Throngs of observers have taken to the tables to watch the action unfold. No player can leave the table unless they go broke or hands are completed. However, the Swede did not respond.
Dwan asserted in a press release distributed by Matchroom Sport , "We have had some tough games over the last few days and the action just keeps on coming. I hope [Isildur1]can make it to London for the challenge so we can play some high-stakes live games as well. Seems like no one is positive about him or his back-story, at least publicly. No, I don't have any more info than you guys do. Check out one of the livelier Poker Discussion threads about Isildur1. Log in to leave a comment. We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better.
When I began poker, I was constantly searching for the tricks the pros were using to win, convinced they had to be hidden away somewhere. I tore through books like this one, expecting to uncover clever ways to play draws, sneaky bluffs that no one knew about, or maybe the secret to handling aggressive players or 3-bet pots.
But that moment of revelation never came. If there is a secret in poker, it is this: the way is as hard, rigorous, and disenchanting as the way has ever been. You can seek out books claiming to teach you such things, but I suspect that, after working through them, you will find yourself right where you started. The aim of this book, then, is not to make you better at poker. Instead, it is to make you a better poker player. Poker is an isolating and confusing profession.
The moment you sit down at a poker table, you are submerged in a profoundly backward and contradictory culture. I asked myself one fundamental question when I decided to write this book: if I could go back eight years, to when I was just beginning my exploration into poker, what would I tell my year-old self?
What have I learned that he needs to know? What are the most valuable ideas that would equip him for the long and maddening journey ahead? You may not be ready to absorb all of the ideas and perspectives presented here. Chances are it will take someone else, maybe a year or two down the road, perhaps a friend, a mentor, a stranger telling you the same thing before it convinces you.
And who knows—some of these ideas may be wrong for you. But let this book be a step in your journey, and even if it does not change your beliefs or your perspective on the world or on poker, trust that it will help, whether or not you agree with it. Trust that it has a place in your process. I want to remind you that your life as a poker player is a journey. Poker defies your sense of it. Throughout your lifetime as a poker player, poker will take many different forms for you.
You will formulate it consciously or unconsciously; you will imagine new shapes, metaphors, axioms, and laws of mechanics. Things will seem to work a different way; you will find new rules and laws and equations. You will be absolutely certain that poker is one thing, and the next day you will claim it is another. It keeps changing and changing.
Yet, underneath it all, poker itself is always the same. Ah , but how wrong you are! We are all in this predicament, and I will explain to you why. Every poker player has in their mind a poker schema.
A schema is simply the way you think things work. When you are in a hand faced with a decision, or when you are trying to understand why a play went right or wrong, you consult the network of assumptions and intuitions you have about how poker functions. Your schema includes all the notions you have about poker, how matches evolve, what it looks like to lose or win, what variance feels like. It includes all of the language and concepts you use to describe and analyze poker. But this schema is not static.
Every time you learn something new about the game, your schema is altered slightly. And of course, your schema is not always changed correctly. You might learn a lesson where there is none, or where there is a lesson, you might learn the wrong one. Your schema is constantly changing and shifting, introducing and fixing errors. This is inevitable in a game that involves random and imperfect feedback.
There is a chaos that underlies your schema too. So is poker a chess match? Well, you are not wholly wrong to imagine poker that way. Beneath all the chaos, poker is a chess match. It is logical and obeys fixed mathematical rules. But we don't have access to that. We don't know the chess match, and we probably never will.
The only thing we have access to is how we experience poker, which is always mediated through our evolving schema. For us, the schema is poker. There is an ancient story from India that serves well here.
It was said that there was a king who purchased an elephant, a rare and exotic animal, from a faraway land. The first man squeezed the tail, and said, An elephant is like a rope. The second man wrapped his arms around its leg and said, An elephant is like a pillar.
