10 Poker Truths
The truth is out there… you just have to know where to look. (Maybe I shouldn’t watch ‘X-Files’ all night long.) I’ve been playing poker a long time and I’ve realized there are some things that are absolutely true. Some of them are about my game, some are about the game in general but all of them are 100% true.
1. Pocket Aces is the best hand in poker.
Next time you are sitting at a table and a player says they hate pocket aces, I have a suggestion. Punch them in the face! I think they might enjoy it. They obviously don’t know what is good for them anyway. I almost put #1 as "I always win with aces" but that’s not exactly true. I would estimate that I win with pocket aces roughly 90-95% of the time. Nothing is more exciting than looking down and seeing two matching A’s or seeing two aces pop up on the screen when playing online.
2. If you want to tell an entertaining poker story, a bad beat story is definitely NOT the way to go!
I used to tell these stories all the time. Then, I’d be sitting down at a food court near the poker room and hear some schmo on his cell phone boring his friend to death with a story of how some donkey called with J3 under the gun and flopped a boat. Here’s the deal with bad beat stories, no one really cares. I remember walking through the area right outside of the Amazon Room at the World Series of Poker in 2005 with my girlfriend. She would count the number of times she heard the words "… and then a/an (fill in the blank with a card) came on the river!" It was usually followed by some expletive filled sentence about how lucky his nit opponent was. I think when we boarded the plane she was in triple digits.
3. It’s more fun to be slightly behind on a coin flip than slightly ahead.
If the two hands flipped pre-flop are 9d-9s and Ah-Kh, I hope I have AK. It’s just so stressful when you have to root for your hand to hold up. You are biting your nails on every street and if you fall behind, you usually only have 2 outs for the re-suck. On the other hand, you have a shot to take the lead on the flop, turn and river. Sometimes, you are even lucky enough to get additional outs on the turn or river depending on how the board plays. Granted, I’m giving up a few percentage points but I’ll take it.
4. Good players win and bad players lose.
You have to look at poker players more like pitchers in baseball and less like boxers. What do I mean by that? Steve Carlton was probably the greatest left-handed pitcher of all-time and Muhammad Ali was probably the greatest heavyweight boxer of all-time. Ali won 92% of the time while Carlton won 57% of the time but their success is relative. In poker, the best players don’t always win but the better players perform better than the less talented players. If you look at the top 10 players on Card Player in 2007, only one of those players did not have a true poker pedigree. David Pham, the Player of the Year in 2007, actually won the Player of the Year in 2000 and finished 2nd in 2004.
5. Poker is 65% skill, 10% luck and 25% timing.
A lot of times, timing is mistakenly identified as luck. Poker is a truly mathematical game. My educated guess is that if you push with AK and get called by a lower pair 1000 times, you will probably win about 450-500 times. The thing that I can’t predict is how many times that will be for all of your chips and how many times it will only be for a small percentage of your chips. An above average player will win his fair share of tournaments but if he/she is playing variable buy-ins, those wins might come in the lower buy-in tournaments rather than the larger buy-in tournaments. It explains the Top 10 money list in poker and why it includes a player like Chris Moneymaker who is nothing more than an average player who caught fire at just the right time.
6. Live lower limit cash games have moved beyond the books.
I’ve read a lot of books about poker and nothing can prepare you for the way that poker is played at a $1/$2 No Limit game. The game has moved away from anything resembling poker described in any poker book out there. The biggest change is pre-flop play as it is now considered standard to raise to anywhere from $12-$25 pre-flop and it is expected that 2-4 players will call said raise. What’s particularly puzzling is that a player will limp for $2 and then call a $25 raise. This used to be the way that online cash games went but these players moved to the online game and now the online game has actually become more standard in its play. I never thought I’d say that.
7. You’re never really sorry.
When you flip over your hand and you are behind I will bet you $10,000 that your first thought isn’t "Man, I hope I don’t hit my card here and suck out because I’d hate to see this guy lose." So, why do you feel the need to apologize when you do? In my opinion, this is totally disrespectful to the person who lost. I know it’s supposed to be the right thing to do but it isn’t like you knocked someone over and helped them up. In this case, you knocked someone over and just kept walking… if you’re really sorry, give me my money back. Didn’t think so!
8. The online poker laws in the U.S. are ridiculous.
It’s pretty silly that there are laws out there trying to curtail U.S. citizens from playing online poker. The laws against people playing poker live outside of casinos and legal poker rooms have been so effective that the U.S. government feels they can have the same impact online, I guess. Join the Poker Players Alliance and help in their fight to legalize online poker.
9. "The Grand" will be poker’s version of "Caddyshack".
Woody Harrelson, David Cross, Dennis Farha, Cheryl Hines, Richard Kind and Chris Parnell are the main characters and Ray Romano, Jason Alexander, Gabe Kaplan, Werner Herzog and a pile of poker players also appear in the movie. It hits theaters March 21st and looks like it will be hilarious. From what I’ve read, most of the movie was improvised and rumor has it the entire final table was improvised as well.
10. Online poker is not rigged.
If you think online poker is rigged, I have two suggestions. (1) Don’t play online and (2) drop by my home game and you’ll see all the evidence you need. As to the first point, if you think online poker is rigged then you are a bigger sucker than those people who play the Money Wheel in the casino. I don’t play Blackjack online because I don’t trust it. If I didn’t trust online poker to be legitimate, I couldn’t play it. If you play enough live poker, you will realize that the stuff you see that "only happens online" actually happens everywhere. Deal with it!
