Professional Poker Player That Likes to Say Baby
How I Became a Poker Champion in I Twelvemonth
One of the globe's best players taught me his unique psychological style of play—and it worked.
I first encountered Erik Seidel the way many poker newbies do. I was watching Rounders, the 1998 Matt Damon movie about a vivid law student who pays his way through school with his poker prowess, and in the terminate quits police altogether to play full-time. In several scenes, a real-life poker match plays in the background. It'southward the 1988 Earth Series of Poker final table showdown, between a young Seidel and Johnny Chan, the "master," as Chan is repeatedly described by the commentators. This is the almost famous poker match in the nonpoker globe, in which Seidel'southward prepare of queens falls to Chan's direct, after the older actor sets an adept trap for his less experienced victim.
At the time, Chan was the reigning world champion and Seidel was at his first-ever major tournament. He'd fabricated information technology past 165 other contenders to make the terminal table, the terminal man continuing save i. Thirty years later, Seidel has go the main. He holds eight WSOP bracelets—merely five players in the tournament's history take more—and a Globe Poker Tour title. He is in the Poker Hall of Fame, one of just 32 living members. He boasts the quaternary-highest tournament career winnings in the history of the game, and is fourth in the number of times he cashed in the WSOP (114). Many consider him the GOAT—the greatest of all time.
Seidel stands out from other players for his longevity: He still contends for No. 1, as he has since his career first started, in the late '80s. That takes some doing. The game has changed a lot in the past 30 years. As with then many facets of modern life, the qualitative elements of poker accept taken a back seat to the quantitative. Caltech Ph.D.south now line the tables. Printouts of stats columns are a common sight. A conversation rarely goes for more a trounce without someone mentioning GTO (game theory optimal) or +EV (positive expected value). Just despite predictions that his psychological style of play would render him a dinosaur, Seidel stays on pinnacle.
Three years ago, Seidel began to teach me how to play poker. Why on earth would a professional poker player—the professional poker player—agree to let a random journalist follow him around like an overeager toddler? It'southward non for money or exposure. Seidel is notoriously reticent, and he hates sharing his tactics. I was, however, an ideal student in a few ways. About important, I take a Ph.D. in psychology, then I was well positioned to understand Seidel'south style of play. I as well never had much of an interest in cards, significant Seidel wouldn't have to rid me of any bad habits. My bookish preparation and my inexperience made me a perfect vehicle for an experiment to see if Seidel'southward psychological game could notwithstanding triumph over a strictly mathematical style.
At the time, I was at sea in my personal life. It wasn't an platonic moment to pursue an abstruse question about a game I knew about nada about. My husband had been recently laid off, and a lot of our lives were in flux. But I rapidly establish myself consumed by poker. The game served every bit the perfect laboratory for my ain questions most the role of luck in our lives. Poker isn't the roulette bike of pure hazard, nor is it the chess of mathematical elegance and perfect data. Apart from the underlying mathematics, poker depends on the nuanced reading of human intention, interactions, and deceptions. It gives you parameters that are but clean enough to allow you to grapple with that doubt.
And and so Seidel and I hatched a plan: He would railroad train me to play in the game's unmarried biggest competition, the World Serial of Poker, with its notorious $ten,000 entry fee. This is the tournament that so dramatically jump-started his own career, with his second-identify finish to Chan. I would take less than a year to ready for information technology.
Thouy first mean solar day of training, I wake up at six in the morning, membranous-eyed, with my tail decidedly un-bushy. The WSOP takes place inside a casino, with tables, chairs, greenish felt, real cards, chips, all of it. The online version, where I first to learn to play, is a not-very-persuasive replica. The poker table is flat and pixelated, surrounded by avatars—hard-to-make-out photos uploaded by the users to stand for their virtual selves. Virtual cards zip from a cardinal spot and flip over in forepart of y'all. A small number underneath the cards tells you how many fries each player has. It's all kind of drab, and made more so by the fact that I had to schlep to a coffee shop in New Jersey, where online poker is legal, to play. Merely information technology's the quickest path to learning from nil: hundreds of hands, hundreds of scenarios, all unfolding equally quickly equally I tin can click with a mouse.
