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March 19, 2020 - Adventures in HellwQrld
35:51
The Lockdown Poker Podcast

I'm here to tell you why poker is a terrible game that will only hurt you, and if you still want to play I'll help you out. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Hello everyone, Poker and Politics here.
And it's time to start busting out that quarantine content you're all looking for.
So today I'm going to begin the Quarantine Poker Podcast.
And what I wanted to talk about right now from the start is how unbelievably painful and terrible the game of poker really is.
Poker's brutal.
Poker is probably the cruelest hobby you could ever get yourself involved in, and if you want to make a living at it, you are asking for so much trouble.
It's a tough game.
It's an incredibly tough game because your level of skill only gets you so far, and the reason why it's alluring is exactly the same reason.
Because you can actually get a moron to sit down at the table and give you all his money.
And you can't do that in any other endeavor.
You cannot be a professional pool player and you can't get some guy who's never held a pool cue before to sit down and play with you.
You can't be a grandmaster at chess and have some novice play you for money.
These other games, these other sports, People will not fight the pros.
People will not engage professionals.
But poker, they will.
They'll plunk down $10,000 and play the World Series of Poker, so they can say that they sat down at the table with Phil Ivey, or Tom Dwan, or Phil Hellmuth, or Daniel Negreanu, or any of these big names, and they'll do it with a smile on their face.
They will dump that $10,000 to tell a story.
And that is the cruel nature of this game, is that it's the only way you can get a sucker to play you, but it also means the sucker has a chance to beat you.
He doesn't have a great chance to beat you, but that chance always exists.
If some moron played Phil Ivey, heads up, for a million dollars, I feel like his odds of winning that are probably 80-85%, but he could lose.
It's possible.
Whereas if you played our grandmaster at chess for a million dollars, he would win every single time.
He could not lose to you.
It would be impossible.
He had no idea what you were doing.
Even if you were an intermediate player, he would crush you.
It's the nature of the game.
And because of that, it becomes incredibly hard To figure out exactly how good you are doing.
When you play games, you generally have an idea as to what you did right or wrong, but in poker, you might not.
At the end of the night, you might lose $400, and it may have turned out that you did everything exactly right.
Every decision you made was perfect.
And by the same token, you might win $400, and you are a complete idiot!
You screwed up everything!
It is why, in the poker community, there is a mantra, decisions, not results.
Because only the decisions matter.
The outcomes of those decisions do not matter.
Because if you did the right thing, and got the wrong result, that's just the nature of the game.
That's just how poker works.
If you got your money in as a 75% favorite, and you lost, just the way it works.
That's just how the game shakes out.
And the next three times you do that, if probability decides to be nice to you, you'll win.
But you never know.
And so, You have to be brutally honest about how you played.
Which is so tough for people to do.
It's very tough for a person to be honest about how a poker session went.
Because that whole luck-skill divide is something people don't want to acknowledge benefits them on the one side and hurts them on the other.
When you play great It was your skill.
When you lose, it was luck.
And that's the problem.
You have to be really honest.
You have to keep a mental note of the big hands you played, and then go over those hands after the fact.
And talk to your friends, who hopefully know poker a little bit better than you, and say, when I made this play, was it a good play or not?
You need to be able to handle criticism.
You need to be able to be told That no, that was a bad idea.
No, you should not have done that.
Or yes, that was a good idea.
And you got to trust their opinions and their advice and take it to heart.
If they do know what they're talking about.
Because the only way you can be fully aware of how well you are playing is if you are honest and
knowledgeable about these situations and you assess them in a very
cold clinical fashion. And that's another cruel paradox of poker is that people think about like
the thrill of victory, the snapping over those big cards,
dragging down that big pot, and the rush of it all.
The excitement, the chase, the glory, the adrenaline.
And the truth is, is that all of that stuff is kind of bad for you.
That really, you have to play poker in an incredibly dispassionate, emotionless, bloodless way.
