Life Lessons From Poker

3/6/2011
Life Lessons From Poker

August 10th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina
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Since I received positive feedback on Life Lessons From Blackjack last week, I thought Id share some lessons I learned from poker as well. Background Again, feel free to skip the background story if you just want to read the lessons part. I only include this for the curious. I first learned to play poker when I was 18, just playing nickel-dime-quarter games with friends from school. I was a fairly weak player back then, mostly using a loose-aggressive style and bluffing way too much. But I enjoyed the game and would usually play at least once a week. Of course, this was only in home games where I mostly played those deviant forms of poker not found in casinos. My favorite game was called 3-5-7. I only played for fun at this time and for many years thereafter, I never took the game seriously. When I was 21 and living in L.A., some friends and I made a few trips to Commerce Casino. I played mostly 7-stud at the time and a little bit of holdem. I didnt keep records back then, but overall I probably broke even. I played at Commerce perhaps 5 times total. It was an hours drive from my home, so it wasnt convenient enough to bother with, since I was only playing for fun anyway. From the age of 24 to 33, I hardly played poker at all, maybe once a year on average. It just wasnt a big part of my life. In January 2004, my family and I moved to Vegas. The availability of poker games in Vegas (and the recent surge in popularity) means that you can always find a game. The Las Vegas Strip is only a 20-minute drive from my home, and Downtown Vegas is 15
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minutes away. Plus the closest casino to my house (Santa Fe Station) recently added a poker room, so now a game is only 10 minutes away. When I first moved here, I thought it would be fun to play poker more often, since I always enjoyed a good game. I had no intention of making it into a career, but nor did I have any interest in losing money at it. I figured that if I could learn how to count cards at blackjack, surely I could become decent enough at poker to consistently beat the lowlimit games. That way I could have fun and win a little money at the same time. Turns out I was right. Based on recommendations from others, I picked up a few books on the subject. My favorite was Winning Low-Limit Holdem by Lee Jones. I followed Jones recommendations fairly closely, and they worked well. I only play the cheapest limits, like $1-3 and $2-6 spread games or the $2-4 structured games. I play in smoke-free poker rooms, which fortunately are becoming more common. Personally I like the campy/friendly (and smoke-free) atmosphere of the Excalibur poker room, so thats where I usually play. Its a very winnable, low-pressure game if youre halfway decent, especially on a Friday or Saturday night when the place is filled with tourists who are mostly there for fun and free drinks. I know most of the dealers there by name, and all are very friendly. Im not out to make a career out of this, and I certainly dont consider myself a shark. I just love the fun and the challenge of the game. Ive always enjoyed competition. On average I play a couple times a month, usually on weekends. I record every session I play in a spreadsheet, so I can see how I did I want to know if Im winning or losing. Last year I came out positive, with a per session win rate of about 70% and a positive hourly rate of $2.27 (net of tips). Obviously Im not going to get rich playing such low limits, but to me this is only an entertaining hobby, not a serious entrepreneurial venture. I only play in person, not online, because I like chatting with other players and meeting interesting people from around the world.
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Poker is by far a much tougher game to master than blackjack because your decisions depend on the actions of other players, not merely on pre-determined rules of play and probabilities. Playing poker also takes a lot more patience than blackjack in my opinion. Between poker and blackjack, I enjoy poker a lot more because of the human factor. Poker Observations Whereas in blackjack most of my observations came from watching other players play their hands, in poker Ive learned the most by observing myself, partly due to the nature of the game (I cant see every decision other people make as I can in blackjack). Here are some observations Ive make from playing poker over the years: 1. You can learn a lot about other people by studying yourself. Simply by observing myself and watching my own tells, like seeing my hands shake when I looked down and saw pocket aces on the button, I learned to look for those same tells in other players. In low-limit games, virtually anytime you see a players hands shaking as they try to place their bet, it means they have a monster hand. Ive thrown away many solid hands after reading this tell, and so far every single time it was the right decision. By observing my own behavior, I could watch for it in other people. How does this apply to life itself? If you know how you behave when experiencing certain emotional states, you can watch for that behavior in others to gain information (which can be extremely helpful in certain situations). For example, if Im watching someone give a speech, I can observe how I behave when Im really bored or really interested. Then when Im the one giving the speech, I can watch for those reactions in the audience. If I see people leaning forward, smiling, and nodding, I know I have a captive audience because thats what I do when Im captivated. If youre a salesperson, how do you behave when you watch someone else give a good/bad presentation? If youre a manager, how do you behave when someone tries to delegate something to you and you dont intend to do it? If youre married, how do you
