Mr Popescu was so kind as to comment on my poker article – leaving a link to an article of his own (albeit in Romanian). Turns out, he’d actually translated the piece into English; I’d already read it at some point, and had meant to get around to annotating it – so, here we go!
There’s an older Romanian article published here under the title Cum devii un jucator de poker bun, which Pete Dushenski has recently translated on his blog. I am so flattered by his effort that I shall take the time to give my own translation below, for his – and anyone else’s – benefit.
As to authority, which is the thing that should open any article of this kind : I am not the best Romanian poker player, I know tens better than me, and there probably are hundreds. It’s unlikely there are thousands, but I won’t say it’s impossible. I am not a professional player (which is to say I don’t make my living at it), I have played with tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table, I have won tens and hundreds of thousands, I have lost tens and hundreds of thousands. I never played, never lost nor ever won millions, nor do I intend to – I believe a limit’s welcome in all fields.
If there are good Romanian poker players, I haven’t seem ‘em. Those that play in London are known more for their miserable table presence than anything to do with the cards. Universally risk-averse, paint-by-numbers nits. “Bad for the game”; hated by everyone, including (one gets the impression) themselves. MP plays an order of magnitude larger than I; and a ~decade ago at that, so high-stakes for sure.
Of all these better Romanian poker players than me I have no knowledge of any one that keeps a blog (another example of a field which could use it). There do exist various things made deliberately to prepare chumps for the chumpatron, as there exist various blogs on which various cocklets speak about things they do not understand nor will ever understand (thus preparing chumps for the chumpatron unintentionally), As such, my authority to speak on the topic flows from the usual syllogism : if you are willing to accept my authority as sufficient then you can read a Romanian article on the topic at hand, and if you’re not willing to accept my authority as sufficient then you can not read a single article on this topic in Romanian, as there isn’t one.
Unfortunately, the linked articles are in Romanian, and I’ll be damned if I’ll plug a Trilema piece into Google Translate – I guess no rabbit holes this time! Suffice to say, I’ve no problems accepting the author’s authority – even without consideration of the stakes he’s playing.
The situation is not similar in the English language space, for instance, as there exist numerous blogs kept by guys who are better than me. How honest and serious they are it is up to you to decide, I won’t go into the discussion as I’m not interested in foreign language spaces.
As with most things, there’s a TON of shite out there on poker; the vast majority of players that know what they’re talking about, don’t talk about it publicly: you either need to be friends with ‘em, or pay for good info. And anyone who doesn’t play doesn’t know what he’s talking about – without exception.
Defining the terminology, or that thing with which this kind of article should continue.
By poker we mean any of the numerous variants, even if generally people prefer playing either some kind of stud or else Texas Hold’em. It’s in the end irrelevant what exact variant is contemplated, the game’s about the same at the abstraction level we find ourselves.
Public games in the UK/US (and I’m told, Europe) are 99% NLHE, with most of the remainder PLO. Exotic stuff (Razz, Draw, Shortdeck etc.) is played at the very highest stakes, but these games are almost never public. And yea – while they have different structures/rules, they’re fundamentally very similar; it’s all poker.
By player we mean someone who wins or loses within the rules of the game. Poker (like any game of chance) can very well be adapted to working as bait for one fraud or another, but we’re not discussing conmen employing poker in their conmanship, we’re discussing players.
There’s a ton of filth in poker. Players borrow money and don’t pay back, angleshooting is reasonably common, rules’ll be bent further than one’d think possible; but out-an-out cheating (or at least, getting caught) is pretty rare. From what I’ve seen, a lot of people care way more about scooping a pot than sullying their reputation (perversely, the smaller the pot, the less they seem to care).
By good we mean someone who is capable of regularly winning more than they lose, the difference exceeding the average income in his demographic group. So, a junior high kid that makes a hundred lei a month on average playing poker is a good player by our definition, because allowances aren’t really a hundred leis a month just yet, as far as I know. A Sudanese living in Sudan making about a hundred dollars a month on average is a good poker player, by virtue of the fact that Sudanese salaries are something short of a hundred dollars.
