will come. That doesn't mean you stop doing things the right way; that means you accept failure as a possibility but still believe in your strategy. The tournament that I believe I played the best in actually saw me leave much earlier than I wanted. However, I was proud of myself because it was the first time I had put together a really effective strategy and stuck to it. It just so happened that it wasn't in the cards that night (pun intended).
Your opponents don't know your cards. Amateurs often think that professionals know what they have. You can put someone "on tilt" by saying things like, "so you have pocket 6's, huh?" The amateur shows a reaction which then tells the professional whether that's a true statement or not. You always need to keep in mind that no one knows your cards (in a legal game), so you can play them any way you want. Even if people think they know your cards, it's still just a hunch and you can change their mind by changing your strategy. You can bet aggressively with weaker hands and lull others into betting hard when you have stronger ones. You can start out betting slow and then bet fast, or vice versa. The point is, so long as no one knows your cards, you are in control and can play them any way you want.
Patience pays off. You can play for a long time and get only crappy cards dealt to you. Beginners start getting anxious and impatient, so they'll start playing with cards when they have no chance of winning. People just "want to play the game," and that's dangerous. Just as good hitters in baseball wait for pitchers to throw strikes before swinging, you need to be patient and don't give in to foolishness. Acting too quickly is often more detrimental than not acting at all. It's not a sign of weakness to fold several hands in a row; it's a sign of having a good strategy and sticking to it.
