Phillips, Larry. Zen and The Art of Poker

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yourself emotions—all still there, buried. They do offer a certain psychic payoff when we wallow in them. Don’t be tempted. Don’t tap into them.

Victimhood [is] seductive, a release from responsibility and caring . . . a weary resignation . . . a comforting self-pity.

—Dean Koontz, Intensity

POKER RULE #96: Don’t succumb to victim thinking.

I have stated several times in this book that poker is nothing more than a long, random, statistical game. The game itself is not out to prove that you are inherently unlucky, that nothing ever goes right in your life, or that you are a perpetual victim. It is simply a mechanical, neutral, random game—nothing more. It is no more out to get you than the Spin the Wheel at a county fair is out to get you. Treat the game neutrally; try not to get emotionally involved.

POKER RULE #97: Resist the allure of failure.

Winning is a thrill, but it is actually rather one-dimensional, if we think about it. Failure, and losing, if the truth be known, are much more multidimensional. They have many more facets and dimensions to them.

If winning is Sergeant Preston of the Yukon (straight as a ramrod), and Dudley Do-Right and Billy Graham, then losing is (by contrast) Muddy Waters and Raymond Chandler and Rick from Casablanca. Which of these has the richer texture to it? The reason for much failure, perhaps (in all areas of life), is because this dimension of failure is more attractive in certain ways, more multifaceted than that of success. There are more emotional textures

and shadings. Now, I didn’t say it was more fun—just more complex and darkly multifaceted. It’s more romantic, in a certain dark, fatalistic way. And if this is true, it may be an explanation for why we are sometimes attracted to it. As regards poker, you have to avoid entering this territory. One way to do this is with Zen detachment. You must resist this strange magnetic pull, the pull of “The Gambler’s Blues” and “Paul Butterfield’s Blues” and all the other blues when you’re at the table. You must resist enjoying the dark side—the dark bluesy realm where you are losing money and wallowing in the wonderful comfort of self-pity. It may seem odd that we could be attracted by losing, but it does have this quality, and all poker players will know what I mean. It becomes quite easy to resign yourself and wallow in it. You must keep the focus on winning, no matter how seductive some of these darker states of mind may be.

A gem is not polished without rubbing, nor a man perfected without trials.

—Chinese proverb

POKER RULE #98: Don’t give in to the death wish.

The death wish is resignation, fatalism, dejection, despair—in the face of luck repeatedly turning against us. The death wish is admitting defeat and shrugging your shoulders and throwing up your hands (generally after a string of losses) and not caring from then on whether you win or lose. The death wish is throwing money into the pot fatalistically, to punish yourself. It is saying, “I might as well keep throwing my money away at this point, because it doesn’t matter anymore.” It is holding your wallet up in the air and saying to the other players, “Here, you might as well take this too.” It is the poker equivalent of self-pity.

The problem with the death wish is that it removes the brain’s

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analytical, decision-making function from the equation. It also tends to magnify disasters. It takes a bad situation and kicks it up to the next level. It also misses opportunities, because its attention is so focused on the great sadness of its plight, instead. It may even miss the turn-around point—when things start changing and going the other way and getting better—so intent is it on making an airtight case concerning the sadness of its plight.

Try not to give in to the death wish. True, it can be difficult and we’ve all failed at times. We’ve all found ourselves in the midst of a cold spell so stunning, so breathtaking, so seemingly endless, a veritable Chernobyl of poker disaster, that we begin to doubt whether we are ever going to win again. We’ve all seen its effects on other players, too: the player who is in white-knuckle panic; the player who is silent, brooding, and sullen; the player who repeatedly leaves the table to make the melancholy trek to the ATM machine (“The Walk of Shame,” as my friend Dave Juergens has labeled this). Still, even here, in the depths, we must try not to give in to it. If a disaster starts to unfold, try as much as possible to keep it under control, not exaggerate it further. Try to salvage something from the night. Play fewer hands. Scale back your involvement. Order a drink. Look around. Go for a walk. Go watch something on TV. Eat something. Go do anything.

POKER RULE #99: After a major poker failure occurs, resist the temptation to do something big, dramatic, and fatalistic.

Sometimes near the end of a losing session a grand dramatic ges- ture—a final big roll of the dice in which you risk all—can be appealing. (Anyone who has gambled for any length of time has heard someone say the following words: “Well, I might as well bet it all now and go home broke.”) This is not a good attitude. A better idea is to pull back and reset. Play tight again. Return to your best game; return to the Zen. Possessing some degree of Zen-like detachment from the game is a form of protection against this type of attitude.

POKER RULE #100: Make sure you know when you’re on a cold streak.

A player is angry, his face is red, his teeth are clenched, steam is emitting from his ears. He is sitting with his arms crossed, sullen, pouting. But a strange thing is happening: 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. When a player is this cold, and getting hammered this bad, he should be playing fewer hands, not more.

Good players can almost feel the cards changing. They know in a couple instances that they are coming up against a wall and that the next two hours may be like this. And they play accordingly. If you are on a cold streak, notice it. Realize that you are cold and stop fighting it. Do not challenge it and continue betting right into the teeth of it—daring it to get you—it will.

When the reality of power has been surrendered, it’s playing a dangerous game to seek to retain the appearance of it.

—Alexis de Tocqueville

26

Examine Your Motives

Search back into your own vision—think back to the mind that thinks. Who is it?

—Zen master Foyan

Why Are You Playing Poker?

The answer appears to be obvious. To play the game, to win money. What other reason is there? But is that the real, deepdown truth? Every player should question himself about his true, underlying motives. Is he really here to play poker? Or is he here for some other hidden reason?

What, you may ask, other motives are there?

