Lessons Learned at the Poker Table
HOW LESSONS LEARNED AT THE POKER TABLE APPLY TO REAL LIFE
by: Lou
Krieger©
Is there a writer who ever played this game and hasn't observed
that poker's a metaphor for life? A metaphor for life! If true,
there should be important life lessons everyone can take away from
the poker table -- lessons which once learned and applied -- ought
to make it much easier for a poker player to survive in a world
where the majority of people haven't learned these advanced lessons
for living.
Be Selective, But Be Aggressive
How true. In the real world you do have to pick your battles, and
carefully choose when to retreat, (fold 'em) and when to draw your
proverbial line in the sand (hold 'em). History is replete with
examples. General Robert E. Lee, confronting overwhelming supremacy
in men, munitions, and technology, was able to keep the Confederacy's
cause alive as long as he did because he picked his battles carefully.
He did not engage the Union Army at every opportunity; he selected
opportunities where he believed he could negate the Union's inherent
advantages and overcome them.
In fact, during the early stages of the war, Union General McClellan
was unwilling to commit his troops, even when the odds were strongly
in his favor. Like a player who is overly weak and overly tight,
General Lee constantly ran him off the best hand. McClellan ultimately
suffered the military equivalent of really bad beat he was sacked
by President Lincoln, who, knowing his man held most of the big
cards, wondered why he wouldn't play a hand and therefore couldn't
win!
Know Your Opponents
If you can pick up tells in a poker game -- where players take great
pains not to broadcast them -- think how easy it ought to be to
read people away from the table. Yet how many of us really take
the time to know our opponents. Your boss is in a nasty, irritable
mood? Maybe you'd be better off feigning an emergency and postponing
your annual performance review until next week.
Wouldn't you stand a better chance of winning when you held a strong
hand? Tackle a tough project now. Close that sale and make some
customer so happy that he calls your boss and tells him how valuable
you are. Once you've done that you're holding strong cards -- strong
enough to stand up to your annual review.
Try it in your social life. You don't have to be an expert on body
language to realize that you're not getting to first base with that
woman who's got her legs crossed, arms folded, and is leaning away
from you with a bored, indifferent expression on her face. It's
time to try a new strategy, or be selective, fold your hand, and
wait for some new cards to be dealt.
Do the Pot Odds Offset the Odds Against Making Your Hand?
No winning player would draw to a flush with 5:1 odds against making
it, when the pot only promises a 3:1 payoff. The winning player
will wait until the pot promises a payoff better than 5:1 before
investing in it. The same thing is true away from the table. While
real life payoffs can vary widely, your investments are usually
time, money, or both. Is it worth your time to spend half a day
trying to make a small sale, without the promise of greater rewards
down the road, or are you better off courting one of your bigger,
better customers?
Whenever you analyze situations like this, the answers often seem
obvious. Still, people fritter away large amounts of time, not realizing
that they can be horribly unproductive. Office workers spend hours
dealing with problems and issues that may be urgent, but are often
neither significant nor important.
Better time management frees you from dealing with issues over
which you can exert little control, and have small payoffs. If you
aspire to success, you'll look for chances to capitalize on opportunity,
rather than wasting your time fighting small, insignificant, brush
fires.
Once you're able to step back from the daily demands of urgent-but-unimportant
issues, you'll be able to see opportunities as easily as you saw
that spending time with important customers was more productive
than chasing opportunities offering insignificant payoffs for your
efforts.
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Have a Plan
If you have no standards at the, and adopt an any-two-cards-can-win
philosophy, you'll soon go broke. Knowing in advance which cards
you're going to play, what position you'll play them from, and how
you'll handle different opponents, are key factors to success at
the poker table. It's no different in the real world. If you don't
plan, you're just a leaf in the wind. While traveling in a random
direction does get you somewhere, it's probably not where you hoped
to go.
Poker teaches you to plan, to have an agenda, and to pursue it
aggressively. In the real world, if you don't have your own agenda,
you'll soon be part of someone else's. In fact, I'd guess that if
you examined people foolish enough to join a cult, you'd find very
few of them with a plan, an agenda, or a set of governing values
to guide them.
Be Responsible. Never Blame Others For Your Failures. Quit Bitching.
Everyone's, it seems, has their favorite bad beat stories. I've
been around poker tables long enough now that I seldom hear one
that's unique. Moreover, I don't care. So you lost in a way that
defied all imaginable logic and odds. A bad decision from a floor
person did you in. Who cares? Enough, already. It doesn't change
anything. You'll never be a successful poker player until you accept
full and complete responsibility for the results you achieve.
Real life is much the same. To succeed, plan on always being held
accountable for your actions. So you weren't born with Rockefeller's
money, Einstein's brains, or Tom Cruise's looks. Neither were most
folks. Get up. Get on your feet. Play the cards you were dealt.
Go on from there. Most of us do not come close to maximizing our
potential. Some don't even try. Like successful poker players, those
who are successful in real life don't place the blame for their
failures anywhere but where it belongs squarely on their shoulders.
Be Sure You Have An Out
When I was 12 years old my arch enemy was an overgrown 13 year old
named Zimp. He was always threatening to beat the crap out of me,
and I had no doubt he could do it. But I had an out. Zimp was big,
and Zimp was strong, but he was slow. Since I could outrun him,
out ride him on my bicycle, and out climb him on any trees or garage
roofs he'd try to chase me over, I could escape every time he decided
to take a run at me. As long as I never got myself get cornered
in a blind alley, I knew I could survive childhood until we grew
up.
I also had another enemy, a kid named Skinny Vinny. Now I could
take Vinny, but Vinny could outrun me, and I seldom caught him.
Had Vinny and Zimp been card players they would have known that
even though I was a favorite against each of them individually (I
could take Vinny, and I could outrun Zimp) if the two of them ever
teamed up, I was dead meat. All it would have taken was for Vinny
to run me down, and keep me engaged until Zimp arrived to toss me
a beating. Neither one of them had an ounce of brains, weren't friends
anyway, and never got together to conspire about how to take out
their mutual enemy.
Next time you're holding a pair of kings or aces, and thinking
about just calling instead of raising to limit the field, remember
Zimp and Vinny. They never got the better of me because each chose
to face me individually -- and I was a big favorite heads up. If
they took me on together, I'd have gone from a favorite individually,
to an underdog against their collective efforts.
I grew up in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood where street smarts were
required learning at an early age. Maybe these street smarts helped
me learn poker, and gave me the discipline to play it well. But
I also believe poker gave me more street smarts than I ever would
have garnered if I never played the game. Who knows? Maybe they're
mutually self-enhancing. If you keep playing the game, and listen
to the messages coming your way across the card table, you'll not
only win at poker, you'll win at life. Keep flopping aces!
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