Big Game

In Anthony Holden's "Big Deal: One Year as a Professional Poker Player," he travels from his home game in Britain to private card clubs to psychiatrists to the World Series of Poker.

His is a journey of skill, wits and mental strength.

The inner poker game is what interested me most about this book, which I like to include in a kind of made-up trilogy of poker literature, along with "The Biggest Game in Town" by A. Alvarez and "Positively Fifth Street" by James McManus.

Poker is a game of internal ironies. Many people play a monetarily dangerous game because they secretly need to lose. Others gamble in casinos because their real-life bets seem mundane compared to the contrived circumstances of a card game.

Holden gambles with fierce competitiveness to avenge the hard-luck life of his father.

Few people play poker solely for the money -- it's too much of a mind game for that.

The top pros are fearless because for them, the game is not about money; rather, it's more about a battle of wits represented by clay-tinged chips on a field of green. You always hear pros talk about how it's more about the bracelet or the first-place finish than the money.

The detachment from the emotional and symbolic value of the chips allows the best players to play their best game, regardless of concerns about what the chips may signify. And yet, many of those same so-called professionals couldn't play well in a small-stakes game where the chips seemed smaller and there was less at stake.

The fact that there are more losers than winners at poker, and that the losers keep coming back, is evidence enough that hordes of people have more at stake than money.

In several recent blogs (including Poker on Film and Dead Money = AlCantHang), the authors have admitted that they are either poor or losing players. They continue because they have fun playing poker and they enjoy the challenge of improving their games.

Realizing and understanding our true motives at the poker table is not easy because it's so easy to deny reality. Bad players blame bad luck, good players point to variance -- both valid reasons for losing, but often used as smokescreens for underlying weaknesses in your game (not that I would ever do anything like that!) Losing players don't keep records of their net gains and losses because they like to tell themselves they're breaking even, or a little bit ahead. Many pros are known to play a tight, disciplined game at the poker table, but then leak it out at craps or blackjack as they delude themselves into thinking they're luckier than the house.

So good poker players often need to face the truth -- about their abilities, about the pointlessness of spending their time at a poker table instead of living, about the futility of wishing for good luck when the law of averages always prevails.

For me, the hard facts of life as reflected at the poker table are the most difficult to deal with.

How can I play a confident, fearless game knowing my own weaknesses? How can I ignore those weaknesses without falling into a cycle of denial about my game?

What motivates me to play well if the triviality of poker exceeds the importance of social interactions, thus mirroring the pointlessness of many of my activities?

Why should I care about winning or losing when the pixels on my laptop screen here in Chile are supposed to signify money that I transferred from my bank account to an online bank account to a poker site, to the point where it seems as artificial as the "faith" standard the North American currency is based on?

And yet I play on, with a stronger, more educated game than ever before, driven by deeper ambitions that outweigh these superficial neurosis that sometimes intrude on the psyche like tilt on a losing drunkard in Vegas.

I play poker because I need to prove myself, over and over again. I want to win. I want to make the fish pay for being fish, and I want to be rewarded for rising above their mediocrity. My desire is to feel superior until I am ready to humble myself again at the next-highest limit, and then start the rat race to the top over again.

Of course there are many other reasons. Like fun and profit, for example. But I have the most fun when I'm winning, thus satisfying my ego's need for progress, recognition and victory over the mundane trials of life that eternally threaten to put me on tilt.

Link:
Play in Wednesday's WPBT event on Poker Stars