Subsequently playing all morning time, I make my mode to Upper Manhattan to come across with Seidel and review how I've played. There are no lesson plans. In that location are no specific topics to cover or goals to hit. Instead, Seidel and I walk. Ever since he got a Fitbit, some years ago, he has been religious in hitting his daily step count, come pelting or smoothen, in New York or Vegas or anywhere else in the world, whether he's in between playing or in the middle of a tournament. It's not but for practice. Walking is his mode of thinking.
As the imperial Hudson glitters bluish on our left and the flowered carpets of Riverside Park open on the right, I try my best to keep up with Seidel's long strides while strategically perching my phone on the side of my bag to record the conversation. I alternate between angling a dog-eared poker-strategy book—right now, Harrington on Concur 'em—out of said purse to find the pertinent pages and property a mini notebook to jot down peculiarly important thoughts that I want to revisit. We must expect similar a very odd duo.
Our earliest walking conversations are, equally y'all'd look, among the most basic. I've already drilled downward the ground rules of Texas Hold'em: You are dealt two cards. Yous decide whether to play them or to fold. If you do play them, you phone call the "blind" bet or enhance. Everyone else follows the aforementioned conclusion procedure, going in a clockwise direction starting from the player to the left of the big blind, a position called, accordingly enough, "under the gun." And so you make that decision again every time new information, in the grade of new cards, appears. At the end, if only 1 person holds cards when the betting is done, she wins the pot. If the mitt goes to showdown—that is, the concluding bet is called—the person belongings the best cards volition win.
Only that's about where the simplicity ends. To the untrained centre, poker seems deceptively easy. It seems like every time I talk to Erik, he has a new story of a bartender or server or Uber driver who recognizes him and offers up the wisdom that he could play just as well; that "lucky suspension" simply hasn't manifested itself.
Seidel doesn't give me much in the way of concrete advice, and our conversations remain more theoretical than I would prefer. He focuses more than on process than prescription. When I complain that it would be helpful to know at least his opinion on how I should play a hand, he gives me a smile and tells me a story. Earlier that yr, he says, he was talking to 1 of the well-nigh successful high-stakes players currently on the circuit. That actor was offer a very specific opinion on how a certain paw should be played. Erik listened quietly and then told him one phrase: "Less certainty. More inquiry."
"He didn't take it well," he tells me. "He actually got pretty upset." Only Seidel wasn't criticizing. He was offer the approach he'd learned over years of feel. Question more. Stay open-minded.
These Zen koans can be frustrating. I do desire answers. I practice want a guide for what to do with my pocket 10s from the small bullheaded following a raise from under the gun and a re-raise from the hijack. Enough philosophy! I want to yell. Give me certainty! Tell me if I'm supposed to phone call or shove or fold. Tell me if I'm making a large mistake! Just Seidel volition not exist shaken. And I'1000 left with that frustrating not-quite-rage that, weeks later, miraculously coalesces into noesis. Poker is all about comfort with uncertainty, after all. Only I didn't quite realize it wasn't just doubtfulness about the upshot of the cards. It's uncertainty about the "right" thing to do.
A number of years agone, Erik heard about a seminar led by Mike Caro. Caro is famous for his book on tells—live, in-the-moment reads of others at the table. "He's a pretty eccentric guy," Erik says. "And he'southward walking around the stage and starts off past proverb, 'What is the object of poker?'" I nod in agreement. A question I've been asking myself frequently.
Erik continues, "Somebody says, 'Winning coin.' He says, 'No.' Somebody else says, 'Winning a lot of pots.' 'No.' He says, 'The object of poker is making skillful decisions.' I think that's a actually good mode to await at poker."
