Phillips, Larry. Zen and The Art of Poker
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turning over); look for “tells” (body language clues); start up a conversation with another player; listen to the jokes; go get the drinks and carry them to the table, and so on.
It is critical that you learn to enjoy yourself in the cardroom in ways other than in the game itself—by constantly staying, and playing. This is part of the Zen of withdrawing from the game that will help keep your game tight.
The fact is, if you are playing correctly, you are going to be doing a lot of folding. So you need to think of ways to fill this time. If you hate this period of time—when you’re not playing, and some do— it will have the effect of throwing your game out of kilter.
POKER RULE #14: Learn to play against other patient players.
Sometimes a player who prides himself on his great patience has merely been playing in a game against less skilled players. He needs to ask himself how he would fare against a table of other patient players like himself. In this case, something quite unusual occurs. The game becomes a Gandhian contest of non-action with all the players trying to out “non-act” the others. In time, things grind to a halt. Nothing is happening at all. Players may be sitting around the table staring out the window, like non-acting Zen priests. There is no movement whatsoever. The waiting game has become so protracted, such a contest of Zen-like non-movement, that it seems like a waste of time.
This player discovers, to his surprise, that he only thought he was patient. Put in with this group he finds that there are other patient players like himself. He learns that there is a whole other level that exists. He learns that there is a patience so slow that it is almost Zen-like.
No thought, no action, no movement, total stillness.
—Zen proverb
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POKER RULE #15: Begin by playing tight, but don’t forget to stay tight.
It is easy to start out playing tight, but then get caught up in the rhythm of the game—the table talk, the ebb and flow, the gossip, the laughter, the one-upmanship, the taunts, the chatter. And all of a sudden you notice that your chips are flowing into and out of the pot, all common sense has gone out the window, and you’re in there with the best of them, flinging chips back and forth.
Some of this is occasionally necessary, in order to know how to operate within the flow of the game, but a lot of it is indulgent.
Catch yourself when you start doing this. Tell yourself to go back to more conservative play. The important thing is not who possesses the control and discipline at the start of the game, but who possesses it at the middle, the end, and all points throughout.
Wait for a good pitch to hit.
—Ted Williams
POKER RULE #16: Stick to the best starter cards.
One common method of playing tight is to play only good starter cards. (Starter cards are the player’s first cards dealt to him in the game—the first three cards in Seven-Stud, the first four cards in Omaha, the first two in Hold’em, and so on. The list of these best starting hands is agreed upon by general consensus of pros and experts alike and is available in many poker books. An example of good starter cards in Seven-Card Stud might be a high pair in your first three cards—a pair of kings with a ten, say; or a medium pair with a high kicker—nines with an ace. In Hold’em, it might be a high pair or an ace-king suited.) Failing to play only good starter cards is like running a foot-race against the other
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players with a self-imposed handicap—like having a metal weight tied to your foot as the race begins. Play the best cards at the beginning of the hand, and the future will be a little less random, unpredictable, and murky.
One inch ahead is all darkness.
—Japanese proverb
POKER RULE #17: Learn to control chaos.
Chaos theory is the branch of physics that deals with situations that expand into disorder as they unfold. (This is a good description of poker—where things can get rapidly out of control.) One characteristic of such events is that they are sensitive to initial conditions. This means tiny differences or defects occurring at the beginning of the event become exaggerated as the event goes along. As the event unfolds it begins to branch out into greater unpredictability.
Only by avoiding the beginning of things can we escape their ending.
—Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave
What this means for the poker player is that the best way to control chaos is at the beginning of the event. And the way to control it over a long-term period of time is to continuously repeat the beginning of the event in the same controlled way. Starting a poker hand with bad cards quickly branches out into unpredictability, and adverse effects begin. This is not readily apparent in actual play. It can be seen easily, however, in computer simulations of thousands of hands, where patterns quickly emerge. Playing a 7-10 in Hold’em, for example, might seem fairly harmless in the individual instance, but if you deal it out ten
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thousand times quickly on a computer you can easily see the disaster that unfolds.