You have to just be a robot that just assesses information that you are receiving.
From your hole cards, from the board, from your opponent's actions.
You just have to be processing all kinds of information and you have to be doing it in a very detached way such that like if you figure out that you're now in trouble that you can fold a hand without being emotionally attached to it.
Because if you stay emotionally attached to a big hand you can end up losing a lot of chips.
You can lose a lot of money.
And so That is another side of the game where the whole allure, the appeal of it, it kind of loses it.
You lose that appeal once you actually see what you're doing, once you actually see what's happening and how the game actually works.
When you're playing it for long periods of time.
When you put in a 10 hour session and end the night up $300.
That's not a great wage.
That's tough.
It's grinding.
That's what they talk about.
The movie rounders.
It's about grinding.
It's about winning one big bet an hour.
It's that kind of thing.
It's brutal.
And it's tough.
I know there's... I saw a Reddit AMA.
There was a guy who is an online poker player and he said that he makes a quarter million dollars a year playing poker online and that he hates it.
That if he could do anything else to maintain his lifestyle he would do so because he finds the poker to be just so incredibly rote and boring that He knows all the plays he's going to make, he knows all the decisions he's going to make, he's seen all these hands so many times, and it's just literally clicking buttons and being just a robot.
It's just processing the same information over and over again, knowing hand ranges, knowing ideas, all that kind of stuff.
But that's the nature of this game.
The other thing is that you're going to run really bad for long periods of time and you have to be so massively overcapitalized to handle it.
If you're playing 1-2 no limit or 1-3 no limit and max buy-in is like $300 or so, you You should probably have about $6,000 worth of income that you're willing to invest in playing the game if you want to be a serious player.
If you're a casual player and you just want to put down $300, $200 every now and then for funsies, that's another thing entirely.
But if you're seriously devoted to being invested in the game, you have to have a huge bankroll to handle the things that are going to happen to you.
Because, again, you can play perfectly for session after session after session and just lose them all.
And that wears on you.
That's tough.
It's so hard to overcome just days and days and weeks of just terrible beats, bad luck, just awful runouts, just not being able to ever get there on a hand.
You have this idiot tourist trapped.
You've got him totally destroyed.
And then he hits his miracle card on the river and takes all the money.
And it's going to happen.
And it's going to happen so many times you're going to lose count of it.
And there's a reason why people talk about how they don't want to hear your bad beat story.
Because you're going to take them.
You're going to take the bad beats.
They're part of the price of the game.
Because if you play pool for a living, The only way you can get people to give you money is if you pretend to be bad and then sucker them into a game and crush them.
You gotta literally be a pool hustler.
Because that's the nature of games where there's no luck involved.
Everyone knows that it's skill versus skill and the superior skill is gonna win out in the long run.
Whereas in poker, A guy might call $75 to try to hit a gut shot straight on you because, hey, I'm going to take a gamble.
I just want to see what's going to happen.
And if he hits it, he hits it.
And that sucks for you, but you're going to have to pay him off because it's very tough to see a gut shot for solid money.
So, now that I've tried to dissuade you from becoming a professional poker player by telling you that it's a horrible grind, you're going to need a lot of money to play, and you're going to suffer unimaginably in the process of trying to get where you want to get to.
If you're like, no, poker, I'm a smart guy, I'm a smart gal, I know what I'm doing, I've seen it on TV, I play with my friends, I crush them all the time, I've been to the local casino, I'm considered a shark there, I'm rolling up a steak and I'm going to Vegas.
Well, not anymore, but when Vegas reopens, I'll be right there.
Okay, so if that is your mindset and that is your mentality, you probably already know the things I'm about to tell you.
What I'm going to tell you anyway is because these are the ground rules of poker for people that are just looking at the game from the outside and they think to themselves that I gotta do certain things in order to get ahead.
I gotta make certain plays in order to make some money and be a winner.
I gotta get in there and mix it up and win some pots.
Winning pots is not what matters in poker.
