Money Hater

I have recently been playing quite a bit with a guy who I find to be extremely curious.  I do not know him at all, but the way he presents himself astonishes me and piques my curiosity as to what he is all about.

His clothes are always ‘different’ (for lack of a better term), yet not totally off the wall.  He not only wears jewelry, but the jewelry he does wear changes from day to day.  (I am fairly confident he isn’t gay, if for any other reason that there isn’t a gay guy alive (or dead) who would ever wear the stuff this guy wears, even if they lived in the 70s.)

Yesterday he wore a yellow, short sleeve oxford type shirt that had a denim collar.  It also had some extra fancy stitching on the back.  It was as if it was trying to be a western-style shirt, but couldn’t fully commit to it.  With this he wore some khaki pants that weren’t quite Dockers but weren’t 70s disco drawers either, and some slip on dress shoes that easily could have been from my dad’s shoe graveyard tucked away in the cedar closet of the house I grew up in.

To top off this ensemble he wore his most common jewelry combination, which centers around a necklace made of turquoise stones intermingled in sort of an interlocking, zipper-like fashion.  This necklace does not dangle, but rather fits snugly around his neck.  He also has a large, WonderWoman type silver bracelet that clamps onto his wrist, which has a turquoise stone centered on it.   On his other wrist he wears a large silver watch that is not any bigger than some of the more common watches around, but is still way too big. Its face is wavy and melting like a Salvidor Dali clock , but not quite. He also wears an enormous ring that is plain silver with a smooth black face and could easily have once been owned by Bootsie Collins.

He dyes his hair.  One day he it is completely light gray, the next day it is black.  A bad black.  “Did-you-use-a-magic-marker?” kind of bad.  Recently it has been brown.

Today there was no jewelry, save a digital athletic wrist watch.   The shoes were a form of slip on shoe like the old Nike aqua socks.  The pants were replaced by shorts that remind one of Jimmy Connors, but not as short.  The shirt didn’t even have a collar.  It was a white T-shirt that said “Thailand” across the top and below had a painting of some building that could be famous but to my ignorant ass is just some Asian looking building.  The actual building must have a bunch of shiny gold on it, because the shirt had actual gold glitter on it.  I think on the roofs.

He reminds me of someone who would be in a Cohen brother’s movie; weird but such a different kind of weird that he could never actually exist but he HAS to exist because no one could ever make this guy up. He looks so different than anyone else in the building, but at the same time he fits right in because he is awful at poker and hates the dealers.

He freaks me out.

…..get the “fuck hims”?  I got this question in an email today from a friend of mine that I used to teach with.   We started playing hold’em in the same home game 7 years ago.  The answer is, “Yes.” Professional poker players do get the “fuck hims.”

The “fuck hims” occur when someone in the game is beating you (what feels like) every single time.  Maybe he always has you beat preflop, but you make a 2nd best hand and pay off.  Maybe he always rivers you with some garbage that he saw fit to get involved with and take way too far.  Whatever.  Anything can bring on the “fuck hims”.  At any limit hold’em game anywhere in the universe, there has never been nor will there ever be a stretch of more than 5 hours where at least one person didn’t get afflicted with some form of the “fuck hims”.  It is inherent in limit hold’em.

This attitude typically leads to disaster, for most of the time it causes the person to play extremely bad.  At this point it is not about money, because after all, “fuck him.”

A guy I know was thrown out of Canterbury because the “fuck hims” found him standing up and berating the entire table for allowing some guy to keep raising with garbage.  This was in a $2/$4 game.

It is always amusing when you see that someone is possessed by the “fuck hims” (especially a professional), but even more enjoyable is watching the path that finally leads them to the “fuck hims.”  I can’t explain it, but you know it when you see it.  “One more outta do it”, I’ll get via text from a friend also in the game.  When this guy get’s involved in a big pot with what clearly was the best hand preflop, you find yourself on the edge of your seat.   Sometimes he wins which brings the temperature way down, but when he loses it is time to sit back and watch the fireworks.  If you’re an asshole like me and most of my friends, you are rooting against him so the fun can begin.

I know that I and many of my friends get the “fuck hims”, but we don’t do anything stupid.  We just make sure to play really tough against the person, and then we bitch about how sick we are of this guy torturing us.  Fortunately for me, many professionals lack discipline.

One professional I know saw fit to 3bet the 43 of diamonds preflop when consumed by the “fuck hims”.  For those of you who don’t play poker, imagine having $100.  OK.  Now imagine you don’t have it any more.