There is nothing so subject to the inconstancy of fortune as war.
—Miguel de Cervantes
Wars, battles, and conflicts of all kinds (including poker) set in motion forces that quickly become unpredictable. Small defects or problems that are present at the beginning can quickly spiral out of control. And if small problems can do this, think what starting out with large problems means. Warlike conditions on any level unleash the chaos model. Wide fluctuations of fortune begin.
Accordingly, the rule is: Control things at the beginning. (This is what diplomats try to do.)
POKER RULE #18: Don’t be drawn in by sudden frequent play on the part of another player.
If (contrary to the above) another player suddenly starts to play every hand, it’s not because he wants to have more fun and wants to participate more, it’s usually because he’s getting better cards. Don’t be drawn in by his seeming ambience and funloving spirit of jollity. Some players are very good at giving off this impression, a kind of nonchalance that seeks to leave the impression, “Heck, everyone else should be playing, too, just like I am”; or: “Hey, we’re all just here to have a good time, so how come I’m the only one who gets to play every hand?” Implying that what they’re doing is a typical stay rate and that all the other players are somehow playing too tight. (Another stratagem is continuous, forceful betting that makes it appear as if the player
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is trying to take charge of the game—muscle his way over the table—when in reality he is just getting good cards, that’s the real reason for betting.)
As always, play your cards, ignore the actions of others.
Let others take their own way, and I take my own.
—Japanese proverb
POKER RULE #19: Discipline your game.
Discipline has some unfortunate connotations in the modern mind—it conjures up images of Marine drill instructors and strict regimens—but the word has a slightly different meaning in poker. It is more like patience—pacing yourself (especially emotionally) for the length of the game. It means detachment. Don’t be drawn off your game. This is the Zen concept of retaining composure, being unaffected by outside forces.
It is different than mere patience, however. It comes from a larger and longer-term view of things—one that steps back and sees things as a whole.
One aspect of this patience is laying low during the cold spells, something that is crucial to conserving your chips during the bad times. It becomes easier to lay low when there is a lot of action taking place among the other players. (This lets you hide in the game and keep quietly folding without anyone noticing.)
Ideally, you want to be as invisible as possible when you are folding; slightly more well-known and memorable when you stay. Fold quietly and unobtrusively; be a little more talkative and animated when you stay. By this means you are playing tight while appearing to play a looser game.
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Take the Long View
You must act as if the goal were infinitely far off.
—Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery
There is a saying in the poker world that “you play by the year, not by the day.” This means taking the long view—judging results as they occur over the long run. Short-term upswings and downswings are disregarded, treated as unavoidable aberrations, and given little weight.
The average recreational gambler needs these short-term fluctuations. He enters a casino with a gleam in his eye, a hope, a dream, a lucky feeling, a rabbit’s foot in his pocket. He needs the world of gambling to be a frenzied, chaotic world—one in which he jumps into the fray excitedly like a sailor on leave, then crawls back out later with a fistful of dollars.
This is the kind of world he wants it to be and needs it to be. But it is not. It is more like statistics and probability—the gradual emergence of correct play over the long run.
In a similar way, the real competition of poker takes place over the long term. Poker is basically a game of sitting and waiting for your theories on the game to be proven correct while waiting for your neighbor’s theories to be proven wrong; this can take place only over time.
Many professional players have remarked upon this long-haul
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aspect, calling it, as poker champion Bobby Baldwin once did, “one continuous game,” which goes on forever and starts up again the next day.
Because of this, you don’t defeat others in poker one-on-one, “heads-up” in a hand. (This is the way it may seem to a casual onlooker.) Rather, you defeat them on a hundred different occasions, each one matching up against the different moods and skills of the other, until the balance of one begins to slowly prevail over the other. It is your opponents’ whole game matched against your whole game: from wide-awake, sharp, creative play to bad times and frustration to great spurts of good luck and folding for long stretches to drooping eyelids and exhaustion at six a.m. in the morning.