He thinks for a bit. "When you lose considering of the run of the cards, that feels fine. Information technology's non a big deal. It'southward much more painful if you lose considering you made a bad decision or a mistake."
Seidel won't tell me how to play a paw not considering he's beingness mean but considering that answer comes at the expense of my developing ability to make expert decisions. I have to learn to retrieve through everything for myself, on my ain. All he can requite me are the tools. I'thousand the one who has to notice the way through. So, perhaps, I'll be ready to play for real stakes, in a real casino, 1 pace closer to the World Series of Poker.
Las Vegas shouldn't be. The incongruity hits you from the moment yous first glimpse it from the airplane. Outset mountains, and so desert, so nifty squares of identical houses that look every bit if they were plucked straight from Monopoly. And suddenly, green, lush oases in the midst of information technology all: golf courses. This stark contrast between the vibrant green forms with the yellows and browns is the almost prominent visual cue that you are entering a place that was non intended by nature.
I hate Vegas, I think to myself as I wheel my suitcase away from the slot machines, toward the airport's exit. The cold air hits me in a burst of disbelief. It's full-on Vegas winter. No one always told me that Vegas can get common cold, and that in addition to all the other unpleasantness, I'd besides be shivering. Goes to evidence what I know about desert climates.
"I call up I hate Vegas," I tell Erik as I hoist the suitcase into the back of his motorcar. For my first foray out West, he's decided to pick me upward at the airdrome.
"I know the feeling," he says.
If flying is an practise in perspective, seeing the tiny World from to a higher place and realizing simply how tiny you yourself are as part of information technology, the Vegas casino is the opposite. It's designed to capture your attention and brand itself expect similar the earth in its entirety. Its interiors are conceived in a way that depletes your controlling abilities and emotional reserves. The slot machines, the free alcohol, the amenities crafted so that you lot never need to await exterior the casino walls. ("So casinos aren't designed for groovy decision making?" Erik asks me when I share my reservations. "Who would've idea.")
Information technology'due south Nov, and I'll exist here on and off for weeklong stretches over the adjacent few months. Information technology'southward my first time trying my mitt at real poker—actual casinos, actual tournaments, players who've been doing this for years, some for longer than I've been alive. I guess I'll have to get over my distaste for the place.
I write out a poker schedule in my notebook: Caesars or Planet Hollywood at ten a.m., Monte Carlo or Delusion or MGM One thousand at 11. I'm looking through the daily tournaments and seeing what I tin can fit in so that I still have time to watch Erik play with the loftier rollers. There are dozens to cull from. Ooh, hither'south ane at the Aria! That's where Erik plays. It's a beautiful poker room, and I'm excited they host something that's closer to my budget than his $25,000 and $fifty,000 purchase-ins. I eagerly write it down with a star next to it.
"No," Erik responds. "You can't play that one." Just why? Information technology'southward so user-friendly and exciting. "You're not ready for Aria," he says.
Why not? I've been playing online virtually daily. And I've fifty-fifty made nearly $2,000 doing information technology! How does he want me to play a $x,000 buy-in downwardly the line if I tin't even play this?
"First of all, the players here are too practiced. Yous need to start at a lower level."
Hmph.
"And second of all, $140 is way too expensive. You need to build a bigger bankroll before you tin can play that high." I feel a blow to my ego. He doesn't think I can pull off a babe tournament. Also, what's a bankroll?
My start few weeks in Vegas don't go particularly well. After an inauspicious beginning at the Golden Nugget—I promptly bust out of my start-ever alive tournament without much fanfare—I try my luck at Excalibur, at Harrah's (Erik laughs when I tell him where I'm going, not because of the location but because I've pronounced it "hurrah"), at the Mirage. Each venue offers a slightly dissimilar feel, and with each hand, even every bit I lose more than and more than coin—funny how expensive a fifty-dollar tournaments get once you realize how many you'll be entering without so much as a cent for your efforts—I start seeing more than and more of the patterns I've been learning nearly play out in real life. There are the passive players, the aggressive players, the conservative players, the active players, the loose players. There are the ones who like to drink. There are the ones who like to play and never fold. There are the ones who are vacationing and here to have fun, the ones who accept information technology seriously and are here to win, the ones who are here to take advantage of others, and the ones who only want to brand a few friends at the table. There are the talkers, the stalkers, the bullies, the friendlies. I watch all of them and, after the game, I take careful notes.
