Folding

"Whether he likes it or not, a man’s character is stripped at the poker table; if the other players read him better than he does, he has only himself to blame. Unless he is both able and prepared to see himself as others do, flaws and all, he will be a loser in cards, as in life." ~ Anthony Holden

Cardgrrl announced recently that she has folded her aspiration to be a professional poker player.

I suspect that the decision reflects, in the manner described by Mr Holden, sufficient self-knowledge to allow her to continue to make money playing cards.

The issue, I think, is the paradox of poker. Put simply, the more you learn the worse you get.

I have been thinking about this for awhile, and I have decided this is how our game plays. I know this sounds crazy, but think about it.

Think about the most fearsome player at the table - the one you hate to get into pots with. Is it the grizzled veteran who has been around, knows the odds and the angles? Or is it the 25 year old who appears to have worked out so much that what passed for his brain has been compressed to the size of a pea by all the muscle - who has demonstrated that AJ is a great hand to go all in with pre-flop - who's total aura of confidence is just as likely from the cocaine as the cards?

If you are like me you are more comfortable with the former - we have some idea where we are at. Against the latter we play our cards and hope for the best because it is simply impossible to get a meaningful understanding of where he is at - he doesn't know - how can we? But it changes as he learns. He studies some and, as a result, maybe understands how lucky he was to crush the game when all he had going for him was aggression and his girlfriend's bankroll. He begins to understand the nature of variance. His confidence suffers. We fear him less.

So the more he learns, the more he proceeds down the path towards understanding the vagaries of our game, the more comfortable we are playing him. He gets worse.

Taken to the logical extreme, it would seem that we are destined to continue to play, observe, learn -- and get worse. We hope for a moment of insight, a moment where all that hard work and thought will pay off in an epiphany of chips. But those pea-brained guys keep coming, those who bemoan the one time they fold because "I would have won you". It is unavoidable - relative to them we keep getting dumber.

Where does it end? I do not know. I know the cycles. We play tighter. We play looser. We play more aggressively in position. We bet marginal hands for value. We check behind. We practice pot-control. We read the latest in the hopes that this will have the trigger, the answer, the key. We adjust our game. We repeat.

Ultimately, we fold. A lot. Until it dawns on us that folding may be the only rational choice (even when we know it is not rational - but remember we continue to get worse by comparison - eventually we must fold all our hands). So we make the biggest fold possible - we get up and leave our game for awhile. How long that while is varies - for me the longest has been about three weeks but others may have learned more.

Good luck Cardgrrl.