You lose sight of the original mind, and seeing the thinking, discriminating mind, take that as your own. But that is not your real mind.

—Trevor Leggett, A First Zen Reader

There are, in fact, numerous other motives.

•There are people who are in dire need of friends; people in search of acceptance by a group—any group.

•There are those with a deep-rooted belief that things always go wrong for them, that nothing good ever happens, who have a wish to confirm this fact to themselves (gambling works wonderfully for this).

•There is the individual who may have an inner vision of himself as a wild, dashing riverboat gambler—role-playing— and yet another player who feels deeply insecure and is looking for something to raise his low self-esteem and self-worth; an occasional big pot and congratulations all around serves the purpose here.

•There is the player who believes in creating memorable, flourishing triumphs—the kind of lone-eagle, spectacular triumphs to be remembered by everyone.

•There is the person who uses poker the way people use punching bags—to get rid of the day’s frustrations—and there is the person who uses himself as a punching bag, and employs poker to do the damage.

•There are those who are simply hooked on the adrenaline of the action, and those who are using poker as a drug to blot out thoughts and pressures—as a form of escape, from work, business, or a spouse.

•There is the retired person who is just passing the time, listening to the latest jokes and gossip, enjoying the camaraderie and the table talk.

I tell people to get to know themselves. Some people think this means what beginners observe and consider it easy to understand. Reflect more carefully, in a more leisurely man- ner—what do you call your self?

—Zen master Foyan

It ought to be stressed that none of these hidden motives are illegal or evil or bad—they may be exactly what you want out of a poker game. But the problem is, not very many of them have any relation to the task at hand: playing the game with the discipline necessary to win consistently.

The Temporary Motive

As if all of the above weren’t enough, there is another category of motive, a subcategory we might call the temporary motive. For

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on a surface level, too, poker offers a myriad of opportunities to convert feelings into direct action.

For instance, feeling lackadaisical? Carefree? Generous? Irritable, impatient? Angry, tired, discouraged? Poker offers a chance to convert all these feelings into actions as well, and often, into losses. (Other temporary motives may also occur: a fight with a spouse; the rent money coming due; being angry at another player, a boss, a parking lot attendant; lack of sleep; and so on.)

Whatever temporary motives or emotions you possess, these, too, can (and will) be converted into direct poker outcomes at the table and will pile on top of the other more permanent ones.

In summation, there are many motives, both deep-seated and temporary. These motives can be as numerous as there are people. Some can be deeply hidden. Some can be surface and quite temporary.

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Poker is a kind of Rorschach test, mirroring the personality of the player, his needs and desires. Because of this, you need to ask yourself: Why am I really at the table? Because whatever your underlying motives are, they will show up in the game. Your actions will filter out like little tributaries from these main premises you hold. It also distorts your game to pursue and act out these hidden goals. (To not know they exist may cause you to wonder why certain things keep happening over and over: “Why I am always ahead in chips at the beginning of the game but seem to lose them all back at the end?” for example.)

In the root and stem of your own psyche there is an accumulation of bad habits. If you cannot see through them and act independently of them, you will unavoidably get bogged down along the way.

—Zen master Yuansou

Man’s character is the product of his premises.

—Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

The practice of Zen stresses direct seeing into one’s true nature. Perhaps the practice of poker ought to stress a similar goal—

direct seeing into one’s true nature.

The question to ask is this: Are you playing poker for some reason other than to play poker?

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Karma

A somewhat similar concept in Buddhism is karma. The concept of karma refers to the consequences of good actions and bad actions as they develop over time (or in reincarnation over various lifetimes, according to some Buddhist traditions). In the West, bad karma has come to mean that somebody is going to come to a bad end. But it is actually, in a narrower sense, a kind of overreaching that takes us outside the flow of normal behavior. Bad actions are ones that are in some way more artificial and inauthentic; they try too hard and by their nature “go outside the lines” of accepted behavior in an attempt to reach their goals. (It is often said of someone in poker when he is playing too loose that he is “out of line.”) As a result, failure begins to occur and come back on them. There is a linking of cause and effect that occurs, between the actions we take and their inevitable outcomes.

Indeed there is nothing in the world so rigid as the law of cause and effect, or karma.

—Trevor Leggett, A First Zen Reader

We don’t know what to call it . . . [so] we say coincidence. It goes deeper . . . You’re a gambler. You get a feeling about a horse, a poker hand. There’s a hidden principle. Every process contains its own outcome.

—Don DeLillo, Libra

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How is your process? How solid is it? Remember, your outcome is contained inside it.

A bad player sits down to play. The other players all exchange a glance, knowing this player’s outcome before it even occurs, before a single card has been played.

His outcome has already been decided. It is contained within his process, his game. The end and the beginning are not separate. Cause and effect are one.

The oneness of cause and effect is not a mere theory, but something actually experienced. Cause is effect: effect is cause; they are not two!

—Trevor Leggett, A First Zen Reader

This is similar to the effect that hidden motives have on our play.

What we sow is what we reap.

27

Mastery: Expertise

in Sight

We have seen the need for Zen calm and detachment in poker; the need for practice, rhythm, discipline, and humility. The starting point, as always, is knowing the game well, perfecting the process—and only then adding psychology, self-control, game selection and other skills. Expertise will then be in sight. In Zen terms, we will have entered the flow.

When Zen practice is completely developed, there is no center, no extremes; there are no edges or corners. It is perfectly round and frictionless.

—Zen master Hongzhi

Humility and self-effacement occur. In our quietness we may even cease to be a perceived threat. Modesty and humility will be in evidence. It might seem that such a person would be conspicuous and stand out in a crowd, but in fact the opposite is true. We become more invisible in the landscape. Those looking at us would probably not notice us.