I enter a $60 daily tournament at Bally's. Information technology's small, but two tables' worth of players, but I feel a certain pride in watching the numbers dwindle to a single table, and then viii, seven, half dozen, until finally, I notice myself in the final four. And it's hard for me to comprise my excitement when I bomb a set up (three of a kind) of nines, an excellent paw if e'er there were. In that location'southward a bet before me, and I joyously shove all my chips into the middle. This is information technology. All my learning is paying off. I will finally accept my first tournament cash. I get chosen by a histrion who is hoping the dealer completes his affluent, and to my horror, the flush hits. I'g out, and devastated.
I most leave it all correct then and there. This game is so damn unfair. Just there's the knowledge, somewhere deep down, that it's to confront that very seeming unfairness that I turned to poker in the commencement place; I resolve to play on. I spend the next week playing day after solar day afterwards twenty-four hour period, taking careful notes, and talking them through with Erik. I'g a warrior, a storyteller, an explorer—not a lost minnow about to be eaten past the sharks. It's a mantra I repeat over and over, hoping that it will eventually stick.
Tuesday morning, I wake up early to make my side by side tournament: a x a.m. start at Planet Hollywood. I'thou surprised that any actual poker players are awake this early. I make my way across the walkway over the Strip that connects CityCenter and the Miracle Mile Shops, promptly get lost in a two-story Walgreens that I had thought was the entrance to the casino, and somewhen emerge into the actual Planet Hollywood. The poker room is in the center of the casino floor. I head to the desk and ask to register for the daily.
It's a proficient turnout today. Over the weeks, I've learned that sometimes these forenoon events get simply a table or two of players, and nosotros accept three already. Every 20 minutes, the blind bets increase. Information technology's a "turbo" structure, built for aggression and quick resolution. If y'all sit around likewise long, you'll find yourself without any chips at all, so y'all have to deed quickly—but act likewise quickly, and y'all'll find yourself out. I've slowly acclimated to the fast pace of the daily tournaments and trying to follow my lessons every bit best I tin within the time constraints. Today, it finally feels like it's coming together. I focus. I pay attention to the players. I try non to panic with the ascent blinds. Every bit each mitt is dealt, I imagine myself explaining the why of any action before I human action. Some players start busting. I'k still in.
Nosotros are down to just one table and I expect down at pocket queens, an excellent hand. I raise. I become chosen. Another player decides to shove, pushing all his chips to the heart. Past me might accept just folded, bold one of the two players had me beat and not wanting to take a chance my entire tournament. But today's me knows enough to call. I've been bluffed all week.
The actor afterward me folds, and we flip over our cards. My opponent has ace-king. It's about as skilful a situation equally I could hope for, short of him having a worse pocket pair. Certain, he tin can hit an ace or a king, and sure, I'm not exactly thrilled. I'd much rather he have ace-queen or ace-jack, reducing his chances of beating me. Simply at least every bit of now, I'one thousand a little bit alee. It'southward what's known as a classic race, a coin flip: Does the pocket pair concord, or does the ace-king outdraw it to win? The variance this time effectually is on my side. I more than double my stack of fries. Of a sudden, I'm the tabular array bit leader.