Professional poker players are stupid.  It has taken 4 years of overwhelming evidence to finally convince me to stop assuming that people have the same understanding of this job as I do and finally admit that “Yes, they really are that stupid.”  (I am a professional poker player and thus stupid.  Anyone with half a brain would have come to this realization after 2 months.  I took 4 years.  I’m dumb.)  Countless conversations that follow the basic template of….

Me: Wait, did InsertNameHere really just InsertSomethingThatAnyPokerProfessionalShouldKnowButClearlyDoesn’t here?

My friend: Yes.

Me: How on earth does InsertNameHere do that?  He’s a pro and doesn’t know this?  What the hell?

My friend: Yes Bob, they really are that stupid.

….have finally coaxed me into reversing my previous stance of assuming that anyone who decides to become a professional poker player actually knows how to be a professional poker player.

Over the past 4 years I have seen thousands of pieces of evidence pointing to the incompetence of poker pros.  To give you some idea what I mean, here are two of my favorite.

1

The World Series of Poker recently came to a close.  Tens of thousands of poker players played over 50 tournaments.  Winning a poker tournament is a lot like making a hole in 1;  regardless of how good you are, you have to be damn lucky to make one.   I have read several blogs of professional poker players who had monetary goals for the WSOP.  “My goal is to have $XXX in cashes this year.”  “I’d like to make 3 final tables.”  If you gave a good golfer 50 shots at a hole in one and asked him what his goals were he’d say something along the lines of, “I’m going to try to make some good swings at it and hope I get lucky and the little thing rolls in.”  If he said, “I hope to make 3 of them” he’d get laughed at.  By everyone.  Even people who don’t play golf know how difficult that is.  The same is not true with poker tournaments.  The average person has no clue the amount of luck involved in them, and apparently neither does the average professional poker player.  Having your goal be anything other than “to play well” is ridiculous, yet countless pros will throw out numbers at you if you ask them.  Amazing.

2

Most people do not understand how to play poker, for it is a difficult game to understand and play well.  In fact there are several websites that now will teach you how to play poker if you pay them.  Since you don’t know how to play, you have no idea if what they are telling you is garbage or great.  (It’s actually a brilliant business idea.)  Recently an owner of one these sites published something on the variance associated with poker.  (Understanding variance is vital if one is to be a successful pro.)  He had graphs and projections based on statistics, and used these as the basis for an argument he was making.  But his statistics were wrong.  Not wrong in the sense that someone punched the wrong key on the calculator, but wrong in the sense that a fundamental error that no one who truly understands statistics could ever make was made.  How on earth can someone who is attempting to explain the variance that comes with poker not understand statistics???  “I don’t know anything about how to fly this plane but let me go ahead and tell you how to do it anyway.  OH and by the way, you’re gonna have to pay me to do it.”  I don’t know what is more disconcerting, the initial error or the fact that he didn’t look at the results and think “Hmmm.  Something isn’t right here.  Better check these again.”   If you understand the calculations you are making, you should have some idea what the results will look like.  When my students used to calculate the distance to the sun, if they got an answer like 1500 miles, they knew they did something wrong.  They may not have known what the error was, but they sure as hell knew not to go around telling people that the sun is only 1500 miles away or apply for a job at NASA.  But you can pay this guy to teach you about poker.  You can also pay me to teach you to fly the space shuttle if you like.

When I first started out, I was very curious to meet other pros.  I wanted to learn as much as I could from them.  I was new to this thing and hearing the perspective of other pros would be great.  I have met professional poker players from all over the world.  To my shock (and on some level to my disappointment) most have no clue as how to properly be a pro, yet strangely they all think they have it all figured out.  It is actually quite astounding but easily explained.

In most professions if you are not any good you find out pretty quickly.   If you suck at golf, there is no hiding it.  You’re not going to be able to fake it for the first 9 holes.  You’re gonna shank one pretty quickly and expose yourself as the hack that you are.  Such is not the case with poker.  There is too much luck involved.  People do not go bust over night.  It is typically a long, denial-filled process.  I see people who are in the process of busting every day.  Eventually I won’t see them any more.

Poker is nasty.  The variance that comes with it is a two-headed monster.  It kills people either by (a) allowing them to run hot at the early stages of their career so that they quit their job/assume it will always be this easy/adopt a lifestyle they cannot afford or (b) throwing a nasty downswing at them that busts them because they don’t understand variance and thus are not properly bankrolled.

I do know what a proper bankroll is but am not quite there yet and that scares the hell out of me.  I wish I was as dumb as everyone else.  I’d probably have less grey hair.