This domination by the better player of the lesser players is not a dramatic process, it is a gradual process.
Cream doesn’t rise to the top, it works its way up.
—Harvey Mackay, from Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty.
POKER RULE #20: “The true journey of mastery is in each moment.”
Poker, much like Zen, must be applied to many situations over long periods until the whole framework of knowledge begins to fill in. It is a never-finished journey. New events, tribulations, and challenges arise. Just about the time we think we have the whole thing comfortably in hand, new obstacles come along to derail us.
The long journey (and learning) goes endlessly on.
Writer George Leonard, in his book Mastery, refers to this as the “goalless journey.” In other words: there is no finish line; the journey itself is the destination.
A journey that has a specific goal or finish line has one benefit, of course: it makes that goal special once it is reached. The
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goalless journey, however, makes all the moments along the path special. According to Leonard, mastery lives within itself and the practice of itself—doing a thing for its own sake; not just reaching the goal, but each hour, each moment, every day is the goal.
POKER RULE #21: See poker as a continuum that goes on forever.
The game of poker should be seen as an endless plane upon which correct percentage play eventually prevails.
The idea is to avoid just throwing money around—to hold back until certain signals align themselves, until conditions are just right. Then jump in. Forget any desire or eagerness to participate in the action.
The winning gambler in any arena is the one who arrives with the idea of laying low, waits to get himself into good position, and then (and only then) makes his strike. He chooses his best spots, waits until the odds are most in his favor, then takes hit-and-run chunks of money, after which he takes disciplined steps to withdraw once again and avoid losing it all back. Players who operate like this are the ones who take home the money over the long term.
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Practice, Practice, Practice
The technically learnable part of it must be practiced to the point of repletion.
—Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery
Should you desire the great tranquility, prepare to sweat white beads.
—Zen Master Hakuin
POKER RULE #22: You cannot apply the principles of Zen until you know the game perfectly—inside and out.
Having the proper attitude of Zen calm and confidence does no good if you do not know the game. Zen will not make up for, or offset, incorrect poker play. As a result, there is a certain amount of ordinary, old-fashioned work involved in mastering the game—a certain amount of sweating the white beads before the days of tranquility come along.
The most important thing to know, above all things, is exactly how to play the game. No outlook, attitude, or philosophy is as important as this.*
Good poker is not a “mood,” it is a series of individual deci-
*There may be something to be said about having a certain attitude: who hasn’t seen a complete novice sit down at the table with the attitude that “this game doesn’t seem so hard” and proceed to run over the game and pile up the chips? Well, this was an attitude he sat down with, so maybe there is some kind of cosmic connection we don’t understand.
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sions. It does not occur by “Buddhistically” meditating ourselves into some dreamlike mental state, but rather by knowing the game well and being in synch with it—by inserting ourselves correctly into the flow of what is going on in front of us.
No Zen attitude will make up for this lack. You may be quite Zen-like and have all the attributes of Zen calm, but if you play incorrectly the result is that you will get destroyed. Practice, and long hours at the table, are indispensable.
Thousands of repetitions, and out of one’s true self perfection emerges.
—Neville Shulman, Zen in the Art of Climbing Mountains
POKER RULE #23: Practice.
If you play tennis once a week against an opponent who plays tennis five times a week, who is likely to win? If you play chess or backgammon twice a year against someone who plays every day, who will mostly likely win? For some reason there are a lot of people who persist in thinking that poker is immune to this law. Keep in practice. It is a rhythm and a groove you get into, like anything else.
POKER RULE #24: Arrive with a system.
You need a system for poker play. The customary method of attaining this system is long hours of play, hard-earned personal experience, thinking about hands you’ve played and analyzing them, learning from your mistakes, a knowledge of probability, observing other players, discussing hands with other players, computer play, book learning, and any number of similar factors. Such a system will give you a correct mathematical and intuitive grasp of the game, and once in possession of this hard-won system, you should deviate from it only on rare occasions and for