At that place are five of the states left. I take hold of some looks going on between the four others. All of them, of course, are men. "And so you lot want to talk near a chop?" the player to my right asks me. A chop is when the remaining players in a tournament hold to divide up the money rather than continue playing. Sometimes, it's done in a manner known as a chip chop—you go the amount of the prize puddle proportional to your portion of the chips. Other times, it's washed according to a principle known as ICM, or the Independent Chip Model, in which each bit is not created equal: Your payout also takes into business relationship the tournament payout structure (the percentage of the prize puddle designated to each identify) and your likelihood of finishing in your electric current position. Either way, y'all divide the coin and telephone call information technology a day.
As the scrap leader, I'thou the one to persuade to chop. I await around at the other players. I have more than than twice the next stack. I milkshake my head. "No, thanks. I'd like to play."
Another histrion busts. "Come on, permit's chop," says my neighbor.
"Yeah. Let'south just chop," says my other neighbor.
"It's in your best interest to only chop," says the tertiary remaining player. "Yous're in a position of power now. You'll get more money. Only you know you're gonna lose all those chips merely as quick as you won them. Just y'all wait."
That does it. I doggedly milkshake my head no, not trusting myself to make a coherent verbal statement. (Little do I know this is just mild banter compared with what I'll soon meet—existence propositioned; being called a cunt; existence dismissed equally a "picayune girl"; poker is a human's globe, and if you e'er forget it, someone will remind you right quick.) Soon, we're down to iii players—again the others ask: Chop, chop? No—then two, and and so, miracle of miracles, only one. I have won my first ever tournament, forth with some $900. I am over the moon.
"Will this be reported to the Hendon Mob?" I ask the man who'south counting out my payout. The Hendon Mob is the website that tracks all poker players' tournament winnings, and I'm excited at the thought that I will exist Hendon-official, a badge of laurels in my mind.
He looks at me with something like pity. "Sorry, honey. We don't report our dailies to Hendon."
I'1000 momentarily saddened past the news—merely the feeling of more than $900 in my hands and the knowledge that I take my kickoff-ever victory is enough to get me to forget the slight. I've now paid for my whole trip with one win. I have a bankroll! I am a role player! Somehow, this is far more exciting than winning online.
I emerge into the sunlight and send two text messages—to Erik and to my married man. The texts are identical: "I won my commencement tournament!!!!"
To Erik, I send a follow-up. "Tin I play the Aria tourney now?"
"You've earned information technology."
That evening, I'chiliad sitting at Aria—not watching, sitting!—at concluding. I feel exuberant. I bust quickly enough; there hasn't been some sort of miracle switch from losing to winning. But the next 24-hour interval, I play again. And the day subsequently that. And then I finally have it: my first always Hendon greenbacks. I place 2d, and this time, it's far more $900. I have $2,215 newly added to my proper noun, and I am on fire.
"It would be good for you to start playing a few higher buy-ins and meet how those experience," Erik tells me. Fifty-fifty I'yard non naive enough to recall that the game I'm playing at my level is the aforementioned one played at tournaments with college purchase-ins, where the skill level and complexity increase. These pocket-sized successes in the Vegas dailies aren't plenty to guarantee success elsewhere, nor are they enough to sustainably fund any sort of movement upward in stakes. Simply they are a offset, and for my purposes, that is practiced enough. I realize now how grateful I should be that Erik limited me to sub-$100 buy-ins to start. I've been in Vegas, on and off, for almost two months—and that's how long it's taken to go hither.
When I go back from Vegas, a alter, it seems, has already taken place. A few weeks later, I find my married man quietly observing me later on I get off the phone with my speaking agency. I've only turned down an date—the first time I've ever washed and then in my entire speaking career—and told them that I was worth more than what they were offering.
"Is everything okay?" I enquire him.
"You lot know, y'all take much less shit from people than you used to," he says thoughtfully, with something I take for admiration. "That's really good."
Over the coming months, I render to Vegas fourth dimension and time over again. I travel to Monte Carlo for my first major international upshot. I find myself in Dublin, in Barcelona, in the wilds of Connecticut. I have some small successes. And some bigger failures. Just I keep going. I desire to earn Erik's faith in me.
