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Today on Pokeroom - June 16, 2005

I was watching Pokeroom last night. It was one of those made for TV poker games that are so common these days. It was a table of big names. One thing I noticed was that one player in particular was a loose cannon. The thing that killed me was that he was the chip leader. What I am trying to tell you is that this chip leader, playing in a crowd of the best of the best pokeroom players in the world, was winning by doing everything that poker books tell you not to do. So I ask again, "Is poker a skill game or a luck game?"

You have no doubt seen the slaves to their judgment filter; they're pathetically easy to spot. They expose themselves, for instance, in the moment of a bad pokeroom beat when they do something patently ridiculous like throwing cards at the dealer or berating other online Poker room players. They feel so bad that they have to lash out. Their only concern is the pain that's washing over them and their desperate effort to make that pain go away. They're filtering through judgment, and they're doomed.

What you'll find at Pokeroom

Really, you've got to ask yourself what's the point of having a pokeroom library if you're only going to read the words one time? I'm not talking about getting your money's worth out of the pulp and print. I'm talking about getting your money's worth out of your online Pokeroom game where, as has long been acknowledged, "If you're not slowly getting better, you're slowly getting worse." So do the dust-off thing, even if you're skeptical.

You've also certainly seen players who filter extensively through process. Faced with that same bad beat, they don't waste any psychic energy on emotion. They just calmly go to pokeroom school on what has happened, looking for mistakes in their own play that they might correct, or flaws in their foes' actions they can look for a chance to exploit.

Interestingly, though, having used certain sources of Pokeroom information to achieve this end, we then leave that information behind. "Been there, done that," we tell ourselves, never pausing to contemplate that the person who "went there, did that," had a much simpler sorting system than the one we could now employ.

A process thinker is a canny thinker. He's making constant instant assessments about his current table image, his opponents' states of mind, his and their stack sizes, their decision-making abilities and the overall quality of the game. Among other things, he's taking note of which of his pokeroom foes think their game, and which feel it, aware that the former are to be respected and the latter to be attacked without mercy. He is aware of his own feelings, but not in their thrall. He understands the crucial difference between review and regret. Review filters through process; regret filters through feeling.

Scientists tell us that certain psychotropic substances have the effect of changing the sorting system of the brain. It seems to me that the mere passage of time achieves the same end. We start out with a very simple understanding of onlne pokeroom, and learn and absorb to the limit of that understanding. Inevitably, the act of learning and absorbing extends the limit of our pokeroom tournaments understanding. If we then to go back and study the same sources of information, we must necessarily get more out of them, merely as a function of already having been through them once.

Why must a feeling player lose in the long run?

Because this type of pokeroom player occludes his own perception with the fog of his emotion. How can such a pokeroom player see the game clearly enough to beat it?

Read flopturnriver.com's Book of Poker Tells Haven't looked at it in years. Sklansky's Theory of online Pokeroom tournaments? I know it's around here somewhere. Doyle's Super/System? Propping up a table leg. But all that's going to change. Hell, I might even take a look at some of my own old writings and see if they still hold water. What have I got to lose? A little time. What have I got to gain? New information; yet another sense of how this wacky game should be played.

Does this mean that if we let a bad beat get to us even once we're doomed to failure? Not necessarily. Look, no one's perfect. We all filter information through both the judgment filter and the process filter.

Then again, you may have the satisfaction of discovering just how much you've figured out about the pokeroom game, how many of its deeper mysteries have, in fact, yielded up their treasures to you. But remember that the point of reviewing old sources of pokeroom information is not to prove how smart you've become. Rather, it's to take advantage of the same wisdom again, in a new and different way. More than anything it's an exercise in remembering that pokeroom learning never stops, or anyway should never stop, not if you intend to continue to improve and excel. And if your exploration does nothing more confirm that, yep, I had it right all along, well, what's so wrong with that?

In a perfect world, we'd only filter through process, but last time I checked, this wasn't a perfect world. However, good news, we can change! By force of will, we can make the decision to redirect the flow of information, bit by bit (and byte by byte) from the path of judgment to the path of process. We will never, trust me, achieve 100% process filtering. But we can shift the balance, and here's a case where, definitely, every little bit helps.

You may also find that information which once confused you is much more accessible to you now. The information hasn't gotten clearer; you've just grown in the game. If that's true, then there's certainly benefit in taking another crack at old texts, if only to reap a fuller harvest of what's there.