Poker Needs Bad Players to Win
During a recent discussion on a poker forum, a friend wrote, "I can't stand it when someone plays a hand bad against me and hits." This guy is an excellent player who beats tough games, but I cannot fathom the rationale of his statement.
I will put this bluntly: if players never hit when they played bad, poker would die overnight.
Let's consider a couple of other games: tennis and chess. If you play either of those games less expertly than your opponent, you get destroyed. In a 10-game match in either pursuit, the inferior player might well lose all 10 games, and refuse to play that opponent again.
It is not a coincidence that there is little money wagered in competitive amateur tennis or chess.
But real-money poker thrives. Millions of amateurs play the game on a "level playing field" against far superior players, including professionals. I say "level playing field" because the superior players never offer any quarter to the weaker ones �� no points given, no pawns removed.
Why would a weak amateur or novice player be willing to risk his money, dollar for dollar, against a top pro?
Because sometimes people play a hand poorly and hit. Sometimes they play five hands in a row miserably and hit all five. They buy in for $300, crush the pros, cash out for $1,500, and wonder why they ever did anything else with their spare time.
They may not know that they've played the hand badly, that the pros are mentally hanging a "fish" tag over their seat at the table. Maybe they haven't read books, watched videos, or been coached. Maybe they know the rules, but not the strategy. Maybe they think they're playing well, but they're wrong. Or perhaps their utility �� their joy �� in the game comes from swimming upstream against the odds and occasionally hitting. I mean, I imagine it's quite rewarding to pick one number on a roulette layout and have the ball drop onto exactly that number. People are terrible at poker for a lot of reasons.
But if terrible players didn't win occasionally, what would happen? We'd be in a chess/tennis regime. Good players would quickly destroy bad ones. Better players would destroy the good players. The top elite would wipe out the "better" players. Phil Galfond and a few of his cohorts would end up with all the money, and before you could say "deck change," poker would be dead.
It's not easy to be equanimous when you play great, the other guy plays the hand as badly as possible, but he wins. I don't know if this will help you, but I try to put myself in the winner's shoes. He may feel "lucky" for a moment. Maybe he had a rotten day at work and this is the first good thing that's happened. One of the beauties of poker is that on every hand, somebody wins the pot and is happy. Happy can be hard to come by in our world, so learn to celebrate that person's joy, even when it comes at our financial cost.
And remember that it's the intrinsic "unfairness" in our game that keeps the players coming, the cards flying, and the pots pushing, day after day, year after year. Hooray for bad players!
Don't want to be seen as a loser? Then Lee is your man. Check out his coaching site at leejones.com/coaching to get a free consultation and see if his coaching is right for you.