It’s hard to get data on this, since everyone bullshits their winrate; but based solely on the rate of ruin, there are LOADS of players – “pros” included – who breakeven or lose – nevermind making more than the median salary! It’s not just the guys at the table you’ve gotta beat: the house rake typically starts at 5% – and I’ve seen it exceed 20%(!)
By this reasoning, to be a good poker player in Romania you have to make about 25`000 lei a year playing poker, and to be the same “internationally” you’d need about a hundred thousand. But each year after year, that’s the big thing, stability. We average all years the year you die and it has to come out above that threshold. The fact that you managed to exceed it a year or two in a row after which you’ve lost your life playing cards does not qualify you as a good player.
By this definition, there are very, very few good poker players. As noted, variance muddies the water: players almost always think they’re a lot better than they are; -EV players routinely go on hot streaks for a month/quarter/year, only to go broke when the law of large numbers kicks in.
There exists the theory (which I do not credit) that playing cards is an addiction, like smoking tobacco. You might imagine how much credence such notions carry with someone who has been smoking a few cigarettes a week for almost two decades now. As far as I’m concerned, heroin and barbiturates are the only addictive substances, unlike alcohol, nicotine, superspecial cunt, hash, Internet, playing cards of any kind and so on and so forth. The test is simple : take a putative addict and separate him utterly and suddenly from his putative adiction. If he dies (like opiate addicts die, no discussion possible) it’s an addictive substance. If he doesn’t die then there’s no addiction involved, the guy in question is simply being a dumb cunt.i
And now, seven hundred introductory words later, looky that we’re ready to go into the subject.
Yes! The vast majority of poker players struggle with playing too little; not too much! If you’ve been winning a lot, the temptation is to take it easy; if the opposite… I don’t feel like playing this week! I’d always laugh to myself when people warned me about getting addicted: they oughtta be encouraging me put more hours in at the office!
I. To become a good poker player you need about a decade of your life. That means two college degrees and a half, or a Medicine and a Law degree. It is, in other words, very much work.
This hasn’t been my experience: my friends and I became good players (in the ealier defined sense of making more than the national average salary for one’s demographic) within a few years, at most.
Of course, at the age of all imaginary possibilities also known as “adolescence” it may well seem that on the contrary, playing cards is a simple and effective means of avoiding work. These cocklets will never become good poker players, no matter what happens. Most of them won’t die in their own beds, either, but that’s a different discussion that fails to interest us. In actual reality living off poker is about on par with living off blogging : they who can accomplish such wonders are few and far between, the ability required of them roughly equivalent with what’s required to finish two or three degrees – and as a valedictorian, not barely making the cut in some third rate diploma mill.
No doubt – most who try to make it as a pro, fail. For amateurs, it’s considerably worse: virtually all recreational players lose money.
On the other hand it’s an interesting life, that keeps you young (in spirit, because otherwise it undermines you physically something fierce), you always meet new people, you constantly bask in the feeling of living your life to the fullest, it doesn’t compare with a paper shipwreck in an office somewhere. It’s not like counting your life in years, or decades. The poker player counts his life minute by minute most often, and rarely knows Tuesday from Thursday exactly because he’s focused on narrower intervals.
It’s pretty taxing on the spirit, too! You can tell just by looking at a guy that he’s had a bad day/week/month/year(!) – variance drives many a player crazy. Professional poker is – in a word – GRIND. Day-in, day-out; up, down, up, down… Hopefully the graph looks good at the end of the month. Having said that, one does frequently find oneself reflecting at the table: “this is mad: I get to gamble… for a living!!” I don’t know of anything else like it – the sense of freedom, accomplishment and sheer degenerate fun! And yea – who cares what day it is – I just doubled up!
I feel the need to underscore this : he who has the talents and abilities required to become a good poker player will become a good anything else : engineer, lawyer, medic, banker, what you will. Almost all alternatives are better paid, per unit of effort and per unit of personal worth. If you’re after money, this profession (for it is a profession, even if not necessarily found in the bureaucratic classifications) is not the best choice.
In short : it’s not for everyone, it’s not a way to avoid work (on the contrary, it’s a way to work more), it’s not a way to make more money (on the contrary, it’s a way to make relatively less money).
