Quotes from the book "Zen and the Art of Poker" Part 2
"POKER RULE #51: Learn to play up and down the ladder. Don't just downscale your bets when you get cold, downscale the actual way you play the game. Back off within your method of play, alternately loosening up your game when things are going well and tightening back up when they are not.
Mathematician tell us that each hand takes place independently of all others. This is good advice to ignore..."
"POKER RULE #52: Unlike many games and sports, poker has a third factor: the cards."
"POKER RULE#53: Include Failure in the System... Correctly played, therefore, poker is really a process of two steps forward and step back. Footnote: There is some evidence that this two steps forward and one step back is more than just a figure of speech: pro players report that on average they expect to have two winning sessions out of every three."
"POKER RULE #54: All hesitations are noted. The game of poker eventually reaches a certain rhythm in which, if you hesitate, it tells the other players something... For this reason it is necessary to know the game so well that you make decicions instantly and are able to control your hesitations - or lack thereof..."
"POKER RULE#55: Prolong the time spent looking your cards. Obvious, clear-cut, good cards lead to easy decisions. No player sits and stares at four kings minute after agoniznig minute, trying to figure out what to do with them. But perhaps they should. Vary how long you look at your cards. Your action are being observed..."
"POKER RULE #56: Resist your first impulse. You may notice (by observing yourself) that if you get a good hand you tend to reach for your chip a little quicker than at other times."
"POKER RULE #57: Be flexible."
"POKER RULE#58: Don't out-clever yourself. Stick to basic poker most of the time. Keep the creativity (deliberately wrong plays) to a minimum... They begin to drift into the area of long odds..."
"POKER RULE #59: Perfect the poker face... Because other players are looking for a reaction - or lack of reaction. It is best to always look as though no card that appears has any effect on you whatsoever; either that, or that every card that appears is exactly the card you knew and expected to appear."
"POKER RULE #60: Determine whether an opponent is acting."
"POKER RULE #61: Learn to read your opponents' voices"
"POKER RULE#62: Good poker is not a gentleman's game, it is a war... It becomes a game in which you pick your spots, attack, and retreat strategically."
"POKER RULE#63: You're never going to win at poker by calling... Good poker hands are like a powerful lever that can be used to move a large boulder, but it is left unused... The point of the scene is the need for aggression when you have a good hand - not inertia and passivity."
"POKER RULE #64: Minimize your losses; maximize your gains. The majority of players could significantly improve their game by folding more often when they have bad cards and betting more when they have good cards... For some unknown reason, in this (as well as other areas of life), the average person is not accustomed to betting a lot when things turn favorable... But the problem here, again, is that by doing this, over the long run your win sizes tend to equal your loss sizes. (A good deal of the actual money winning takes place in the difference between win sizes over loss sizes over time - losing $50 on the times you lose, on average, say, while winning $100 on average when you win.)"
"POKER RULE #65: Play tight and defensively until you have something - then bet a lot... For it to work, you have to keep doing it, not get swept up in the action and let it slip from mind... Would it be fair to the other players in the game if everybody had to put in $40 or $50 whenever you had good cards, but only had to put in $5 or $10 when they had good cards? The answer would be no, it wouldn't be fair at all. It would give you a big advantage in the game... Bet heaviest at the strongest times."
"POKER RULE# 66: Learn how to bet extravagantly and wildly at times yet be able to turn it off completely at others... And it is difficult to bet lavishly and freely at the right times, yet retreat into monklike quietude at the other times. This is achieved by self-discipline and being flexible, not locking your game into one or the other extreme."
"POKER RULE #67: Learn the language of betting... Use betting as a probe, to ask for reactions (and don't forget to watch for reactions when you do this). If an opponent has a better hand than you, he will generally let you know."
"POKER RULE #68: Higher betting levels often induce a new emotional range on players' faces... You would have some serious misgivings at each step along the way that he would be quite used to watching for. Players always watch other players' faces in poker, but they often become billboards once serious money is on the line."
"POKER RULE #69: All other things being equal, big money can run you out of a game... For reasons cited above, big money can reveal your stress point in a game, your hesitations and doubts, and pour it on unmercifully with raises and re-raises to disrupt your game... Moral: Don't be under-funded, and don't play in games that are out of your financial range."
"POKER RULE #70: Get out when everything is going against you... This is a good time to get out."
"POKER RULE #71: Know your game so well that you can act without thinking... The answer is: It is like playing music, or typing on a computer or typewriter. Do we consciously stop and think at every note we play or every letter we type?
"POKER RULE #72: As you become a more experienced poker player, try turning your game over to your instinct. The most important part of the above sentence is the first part: as you become more experienced. Do this too early in your poker career and it may backfire, usually with disastrous consequences... In a sense, expertise is being able to raise these hunches to the conscious level and analyze them."
