Random thoughts

Read a thread on 2p2, quite interesting:

"First of all, I’d like to dispel some common poker mythology. Everyone has “that friend” that plays poker and has won some arbitrary amount of money playing it online. Fewer people have a friend that actually plays it and wins money regularly. But regardless of which friend we’re talking about, these friends are always stamped with the label of having the ability to make money easily. I mean, look how easy it looks on television. Phil Hellmuth bets the turn for $8500. Phil Ivey raises it to $30,000 and Hellmuth folds. Ivey wins a $46,000 pot, more than the average North American household income. It’s so easy! Not so fast…

Okay so maybe comparing online cash game players to Hellmuth and Ivey is a mistake. But the point I’m trying to make is that to the untrained eye, poker seems like a game where a select few people were simply born with the ability to play it and automatically make money the “easy way” without having a “real job”. Only those that play the game regularly (or once did, and perhaps failed) or are close with someone who does, are informed enough to appreciate that the game is indeed quite difficult and that being a poker player isn’t quite as “easy” as it looks. The game was somewhat difficult in 2004, and its difficulty level with respect to being a profitable player has multiplied since then with thanks to coaching and teaching websites.

The big misconception about poker players is that they are extremely lazy. This mostly stems from the fact that they normally “work” for less hours than the average working class individual and the myth is compounded by their notorious couch-potato behavior when not playing the game. But what people don’t realize is just how intense the common work hour is for a poker player in contrast to that of a typical office job. The online poker player has the amazing opportunity to increase his hourly profit by maximizing the number of tables he plays until he begins approaching the threshold where more tables is too many and actually hamper his profits. (Note that the ability to find this threshold is an important attribute for any successful poker player.) Depending on the game-type, this threshold is typically somewhere in the 400-1000 hand/hour range. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll use 600 hands per hour. This of course results in roughly 10 hands per minute. Or, one hand every 6 six seconds. Many hands can be complicated enough to demand as much as hours of analysis in investigating the optimal strategy to maximize profit in the given situation. So if we consider that hours of thought is commonly being compressed into 6 seconds of intuition during each poker session, we begin to appreciate just how intense the process of playing online poker can be. During a standard two hour session, online poker players have no time to check their e-mail, go to the washroom, watch a youtube clip, check their facebook, or in some cases, go to the bathroom. Nor can they answer the phone, or go to the front door to get the food they had delivered. The point I’m making is that when that guy you know that makes a bunch of money playing online poker tells you he works 15-20 hours a week, that actually converts to a far greater number of hours when considering just how mentally demanding the online poker hour is.

So now you can understand why some poker players have some weeks where they only play 10 hours. Or why they often finish their session to go drink a beer and watch sports instead of dash towards the gym. (Note that in my opinion, keeping active is an important ingredient in achieving full potential career-wise, not just in poker. But not all poker players share the same opinion.) I’m not looking to start a debate, but I would argue that a hard-working online poker grinder expends more mental energy in a given week than a typical 40-50 hour/week office job. But there’s really no way to prove that so it’s a pretty moot point.

This leads into my next argument in defense of the poker player who seems to be living the “easy life”. Being a poker player is stressful. Extremely, stressful. That’s not to say it’s necessarily unhealthily stressful. The key is that the root of the stress a poker player feels ultimately lies in just what their expectations are from their poker career as well as the situation they put themselves into. There’s a constant ongoing struggle for a poker player to find the appropriate stakes to play where his edge is big enough to dilute the variance factor, yet where he is also in the realm of maximizing his profits. Some players tend to lump the ego factor into this decision as well and simply just play for as big of stakes as they feel like they can win at. Other players lie on the other end of the spectrum and grind out the small stakes because they simply can’t stomach the larger downswings that happen at mid-to-high stakes. But regardless of what stakes a player chooses to play, they usually have a ballpark estimate of what their winrate and hourly profits should be. And every poker player walking the Earth has taken that number and extrapolated it to a year’s worth of grinding to figure out what they *should* make this year playing poker. So now we have constructed a goal. And with goals, come stress. The stress of falling short. The stress of not being on track. The stress of moving backwards. The stress of leaving work with less money in your figurative pockets than you had when you arrived at work. I like to think of this stress as the “macro-stress” involved in being a poker player.

