An elevator anecdote from Aaron Jones prompted me to share a sans-stair story of my own. A recent visit to my gym found me sharing 30 seconds with a middle-aged yummy mummy already in her Lycra workout gear. I said, “Hello,” as I always do when I encounter another person in a lift and was met with a rather overly-enthusiastic response. “Oh, Hi!!,” she replied and then continued to recount to me some tale the details of which I cannot recall. Suddenly, she interrupted herself,
“I’m sorry, I thought you were the father of one of my children.”
…
…
(I’m not)
…
Her response (to herself) was to now turn and face the wall of the elevator and then sprint out as quickly as possible once we reached the gym floor. Of course, conversationally, she had spewed, but everybody does. It wasn’t offensive (in fact indirectly flattering) and the faux pas of mistaken identity is an easy error to commit. If she had had the mindset that, “everyone says stupid things sometimes,” she might not have reacted in such a negative-life-EV manner
Change scene to the verdant felt of online poker and your author has been three-betting a wide range against a weak-tight Polish player for the last half-hour, picking up 40-something big blinds from C-betting flops and double-barreling appropriate turns. Hero picks up AKKJss and gets 4-bet for the first time. We think for a couple of seconds, a voice in the back of our head moans, “The nit only ever has Aces…fold!” and we ship it in.
Obviously he has Aces.
Obviously we don’t suck out.
We lose a 200BB pot and our last half hour of exploitative play has been ostensibly for nothing, and we definitely should have folded. Obviously.
As in life, this spew doesn’t matter too much, as long as it doesn’t happen too often. Every pro spews sometimes, including even poker luminaries such as shaundeeb, Elky, Phil Galfond and Isildur12. What does matter is how we react to it. All too often, my reaction will be to start 3betting the weak-tight player even wider to “get it in and get it back.” Whilst this can have some positive unintended consequences,3 changing one’s play based on emotion ahead of reason is a thing for losers in poker, not winners.
Instead I should have reflected more positively; the fact that this player’s 4-bet range is so narrow that I can 3b/fold AKK is good news for me, not bad. I would still have got stacked by a better player, it would just be a cooler, yet against this player I can make better decisions in the future by 3bet/folding such hands. It is also interesting to examine the emotions underlying our sudden change in play-style post-spew. Presumably we are already trying to play the optimal style (most profitable) that we can against this opponent. Thus a sudden non-reasoned change in our play is achieving nothing more than punishing ourselves in the form of reducing our own win-rate! That this is absurd is obvious, but to understand the emotion we come full-circle. We need to accept that “everybody spews sometimes,” and not hold ourselves to an unattainable perfect standard where we never make stupid mistakes. Once we can do that, our reaction (or lack of) to each spew will see a dramatic increase in our win-rate.
What happened to the woman in our story? I now encounter her, on average, four times a week in the gym and every time she tries to avoid eye contact or scurries around in an embarrassed manner when I say, “Hi.” A little more composure after her conversational spew and her life would be a lot easier.
Don’t punish yourself folks, and poker won’t punish you.
Leave A Comment