What matters is winning money.
Winning all the chips.
Winning big pots.
The way you do that is by actually playing out hands, by actually assessing things correctly, using all the information you're gathering in order to make proper bets that make it wrong for your opponent to call you.
And if they do call you, they are making a mistake.
And that is the other important rule of poker.
I came at it in a bleak way a little while ago about decisions that matter not results.
The only time you are truly winning at poker is when your opponent makes a mistake.
Period.
That's it.
If you count the number of mistakes you made in a session and the number of mistakes everybody else made, if you're making less mistakes than everybody else, and you're actually honest and you actually know what your mistakes really were, then you're doing good.
Because that's all that matters.
And so what I'm talking about when it comes to winning those big pods and making people make mistakes against you and not making mistakes yourself is so many people are scared to death of playing big hands Getting involved in hands where they're going to have to take a flop, a turn in a river, to try to maximize value.
They don't want to do it because we're hardwired as humans to want to win when we're winning and not risk losing, even though the risk of loss entails massive long-term profits.
Like, If I was going to tell you that you could win, I will tell you, I will give you $100 right now, or you can roll this die, and if you don't roll a 1, I will give you $2,000.
Almost everyone would roll the die because they're getting 20 to 1 odds on an event that will only happen 1 out of 6 times.
But if I say $1,000, some people might just take the $100 because they're like, ah, it's not worth it.
It's $100 in my hand.
I know my luck.
If I want to roll a one, they probably won't, but they might.
And then if I shave it down to $750, eventually it comes down to a point where I'll still be offering the right odds, but the person will not take the deal because they just want the sure thing.
They want to lock up the sure victory.
And this happens all the time when people get big hands like pocket aces and pocket kings.
You will see them shut the hand down immediately.
Someone might put in a small raise, 1-2, no limit game.
Someone raises to 10.
They might come over the top to like 60.
And this is ridiculous because you have a really strong hand that's very likely to win the pot.
And now you're making the pot as small as humanly possible so you win the least amount of money that you can with your incredibly strong hand.
And it's not about winning that pot, it's about winning the chips.
It's about getting that money.
So you need to let people play with you, build a pot, and then take it from them.
Now the second level of fear is the people who have the Aces or the Kings will raise preflop, Not to blow everyone out of the pot, but enough to just get some action.
And then once the flop comes down, they'll move all in.
Because they're only willing to go that far.
Now sometimes this might be the right thing to do.
The flop might be very terrifying.
They might be very well coordinated.
They could be losing already, for crying out loud.
Again, they don't want to get maximum value because they're worried they could lose.
And they think they're winning.
And we, as people, we think it's a really massive injustice when we were winning and then we don't win.
It's unfair to be winning and then lose.
And the pain of that, the pain of going from being a winner to being a loser, is something we actively try to avoid.
And we do that and we spite ourselves in the process by costing ourselves money, by not seeking out maximum value and instead seeking to avoid the emotional damage of having our aces get cracked, of having our kings get cracked, of having the big hand and having it not rolled up for us.
And the thing is you can't truly avoid that pain.
That pain is going to come no matter what because you're going to have big hands lose.
And one of the funny things that will happen a lot is these people will put in a massive raise, get called by a bad hand, then the bad hand will get lucky and beat them and they will get mad.
And they will scream and yell at that person and say, why did you call $50 preflop?
Why did you call $75 preflop?
What did you think I had?
What were you doing?
What were you thinking?
And The thing is, what they are literally saying to that person is, why did you not make the correct play?
Why didn't you do the right thing?
And when you are asking someone in a game of skill, which poker is, why didn't you do the right thing?
I told you what the right thing to do was and you didn't do it.
Imagine how stupid that sounds in reality.
Imagine playing chess and telling your opponent, you should take my knight.
And they look at you confused, and you're like, look, I know you think it's an even exchange, but in reality, if you do this five moves down the line, you're going to be able to pull off this pin.
That will win you a bishop for free.
