Poker
By Numbers
Exhale…push’em
all in and sit back. You’ve done the math,
calculated your odds and now it’s up to fate. Poker
players must possess several qualities in order to be
successful…none more important than the ability to
step back and let the chips fall where they may.
You
already know that poker is a game of odds. The longer
you play, the more you tend to apply odds and
probabilities to your game. When you first started
playing you likely left a lot of your decision up to
chance, lacking the knowledge or perhaps just the
discipline to calculate your actual odds of winning
and weigh them against the spoils of the pot. As your
game progressed and you gained knowledge, you
instinctively applied a different approach…opting to
gamble less and calculate more.
Once
you reach a certain level, all the odds, angles and
expected values actually start playing tricks on you.
Since you have studied and practiced, you feel like
you have every angle down. It is very easy to forget
that poker is still a game of chance. That’s what
makes our game so beautiful, it’s not the smartest
or best player that always wins. There is always the
chance trump card, a miracle inside straight or quads
on the river. Chance rears its head in many forms on
the poker table, each time it adds another bad beat
story to the books.
That
is where poker by numbers comes in. You stop playing
the hand and start playing long term. Chance becomes
your advantage, realizing that you will profit over
the long term by other players undying commitment to
chance. Calculate each hand the best you can, take a
breath and make your move. Each time trust that the
powerful force of chance will eventually have to bend
to the unstoppable laws of math.
No
matter how much you play, how calculating you are,
there is always a time when you have to succumb to
chance and have faith. That is the key. Professionals
keep from going insane when a miracle draw hits, by
playing the numbers rather than the hand. Each all-in
or hard call is written off instantly. Do
your best, make your read and then let the chips fall
where they may. You may not win that hand, but you
have to hold true to the cardinal rule of poker…math
always beats chance in the end. This is the rule that
governs the very philosophy of every professional
player. If you can’t expect that eventually correct
play will win out over luck then you might as well
take your buy-in and go join the other tourists on the
slots.
If
you take one thing from this article, I guess you
could call it the moral of the story, it should be “That
you’ve gotta have faith.” Poker by numbers means
that you are never again going to be so upset by a bad
beat that you go on an hour long tilt and lose it all.
You can now rest easy, the Zen of poker has just been
revealed. The outcome of one hand should mean nothing.
You play by the numbers. Not the numbers of today, but
the numbers overall, and there’s a certain calming
effect in that. You know that when it’s all said and
done, all the luck in the world isn’t going to help
a poor player. The numbers always win.
