My blah relationship with Poker

I first properly encountered Poker on Facebook. There was a Texas Hold-Em game that you could play right in the browser. A friend of a friend I had been sorta chatting with would play it, and she asked me if I played it, and I lied and said yes I did, and so I joined her and lost a bunch of fake Facebook money. But I found it interesting, and I played a little more of it. I would get pretty decent (probably terrible) at Facebook Poker, which doesn’t tell you anything at all, because people are playing with fake internet points. I liked the feeling of winning. I was then a teenager with no money to spend on “real” poker. A bunch of my other friends would also play Facebook poker, and we’d play it together to socialize– it was something to do instead of simply sitting in a chat group. Rituals are useful for peopling.

So after playing poker on Facebook a few times, we decided that we ought to get together and play it in real life. This was around 2007, maybe, and poker was starting to get more popular in real life, too. You’d hear about supposedly amazing games being played in people’s houses, where people were making tens of thousands of dollars and supporting a baller life entirely on poker, dropping out of school and stuff. YouTube was only just starting to become more popular, and people were using it to watch the world series. I got familiar with names like Daniel Negreanu and Gus Hansen and Phil Ivey and Phil Helmuth and the like, and it was all rather glamorous and entertaining.

When playing poker in real life with real money, I discovered that I sucked. I spent far too much time looking at my own cards, and hardly any time thinking about anybody else’s. I didn’t know how to hide my tells. I would lose my buy-ins– mostly $10 at a time. Within my small group of friends, it wasn’t a very big deal. None of us really knew what we were doing, we were all sorta just flaffing around. Really, the $$ was just so people wouldn’t be bullshitting outright, but we were doing it to socialize. That said, a friend did have much more money than anybody else, and he was far more willing to make crazy bets. The games were a bit of a disaster, I guess.

But it got my feet a little wet and I thought I’d play more with other people. I played with a group of musicians– $20 buy in. The larger sum of money scared me– I was a broke teenager. I ended up losing my buy-in. At some point I had folded despite having the best hand, went on tilt, and then went all in with a good hand later on to be beaten by a better hand– I lost two buy ins. $40. It was a humbling experience. I had been fleeced. They were friendly about it but I felt like a failure.

I would keep playing little cash games here and there. I had a memorable evening with another group of friends where I made over $60. I felt like a king. I took a cab home and still had made over $50.

I would play with my colleagues at work a few times, and most of them are way better than me. We’d play $50 buy-ins. As a working adult, the cash didn’t really stress me out as much as the $20 buy ins did when I was a teenager, but I was still loss-averse enough to be fleeced for it.

At some point I entertained the notion of studying poker and getting better at it– it seemed like all my cool friends were doing it. I even naively wanted to blog about it– I believe I had planned a series of blogposts in about 2010 about life lessons from poker. How presumptuous of me to plan the life-lesson blogposts before even having the lessons, before even getting any good at the game! (I suppose that’s the life lesson for me now, on retrospect. Don’t presume.)

I’ve since put aside my interest in poker altogether. I mean, I like shuffling cards, and I’d enjoy watching people play it, but I realize I have lost the interest in trying to become better at life through poker as a proxy. I am now exposed to more of life directly– I have the opportunity to get better at life by being a better husband, colleague, friend, writer. So there’s no real need for proxies. The idea of learning to calculate all those probabilities of all those hands– it would be nice, sure, but it requires an expenditure of time and energy that I feel like I can’t afford.

And here’s what I’ve been thinking– poker is ultimately a closed system. Meaning– the rules don’t change. Human nature doesn’t change. You can’t secretly get more cards, you can’t stack the deck, you can’t change the nature of the game. All you can do is get better at playing the game as it’s already been designed. And I realize that bores me. Perhaps its a case of sour grapes– I’ve realized that I have never been able to be the person who’s completionist about something. I will never be the one to master one specific thing better than anybody else. There are always people who are more anal than me, more patient, more focused, more deliberate. If I try to compete on that level, I’m screwed. I will always be outclassed.

Instead, I’d like to devote my life to pursuits where I feel like I can change the rules to suit my own styles and desires. I think writing is a great example. I’d rather be an above-average writer than an above-average poker player. Writers get to improvise. Writers get to make up their own stuff, their own ideas, their own rules. Sure, there are certain fundamental principles, but there’s a lot more art to it. You can come up with something clever that directly contradicts everything else before it.

No, I’m still not explaining it properly. I think here it is– becoming a better poker player means climbing up one of the various leaderboards– cash games, tournament games, etc etc. Becoming a better writer (as I choose to define it) means developing yourself, with respect to yourself. Sure, there are book sales and bestseller lists and stuff, but those things are just… I don’t know, they indicate something else entirely.

Whatever the case, I thought it would be interesting to contemplate how at some point I was very interested in poker, and now not at all. I’ve acknowledged that it’s something I’ll never be great at, and if I’m not going to be great at it, I can’t even really be bothered to be moderately good at it. I’m happy to apologize for being a shitty poker player because I was spending my time honing my craft as a writer.

Yeah, that’s about right.