Unless I do these series of things.
If I do that, you're going to take two pawns off me and have a really good board.
Really good positional setup.
Your pawns are probably flawless.
Mine will be disastrous.
And I'll be down pawns.
So, I mean, that would be losing chess.
That would be how you don't win in a game of chess.
By telling the other person what the right tactics are.
That is what people don't grasp when they're playing these games is that the last thing on earth you ever want to do is make the right decision for your opponent easy.
You don't want to make things simple for other people.
You want to make them tough.
You want to make them sweat.
You want to make them suffer.
The best thing on earth you can do is to put out a bet and then the other person has to think for a couple minutes about what the right thing for them to do is.
Because now you have put doubt in their mind as to which path they should take.
That's a good sign.
It's a good thing.
You want to do that to people.
You want to sow confusion.
You want to cast doubt.
You want your actions to be inscrutable.
You want the power of your hand to be concealed.
You do not want to bet giant piles of money, screaming at the top of your lungs, I've got aces, you should fold.
And then when they fold, think that you did a good thing, because you didn't.
You did a terrible thing.
You cost yourself all the money in the world.
And if you play the game that way, you will be a long-term loser.
Because when you help your opponents to the right answer, you are costing yourself money every single time.
It is the worst possible thing you can do.
Well, that and straddling.
Well, I'm kidding about straddling.
Whenever you're at a poker table, you'll hear someone scream, Ah!
He straddled him!
Dumbest bet in the casino!
So, yeah.
Have a big bank roll.
Be incredibly honest about the level of play you're actually performing at.
Are you actually playing good?
Or are you just getting lucky?
Or are you playing good and just getting unlucky?
You gotta figure that stuff out.
You gotta understand these things.
And you also have to know that your decisions are what matter, and you have to minimize your mistakes while inflicting mistakes on your opponents.
These are the keys and the principles of actually being a long-term consistently good poker player.
And having said all of that, it's now time for the hilarious questions and answers section of this podcast.
One of my readers, followers, Twitter friends, I don't know what you call them, Jan says, Is poker the one with little nets on sticks, or the ones with mallets and hoops?
Those are, I believe, lacrosse and polo.
This is the one with cards and chips.
So, hope that squared those things away.
Occam's dull Kyodon Razor 3301.
I think that's a cicada reference.
Asks, what hand does Q prefer?
I would think that Q would prefer pocket queens, because that would be two Q's.
I would also think that an ace and a seven would be acceptable to Q, because that would look like 17.
Pocket fives would obviously be a very good hand for Q because it would be 5-5 and it would show that they were over the target.
So 4-5 would be Trump's presidential number, so that would obviously be a hand that Q would enjoy.
So I think there's a lot of options for what hand Q likes the most.
Optimistic to a fault.
Pocket Jacks are, in a way, played a lot like the way the idiots who overplay the aces and kings play them.
says, pocket jacks are they truly cursed? And the answer is yes, pocket jacks are terribly cursed.
Pocket jacks are in a way played a lot like the way the idiots who overplayed the aces and kings
play them. But pocket jacks are played that way out of out of fear, out of true terror that the
jacks are going to be drawn out on on the flop, which most of the time they kind of are.
It's tough to get a good flop for Jacks, because a lot of times an Ace or a King or a Queen is going to show up and you're going to have to make tough decisions.
And that's the big thing about a hand like Jacks, is that you've got to think a lot, and people don't want to think, they just want to win.
So if a flop comes out and there's only an ace as an overcard, that's bad because most people play bad aces.
If there's a king, it's not nearly as bad because people will not play terrible kings when they face a raised preflop, which you're probably going to put in a raise of jacks because you kind of have to because it's a strong hand.
It's a tough hand, but it's a strong hand.
So, if you put in a raise and someone calls you with King 7 or King 5 and they hit a King on you, that's just, again, that's bad luck.
You have to just chalk that up.
