Phillips, Larry. Zen and The Art of Poker

64 ZEN AND THE ART OF POKER

barks on a desperate eating binge). The harmonious Zen individual is no more. The formerly mellow individual is a memory. A type of anger not unlike childishness gains the upper hand.

The former Zen player is now a fuming player. He may deliberately go down the list and do exactly the opposite of everything he knows he should be doing—willfully, almost spitefully.

This is what is known in the poker world as tilt.

Tilt can be the result of bad luck, bad beats (tough losses on very good hands), lack of emotional control, playing too often, or any number of other factors. It’s hard even for a veteran player to be at the top of his form in every game, all of the time.

There is also a danger if you have been relatively hot for a while. You become too accustomed to things working. And then suddenly they don’t. Annoyance sets in—and irritability. You’re playing just as you were before, only now you’re losing. The game itself begins to seem like a waste of time.

What is needed is a return to Zen. All methods of forcing, striving, and straining must be rejected—naturalness embraced. We must step back, see the big picture, and try to get ourselves composed again.

Zen always reminds us of the need for patience, not forcing things. While it cannot control outside events, it can lead to mastery of yourself, which in turn will begin to control your game— and indirectly, their game.

POKER RULE #42: Your biggest opponent, and worst enemy, is always yourself.

Years of experience eventually teach you that your main battle, always, is with yourself—your propensity for errors, for rationalizing marginal hands into good hands, lack of concentration, misreading other players, emotional eruptions, impatience, and so on. Your opponents are merely dim outlines that come and go. Few of them ever reach the exalted heights of damage that you can inflict on yourself.

10

Rhythm: The Back-

and-Forth Flow

An ancient said: “The mind turns in accord with all situations; this turning is truly mysterious.” The Master said: “Recognizing your nature in accord with the flow” means that if you want, you take; and if you are slapped, just be slapped. If you follow the flow in this manner, [the mind] will turn in accord with all situations.”

—Suzuki Shosan, Warrior of Zen

POKER RULE #43: Be wary of pushing forward aggressively when encountering resistance.

There is a well-known rule of warfare: “Advance with bayonet; if you encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, fall back.” Contrary to this maxim, many poker players push forward and, encountering steel, what do they do? They keep pushing forward! We all do it at times, only to shake our heads later, at our bullheadedness. If we bet and hit a wall, we need to start sensing that there is a wall there, instead of trying to deny it or otherwise rationalize it away. When we feel something solid up ahead, stop trying to push on through. We cannot win at poker until we correctly perceive these signals.

Such miscues generally result from not reading the situation correctly—for example seeing an opponent as weak, who is merely pretending to be weak; trying to push through a good hand in the face of clearly strong competition; failing to bet when you should have bet; not backing off when another player is very hot; not recognizing your own emotions getting out of control, and so on. It is generally a case of being out of harmony with what is going on.

“Out of harmony” is just what it sounds like—an individual who is bumping into desk corners, fighting with office copier machines, being belligerent with people, and being generally in conflict with his environment and out of sorts in a variety of ways. Such a person has ceased to be part of the flow, and to move with it. The same happens in poker.

POKER RULE #45: Observe the rhythm of the wall.

When your opponents are all betting away very strongly, smoothly, and confidently, the good cards are distributed away from you. Picture it as a wall, one that goes up on one side of the table and comes down on the other. Ask yourself where you are in relation to this. Don’t take on the high wall with your low wall.

You may have noticed that at the times when you are running cold in a game the players across the table are cheerfully betting and raising, and oppositely, when you start getting good cards, there is a kind of collective downturn of fortunes across the table—a faltering, a hesitancy.

One reason for this is that the good cards in your hand are not in someone else’s hand. When the wall of strength goes up on one side, it invariably starts to crumble on the other. Observing the rhythm of this back-and-forth movement of walls being constructed is taking a larger view of the game that has origins in Zen.

68 ZEN AND THE ART OF POKER

POKER RULE #46: Wait your turn.

This may sound too simple to be true, but maybe it is not far from the mark: let the other fellow have his victories, and at other times he will withdraw and let you have yours. (A player sometimes says, when folding: “I’m going to get out of your way.”)

Wait until you have the better hand. This is when it is your turn. (This might not necessarily mean having a great hand; it might mean having an average hand when everyone else is weak.) Get yourself into this rhythm.

Be patient. Your turn will come. It will generally be dictated by the betting on various sides of the table. The lull is your turn. And have no doubt, your turn will come. Be ready when it does.

If you have a great hand, but there are three or four other players eagerly raising and reraising, the chances are that this is not your turn, even though you may have terrific cards. Conversely, you may have mediocre cards but sense weakness all around the table—and this might be your turn. Tune into this!

POKER RULE #47: Fit yourself into the flow of the game.

Some players approach the game of poker simply as a game, the way you might play Chinese checkers, or Old Maid. They can be observed playing their own cards and nothing else, staring hard at their hand, brows furrowed, never glancing up, struggling along. It’s as if they are playing in a vacuum. Still others do the opposite, trying to dominate all parts of the game, force victory, muscle over the game with various aggressive maneuvers. We might say that the former group doesn’t know there is a flow going on, while the latter group is trying to annihilate it, stamp it out. In Zen, the correct approach is always the middle way—nei- ther passive nor trying overly hard to dominate.

Do either of the above two approaches work? Yes, intermittently. A better approach—one that experience shows works

more frequently—is to try to fit yourself into the flow of it. Your chances of placing yourself into a game and winning by this means are generally better than your chances of both playing solitary or bulling your way over it and beating it.