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behave when you arent really listening to your spouse? Observe how your own behaviors reflect various internal states, and then watch for those behaviors in others to gain information. You may be surprised to find that emotional states produce a physiological response that is extremely similar from person to person. 2. You can learn a lot about yourself by studying other people. This is the reverse of #1. By observing how others behave in poker, and then seeing what kind of hand they have, I can connect their behaviors to information. Then when I see these physiological tells again, I can more easily put that player on a hand. Many poker players do this. No big whoop. But how many poker players take what they learn about other players and then apply it to themselves? This means watching for the tells you pick up from other players in yourself, especially when youre heads-up against the player you saw express those tells. So if you see someone looking away from the table when they have a monster hand, make sure you dont look away when youve got a monster. You can also take this concept a step further and use it even more proactively. If you see other people behave a certain way when they have a great hand, you may find it beneficial to exert that same behavior on purpose when youre heads-up against that player and want to bluff him/her out. Its a sneaky way of using that persons own physiological response to feed them false information. Just make sure you arent too obvious about it, or the other player will catch you. I find it works best as a subconscious signal that alters their intuitive feeling about the hand. So whats the life lesson here? The lesson is that this kind of manipulation also works outside the game of poker. By learning someones tells, you can consciously exhibit a certain behavior to activate the response you want. Certainly this sounds manipulative, and it is. But by being aware of this tactic, you can reduce your susceptibility to it. TV commercials use this kind of manipulation all the time. They know all the tells for
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various emotional states, and they use them to attempt to manipulate your emotional response. This is one reason so many commercials appear logically stupid, but they can still be effective if they include the proper signals that bypass your mind and drive their message into your subconscious. Think of those drug commercials where they read the side effects (which often sound worse than the symptoms the drug is supposed to treat), but the visual imagery suggests the exact opposite. The characters exhibit the tells of the emotional states the advertiser wants you to associate to their product or service. But those signals often have nothing to do with the product itself. In other words, you arent being shown the real emotional states the product will induce in you, but far more pleasurable states that probably wont occur by using the product at all. How many beer commercials show drunk people behaving stupidly? 3. Both intellect and intuition can provide input for making correct decisions. In poker sometimes logic is correct, and other times intuition is correct. Sometimes they agree; sometimes they dont. In life, however, you generally have more options than check, bet, call, raise, or fold. Life is more open-ended, and when logic and intuition disagree, sometimes its best not to choose sides but to listen to both and seek out a third alternative. When my logic and intuition seem to disagree, I try to step back and see the situation from other perspectives. In the past Id usually favor my logic, only to find that my intuition was right. Then Id slide too far the other way, and pay the price of ignoring my intellect. Now I know that both inputs provide information, but they do so by acting upon imperfect data. In poker youre limited in how much data you can gather. But life offers other extra opportunities for peaking at the cards. You can ask for expert advice while you play. You can take in new information to augment the data your logic and intuition are processing. You can wait for clarity before acting. You can even dive in with your best decision, see what the next card looks like, and adjust course afterwards.
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4. Dont be a fish. Fish are bad poker players who are essentially there to give away their money. They dont bother to develop much skill at the game, so they just play badly. And the longer they play, the more they lose. Isnt life the same? If you play badly long enough, eventually you lose. Abuse your health, your relationships, or your finances, and you can kiss them goodbye. Good players learn the rules of the game and build their skills. They eliminate negative habits that would otherwise bring them down. 5. You can make no mistakes and still lose. In poker you can expect to take bad beats again and again. Eventually youll take one in a heartbreaking situation when someone draws highly improbable runner-runner cards to beat your made hand. Life is the same. You can play perfectly and still lose. Theres no security in the cards. The only true security lies in knowing you did your best. Focus on making correct decisions, and let the cards fall as they may. 6. No single hand will kick you out of the game for life. When you take a bad beat, just take a deep breath and brush it off. Its in the past, and theres nothing you can do about it now. Stay focused on the present. Theres another hand to be played. 7. Do not play J8s UTG no matter how seductive it looks and how certain you are of achieving a multiway pot. The life lesson here is left as an exercise for the reader. If youre a poker player yourself, I invite you to share your own life lessons from the game
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by posting a comment.
11 Responses to Life Lessons From Poker