Now, it's not bad luck if you know they're the kind of schmuck that just won't make a big bet or call a big bet with top pair, and you put in a big bet and they call you, then you need to change.
Again, processing information.
If the guy that won't continue a hand with top pair is calling you down, then you have to be like, okay, my jacks are probably no good here.
But yeah, jacks suck.
They're tough.
They're tough.
They require thought.
You gotta, you gotta work out the hand with jacks in order to get to the result that you want.
So when you see the pocket jacks in your hand, you gotta put in the thinking cap and that makes it difficult.
And so, uh, Yes, the agony of pocket jacks is one that any Texas Open player knows well.
Kim, who has 3313, again, I don't know if this is Cicada numbers or I'm just wrong on all that, but Kim says, will a dead man's hand actually kill you?
And no, it won't.
The dead man's hand is actually the story of Wild Bill Hickok.
Who was shot while playing poker, and we don't know if the entire hand is apocryphal or not, but the legend has it that the cards he was holding and kept clutched in his hand even after being shot were a pair of black aces and a pair of black eights, and the fifth card has been lost to history.
It's a very interesting story because Wild Bill, being a gunslinger and having known that he made lots of enemies throughout his days, he always sat with his back to the wall in bars and did this so he could track people coming into the bar to make sure no one was coming in there to kill him.
And on the day of his death, when he got to the poker table, all the other chairs were full and the only seat was the one that had its back to the door.
And instead of asking the person who had their back to the wall to move so he could take that seat and have security, he didn't want to appear to be Scared?
Or intimidated?
So he was like, yeah, I'll just sit with my back to the door.
What's the worst that can happen?
And then a few minutes later, he got shot.
That's the way the world works, obviously.
So, uh, that is the Dead Man's Hand.
It itself won't kill you.
And if you actually do make aces and eights, you're in really good shape at Texas Hold'em.
That is a strong hand in this game.
And I've called it out a lot of times when people get it, because I'm a dealer.
You know, they'll hit me and say, Dead Man's Hand, aces and eights.
Boom.
If I am not allowed to touch my face, how will people know when I am bluffing?
Physical tells aren't that huge a part of the game, really, that I have ever seen.
I do see some physical tells.
I might do a podcast about the physical tells that I have seen and I do know about.
Most of the information you get in this game is based off of betting and reactions.
People are terrible about concealing their emotions.
Poker faces are not very good When you're playing low stakes poker, people do give away information very easily if you watch them.
They will do very dumb things, like audibly sigh or just get, like, they'll shake their head.
I mean, that's a tell.
It's a really silly tell.
But the vast majority of the time, The tells are ridiculous bets, or people giving up on a hand where they bet you twice and on the river a card comes out and they just slap the table in disgust for a check.
There's like, boom, check!
And those are people who had huge draws usually and then didn't get there.
that's they just get they just get upset they shut down but they can't just shut down and just lose they have to emote some they have to give something up but uh and again a lot of the time it's just they put out a bet of 20 then they put out a bet of 40 and then on the river they put out a bet of like 20 again.
They dial it back.
Now they're admitting they're scared.
Or they put in a stupid huge bet and just really make it obvious that they have a huge hand.
Or if they're a drunk lunatic, they make it really obvious that they're bluffing.
Those crazy huge bets are what we call polarizing bets.
They're either a total bluff or a massive hand.
And if you play with a person for about a couple hours, you should be able to figure out which side of the polarizing range they're on if they're not good.
And so you'll know that you just fold every time they do it, or you take their money every time they do it.
But, uh, yeah.
And for the record, I can't stop touching my face.
So if I do get COVID-19, that will be my downfall, is that face touching is unavoidable to me.
It's just a sickness I have.
And finally, Kit says, with a snowflake, asks me, what pro semi-pro would you least like to play against?
Will Kassouf would probably be pretty annoying, just because I think his reputation would make the table uneasy.
And when you are playing poker, especially like low stakes poker, you want people to be You want a very laid-back, cheerful table.