For some players, arguably the majority of players, macro-stress pales in comparison to the micro-stress they experience on a daily basis of grinding. As everyone knows, there’s luck involved in poker. And as only a select few people know and fully understand, that luck is really only significant in the short-term. (Note that just like in economics, independent short term factors can ultimately affect long-term factors in some particular circumstances, but we’ll ignore that for now. For clarification, an example would be if a player’s luck is so bad in a short period of time that it affects him mentally and emotionally, it may actually hinder his long-term results even though in theory it shouldn’t. But hey, we’re all human.) In the long-term, players play enough hands that for every time they’ve been unlucky to a certain degree, there’s a paired time where they’ve been lucky to that same degree and voila, the luck factor self-implodes and the actual results converge with expected results. But in the short-term, there is a ton of luck involved. In any given hand where you get all of your money in on a table, unless you have your opponent drawing dead with 0% chance to win, you can lose. And you do. If you get it in as an 80% favourite, you should win that “most of the time”, right? What about three times in a row? (51.2%.. you’re only a slight favourite!) The human mind likes to simplify things in terms of absolutes. It’s difficult to comprehend that when you win a pot that you were an 80% favourite to win, you actually “got lucky”. You “got lucky” to receive that additional 20% of the pot that mathematically belonged to your opponent. But the 20% of the time where he wins 100% of the pot, you get a feeling of “oh my god that’s so unlucky”. Over the course of a session where a player plays thousands of hands, tens of these hands result in all-in pots where the mythological poker gods decide whether you get more or less of the equity you deserve. When you get the short end of the stick and repeatedly have the moments of “ugh I got screwed again”, it generates a level of stress. Each hand you get unlucky in becomes another attack on your mental psyche and unless you make the decision to stop at the nearest sign of running bad, it wears on you. (Note that stopping at the nearest sign of running bad is ultimately only a good decision if you happen to be poor at managing your emotions. But some players would certainly benefit in abiding to such a rule.)

So we have two profound and separate, yet related, sources of stress to deal with as a poker player. Most players most likely have more sources of stress but we’ll stick to the most obvious ones for now. The key component that sets these two stresses apart is simply that one is good, and one is bad. And I feel as though this is something that many poker players struggle with as they might fail to see this contrast and simply deal with all stress similarly.

Micro-stress can be managed and dealt with independently. Some players smash keyboards, other players slam mice, while others go for a run. Personally, I think weightlifting is the ultimate micro-stress reliever and it’s my clear-cut method of choice. Macro-stress, on the other hand, is good stress. In my opinion, it’s a necessary stress. It’s that sense of urgency in search of accomplishment. It’s what drives a person to wake up when their alarm is ringing instead of pressing the snooze button. It’s a good thing. Without it, we can quickly fall victim to poor production and a lack of self-pride. And this in turn, in my experiences, leads to a sense of unhappiness. Not so much unhappiness, but moreso, not as happy as one *could* be. That’s not to say that macro-stress is such a great thing that we should strive to feel it. It’s not a good feeling to have a bad week and feel further away from your monthly goal than you should. The key is to apply the macro-stress in a manner in which you can have more control over it. In the poker sense, this means making more achievable goals instead of ones that rely on luck or other uncontrollable variables. More specifically, I believe its astronomically more productive to set a goal for the number of hands to play or the number of hours to grind over a given period than to attach any sort of monetary figure to it. This way, we feel that urgency to “work” and keep on track, while absorbing negative macro-stress by focusing more on what we can control. It lets a bad session feel more productive in that, at least you got closer to your goal hands-wise or hours-wise."