Playing As If Your Life Depended On It

Have found myself over on Deuces Cracked here of late where I recently started watching a few of the instructional vids, including Tommy Angelo’s unorthodox series titled “The Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment.” I call Angelo’s series “unorthodox” because unlike the other series that focus mainly on strategy advice and theory, Angelo’s deals with larger “meta”-issues having to do with the psychology of the game.

I’ve only watched the first (of eight) episodes thus far, but it appears they mainly consist of Angelo and Wayne Lively having conversations about various topics, some of which one can find introduced in Angelo’s book, Elements of Poker. (Read more about his book here.) There are also some subtle animations and nifty piano music by Angelo himself that punctuate the conversation.

I have also started to watch some of the other instructional vids on the site -- a new thing for me, really, as I’ve never really partaken in this form of poker learning. Once I get through Angelo’s series I’ll come back on here and write something about it, I imagine. And I’ll also keep you updated on how watching the other vids helps with my play. (You Deuces Cracked peoples -- have any particular recommendations?)

There was one idea Angelo brings up in the first episode of “The Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment” that he also discusses in his book, something called “The Professional.” As I understand it, The Professional exists as a kind of guiding principle in Angelo’s mind that helps govern his actions at the poker table. The Professional is sort of like a version of himself, a person who is much like Angelo in every way except for the fact that his approach to poker is unwaveringly serious. That’s because he plays for a living, thus his very existence depends on making correct choices.

“I created The Professional to help me decide what to do,” writes Angelo in Elements of Poker. “When I need some advice about a poker decision, I just ask The Professional.” The Professional is someone whom we cannot really be, I think, but rather someone whom we can conjure up as a particularly good, right thinking version of ourselves. As Angelo explains, “when we talk to The Professional, we’re just talking to ourselves, our best selves.”

Angelo speaks of The Professional as someone who plays poker as if his life depends on it, and lives his life as if his poker depends on it. “The Professional is all meta-game, all the time,” says Angelo.

Like I say, it’s really just a heuristic device, this Professional. (If I understand it correctly.) An idea to help us clarify our thinking at the table when faced with a particular decision. Asking oneself “How would I play this if my life depended on it?” might be a little much at times, but you get the point. Such thoughts do encourage a kind of seriousness and/or focus, and as we all know, there are times when a lack of either cause us to do things we wish we hadn’t.

That picture, of course, is of the knight Antonius Block playing chess with Death from Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal. Block really is playing for his life there. Those of you who’ve seen the film know that even in this literal example of playing for one’s life, Block’s concentration wavers.

He’s only human, after all. (Unlike The Professional.)

Worth a Listen

Yesterday I listened to this week’s Two Plus Two Pokercast. Another good show (as usual), with the second half devoted to a lengthy interview with poker coach, player, and author Tommy Angelo.

I’ve written about Angelo here before, having reviewed his book and even getting the chance to meet and have dinner with him last summer. Smart, funny, friendly guy who has a lot of insight into the psychology of poker.

When I met him last summer, I’d neglected to carry my copy of his book, Elements of Poker, to Vegas with me, and so missed the chance to get him to sign it. But he had a souvenir for me, a “tiltless” poker chip which I subsequently used as a card protector during the weeks I was there.

Not gonna rehearse the whole hour-long interview here, but I did want to share a reaction I had while listening. It was during the first part of the interview when the topic of conversation was tilt and how to avoid it. Co-host Mike Johnson started talking about those great players who seem able to avoid tilt altogether, and that led to Johnson asking Angelo a two-part question.

“The one thing I find fascinating when I sit at a live table is the player who can take a bad beat and just let it roll off them,” Johnson began. “Those are the players you always look at as the premium players -- the ones that just never get bothered by anything.” Then came the two-part question: “Can you tell the difference from somebody who it actually doesn’t bother versus somebody who it is bothering and is stewing on the inside, but they’re just not showing it outwardly and are able to control their image to the rest of the table, but inside they are actually letting it affect their game? And what’s worse, admitting it and actually having outward tilt or keeping it bottled up inside and not having it show to the other players?”

As I listened, I imagined my own responses to the questions. Then, like a poker player waiting for an opponent to act, I found myself anticipating what Angelo would say. I’ll admit to feeling a little overconfident about being able to guess Angelo’s answers. Having read his book, as well as having met him and gotten to know him a bit, I thought I knew what he’d say.

To the first question (I thought) he’d express humility and say, well, of course he couldn’t tell the difference if the player was successfully controlling his or her image. To the second question, I thought he’d say it was better to hide tilt, if you could, given the practical benefits of doing so.

As it happens, that’s how I’d have answered both questions. And as it happens, that’s not how Angelo answered ’em. Not at all.

“The answer to the first question,” said Angelo, “is I do believe I can tell... now.” He went on to explain that while he couldn’t do so before, these days he often (not always) can tell the difference between someone who is not tilting and someone who is tilting but hiding it because he himself is able to remain calm enough at the table to observe his opponents more closely. “I’m able to quiet myself to a degree that I think I can pick up on feelings that are buzzing around the table that I didn’t use to be able to pick up on when my own feelings were more dramatic,” he explained.

Angelo went on to use an analogy involving being seated next to a noisy generator pumping out 60 decibels of sound. Sitting there makes it impossible to hear something nearby that is less than 60 decibels. So, says Angelo, if you’re there at the table generating 50 “decibels” of “mental noise,” it makes it hard for you to notice the guy across the table who is tilting but hiding it and thus only transmitting 20 “decibels” of “negative energy.”