Because when you have a table that's tense and agitated, people aren't having fun and they're not as willing to lose money.
They're getting antagonistic and they want to just sort of engage people.
It becomes personal.
It becomes like a contest to see who the true alpha male is.
And beyond just the fact that that makes the game tense and awkward, it means that people actually start focusing up and trying to play better.
I mean, some people might play bad because they've got to prove a point, they've got to beat this guy they hate, but if you're not that guy, it doesn't really help you that they're taking a shot at this other person.
So that would not be great.
Mike Mattesau would be another one that'd be pretty bad.
That dude is like a half step away from being full-blown QAnon at this point.
And I don't know that I could deal with someone trying to red pill me at the table.
That'd be really awkward.
But yeah, I think the Daniel Negreanu kill-em-with-kindness attitude and the way around the table is a much better attitude to take.
And if you're not a gregarious, affable, outgoing extrovert, just be quiet.
Just play your cards.
Just be friendly when people talk to you.
If people say, hey, what'd you have?
Just feed them a line.
Just tell them something quick and then just Go back to listening to your music or checking your phone or whatever you need to do in order to just stay anti-social at the table.
And trust me, I'm exactly that way.
If I'm at a table with people I don't know, I'm not a very gregarious person.
But I don't want to be a negative influence.
I don't want to be an agitator.
I don't want to make people upset.
This is the kind of thing that's really just simple.
It's really simple.
Just don't be a jerk.
Don't cause people to be upset.
Because when you do that kind of thing...
You make it a lot tougher for you or anyone else to have a good time and win money at the table.
You don't want people focusing against you.
The last thing on earth you want is for a guy that is drinking beers and having a good time and telling bad jokes.
The last thing you want to do is either run him off the table or get him to stop drinking and start focusing.
You want that guy's flashing around with 7-10 offsuit.
You want that guy, like, calling a 3-bet with pocket 4s and then making some sort of heroic read on you because the board came out 10 high.
He's like, ah, you got ace-king.
I know you didn't hit any of that.
I'll call that $150.
That's what you want.
You desperately want that guy to do those kinds of things.
You don't want that guy to sit there folding for 45 minutes waiting for himself to catch aces or kings because then he's going to teach you a lesson you no good so-and-so.
That's terrible.
It's such a bad idea.
It's such a bad way to act around the table.
So yeah.
So that'd be my mindset on who I'd want to play and the attitude I'd want to play the least with.
There was a man who I knew out in Vegas.
His name to all of us was New York Brian, and that man could ruin a table like you read about.
I'll never forget, there was this one night at the Tropicana in Vegas.
It was rodeo week and all the cowboys were in having a great time just palling around
being clowns, talking off money, playing like suckers.
He came in and ruined the vibe, destroyed the table because everything with him was
he just felt like the whole world was out to get him.
It felt like everyone was there to hurt him personally at all times.
Anything would set him off.
It's a one-two, no-limit game.
A guy throws in a red chip to call.
It's a $5 chip.
And Bradley would just look at him and go, is that a raise?
Is that a raise?
OK.
So I want to make sure that was a call.
Because I didn't want to, like, he would think that the guy was trying to pull a move by, like, trying to fake him out by throwing out the five and then just not letting it be known if it was a call or a raise or not.
Everyone who plays poker knows that it's just a call to throw one chip.
And Brian knows that too, but he just couldn't help himself.
He just couldn't stop.
He just had to be angry at all times, and thinking that everything anyone ever did was a hustle and a scam that was being perpetrated upon him, and by God he was not going to let it slide.
And the man ruined every poker game he ever sat down, and he had no idea that that's what he was doing.
So yeah, don't be New York Brian.
It's a real bad look.
It's a bad thing to do.
So yeah, that is the first installment of the Quarantine Poker Podcast.
Feel free to ask me any and all questions as we journey on this magical adventure of trying to survive gross government negligence and a weird, deadly virus.
That is ravaging our nation and our world.
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