There’s a player who for all intents and purposes is completely mad. He does just what you are not supposed to do. He is the sort who will have most poker players pulling out their hair. He makes massive bets into a board of Ah Kh Th Ks then after his opponent folds, turns over 3d 7c with a smile on his face. Then he just calls with aces or kings in any position. Sometimes this means he gets into all sorts of trouble. I have seen someone in the BB read him for exactly kings or aces and be spot on. The BB had hit 2 pair but there was a flush and straight possibility on board. After questioning him, the BB decided his 2 pair was ahead, and he was right. Ali had slowplayed his aces just for kicks, but it cost him.

Sometimes slowplaying the aces works and he makes a ton of chips. Out of all the players I have played with, I don’t think I have seen anyone hit hands in quite the same way that Ali does. I have sat there and seen him hit about 7 prime hands in half an hour, and also hits trips with his medium pairs. Now I can’t think of anyone who has ever hit hands like this guy. The rest of us have sat there, dying in a desert of no hands, no luck, no chance, no hope, just total despair, while he hits hand after hand. He then bluffs with absolute rubbish. When someone finally calls him he turns over trips.

Sometimes we just laugh or scream, or a mixture of both. Some people hate him. They just can’t wait to see that smug smile wiped off his face. But you know, after playing with him for some time, I actually find him quite amusing and entertaining. I’ll say one thing in his favour. He never bad mouths anyone or taunts anyone. All he does to wind people up, is to turn over totally mad bluffs. This is his entertainment. Maybe he’s lonely and playing poker is his one way of interacting with people. He is middle aged and short, with a moustache. You wouldn’t give him a second glance walking down the street. But he is one of the strangest, wildest, aggressive players I have ever seen.

He is one of those adrenalin junkies, but unlike the kids who get their kicks from playing 12 tables at once and pushing all in on every hand without a second to draw breath, he gets his kicks in the old fashioned way. From playing all sorts of rubbish hands, and sucking out with them, or turning over aces played slow just to see the looks on people’s faces.

I was starting to think maybe he is a genius. Maybe Gus Hansen has something to worry about. This guy just kept hitting the river when I watched him play. I have never seen anyone hit the river quite like him. Then I saw a board of Qs 4s Ac Kh and his opponent bets half the pot from quite a short stack. Ali proudly turns over As Ts to everyone’s astonishment, including his opponent who was well behind. “But but but but….” Finally everyone picked their jaws up from the table and said “you’ve got the nut flush draw, an inside straight draw, top pair, a zillion potential outs, and a ton of chips and your opponent hardly has any.”

But whatever it was he was doing, whether you agree with it or not, there was a period of a few months where he just kept winning. He couldn’t lose. If he was part of any religion I wanted in. I’m an atheist, but I would try anything. I’m that desperate. I ended up quite liking him. I know I shouldn’t. I hated him at first but I just couldn’t help but be entertained. It is always fun when he is at the table. Mainly I think because of the reactions he gets from all the other players. Luvdoinit would probably wait for him outside. and whack him over the head with a baseball bat. I know several players who want to do just that.

I guess he was just on one of those runs. It was the sort that just makes you laugh and cry. When he is on one of those runs I am thinking, “but I haven’t seen ANY hands. NONE. NOTHING. Just give me one hand like Ali’s. Just give me ONE piece of luck like ALI. That’s all I need. ANYTHING. FFS. ANYTHING!” I have seen him in tourneys, amass huge stacks of chips and then throw them away as though they were nothing. But when they are all gone, he leaves without barely a flicker of emotion. He leaves as quietly as he arrives. Once he’s out no none notices him. Until next time.

I am always finding comments made by people that have absolutely nothing to do with poker, but can apply to the game. Here is one I heard in a documentary made about Darwinist, Richard Dawkins. He was questioning an expert on major companies and why they are successful, and relating it to Darwinism. The expert had this to say…

“The press loves to play up company CEO’s and entrepreneurs as these heroes, and in many ways they are, they work incredibly hard and they’ve made sacrifices, but the myth is that they were these great visionaries, these people who could predict the future and drive an organisation toward that future. The reality is economic systems just like biological systems are hugely complex, and being able to predict what’s going to happen in the long term is extraordinarily difficult or even impossible, and what some companies do is rather than try to outguess where the market is going they’ll create some notion of variety within their company and then let the market choose, let customers decide which products and services they’d like best.”
Dawkins : “So these legendary moguls…is it sort of luck that they’re the ones who’ve just, they just happened to get it right, and with hindsight you could say they got it right, but that’s all, it’s just hindsight?”
“Well not to take away from the talent that these individuals may have, but if you imagine a room full of people flipping coins, if the room’s big enough, one of them is gonna to get ten heads in a row, and then if you ask that person “what did you do?” they’ll say “well I’m an expert coin flipper I got my risks just right,” and we see the same thing in business.”

This relates perfectly to those who go on a run of winning just about every 50-50 and every 30 per cent decision. Yes you have to win some heads up battles. But being on a run where a player wins virtually every heads up, makes him look a lot better than he is. He may also make the mistake of thinking he is a lot better than he is. He may win a tournament or even more, but working out how much of this is due to great play, and how much is due to just plain old good luck is sometimes hard to analyse.