In Jan of 2018, most a year since I played my first hand of live poker, I alight on i of the oldest and nigh prestigious stops on the poker bout, the PCA, or PokerStars Caribbean Adventure. The Bahamas are beautiful, merely I encounter them only for the few minutes I spend walking exterior between my room and the casino. They say the more sightseeing you lot're doing on a poker stop, the worse you're likely playing. I've been spending a lot of time indoors. After sixteen hours of grueling play, I have made it to solar day ii of the tournament. I stumble into bed, only to realize I tin can't actually sleep for more than a few hours. The adrenaline rush is as well much. I enter the familiar spiral of I need to sleep to play well, oh no, I'yard not sleeping, this is terrible that anyone who has ever dealt with insomnia knows so well. And sleep or not, it's on to twenty-four hours ii.
Today, my caffeine-fueled mind is a muddle running on its last fumes, simply I make some hands and somehow avert busting. Which ways that—drumroll—I have managed to make the final tabular array. I'm among the last of viii players standing at a major international tournament. That dark, I jerk awake with the sense of dread that comes from a particularly disturbing nightmare. When I realize I'd dreamt of playing out a bad trounce in my head, I start laughing, a hint of hysteria creeping in.
At 11 a.m., my phone pings. It's Erik. "Job today: relax, focus, think. You worked difficult for this. Don't allow distraction."
I nod, forgetting for a 2nd that he tin't see me.
My phone pings once more. "I'm very excited and and so is Ru." Ru is Ruah—Erik'southward wife.
I get together my things and walk downward to the casino. I've been to concluding tables before, merely never at a major consequence. When I look around me, it seems like I must have entered an alternating timeline.
There's Chris Moorman sitting to the left of the dealer. Moorman is a feared tournament crusher who has been ranked in the past as the No. 1 online-tournament player in the earth. Harrison Gimbel is two seats to my left. I don't know him, but I practice know that he has won the coveted Triple Crown of poker—a WSOP bracelet, a WPT (World Poker Tour) championship, and a European Poker Bout title. Actually, he won the chief upshot at this very stop. He'due south on familiar turf. To my right is Loek van Wely, whom I recognize from looking him up the previous nighttime—a basic step in preparation. Van Wely is a chess k primary and Dutch chess champion, who was once ranked in the top x chess players in the earth. Another player is a Canadian pro with almost a million in earnings. Yet another is a pro from Chicago with over a million in earnings. I experience similar a full impostor.
Jared Tendler, my mental-game coach, wouldn't approve of my thinking, but I can't help myself. We worked on this very thing. "Anybody got lucky at some bespeak," he told me. "Strip downwardly the mythology around their greatness. They still have weaknesses. They are humans kickoff, players second."
I try to collect myself. I take deep breaths. I reflect on how far I've come up. Improbably, I'm second in chips, with over seventy big blinds to work with—exactly where y'all want to be heading into a final tabular array. I go a heave from a big surprise: When I walk into the tournament room, Seidel is there to greet me. He hadn't told me he'd come. He has a terminal table today, too, but non for a few hours. He could be resting. I'm chuffed. I tell him that I'm and so nervous I couldn't consume breakfast, and I'm worried I might actually vomit.
"One manus at a fourth dimension," he says. "The nerves go away when you are paying close attention to play. You've got this."
Easy for him to say, what with his countless final tables and titles. I put on a brave smiling and ask him if he has any concluding-minute advice.
He does. "Don't exist a fish," using poker slang for a weak role player.
And with that, he's off to kickoff his day and to watch the action from afar. Final tables are hell to watch in person, considering yous can't see hole cards. Don't be a fish, I repeat silently as I sit downwards and smile for the cameras. Don't exist a fish. Don't exist a fish.