Josh Says:
August 10th, 2005 at 5:17 am Much like playing A-x, when youre sure the oponent has a high pair Its a lot more fun in life, than in poker, when you can actively do something to improve your hand.
moony Says: August 10th, 2005 at 6:56 am Steve, can you elaborate more (in a later article perhaps) on the interplay between logic/intellect and intuition/emotions? I sometimes feel that our mind is pure emotion logic is just an illusion a special kind of emotion, and that emotions use logic to strengthen themselves or weaken other emotions.
Kent Briggs Says:

August 10th, 2005 at 8:13 am FYI, Lee Jones has a new (3rd) edition of Winning Low-Limit Holdem out. You may want to link to it instead.
Steve Pavlina Says:

August 10th, 2005 at 8:43 am @Kent: Thanks. I updated the link. @Moony: A while back I wrote a post that addresses logic vs. feeling: Thought vs. Action
Dexter Says: August 10th, 2005 at 2:05 pm Steve, you obviously are a very high energy person. You ran a successful business (Dexterity Software) and also had the time to study these games, play them, and improve your skills on them.
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Im also running a successful business, but this takes all my energy 100% of my stamina. Outside of my business Im tired and grumpy and behave like a vegetable. Other articles by you also show that you have lots of energy. What is the secret of your exploding energy?
Dexter Says: August 10th, 2005 at 2:06 pm One other thing: I consider your thoughts on commercials extremely insightful. Thank you for sharing your insights.
Steve Pavlina Says:

August 10th, 2005 at 2:45 pm @Dexter: Perhaps its because I havent had a job since 1992. When you dont have to go work for someone else for 13 years straight, it frees up quite a bit of time, energy, and passion for personal goals and hobbies. I doubt I would have had time to learn poker, blackjack, juggling, Tae Kwon Do, marathon running, etc. if I had to get a real job.
Ilya Olevsky Says:

August 10th, 2005 at 5:51 pm Id just like to add to Steves reply to Dexter that diet and exercise make a huge difference in your energy levels. I became vegan almost two years ago, which made my digestive system work about 500% better. Eventually I also ditched just about all products that contain processed sugar (the hardest one to give up was ketchup which I was quite addicted to, but after a while I didnt miss it at all). It wasnt until I started exercising regularly however, that I felt the biggest difference in energy. I started running in March of this year with just 30 seconds run and 2 minutes walk for 20 minutes. Now I run continuously for that same 20 minutes. It seemed like an impossibility back when I was doing the 30 sec run/120 sec walk. Eventually I got to 1 min run and 1 min walk, and one day during my run/walk routine I just decided to see how much I could run without stopping, and ran for 10 minutes straight. The next time after that I decided if I can do 10, maybe I can do a lot more, and I was able to do 30 min. But my body tells me that I cant run 30 min every day (too much of a load based on how I feel after that) so I do 20 for now, until Im ready. A small piece of advice while Im
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on exercise: a lot of it is a mental barrier. Based on my personal experience, most people think they can do a lot less than they actually can (and the army drill sergeants seem to know that quite well). Once I thought I can run for 30 minutes I was able to do it. If I didnt believe this, I wouldve stopped long before the 30 min were over because my legs sure didnt like it. It seems that your body will try to make you to stop way before it actually reaches its limits. I think I went way off course here, so let me just get to the point. Steve said this before, and I think its worth mentioning a few hundred more times. Exercise provides you with a great increase in energy and clarity of mind. I have experienced this, and let me tell you that the difference between how I felt before I started exercising and right now is night and day. When Ive stopped exercising for a few days at one point, I started feeling like sh*t. I had completely forgotten what that was like, and, needless to say I instantly got back onto the treadmill.
Jose Says:
August 12th, 2005 at 4:52 pm Steve have you played this game called Bluff before? I found this game extremely interesting because I got to see a huge variance of different behaviours when people are called upon to lie. Some peoples voices start to shake, some people act suspiciously overly nonchalant, some people have an absolute poker face, and so on. It was also rather interesting when I left the game but went around observing the cards of the players from behind their backs- I got to see how each persons lying style was like- strangely I found some of my friends who are normally the most honest around turned out to be compulsive liars- I hope they were only doing so in the spirit of the game. Worryingly, a number of them were really smooth liars..
Michael Muryn Says: August 15th, 2005 at 9:08 am @Jose haw! the people and the subject of apparence vs. the reality
Nick Says: August 25th, 2005 at 12:03 am Steve, could you please clear out for me why you shouldnt play J8s from UTG and how it can relate to real life? Is it because of Murphys law that someone will ALWAYS raise you out of the pot when sitting on a decent draw?
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3/6/2011