To the second question, Angelo also had a different answer than mine, and different from the one I’d guessed he’d have. But in this case, I think we were hearing the question differently. Rather than say it was best not to “admit it” and have “outward tilt,” Angelo replied that “accepting it is always the best thing.” He went on to talk about how “it is always best to be able to stop and to say ‘I am on tilt now’ -- in fact, that is the cure.”

Like I say, here I believe I was thinking of the question in terms of trying to get along at the table without giving your opponents free information, while Angelo was looking at the notion of “admitting” one was on tilt in a less literal way -- i.e., admitting it to yourself, not necessarily to others.

Anyhow, check out the show for more. And again, let me recommend Elements of Poker as an entertaining and informative compilation of Angelo’s many ideas. Angelo has built on those ideas in a new series of videos over on Deuces Cracked, titled “The Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment.” (I remember him speaking about working on the series when we met back in late May.) I don’t have an account over there, but the series sounds worth checking out, so I may have to get me a trial membership or something. ’Cos reading or listening to Angelo always seems to have a positive effect for me and my play.

Indeed, after listening to the show, I played some online and as I did I very consciously avoided checking email, surfing the web, or doing anything other than try to focus on the game. Was in fact able to open up three tables as a result -- whereas normally I’ll only play one or two -- as I found myself with enough available mental capacity to handle ’em. In fact, the only extraneous activity I did at all was to riffle a few chips here beside the keyboard, including that “tiltless” one.

And the session went well. I played competently, but benefited a lot from a couple of very bad plays by opponents. Dunno if they were tilting or not -- indeed, now that I think about it, they probably were. I think I still had too much of my own mental noise whirring to be able to tell who was tilting and who wasn’t.

Was listening well enough to know I wasn’t, though.

Speaking of . . . Online vs. Live (Part II)

I mentioned here before occasionally Bart Hanson’s podcast Cash Plays which ran for about a year over on PokerRoad Radio. Hanson left PRR back in December and moved his show over to the online training site Deuces Cracked, picking things back up there in mid-January.

Hanson is calling the new show “Deuce Plays” (a title which I’m not too sure about), and it follows pretty much the same format as his previous show, with Hanson having lengthy interviews with various guests. He may be primarily interviewing Deuces Cracked pros and instructors on this new show, but as was the case on PRR, the show is still focused on middle and higher stakes cash games.

(Incidentally, it appears PokerRoad will soon relaunch the Cash Plays show with a new host, Jeremiah Smith.)

As someone who plays almost zero no-limit hold’em (particularly cash games) and certainly doesn’t even come close to playing the stakes Hanson and his guests usually play, I probably shouldn’t find Hanson’s show as interesting as I do. I always somehow find the shows compelling, though, and I think I probably pick up certain tidbits that are of use now and then.

The most recent show (the 2/24/09) features poker pro and coach Tommy Angelo, author of Elements of Poker. I believe it is the first of a two-parter. Some of you might have heard Angelo on the Two Plus Two Pokercast back last August (episode 36), where he was a big hit. If you haven’t read his book or heard him before, you might check out the new show as a good introduction to some of Angelo’s ideas.

Anyhow, like I say I shouldn’t really care for Hanson’s show but I do. Case in point: A couple of weeks ago Hanson had Sean Nolan on as a guest (the 2/10/09 episode), and about 20 minutes into the show the pair were discussing the relative merits of 20-tabling $5/$10 full ring NLHE games versus playing four $25/$50 six-max. tables. What business do I, a guy who generally sticks to playing just two or three limit hold’em games at once, have listening to this debate?

Still, like I say, I’m listening. And frankly, several of the factors that Hanson and Nolan focused on in their discussion -- variance, relative skill levels of opponents, theoretical differences between short-handed and full ring play, and so forth -- are relevant to all of us, no matter what limits or games we’re playing.

One other interesting item came up on that show with Sean Nolan -- really, this was the whole reason I decided to mention Hanson’s show. At the very beginning, Hanson talked about how six months ago he was struggling a bit at the $10/$20 no-limit hold’em tables at the Commerce Casino (in Los Angeles, where the LAPC is currently winding down). In order to “retool” his game decided to move back down to the $5/$10 NLHE tables (a 150-big blind capped game), which he found “a world of difference” with less variance and, apparently, less difficult competition.

“Then I watched your videos,” he told Nolan, referring to the instructional vids Nolan had created for Deuces Cracked, “and then I put in about 80,000 hands at $0.50/$1.00 full ring (which is 100NL).” That’s when Hanson said something I found fairly provocative:

“I think that a $0.50/$1.00 game [online] is way tougher than $5/$10 no-limit [live].”

He asked Nolan for his opinion and he essentially agreed that 10-to-1 ratio sounded “about right” when comparing the relative toughness of online and live play. I recall Isaac Haxton making a similar claim on PokerRoad Radio -- I believe it was last January (the 1/5/08 show) -- where he also suggested something like a 10-to-1 ratio between the skill levels online and live.

I wrote a post a good while back concerning the whole online-vs.-live thing, so I thought I'd make this one a sequel. As someone stuck in a part of the country with no live poker, my live experience has been quite limited and thus I can’t comment with any authority on this issue at all. Additionally, there are differences between the way limit games and no-limit games are played that would likely make it problematic simply to apply the same 10-to-1 ratio over on the limit side.

But are these guys right? Is the difference in skill levels that huge? Are $0.50/$1.00 games online as tough as $5/$10 live?