Finding ways to win at poker can be a surprising quest. While randomly browsing one night, I came across an ancient Chinese story about a tree that was considered useless. The legend says it was enormous. Old enough to have watched generations come and go. Its branches provided shade, its roots held the ground, and it had survived for centuries. A mature carpenter walked past it and didn’t even stop. His apprentice was confused. Why ignore the biggest, most impressive tree he’d ever seen?
The carpenter knew that it was too twisted for furniture and too unreliable for construction. Use it for a boat and the boat might sink. Use it for a pillar and termites would eventually have a feast. To the carpenter, the conclusion was simple: this tree was worthless. And that was precisely why the tree was still alive. The useful trees had been cut down generations ago.
The useless one had survived.
Sometimes, what are seen as qualities that make something or someone valuable, also make it vulnerable and there might be a surprisingly good poker lesson hiding inside that tree because, as a poker player, one of the most dangerous versions one can become, is the one that is too good to win because every poker player wants to be a useful tree while variance just happen to love to crossdress as a carpenter.
Being good at poker
Poker players love being right. We love making the correct call, finding the perfect bluff, putting someone on exactly the right hand and watching them turn over the cards we predicted. But when everything goes well, something very dangerous can happen: we start believing that our results are telling us something about ourselves.
We win for a week, then for another week. Great! Then a deep run in a tournament, and a few more big cash game pots.
The bankroll climbs and gradually, it’s not just playing poker anymore. It’s become ‘being a good at poker’. Maybe that’s even the truth and, against all expectations, this could make the problem even worse because opponents or friends might be impressed. Poker, not at all.
Variance has absolutely no interest in recent personal achievements. It’s not its fault. It’s not mean. It just doesn’t know how many hours players have studied solvers over the last years and it does not recognize a correct fold or how many heathy meals a player has been eating. Its job is simpe: mess things up. That’s what it sticcks to. It’s great at it. The cards are perfectly happy to hand a player nine consecutive garbage hands followed by a disgusting cooler to the best player of history and that’s where poker differs from many other competitive activities. We all (should) know that.
Playing brilliantly and ending up losing does not happen too often elsewhere, especially not on a regular base. Poker as a game is pretty messed up but that’s also what makes it attractive. Because, sometimes, maybe, if one does not stumble until the very end of a tournament, the ridiculous odds could flip.
That said, players can also play terribly and win. That happens pretty often too. It’s not a bug. It’s poker. Again, everybody knows.
The most dangerous time isn’t when losing
Everyone understands that a downswing is dangerous. Confidence gets hit and players start questioning their game. We wonder whether we’ve forgotten how to play poker altogether but there is another period that can be even more dangerous: the heater, especially early in a career.
Winning at poker (or at anything else) feels fantastic. Winning repeatedly feels like evidence, evidence that we’ve finally figured something out. Except there is a little reasoning problem: a winning streak contains both skill and variance and, from inside the streak, it can be extremely difficult to separate both. Skill is part of a repeatable process. Variance, not really. That’s where the ego starts doing its little magic trick: We win because we played well – end of the story. The ego is pleased, the brain loves it. Then we win again because, obviously, we play well again. Pretty soon, every good outcome feels deserved. And, logically, every bad outcome feels like an injustice.
That’s a deadly place to be.
When confidence becomes a leak
In poker, the player who has just won €10,000 may be playing better than the player who just lost €10,000. Or exactly the opposite. The result alone doesn’t tell us. It’s not like a score in football, which, by the way, also does not really tell us. Humans just love measurements and certainty but we also seem to be terrible at leaving results alone. From football fans debating the game long after it finished to poker players reviewing sessions. We seem to want a story, a justification, a why and how that goes with the result and the easiest most beautiful story is: I won because I’m good. Lights flash, general applause, standing ovation… winning is awesome!
Also, winning as such can quietly change behaviors by inducing to play bigger or less cautiously. No matter how, winning often alters the way we play, that exact way that we believe is responsible for our success in the first place. We might also alter it by taking more marginal spots or by defending the blinds with 94off because ‘the button is bullying me’. More hero calls, more bullets with less respect for the bankroll or for sleep.
Nothing dramatic happens at first. We might lose a bit but, let’s remember: that’s poker. This can make hard to identify whether we run bad or play bad.
Poker’s version of fine timber
Every poker generation produces its own fine timber: players who suddenly appear everywhere with huge scores, massive tournament runs or ridiculous cash-game graphs. Every generation has its legendary sun run wonder. Some rare specimens even last for a few generations.
Everyone knows the story and sometimes the player really is exceptional but poker has a nasty habit of confusing short-term results with long-term ability. A player can be brilliant and run incredibly well. A player can be mediocre and run incredibly well too.
The cards don’t provide nor respect footnotes and wishful thinking. They simply produce pure statistical results. That makes humility particularly valuable because the human brain is naturally good at binary stuff: good and bad, win and lose. Statistics are all about nuances and fine lines resulting in delayed results. Monkey brain, delay no like.
Humility is not pretending to be bad or to underrate oneself but to understand (really deeply) that being good at poker doesn’t make anyone immune to variance. Moreover, there is a case to be made for the fact that the better a player becomes, the more important that distinction can be.
What if the ancient tree understood something poker players often don’t?
