Notes from a novice

I took a break from playing poker for several months. It was the right thing to do. My judgement had become clouded. I made decisions motivated by ego, a sense of justice, some wierdly wired sense of terrified desparation, manically blurting out a tourettic bet or fold. My game was fundamentally tilted. A kind of poisonously psychotic rage would infect my game. A sense of wounded injustice. Raw fear. And I knew my game was better than that.

So I quit cold turkey. I stopped playing poker. Stopped reading poker. Stopped thinking, talking and writing poker.

I've stepped back in with a clearer mind. I still lose it from time to time. I'll catch myself making the loose and vengeful call preflop. Or betting into an opponent for the wrong reasons (most often boredom, which utterly undermines my game, sometimes arrogance). A variant on this is a form of, I guess, contextual dyslexia. Making context based plays based on the wrong reading, again, as a function of boredom. Bluffs at the wrong time. Middle pair reraises that are going to get called. Reading passivity for weaknesses. Misjudging my image. Encountering situations that I don't adequately understand, and having to react with optimistic ignorance, or pessimism. A necessary condition of the novice.

I take my bad beats with relative equanimity now. Occasionally I blow up, and exhale a diatribe of vicious incredulity. The standard type gibberish most of us rant from time to time. But I sit back down and play my cards, and try to work out how best to use what I've just learned to my advantage. To allow poker to effect my sense of myself is a profound error.

My standard learning structure for most things runs something like this. Learn the basic principles, the guiding rules and laws. Having grasped the fundamentals, I can now construct models of the various contexts, phenomena and situations I am likely to encounter, and see how they work. Failed simulations, models and predictions indicate gaps in my understanding, and I can use these to hone my understanding. It doesn't quite work in poker. Failed models, simulations and predictions come with the territory. Exception is part of the rule. Certainty is not the goal.

To put it another way, playing poker by adage, by rote, is not the way to play poker. Auto-donking, if you will. The lazy supposition of automatic supremacy. Poker seems to be, above all else, a game of context. Sometimes it is a context one in part creates - in terms of table image, preflop raising, targeting specific types of players with specific types of play. Flat calling with a monster against a lag. Sometimes not. The context may be thrust upon you. But it is context that determines what the correct action is. And an adage, or rule is too inflexible a thing to cater to all contexts.

Lets call it the tyranny of the certain over the truth of the probable.

A set of independently simple variables interacting to produce a complex set of contingent systems and contexts. As such, the Holy Grail of poker playing is rarely certainty. Its generally likelihood. At least for someone playing at my level. Its an easy, and obvious thing to say. Its more difficult to understand. Its, for a newbie, even more difficult to see experience re-inforce that understanding.

What I look to do now is to make what is probably the right play in the context. It means I'm paying a lot more attention to whats happening at the table. I'm remembering things, hands and actions of other players, and incorporating them into my actions. With enough knowledge and understanding, I get to consciously influence the context other players experience. I get to apply pressure at the times most advantageous to me. I get to steal, I get to bluff successfully, I get my hands paid off. Enough of the time for me to feel a sense of progress. Enough of the time for me to sense that I am playing a different game to the one I had been.