Young Hands Club

I got into poker at medschool, back in 2011. I can’t recall who got me into it, but I was soon playing small stakes tournaments with flatmates, classmates and other students. I tend to get obsessed with things – when I’m into something, I’m really into it. I’d watch episodes of High Stakes Poker (still a classic show from the Golden Age of Poker – when everyone was terrible, the games were insane, and there was easy money everywhere) on Youtube, read strategy books, and look out for games running on campus.

I first visited a casino in late 2012 – the since-closed Golden Nugget behind Leicester Square. They spread the lowest-stakes game in London, and had the lowest-quality punters to match. Mostly homeless/retired/benefit-stooges; with the odd crazed Russian tax evader. I remember one old guy who’d order food and stash it away outside in the bushes prior to buying in, so that he could still eat if he went broke at the table.

To say that one sees some mad shit at the poker table is an understatement: fights, chips thrown at dealers, joy, despondence – the totality of the human condition! And that human condition – for the most part – is petty, irrational, unhappy. I was shocked at how many scumbags/scammers there are – I naively lent a fellow semi-pro a few hundred quid; didn’t get repaid for over a year – and that was running above expectation!

And yet, the game itself, I loved. I’d never really gambled before; still don’t see the attraction of -EV gaming (though I’ve heard different theories) – and yes, for the VAST majority of players – be they pros or recreational, poker is -EV. I was always amazed at how much money the casual players threw away – week in, week out – while never improving their skill. It felt like pure madness to me; surely they must know they’re losing players? A fellow pro told me that these guys just wanted to gamble – if not poker, they’d lose it on roulette, blackjack, whatever. Even the majority of pro players lost money – I’d estimate the average time-to-busto for a professional poker player at ~6months.

Interestingly, the biggest hits to one’s winrate didn’t tend to come from fuckups at the game itself, but rather, not being able to control the metagame stuff: emotions, tilt, patience, the bullshit of a fish drawing out on you. I remember I used to have mild problems with this stuff right at the start of my career (“how DARE this idiot get lucky against me!”), but I quickly got over it. LOADS of pros (let alone casuals) never do, and spazz-off chunks as a result.My main issue was that I’d do monster sessions – 12,24,48(!)hrs at a time – you’ve gotta be on your A-game at all times, and that’s pretty tricky after playing 2 days straight. I implemented a strict schedule (anathema to a poker player), and my winrate shotup.

Poker is pretty uniquly meritocratic: the better you are, the more money you make (excepting variance); and yet, almost all professional poker players (myself included) are happy getting to a certain level of skill, and staying there. While it’s true that there are diminishing returns to improving, and as long as you’re better than the people you’re playing against, you’ll win – most everyone is happy literally leaving money on the table by not putting in the arduous study work away from the table. I was happy getting to a skill level where I played aroud the £10/£20 level; a couple of my contemporaries got up to stakes ten times that; the vast majority stayed down at £1/£2.

It’s hard to play poker professionally part-time; it tends to envelop everything on and off the table – life gets viewed game-theoretically: what’s the value/expectation/risk/variance of the proposition? Burn out is massive – even if one doesn’t go broke, most pros need frequent breaks. It doesn’t matter how much one plays; how professional one is, the brain just isnt built to withstand variance, and one ends up going a tad loopy after one-too-many nights in a row of 5-figure swings.

There’s also a constant battle to avoid various psychological defence mechanisms – cognitive dissonance, results-oriented thinking and risk-aversion are massive killers of winrate. I particularly struggled against the situations where one has the option to take a slightly lower EV action – along with much less variance, or make slightly more money, and have wildly larger swings. As a properly bankrolled pro, there’s no decision; yet I’d still routinely chicken out!

As cliché as it sounds, poker really is a battle primarily against oneself: the average player is so bad at the game, it doesn’t take much to be develop a winning strategy; and yet, the vast majority can’t manage it.