The ancient tree didn’t need to prove anything. It didn’t need to be the tallest and it didn’t need to produce the best wood. It had no desire to become chic furniture. It just kept existing.
That is surprisingly close to one of the most important skills in poker: knowing when not to force the game.
No need to play every tournament, to take every shot, to play the biggest available stakes every time, to try to turn every winning session into a bigger winning session: to chase all the action all the time.
Sometimes the most profitable decision is remarkably boring: sit out, protect the bankroll, go home when tired, come back tomorrow. Very impressive but absolutely terrible social media content or bragging material. Yet, undeniably excellent poker.
The real skill is surviving one’s own success
Since we started with tree analogies, it’s fun to mention the dark forest theory at this stage. In very short, it’s a chilling proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox (why we haven’t found aliens yet). It invites us to picture the universe like a dark forest at night. It seems empty only because every intelligent civilization is hiding like frightened pray, or sneaking around like a hunter. Because not all civilizations can become dominators and since one can never fundamentally trust the intentions of another species, the safest survival strategy would be to stay completely silent and that would be the strategy most species, that would evolve past a certain degree, would opt for… or go extinct after being spotted by an evil species – that is, if they haven’t destroying themselves fighting over cultural differences and resources before all that.
Variance is often discussed as something that happens to poker players like aliens would be attacking Earth for no reason out of nowhere. The thesis is that the chance of evil alien species attacking us one day would be reduced if we would remain on our planet, mind our own business and stop blasting signals and vehicles all over space around our planet. The point is not whether evil aliens will come to kick our Aces at the poker tables and elsewhere but that variance, while it cannot be completely avoided, can largely be attracted.
Remaining disciplined after winning is not easy and playing normal stakes after a big bankroll boost is not the norm. The easy fix would be to continue making decisions based on ranges rather than on recent results. Monkey brain needs to accept that being up €10,000 doesn’t mean we’re entitled to being up €11,000 and that we can lose three, five, ten buy-ins without deciding that we’ve suddenly forgotten how to play. Perhaps most importantly, we should remain capable to win without becoming addicted to the feeling of winning. We recently released an article about the relationship of poker with gambling addiction. It’s a complicated relationship. It’s available here: https://pokerexclusive.com/the-rounder/gambling-addiction-and-poker
Not getting addicted to wins is harder than it sounds because winning creates expectations and a big score might make normal results feel disappointing or boring.
Boring is underrated
Many poker players who stop playing, don’t do so after hitting rock bottom. Many do so at the peak of their career although it’s one of the games where it could make sense to compete forever since physical shape, age and strength are rather secondary. The mature poker player eventually discovers something deeply irritating: a lot of good poker is boring.
Folding is boring. Waiting is boring. Playing within the bankroll is boring. Not taking all the shot is boring. Leaving the table to sleep and eat well: mega-super-boring. The player who needs constant action will eventually find or manufacture it where there is none and the player who needs constant validation will eventually chase results but the player who needs to prove they are the best will eventually take risks that have nothing to do with making the best poker decision.
Winning at poker has nothing to do with winning today
Winning today means having more money at the end of the session. Winning at poker is something much bigger.
It’s still having a bankroll after the heater but also still having a bankroll after the downswing. And also after the second or third downswing. It’s the ability to play an A or some solid B game even when it feels like the cards, the dealer, the cashier, the poker gods and even the parking valet hate you.
The goal isn’t to avoid variance. That would mean to stop playing. The goal is to avoid allowing variance to change the quality of our decisions.
The paradox of being ‘too good’
Someone who is bad at something and who recognizes it, might be tempted to work on his leaks sooner or later and can end up surprising others. The players at risk are the ones who become convinced they’re too good to lose because, once they believe that, losing becomes unacceptable. That makes poker life unbearable eventually. Once losing becomes unacceptable, discipline starts to disappear and chasing, forcing and risking become standards. Again, nothing spectacular happens. It basically comes down to stop respecting the very principles that created the success story in the first place, out of comfort and unawareness.
The ancient tree suggests another way in order not to become the most useful tree in the forest, not to try to be the smartest player at the table, not to confuse a heater with immortality, not to confuse a downswing with incompetence, and also not to confuse inactivity with weakness.
The ultimate poker edge is staying alive
Poker has no shortage of people who can have an incredible month or year. Far fewer can have an incredible decade and almost none have incredible careers. That’s because short-term poker rewards all sorts of things and long-term poker ends up eventually exposing everything and showing up with the bill.
My brother loves to say: ‘Every gambler eventually buys a car they never get to drive. The only choice is whether it’s a used hatchback or a fully loaded sports car.’
Players simply need to make enough good decisions, protect themselves from the catastrophic ones, and remain in the game long enough for mathematical edge (if there is one) to have a chance to express itself.
That may not look particularly glamorous but neither did the old twisted tree. For hundreds of years, everyone around it was being turned into boats, houses, furniture and firewood. The useless tree just kept standing there. In poker, sometimes the players looking like they’re doing the least are the one doing the most important thing: they’re surviving. They’re letting variance pass and have been around for the last 20 years. In the big games as well as in the smaller games. For the love of the game, for the love of the community but also for the love of every opportunity that did not turn into an obligation.
If you enjoy this kind of content, we have more articles about topics gravitating around poker in our LIFESTYLE section.
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