Feb. 14, 2004

Last evening one of the local (Las Vegas) news stations featured a spot on how to play Texas hold'em. The news reader (he calls himself a reporter) introduced the story by saying the game is hard to learn, but his station was going to teach viewers how to play, "right after this message."

When the team came back from a bevy of commercial messages, the reader introduced a professional poker dealer sitting at a poker table who contradicted the news person's report by stating that hold'em is a very easy game to learn and that if you already know home poker, you can pick up on this game very quickly. He then scrambled the cards, shuffled and hurriedly explained. His lesson took a total of three minutes.

Maybe nobody saw the humor in the dichotomy and if they did, then they're real poker players.

Hold'em really is easy to learn.

Hold'em really is hard to learn.

Maybe it's a little bit like driving. Find an empty field, get behind the wheel and press the accelerator. In no time you know how to drive. But take that same car out on the nearest freeway with only that bit of knowledge and you're looking for trouble.

So much of poker is a contradiction. It's supposed to be a game of honesty but in reality, it's about dishonesty.

Look at the river. You have a solid hand on the flop. The turn looks dangerous. Then this fresh-water alligator jumps out and bites you. When the water starts churning on the turn, you know you're beat but you hand to "keep him honest," so you go in another bet and a raise.

It's hard to admit you're beat but it's harder to lose the pot. And if it turns out you were bluffed, so what? Bluffs work -‹ sometimes.

And speaking of bluffing, isn't that kind of like lying? In this game of honesty the best hand is supposed to win, but that's not the way it happens most of the time. In many pots, the best hand finds its way into the muck because some sharp player figured out a way to make the person holding the best hand think he was holding the second-best hand.

Sometimes that bluff will force a player onto tilt and he will begin to play recklessly and the result can spell disaster.

Aggression is good -- sometimes.

In poker, you have to play the cards to win the pot so why not see every flop. If you don't play, you can't win! Or at least that's what a player might think is proper procedure. So go ahead and play every two hole cards you get from the dealer and guess what? You lose money.

That's the interesting part about poker. It's everything you never learned in kindergarten, in high school, in college or in the army. It's a game where you take what you've learned and figure out how to bend it until it's just about at the breaking point.

If you're smart, you never get mad because someone else was able to bend it a micro-inch further. You learn from it and do it too.

It's the one game where being two-faced is actually a good thing.