The third man grabbed the trunk and said, An elephant is like a tree branch, and so on, each man coming up with his description from his limited perspective. This is how schemas work. Our limited experiences and perceptions congeal into a mental model of the subject. Of course, an elephant is none of the things the men described, and it is even more than the sum of all their perceptions. In this way, we are blind men groping at the limbs of poker. We graze against it again and again, even over hundreds of thousands of hands, but our schema is all we can make of it.
What I mean more concretely is this—every time you try to formulate a match, or try to analyze a situation, you will be wrong. Wrong about what—that will depend—but the fact will remain that reality will be shaped differently from your schema. It has been and always will be. And it will change again. This is true even for the strongest players in the world. As a poker player, you doubtless want to think of yourself as a student of logic and mathematics. You imagine rationality to be the mortar with which you build your castle of poker.
You may be correct that poker is governed by mathematics and logic. But you yourself are not. Poker is played by humans. It is experienced and learned by humans. Humans are not rational machines. The operations of their brains are not a chess match.
Build your castle. You have to, even if the only materials you have are the sand and mud beneath you. Go on constructing your poker game. But know that your castle must collapse again and again. Know that your strongest and most steadfast reasoning will eventually fall. But so it is; the building must go on. Do you agree to it?
Do you want to be a poker player? Then this is your path, the only one. You will be wrong, always wrong. But you must keep being wrong and keep whittling away at that wrongness. It is from this point that we begin. The turn is essential. Once you understand it, you can begin to face the philosophy of poker. Here is its most important fruit: that we are fallible.
You might say to yourself: of course I am fallible! But I am referring to something more dire. I mean more than some watered-down platitude like everybody makes mistakes, by which we mean errors in calculation, execution, emotion, etc. What I want to teach you instead is mistrust.
Yes, mistrust. An uncommon virtue, but one you must learn as a poker player. Not merely to mistrust your teachers, or received wisdom.
What you must learn is to mistrust yourself. Mistrust your brain. Mistrust your logic, your math, your confidence, and even your own story. Cast doubt over it all; imbue everything with a shadow longer than the thing itself. This is how a great poker player must think. Self-doubt is the most important ability for a student of this game—but not in the sense of being timid or flimsy.
Those traits have no place in a poker player. What you must have is a confident self-doubt, a powerful mistrust of the parts of yourself that ought to be mistrusted. We will explore that question gradually throughout this book—but first, we require a framework in which to understand it. First, we must establish or re-establish the fundamentals of poker theory. You cannot build a castle until you build a foundation, after all.
In beginning our exploration into the nature of poker, we will start by posing the question, How does one construct a poker game from the ground up? I began by implying that the reality of poker is inaccessible to us and that we are inescapably bounded by our humanness.
But it is not futile to try to understand those limitations. On the contrary, we have no other choice but to try to understand them as best we can, using whatever resources are available to us. We will begin, then, by exploring models of poker as a system. This is the way you are used to thinking about poker—poker as an external thing, out there in the world.
But as this book progresses, we will move past that and turn inward, to eventually explore the interface between the human mind and poker. Both are essential to our understanding of poker. But we must start from the outside and gradually work our way in. Since you are reading this book, I am going to assume a thorough acquaintance with elementary poker theory.
The concepts I will discuss supervene on more basic ones, such as value, ranges, reverse implied odds, balance, game flow, game theory, and so on. If you do not have a grounding in these concepts, I urge you to acquaint yourself with them before trying to tackle this chapter. You might also want to consult the glossary as you read. As we explore poker theory, these first few chapters may get pretty complicated. To become a great poker player, you must first learn to think like one.
But ideas are useless if you don't have the requisite experience and knowledge to talk about them. So the first step is to equip yourself with the language, concepts, and perspectives through which advanced players view the game of poker.
To become a high-level poker player, you must make a structural shift in your perspective. You must start to look at poker holistically , rather than reductionistically. In other words, you must look at a poker game on the whole , rather than looking at it piece-by-piece.
The foremost example of this is in how you analyze hands.
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