Losing

My first foray into online poker didn't go so well. I had $200 to work with. I lost all of it in less than an hour, four buy-ins of $50 playing heads up with $.25/$.50 blinds. It's not the losing that bothers me so much as how I played. I can point to a couple specific plays that were certainly wrong, but it's more an overall sense of unease.

Some poker player said, "The bad part about losing isn't the money, it's the embarrassment." Exactly. Everyone knows the feeling: you're right, but you can't prove it, and nobody knows but you. This happens all the time in regular life, but poker takes it to new heights. Part of my problem was that I felt my opponents were playing badly and I was frustrated that I wasn't beating them. But as soon as you start to feel frustrated, you're the one at risk of losing by making a bad decision.

There's a famous story about Nimzovich, one of the greatest chess theorists and writers, throwing the board and screaming, "How can I lose to this idiot?!" after dropping a game to an inferior player. But this kind of thing happens relatively rarely in chess. This is why, minus some sort of elaborate hustle, you will almost never make real money betting it. If you are a favorite against someone, they probably know it. And if they don't already they certainly will halfway through the first game. Playing chess against someone much better than you is a uniquely oppressive experience: you feel like there's absolutely nothing you can do. And in fact, there isn't. Your lack of understanding dooms you from the start.

Poker is just the opposite. Every play feels like it might work. No one ever thinks they're a dog. You could play someone ten heads up sessions, win seven, and he would likely want to play ten more. This is why poker is profitable. There are people out there who donate money for years and years, thinking they're favorites the whole time.

It also means that, if you play a lot of poker, you will lose to idiots pretty often. This tension exists for any professional poker player. The idea of mastering the game, taken to its logical extreme, would mean winning every time. Yet it's precisely the game's built-in refusal to let anyone reach this summit that makes it profitable.

But I haven't made it there yet. I wasn't even a favorite. They played bad, but I played worse.