Here’s a comment that I find applies to my life – just about every day…

“Some days in the poker world, the biggest mistake you can make, is to get out of bed.” (Padraig Parkinson)

Here is one that is quite often misquoted as “football is more important than life or death.”

“Someone said – “football is more important than life and death to you,” and I said – “listen it’s more important than that.” (Bill Shankly, manager of Liverpool FC 1981)

I am not a subscriber to that line of thinking as far as something as unimportant as sport, or a game like poker is concerned. However, poker is a business and is either the sole source of income or a partial source of income to many people. It has to therefore be treated seriously. If you put a lot of study and hard work into the game, it will pay off in the long run.

I think poker will teach you a lot about life and life will teach you a lot about poker. The game does sometimes seem to exist in its own little cocoon, with reality seeming far away. But what has been said about the game being “a people game” is as true as ever. If you are a good reader of people, and can pick up on why people do things, and know a lot about life, this really does help you at the poker table. Poker can also teach you an awful lot about life, and the nature of luck.

The game does not exist in a vacuum. It is why I believe internet multi table players do not improve their game. I hear of these players doing exactly the same thing over and over, which may well be good enough to take the money but means their game does not evolve. How can it? If one of these players decides he is going to push if he has top pair on the flop, no matter what, it may take the money in the long run, at that low conveyor belt level, but it is almost the antithesis of what the game is about at the higher and better levels. If for instance, the flop comes 2 3 6, and the player holding K6 reraises all in to a huge reraise no matter what player he is against, because he always moves with top pair on the flop, it shows there is no learning process at all. If you are against a wild hyper aggressive player, it may be correct to do this. But what about the tightest player at the table?

These multi table players, play so many tables they don’t even know who they are playing against or how these people are playing. It isn’t a computer programme but it may just as well be. The computer doesn’t learn, it only knows what you feed into it. If the programe is well written, the computer does what you want it to, but it doesn’t learn. These players do not learn or interreact with other players in any way, or learn to adjust their play based on what their opponents are doing. It’s why you find a lot of kids playing multi table poker. They don’t know much about life and they don’t really care. They don’t know much about poker either, beyond the small confines of the computer screens and a video game version which is only a small part of what the game is really about. Can they earn money at it? Yes of course they can. I’m not saying they cannot win money. You can win money on the lottery or bingo. It needs more skill than that to play online poker, but their poker skill does not develop, just as the computer programme does not develop beyond what is put into it.

In poker as in life you make your own luck – to a certain extent. Anyone who suggests that you make all your own luck and that your fate is entirely in your own hands does not have much of a grasp on reality, or the nature of luck and what life is about. Sometimes those gurus who charge thousands to suckers just to tell them that all you need is a positive attitude are just conmen ripping off the suckers. In fact poker and odds can teach you something here. It is true with something as simple as a coin toss that after a few tosses you can have all heads or all tails. It is true that the more times you toss that coin the more the results will resemble a 50-50 split. But what you also must realise is the more times you toss that coin the more unlikely it is that the split will be exactly 50-50. If you toss the coin a million times the odds are astronomically high for the result being either an exact 50-50 split, or all heads or tails. Luck evens out over the long term to a certain extent but does not even out exactly.

Think of some Olympic sportsman or woman, who trains, gets the diet and everything else right, and is in perfect form leading up to the big event. Then some madman drives straight into their car as they wait at a pedestrian crossing and injures them badly. All Olympic hopes gone and that event only comes around every 4 years. They did nothing wrong. They were just unlucky. Or look at some young kid who is taken on a flight by their parents and the plane crashes. the kid did nothing wrong. He or she had no say over whether they take the flight or not. They were just unlucky. I am just saying something here that should be painfully apparent anyway. Bad luck happens. It isn’t fate, it’s just the way the odds play both in life and in poker. Some people are just more lucky than others.

All you can do is prepare yourself the best you can, this includes preparing yourself for the unexpected. Sometimes things happen that are entirely out of your control. You have to accept this too. Tell yourself you did the best you could, and that’s all anyone can do. Anything outside of this you have to let go, and accept it was not under your control. This gives you the best chance of all. The people who do the best in life as in poker are able to take these outside events, accept them, and not let themselves be affected. Those who do not let those unexpected bad bits of luck that are entirely are out of their control, affect them, will have the advantage over those that do.

I would say to anyone who wants to give the game a go, fine, go ahead. Study books and other players and try to give yourself the best chance of winning. But if you lose continually there comes a time when you may have to accept that you are not good enough to win at the game. Then you have to decide whether you want to play poker as fun, and lose, accepting it as an expense like any other hobby, or give it up. It is being able to decide how much luck you think has been involved in your results. Some people can run incredibly good and therefore think they are great players, while those who run bad think they are awful and blame themselves. Judging how good you are can be very hard, and expensive. Try and be as objective as possible. In poker and in life, the most talented will win eventually.