"POKER RULE #73: Get to the point where you "put someone on a hand" and proceed on that assumption, then take the penalities that accrue from being wrong and the profits that accrue from being right. In poker, to put someone on a hand means you predict specifically what hand they are playing and act according to this... Putting a player on a hand is a valuable skill, but due to the very specificness of the prediction, you can be wrong at times and it can occasionally blow up in your face..."
"POKER RULE #74: Try playing on instinct. As an exercise, try tuning off your thinking mechanism from time to time and going by your instinct alone... Playing by instinct is going to be wrong at times but doing it on a regular basis will purify the process..."
"POKER RULE #75: Play on your second set of emotions, not your first... Your hunches, your intuition, your gut feeling of where you are at in a hand, your feel for the situation. Oddly enough, most players seem to have no qualms whatever about pushing all their chips on their fist set of emotions - (anger, greed, pride, ego , stubborness, revenge, one-upmanship)..."
POKER RULE #76: Join the flow. A person who is outside the game - a newcomer, let's say - once he has played a few times is welcomed inside, and joins the rhythm and the flow... Once this player is welcomed into the interconnectedness of the flow, a more Zen-like rhythm is reached for all players."
"POKER RULE #77: Don't brag."
"POKER RULE #78: Don't rest on your laurels. We have no laurels. The war starts over each time. Don't be overconfident of your poker skills and expertise at any time..."
"POKER RULE#79: Don't refer to your past as somehow giving you an edge. "I just came from playing Hold'em for two years in Las Vegas" is typical of the kind of self-referenced edge you sometimes hear... Most forms of self-pride come to grief in the game of poker."
"POKER RULE #80: Don't become overconfident. By overconfident I don't mean cocky, superior, pompous, self-important. I simply mean a quiet inner conviction that "probability can't get me anymore, I'm just too good." Dismiss pride."
"POKER RULE #81: Your edge is small. Remember always that any edge you have is a small edge... Your edge is a very subtle shading or gradation. Treat it humbly. The rule always: Humility!"
"POKER RULE #82: Be very careful when you are flush with money from a big win... Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof (otherwise known as Flush with Money), is one of the most dangerous conditions in gambling - the state of being ripe for a fall is so ripe that it's almost off the chart..."
"POKER RULE #83: Don't steam. Steaming, in poker parlance, is what happens when your queen's-up full house loses to a king's-up full house, or when your four kings lose to four aces... Use the time usually devoted to steaming to go back over the hand in your mind to see if you missed anything... "
"POKER RULE#84: Don't complain when you lose. Not complaining when you lose is not only good sportsmanship, it also has an important practical value... Who wants to call a bet against a guy no one can remember losing?"
"POKER RULE #85: Don't be mean-spirited. Playing poker brings out the worst in certain people - they take losses personally, act rude, get nasty, launch vendettas, and so on... This sort of mean-spirited approach to the game is not particularly helpful for the player or anyone else... The real reason is this: It can get reinforced, by success..."
"POKER RULE #86: Eliminate macho"
"POKER RULE #87: Don't develop a personal vendetta against a certain player."
"POKER RULE #88: Show your opponents that you can't be baited."
"POKER RULE #89: Resist the temptation to develop a theme to the game."
"POKER RULE #90: If you lose the Zen, at least continue to play your cards right."
"POKER RULE #91: While being in a good mood doesn't guarantee success at poker, being in a bad mood almost always guarantees that something is going to go wrong."
"POKER RULE #92: Skip the last two hours of the game."
"POKER RULE #93: Don't Panic... Stay focused, quiet, and alert. The good things can occur suddenly, and they can occur in bunches. (They can also occur right at the end of the night.)"
"POKER RULE #94: The cards will tell you how much money you are going to win... The cards will let you know the range you are going to be in; your job is to maximize it... Don't overplay your cards. Success in poker is a rhythm; don't try to go outside the rhythm... "
"POKER RULE #95: Don't get in touch with your victim side."
"POKER RULE #96: Don't succumb to victim thinking."
"POKER RULE #97: Resist the allure of failure... You must keep the focus on winnning, no matter how seductive some of these darker states of mind may be."
"POKER RULE #98: Don't give in to the death wish... It is saying, 'I might as well keep throwing my money away at this point, because it doesn't matter anymore.'"
"POKER RULE #99: After a major poker failure occurs, resist the temptation to do something big, dramatic, and fatalistic... A better idea is to pull back and reset. Play tight again. Return to your best game; return to the Zen..."
"POKER RULE #100: Make sure you know when you're on a cold streak... He is not aware of his condition. He is not stepping back from it and seeing it -- and, more important, not acting on this information. As a result, as cold as he is, you often see him right back in there on the next hand, fighting struggling, betting..." |
