Pokerwiner.com → Within poker principles
Consider, for example, a player who’s burning up money so fast that he will soon be faced with a choice of either quitting poker, or facing financial ruin. Reading materials may help such a player slow down his losses enough to keep him in the game as a long term modest loser. While this may cost him more in the long run, it should please those whose only interest is their own earn.
Similar is the potential effect on the heavy loser who, because of his losses, plays only sporadically, depending on current cash reserves. The poker literature will sometimes help him become only a modest loser who then plays regularly. This clearly helps games survive and flourish. This, again, must please winning players with any concern about having a game on a regular basis. Before pointing out another likely effect of written materials ,I will make an observation about the prevalence of middle and higher limit games across various poker markets. In small to medium sized markets middle limit games, typically between $10-$20 and $20-$40, are usually the biggest games spread.
In the smaller markets there is often no more than one of these games. Often there is nothing even that big. Sometimes such a game is spread only one or two days a week. Games at higher limits are often out of the question in these areas, as few if any of the players are prepared to play in them. In the larger markets, middle limit games are much more common, but high limit games (say, above $40-$80) while spread, are relatively few in number. Moreover, they may drop considerably in number on certain days or even disappear from a specific cardroom if not carefully nurtured.
For example, I was at a major cardroom in Los Angeles on three different days during a short period not long before writing this essay. This is a very big cardroom, known for games at limits like $80-$160 and higher. Around the time of my visits, for reasons difficult to pin down, they had experienced a modest decline in their bigger games. Moreover, these games are known to be less consistent on the weekend another indication of a player base that could stand to be bigger. On a Saturday, I found that the biggest holdem game there was $50-$100. On Sunday it was $30-$60. On a subsequent Friday an $80-$160 game started short-handed but quickly broke up.
The rest of the day $40-$80 was biggest holdem game. There were always a few names on the lists for bigger games, just not enough on these occasions to get them started. This, while the main floor teamed with countless smaller games. This dearth of games points to the obvious need for more players for games at these higher limits. In both large and smaller markets, then, there are players for whom there are too few games at the limits they want to play. This is another problem for which poker books and articles may provide a measure of help. What $80-$160 player wouldn’t like to always have a few games to choose from every day of the week? Unrealistic?
Maybe not, if more players are helped to survive and move up the limits. They need not be world beaters to do this. The poker literature should sometimes help turn a small loser who would never move up from a limit like $10-$20, for instance, into a break even or modestly winning player who might then have the confidence, and maybe the bankroll, to move up to bigger middle limit poker games or even the higher limits. His entry into these games fills another seat and helps strengthen the player foundation, enabling the games to be spread more consistently, ultimately helping to create new games. Note as well that games at a given limit help support those at neighboring, higher limits.
Many players will play regularly at a higher limit where they might only break even or lose a little. They just want to play at that limit as long as they can survive without getting hurt too badly. Though I would love always to have available games containing only terrible players, I certainly prefer a game with a couple of these mediocre players in it to no game at all. Thus, books and articles help create games for players wishing to play higher, but whose opportunities are limited. That they do this by improving the skills of some readers is well worth it.
Of course, reading will be an important factor in creating a few excellent players, but I am quite sure the mediocre players created in the same way far outnumber them. So the next time you hear a player complaining that a book or article he is reading is only going to make the games tougher, tell him about the “third factor” and all the games the poker literature creates. If he won’t hear it, then simply suggest, “Well, maybe you’d better stop reading. After all, you wouldn’t want to make you’d the games tougher – now world you?”
AFTERTHOUGHT
No doubt some readers will be displeased with certain of my comments about tournaments,but they represent my genuine concerns about the negative consequences of this aspect of poker. Additionally, at the time of this writing tournaments have received a great deal of attention in the poker media. So a few words to the other side were called for. We need more discussion of the topic, and I hope my essay might encourage that. I suspect that readers who have long been serous poker players had already considered analyzing various life decisions as risk-reward ratios.
But for those a little newer to the game, I hope that my little essay sparked some thoughts about how you approach decisions involving some significant risk. I focused here on the risk of death, but there are lots of other risks involved in life’s decisions. Though you need not always take a gambling theory approach to decisions, it can be remarkably effective tool to which most people are oblivious on anything other than some “intuitive” level. Perhaps it is not surprising that a poker writer would argue that the poker literature helps poker more than it hurts it.
It would be understandable that I would want to defend my decision to write. I could point out that I don’t have to write, that the time it takes away from playing poker costs me money. I will say that I would not write about how to play poker if I thought it was going to reduce my hourly rate at the game. As the essay on the topic makes clear, I submit that good poker writing can increase the numbers of middle and higher limit games. Maybe all of that is dwarfed by another point. The idea that the principles and tactics of skilled poker play can or should remain some sort of inside secret, available to a few is, in the end, just silly.
Not only is not going to happen in this age of accelerating information exchange, with the Internet leading the way, but we simply have no ethical leg to stand on ion suggesting that a few people should be privy to information that is purposefully withheld from others. I predict that, much as with games such as chess, or sports like tennis, nearly all the details of expert poker play will come out in written and other materials. Those who succeed will be those best able to understand and use that information.
Knowledge and talent will remain the decisive factors. The only different might be that new forms a of poker may be invented from time to time, providing an extra, albeit short term, edge to those who learn the nuances of those games first. In any case, the players best educated in general poker theory will always have an edge, and will be able to more quickly adapt to and learn the subtleties of new games.