It’s remarkable how little regard the average joe (read: idiot) has for a poker player. At best you’re seen as merely lucky; most think you’re a degenerate-bordering-on-criminal (though, somehow it’s perfectly respectable to be a coppa/beurocrat/public “servant”). I’m not sure with regard to the salary comparison: I know many poker players who earn more than they would as medics/engineers/lawyers – at least in the UK.
Nevertheless, the hardest way to make an easy living, as they say.
II. To become a good poker player you need a partner. Ideally it’s a beautiful woman that loves the cock, who also loves you loyally and passionately, encourages and supports you, has independent income sufficient to support both of you (so secretaries, sales clerks and other unqualified workers are right out), does not want children, does not want to learn to play cards, is not bothered by not seeing you for days at a stretch and makes killer cocktails. In case you’re holding your head and going “Oh God!” : I can assure you that such women exist. I know three. I would guess the whole world contains maybe a thousand, which means that about a thousand dudes (as a degree of magnitude) have the opportunity to become good poker players from the ideal position, on the button with pocket rockets in the hole.
I’d never really thought about it, but it’s true: loads of successful poker players have doting girlfriends who don’t seem to care that they’re routinely away for days/weeks at a time! And come to think of it, most of ‘em do pull in decent money, too – nurses, corporate jobs, “marketing” – that sorta stuff. That said, there are plenty of guys who kill it solo, too.
Unideally, anything that can keep you going for ten years without fail. For more and more people this means their mother forced into a sort of surrogate, such as for instance this cocklet. This solution doesn’t actually work, for reasons we’ll get into below, but meanwhile the fact that these days it’s socially acceptable and even common for thirty year old kids to still be suckling on the financial tit of their parents leads to more and more people than ever in history trying to become good poker players. This does not mean more people end up good players than before, it simply means it’s easier than ever to live off it, if you’re a good player yourself.
Haha, there are quite a few players that live with mum/grandparents; though it’s more common to live with a bunch of fellow gamblers.
III. In becoming a good poker player intelligence is entirely a secondary matter. I know it seems hard to believe, the cinematographically convenient representations as seen through movies and sitcoms have created this aura of hyperintelligence. It’s a false image, that hyperintelligence is a marotte. After all, if you were to credit the cinematographically convenient representation, email’d be a pretty fucking weird thing, wouldn’t you say ?
It’s true; while there are good players who’re intelligent, many of ‘em are pretty normal. They’re all smart, though – in the sense that a good pimp or gangster is smart: they know the parameters of the game they’re playing – how to extract value, handle risk and maximally exploit every opportunity.
Discipline is by far the most important quality of the good poker player, intelligence being a distant second and at great contest with intuition (which intuition is a mystical something that I have no way to explain but nevertheless saw with mine own eyes, in myself as well as others so I’m not about to contest its existence). This is the reason why a partnership with one’s parents is toxic : the man dependent on his mother does not have the resources of adulthood at his disposal, and thus no way to achieve actual discipline. All they can build are fakes (and uncoincidentally, the link I gave you illustrates the problem perfectly : the hyperintelligent cocklet – for he is hyperintelligent – sucks it exactly for lack of discipline incumbent upon an unhealthy relationship with his mom). Accuracy forces me to introduce here a bizarre exception : the incestuous relationship between the daughter and the step father can work perfectly for the needs of the girl in this direction, I’ve seen this with mine own eyes and as such can’t deny it, no matter how wildly… inappropriate, let’s say, it might seem.
This can’t be stressed enough: discipline is – by far – the greatest determiner of winrate. Not tilting when drawn-out on; making the agonising but correct fold; going home when frazzled but you still wanna play… I remember checking my records early on, and seeing that my winrate had been halved just from continuting to play when knackered. Being card-dead and having to fold the only hand you’ve played in 4 hours when you know you’re beat – it’s a killer!
I too have seen this mystical intuition (mostly in others) – some players just KNOW they’re good in certain spots – it’s like they can read the fish’s mind; supernatural or not, it’s a massively profitable ability.
