Jan. 22, 2005
 

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. William Hazlitt

Okay, so you're watching all the poker action on TV and you see guys make some fantastic last-ditch saves when a deuce hits the river to secure a straight or finish a flush or trip his hole card. What seems like a mountain of chips moves from one player to another, shifting the lead in the race for a million dollars to the clear underdog. You think you've just seen a lesson in poker and you're ready to turn on your computer and sign up with some dotcom poker room or at the very least, jump in your mode of transportation and get to the cardroom nearest your residence.

You want a piece of that poker pie.

You're ready to do this suspecting with some euphoric admiration in a dark corner of your brain that the guy who just took the lead and eventually won the tournament was probably blessed with a ton of good fortune but not a lot of card sense, and his opponent just had a less fortunate day.

No matter. You know you can get a piece of this pie so you sign up with one of the agencies that will transfer money from your bank or credit card, Neteller or Firepay, perhaps but definitely not PayPal, which refuses to get involved?, and you follow an affiliate link to one of the online poker palaces to compete in the next big tournament. The first prize is going to be entry into one of the millionaire-making events that have become household names.

Now you wait for your first look at your down cards, the two-card combinations we've been investigating on and off for the last few weeks.

Why is it so important to grasp the probability of certain two-card combinations hitting anything so significant? The answer, while relatively logical, doesn't always make sense, especially when you're watching all those players make those gut shot straights, those last-ditch flushes and low-card trips on the river. Nonetheless, if you're going to take poker seriously, you have to take the basic theory seriously. It will save you a lot of heartache, believe me.

Let's look at this scenario. My friend Paul entered three online tournaments last month (December). All three events had minimal buy-ins, with rebuys. (He was having a dry spell in the winning department so he decided to ride it out where it would cost him less money.) In the first tournament, he competed against about 1,700 players; in the second, against 1,200 and about 800 in the third contest. If I understood him correctly, the poker room rewarded about two tables with cash, and the winners received seats in a satellite tournament for another tournament.

I probably don't have all the minute details correct because he was telling this to me on a cell phone that kept breaking up but the crux of the matter is here and it serves to illustrate this: For every 1,700 people who enter a single tournament, 1,680 probably won't get money. So entering tournaments, situations where those less-than-premium hands have to plow through 1,699 competitors, probably won't bring you success.

You have to have too much luck.

While tourney play can help you become accustomed to the game of Texas hold'em, which seems to be the only game people want to play anymore, it's a long shot that you're going to make any money.

If you seriously want to contribute to your income via poker, you must consider ring games and you must be prepared for the fact that, just as in tournament play, the best hands don't always win. Unlike those wild and woolly tournaments, though, where any two cards can win, in ring action, the best hands win more often than the junk.

But this is where the game gets tricky. There's a lot of trash talk in tournaments when a player takes a beat on a hand he thinks should win. Phil Hellmuth is one of the kings of this kind of thing. He'll especially razz players who beat him when his starting cards have a decent chance of winning.

Don't worry; it's just talk, just frustration, just resignation. Like every player, Phil knows the chances of winning with any two cards from the get-go. And he knows, for instance, that even with a hand like big slick, which he might get (according to my poor math skills) once every 335 or so deals, and which has about an 18 percent chance of winning, he's not always going to triumph. Put into perspective, then, getting your ace-king suited slapped down by a lowly pair of deuces, for example, has to hurt, particularly when you wait so long to get it and you know full well you'll win only about 18 times out of 100 when the dealer is nice enough to deliver it to you!

Still, starting card memorization is the first line of offense in this game. And, like any positive move, the result isn't always equally positive.

In blackjack, for example, the positive move when you hold a sixteen against the dealer's deuce, is stand. While it doesn't mean you're going to win all the time, the correct move cuts down the number of losses you'll experience if you hit the sixteen in that situation every time.

In hold'em, what you see is what you get but it's not always what ends up in the plus column of your win-loss logs.