Uncle Marv's Poker Philosophy

Let me begin with what is commonly known as housekeeping. As I reread my first blog it became clear to me that I ended it abruptly. Initially I thought that I had allotted myself enough time to do a complete job but then I clicked the wrong button and my text became barely readable. I spent the next hour trying to correct the problem and then as time ran short and my wife wandered over to help me, I decided to hit the send button rather than wait for her to “accidentally” hit the delete button. If Shakespeare had been as forceful with his wife, then he would have had 38 plays to his credit, not 37. Of course to be fair, computers were not as advanced back then as they are now – but then again, neither were wives.

That having been said, this is after all a poker blog so we should try to talk about poker a bit, and hopefully in some orderly fashion. In the last blog I told you my nickname and then found myself on a nickname tangent so I never really had a chance to lay out my poker background and philosophy. Let me do that now.

I first learned to play poker when I was about five years old because my dad got tired of playing war with me but it wasn’t until I was about 12 and sat week after week after torturous weeeeeek watching my family lose all their money playing poker that things about the game started to sink in. In those days the most popular game was 7 card stud. I would find a high chair (meaning a chair that would allow me to sit higher than the others, not a baby’s high chair) and place it strategically behind one of my family members so that I could see their hole cards as they played. Slowly but surely as I watched the other players consistently beat them I would find myself asking questions - not to them of course but just in my mind. Why did they raise when another player so obviously had them beat? Why didn’t they bluff when another player so obviously missed his draw? Why were they playing poker when they could have simply gone to the nearest bridge and thrown all those dollar bills into the river?

And then one day it happened. I was 12 years old but I remember it as clearly as if I had been 13. The family member I was sitting behind had just been dealt cards but she had to answer an important telephone call. Looking around the table at the adults she asked if it would be okay for me to play her hand. The others snickered and nodded anxiously hoping I would make a nice contribution before she returned. I moved excitedly into the seat and played the hand, milking the others and winning the largest pot of the night. The only other thing I remember about the hand was that as I raked in the money one of the men in the game started yelling that he did not want to play with a child who didn’t know what he was doing. And so at age 12 I was banned from the game, booted back to the bleachers where I continued my education.

Some years later I taught a class entitled “How to Win at Poker” at the Discovery Center in New York City and at the beginning of each session I would state my poker philosophy very succinctly. It is a philosophy that I learned at age 12 and when I would share it with the students it always got a big laugh until they realized that I was deadly serious. And this was what I told them: “If you want to win at poker, the best way to do this is to find people who are worse players than you.” Now I will admit that in almost any competitive endeavor competing against better players will make you a better player. But for the most part losing in tennis or golf or bowling is not costly. If you are wealthy enough to want to play against better poker players with no cares about losing money then fine. But if you want to win at poker, there is no better rule to follow than the one that I used to begin my poker classes.

Having established my first rule of poker, I do realize that it isn’t always possible to play with worse players than yourself. If you aren’t able to establish a home game filled with crummy players, or if you want to play more poker than that will allow and so you find yourself perhaps heading to a casino poker room where you have no control over who else is at the table, then you need to develop other skills. There are plenty of books available with plenty of ideas and strategies and suggestions. Some focus on the math, some on game theory, some on bluffing, some on psychology, some on tells, but I believe that in order to succeed you need to have a complete understanding of the game and what I consider to be an innate talent for making the right choices and executing them properly. It’s one thing to know when to push all of your chips into the center of the pot on a stone bluff, but it’s quite another to be able to physically maneuver those chips to their destination without letting your opponent know that if he calls you, you are going to crumble to the floor in a miserable heap. I have found that very few books address the totality of circumstances necessary to be the consummate player - not that I am that player, although I think I could be if I could conquer my Achilles heel. It’s no secret amongst my poker buddies so I don’t mind sharing it to end this blog. It is a four letter word which starts with a T, and it happens to me whenever I take a really bad beat on an all-in hand. In the same way that Marty McFly reacts to being called a chicken, that’s how I respond to a bad beat all-in. I am working on this problem and have been doing so since I first started playing no-limit hold ‘em. I will probably still be working on it as they pry the cards from my cold dead hands and that’s what keeps me from poker fame – well that and the fact that I almost never play tournaments. You know the golf saying “drive for show, putt for dough” I believe it is equally true for poker “tournaments for show, cash games for dough,” but now I notice that I am starting to babble so this might be a perfect time to say – until next time – and if you are playing against me, may you push your chips all-in thinking you have the nut flush after misreading the board. Bye bye for now.