Worse, as many successful online poker players have discovered, it’s a challenge to move money out of the virtual realm and into our realworld wallets. I’m not talking about the mechanics of moving money around; that problem has long since been solved. Nor am I talking about shady sites bogarting your dough, though that has happened and can happen, and it pays to play only at sites you trust. Rather, I’m talking about the need to maintain a large bankroll to keep generating large profit. Cut significantly into your bankroll (to pay the rent, say) and you have to drop down to lower levels, and potentially less profitable games, to protect your bankroll from a big negative swing that could kill it.
So there is, I think, a certain mythos surrounding internet poker. Many people see it as an opportunity to Get Rich Quick in Your Bathrobe. While some have, most don’t. As with any gold rush, it’s the efforts of the many that fund the fortunes of the few. Will this book make you one of the few? I wish I could say for sure that it will, but that would neither be truthful nor, I think, doing you a service. After all, it’s in the nature of the few to be, well, few. While diligent and dedicated players are not in short supply online, even the diligent and dedicated may lack the smarts, confidence, drive, talent, time, discipline, home life, mindset, and skill set to win big online.
Plus, you could always get unlucky.
Thus, we have internet poker as it presents itself to us in the budding days of the 21st century. It’s not the money tree that many of us hoped it would be. It’s not the road to ruin that many of us (or maybe many of our spouses, pets, or clergy) feared it would be. At the end of the day, it’s “a powerful force that can only be used for good or for evil.” How we use it has always been, and continues to be, pretty much up to us.
Sigh.
I shoulda bought the bobby helmets instead.
Rome, March 2005
1
WHO ARE YOU?
I can read minds, sort of.
No, I can’t guess your favorite color or think of your number from one to ten, but I can make a reasonably good stab at what’s in most people’s heads most of the time. The art came easily to me once I understood that 90 percent of everything everybody thinks is pretty much the same as everybody else. I discovered this skill in a poker game, waiting for a guy to bet or not bet into a really scary board of A♣-Q♣-J♣. I held just 8♥-7♦ and I remember being afraid the guy would bet, for I would have to credit him with a piece of that flop, and fold. And then it hit me with the force of revelation: If I’m afraid of the board, so is he! Looking at him, I could almost see the little thought balloon floating over his head:
When he checked, I bet and won the pot. Thus did my mind reading career begin.
I have since learned that mind reading is a useful skill across a wide range of my activities. As a writer trying to figure out how characters in stories think, I start by asking myself: What do I think? From this I can extrapolate what’s going on in my characters’ minds. As an editor working with writers, it’s easy for me to know what my writers are afraid of—hard censure, hard notes, and hard work—because when I’m a writer working with an editor, I’m afraid of these things, too. Negotiating has also become easier for me since I learned not just to see things from the other fellow’s point of view, but really to inhabit and own his perspective.
The trick of mind reading, then, turns out to be simple. To read other people’s minds, start by reading your own. If you’re open enough and honest enough to tell yourself what you really, truly think and feel and hope and fear, you’ll pretty much have the measure of everyone around you. If you tell yourself these things in a vague and approximate way, you end up with a vague and approximate notion of others’ thoughts. But if you analyze yourself with precision and in detail, you get a precise and detailed look into other people’s heads.
Do you think I’m wrong? Try it. In fact, try it on me. I’ll bet you can easily list five things I’m thinking right now. Start by asking yourself what you think of my claim to be able to read minds, and what you would be thinking if you were me, trying to sell that claim to you.
>>
Here are some of the things I’m thinking:
I don’t think they’ll buy it; it’s such an outlandish claim.
But it really works, and it works on so many levels.
They’re probably wondering what this has to do with poker.
Speaking of poker, I’d rather be playing right now than writing.
I wonder if I’ve gotten any new email in the last five minutes.
They’re gonna think I’m crazy, starting a poker book with a rant about mind reading.
Maybe I am crazy, starting a poker book with a rant about mind reading.
But we all know that simple self-awareness is the golden key to success in poker, and even if we can’t read others’ minds, there’s no end of benefit to being willing and able to read our own.
Or maybe we don’t all know that. Maybe just I believe it.
Gosh, maybe I’m on the wrong track.
In fact, what gives me the authority to write this book in the first place?
You’re a fraud, JV. Soon everyone will know.
No new email. Just spam.
Did you get me right? Half right? Even a little bit right? What did you learn about me? (And, oh, by the way, what did you learn about you?) As you can see, you don’t even need to be in the immediate company of the person whose mind you’re trying to read. Is this not useful in online poker, where our foes are scattered all over the planet, and all we have available to decipher them is the scant information they make available to us through their screen names, points of origin, bets and raises, checks and calls, buy ins, rebuys, and very occasional lines of chat?
Now let me explore what I think I know about you. I don’t expect to get you completely, but check me if some of this doesn’t apply. First, as mentioned earlier, I think you’re probably male. That’s not mind reading, though, just demographics. From home games, to Duffy’s Card Shack, to online play, to the main event at the World Series of Poker, men comprise the thick majority of the poker playing community. Online, of course, any he-man can hide behind a screen name like CurlyShirley, so it doesn’t pay to make too many spurious gender judgments. That said, I’ll assume that most of my readers are male; you should assume that most of your online opponents are, too.
You’re young, I surmise, for the bulk of the online playing population is, as are most poker book buyers and readers. You’re young enough and eager enough not only to invest your time and energy in online play but also to invest your time and energy in improving your play. As we grow older—as you’ll discover if you’re yet young—it gets harder and harder to keep the flame of learning burning. It can be done, of course, but that adage about old dogs and new tricks is not without merit. If I’m wrong, by the way, if you’re not young, then more power to you for staying alive in your mind long after most of your peers have sunk into the know-it-all complacency that antecedes stuffy nostalgia, long naps on the davenport, and death.
You probably live in the United States. Whether it’s that our culture and technology create a favorable environment for the online player, or that the rest of the world simply hasn’t caught up or caught on, I can’t say. It’s worth noting that while most players are U.S.