The hours laissez passer. I lose some pots. I make mistakes. I rally. I focus. I retrench and build my stack back up. I should rightly bosom when I become a pair of sevens all in pre-bomb, simply to notice myself against a pair of aces. I'one thousand halfway out of my seat, and I get lucky with a miraculous sequence of cards that help me make a straight. I make more mistakes. But somehow, the players continue busting, one past one, and I am even so here.
I pick upward chips. I double up against an opponent I've been calling Aggro Oldie in my caput, on account of his overly aggressive approach that takes advantage of his image of an older man who wouldn't maybe bluff. He tries to bully me pre-flop, but I take a stand with a suited king-jack and agree against his queen-10. A few hands later, I knock him out of the tournament. He raises from the small blind, and I find myself in the big blind with the ace-rex of hearts, a monster hand under any circumstances, especially so now. I make a large bet, and he decides he'due south had enough of me and goes all in. I call instantly. He has ace-deuce, off adapt: I'm in smashing shape going to the bomb. I make a directly, and suddenly there are simply two of us. I am at my first major final table, playing heads upwards for a major title.
Earlier we restart play, I text Seidel. "Heads upwardly! I'one thousand chip leader." I ask him if I should consider talking virtually a deal. "If you think he'south practiced," he writes back. Later a interruption, he adds: "You've been practicing though."
He's right. I have, indeed. "I think I'll stick information technology out for now," I write back. I'm feeling this.
"That's the spirit!" Seidel replies. "Nosotros are walking over! So damn exciting." He and Ruah are making their way over to the casino to cheer me on.
The thought of them watching gives me an energy boost that propels me through the next few hands, until I face what could be a tournament‐changing decision. I enhance earlier the flop, holding the ace of clubs and king of spades. My opponent, Alexander Ziskin, a professional actor from Chicago, calls. The flop is two 10s and a seven, with ii spades. He checks. I bet again: My hand is even so very strong, and even if he has a pair, I have plenty of opportunity to improve. Just instead of folding or calling, the easy options, Alexander raises, to almost iii times my bet. I hesitate. Does he have a 10? If he does, I'one thousand in bad shape. I decide that he would phone call with a x instead—on a board that dry out, why not let me hang myself? I have ii overcards and a chance at a affluent. I call the raise. The plough is the deuce of spades, putting a tertiary spade on the board. "All in," he announces. Oh no. I have just ace‐high. What do I do?
My brain starts calculating. If I call and I'yard incorrect, he has the chip lead and the momentum. This is a huge decision, especially without and then much as a pair in my hand. But I do have a spade, and not just any spade—the king of spades. That means I could ameliorate to the best manus, if withal another spade is turned over on the concluding menu, even if I'yard at present behind. I afflict for several minutes, counting the combinations of possible bluffs he might have and whether or non they outweigh his value hands, before deciding that I but can't fold. The pot odds are in my favor. The math is on my side. And he probably knows how hard this is for me, making him that much more probable to attempt to pull a motility. He'southward the pro. I'm the amateur. He's been hither. I oasis't. I call.
Alexander turns over the jack of diamonds and the eight of spades. He has a gutshot straight draw (one carte can give him a straight) and a flush describe—but my mitt is still best. And my flush draw beats his. All I have to do is hold on, to avert i of the eight cards that will give him the winner (a nine, a jack, or an eight, every bit long as they are not spades). The cameras rush closer. The reporters huddle around. I look for Erik and Ruah, but everything is happening so apace that they haven't yet made it to the tabular array. The dealer waits until the floor manager tells her she tin flip the adjacent card.
We sit and wait. It seems to drag on forever. And finally, she gets the indicate. The river is dealt. It'due south the rex of hearts. I tin can't believe information technology. Alexander is getting up and walking over to shake my manus, and I still haven't quite registered information technology. I've merely won. $84,600 is mine. I'thou the 2018 PCA National champion. And I've got my buy-in for the World Series of Poker.
This article was excerpted from Konnikova'southward recent book, The Biggest Bluff.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/how-i-became-poker-champion-less-year/613372/
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