I lost a hand this week that I'd play the same way next week, and it's taken me a long time to be able to say that without wincing.
I've spent a few evenings lately trying formats I'd ignored for years, Omaha mainly, and the thing that jumps out is how much of the result the deal gets to decide in each one. Switching between online poker variants has made those differences harder to ignore. Omaha hands everybody four cards. Two decent hands start a lot closer to a coin flip than they ever would in hold'em, so the deal gets a bigger say. Hold'em leaves more of it to the people holding the cards.
People who don't play tend to think poker is the cards. Fair enough. The cards set the odds, and the odds are real. Aces lose about once in every seven hands against any two random cards, and when I'm the one holding them it feels like a lot more often than that. But everything after the deal is a decision, and there are a lot of them, and most of mine are bad.
I'm aware that's exactly the kind of thing losing players say. Everybody who ever went broke at a card table believed they were making decisions.
Where I sit matters more than I'd have guessed. From the seat that acts last I'll play hands I'd fold in a heartbeat from the seat that acts first, because by the time it gets round to me five people have already told me something, whether they meant to or not.
Then there's reading people, which is the part everybody wants to be good at. I read a thing a while back about a study where students watched two-second clips of pros pushing chips into a pot and had to guess how strong the hand was.
The ones who saw only the face did worse than a coin flip. The ones who saw only the arms got it right more often than not, and the smoother the motion, the better the hand.
So the face is a bad guide, which anyone who's been bluffed by a bored-looking accountant already knew. I'd love to tell you I've put this to use. The practical lesson, so far, is to keep my own arms still, and I'm not even sure I'm managing that.
Bluffing is the reverse of all that. A bet says I've got it, and whether anybody believes me has less to do with my cards than with everything I've done at that table for the past hour. I bluff less than I used to and get caught about as often, which tells you something about my earlier career.
Timing counts too. A bet that comes instantly and a bet that comes after a long pause are different bets, even if the amount's the same.
The hardest hands to play well are the ones right after a bad beat, when you're trying to get even by the next round of hands. I've done it. You know you're doing it, and you do it anyway, and then you've done it twice.
I asked Bob McCown onto my podcast in 2019, got turned down in public, and didn't ask again for seven years. I'd like to say poker taught me that kind of patience, but I think the podcast did, and poker just tests it. You fold a lot. The hand you've been waiting for shows up when half your stack is gone.
There's a German study from over a decade ago, out of the University of Bremen, where they dealt 300 players rigged cards for 60 hands and compared the self-described experts with everybody else. The experts didn't win any more with good cards. What they did was lose less with bad ones.
The games differ in what they ask you to throw away. In Omaha I'm dealt more hands that look good and have to throw most of them away. In six-handed hold'em I'm dealt junk and have to play it. I still lose with aces more often than feels fair, and when I do I go back over everything I did before the river, because that was the part I'd had a say in.