The proof of this: How many times have you seen someone play solitarily and win? Seven or eight times? And how many times have you seen someone sit down at the game and start betting heavily and extravagantly and win? Fifteen or twenty times? And how many times have you seen a player who sits down quietly and simply seeks to fit himself into the flow of the game, win by doing this? Fifty? Sixty? One hundred?

♥ ♣ ♦ ♠

Think of the game as a puzzle, and your goal is to fit yourself in as a puzzle piece. If you try to fit in the wrong place—or force yourself in—awkwardness and disaster result. But if you consider the game as a whole, and find the place you were meant to fit (without trying to force it), things often reach an effortless state.

[Some Olympic athletes] . . . allude to a “zone” or trancelike state where time seems to slow and things seem crystal clear . . . You will not be able to force your way into the zone, but when you relax and focus on perfecting every detail, the zone will find you.

—Steve Fox, Cardplayer magazine

Most events have their own rhythm. You can try imposing your own rhythm on them, but usually this succeeds only for a short time. Unless you are very powerful (or very good), you ought to seek to join into the situation and operate within its rules and terms instead of trying to change or dominate it.

In fact, we might say that virtually everything that happens successfully in life happens because something “fit in” with something else. From the way men and women relate to a new guy joining the

70 ZEN AND THE ART OF POKER

cave family to a bird riding on the back of a hippo in Africa to a new product on the market. This is a very deep underlying principle. Don’t try to ignore it or go outside of it. Fit yourself into the flow.

In poker this might mean staying within the strength of your hands, not overplaying them, backing off in the face of stiff competition, folding when too many players are in against you, raising yourself when others show weakness, and so on.

POKER RULE #48: Become aggressive within the openings that appear.

Watch a professional basketball team in action sometime. Notice the best players on the team, and how they play. Now watch the second-string players when they come in off the bench. Notice how, by contrast, these players often flail about trying to make something happen, arms akimbo, using much greater energy, but energy that is dispersed wildly in every direction, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not. Note how much more efficiently is the energy expended by the better players—projecting it deftly into openings they see between their opponents, and if none exist, remaining stationary or falling back. Their energy either projects itself into the openings or conserves itself. Use this as a model for employing energy into the openings of poker that occur. Bad cards come up for all your opponents and there is silence, indicating doubt and hesitation; or you notice an opponent is playing bad cards consistently; or a player reveals that he will fold a good hand whenever you raise him. These are all openings for you to enter.

There is one further lesson that needs to be noted about these openings. When you watch a great player such as Michael Jordan being guarded by another player, you see a fine-tuned sense of when his opponent has shifted too far in one direction . . . and then Jordan would go the other way.

You be Michael Jordan in the game of poker . . . move back and forth with opponents following you, shadowing you, and when they overcorrect in one direction or another, you go the

other way aggressively and pour it on. This is simply attuning yourself to the Zen rhythm of the game.

The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.

—Mao Tse-tung

Bumper Cars and the Head Butting of Rams: The Art of Conflict Avoidance

Playing poker could be compared to driving the bumper cars at the county fair.

The goal is to steer around the other bumper cars. It is not to look for confrontational points and jump at them. Some players, however, persist in thinking the object is to bump heads. To have this goal is similar to seeing young rams on a mountaintop butting heads with horns. In the meantime, unseen and unnoticed, the wise old ram avoids this situation and detours around it. Later, when the two young rams are resting from the rigors of their fight, the wise old ram walks right through the territory they were fighting over with no effort at all. In Zen, this is naturalness—the ordinary way. And in poker, too, this head butting is not really the object. The object is to steer carefully around these situations.

You will often see players banging each other back and forth with bets in a game, going head to head. They are like the young rams. They think success means battling for the big glamour pots, competing for the favor of the crowd with dramatic eye-catching victories. If such players would focus instead on acquiring a few smaller pots, quietly, every hour, they would slowly move into the lead. This is the way of the old ram. He is not there to make a statement with his play; he is gradually building a bankroll instead.

For the true warrior, there is no warfare.

—Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala:

The Sacred Path of the Warrior

72 ZEN AND THE ART OF POKER

Winning is not the basic goal behind martial arts training. The truth—although many people seem to forget it—is that most of the arts are designed to skillfully avoid win-lose situations, to avoid conflict altogether.

—Chuck Norris, The Secret Power Within

POKER RULE #49: Pick your times of confrontation.

Would you rather have good cards when other players have good cards, or when they are weak and vulnerable? This is a Zen question with regard to poker. The latter is usually better. This is the time you will gain the most by having a confrontation. It is better to use your strength at this time, rather than during the times of their strength.

There is a famous cautionary Zen quote that says: “When two tigers fight, one will be killed and the other will be seriously wounded.”

What this means is: Why use strength against strength? World-class poker players can sometimes be seen avoiding these

types of situations, folding excellent hands rather than knocking heads with another great player who also has a great hand. Why be wounded or killed? Withdraw; conserve your energy for a better opportunity. Pick your spots—times of confrontation—carefully.

Good warriors prevail when it is easy to prevail.

—Sun Tzu

In war, when adversaries are orderly in their movements and are at their sharpest, it is not yet time to fight with them; it is best to fortify your position and wait. Watch for their energy to wane after being on alert for a long time; then rise and strike them.

—Liu Ji

POKER RULE #50: Adjust your game for how much competition you have in the hand.

Many players play their cards exactly the same way every time, independently of how many opponents they are up against or how strongly these opponents are betting. They play a pair of aces in Hold’em or Seven-Card Stud all the way to the end of the hand, whether they are up against one player or six, whether three opponents are eagerly raising them or none. We need to factor these variables in. Why join in to times when it is an unfavorable circumstance?

Plan before acting. Fight only when you know you can win. —Zhuge Liang