IV. To become a good poker player you’re stuck spending about four years (ie, the smaller degree) learning by heart the number tables of the job. What’s my odds of full house if there’s five players and someone else has a straight ? But what if it’s a straight to the king and I want queens fulla kings ? What if the straight’s to the queen ? But what’s the odds for a straight flush to the queen of diamonds if I hold aces fulla tens ?ii All numbers, in all situations, by heart. By. Fucking. Heart. All. Absolutely all.
This hasn’t been my experience, or that of anyone I know. There are fairly simple heuristics that get one close-enough to the odds, and can be learnt in an afternoon and ingrained in a week – at least for NLHE.
A relatively smarter method of satisfying this boot camp is playing bridge. It has the advantage of being much cheaper than poker, and comes with an opportunity to socialize with intelligent men and women more or less on their own feet (for I’ve not seen that many waitresses playing bridge). It also has the disadvantage that you learn, aside from the many things useful in poker, a lot of useless crap. It is still the avenue best fitted for the patient, given that perhaps your passion for the table isn’t quite as deep as you judged it to be, and this much more… comfortable game, more tolerant and more loving of mankindiii might actually satisfy you for the rest of your life. It is unadvisable for the agitated and assorted cholerics, given that playing poker rather than bridge gives beginners a valuable opportunity to be scared of their own stupidity, an experience which (coupled if at all possible with some serious beatings with sticks) will serve them immensely for the rest of their life, whether they quit poker or not.
People tend to play microstakes (1c/2c) online if they wanna get volume in but don’t have any money. Granted this doesn’t have any social aspect to it, but I don’t know of any exception to the need for playing poker to get better at it. And yea, poker will quickly highlight the cost of being stupid (not that this seems to have any effect on the stupids)!
V. After you’ve got the small degree (but only after, let’s be quite clear on this point, only after you know the numbers like a prayer) you can move on to the large degree, the real thing. Forget everything and focus on the other players. What’s he telling you about what he thinks his numbers are ? A good poker player can play and win consistently against amateurs without as much as looking at his cards. It’s not a line, it’s a truth : his own cards he can evaluate statistically, the others’ cards he can read straight out of their faces, after which he compares a known something (their cards) with a likely something (his cards) and overall derives a profit. This in the end is the best way to test both your ability and your relationship : take your partner and strip her without looking outside of her eyes. I mean, of course, strip poker, but honestly there’s not necessarily much need for the entire cards distraction.
Because in the end this life can be lived even without being a good poker player.
It’s true, and it’s spectacular: some players are simply incredible at the soft-skills: reading their opponents, knowing how they think – BETTER than the opponent knows himself! – and interestingly, it tends to be the players that aren’t so good at the maths-y/GTO side of things. Having great equilibrium play is certainly impressive, but I’ve always been in awe at this side of the game (maybe coz I’m more of a maths-y player myself).
PS. Out of intellectually bankrupt puritanism, the majority of “developed” states implement fiscal policies based implicitly and sometimes explictly on the theory that professional playing is a social ill that must be destroyed. Apparently men marrying men are fine, but god help you if you play cards. As such they tax winnings (often astronomically) but do not allow deduction of losses – should I win ten thousand today and lose nine thousand tomorrow I’m not ahead by a thousand like logic seems to imply, but behind by four because the state’s trying to steal half of the ten.
This nonsense should be taken apart, but practically it seems improbable, especially given that the same states (completely outside any sort of control) have come to where they charge to their own income account nine tenths of the retail price of cigarettes, for instance. The practical solution is tax avoidance, of course, and it’s applied with gusto and for good cause by absolutely everyone.
Bafflingly, the UK is one of the only countries that doesn’t tax gambling winnings; I remember being shocked at learning the USG nicks half or therabouts of tournament payouts(!!) And yes, the wracket is a wratchet: they ain’t covering half the buy-in! That said, go ask a poker player how he tracks his cash-game tax returns ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
And finally, FUCK the normies – those bloodless, worthless, lifeless lukewarm cucks who want nothing bad to happen – they that despise gamblers – one of the few remaining no-bullshit professions; where one puts his money where his mouth is, grabs his balls DAILY and announces, “FUCK IT: I’M ALLIN”.
