The Value of Studying Poker part one

Back when I first started to study and learned how to play poker, I read and grabbed everything that I could possibly get my hands on regarding the game. I basically had every major book and I only stopped buying poker books when I realised something very important. As I played and studied the game, I had always thought that there were numerous instances where games and other sports seemed to share certain characteristics with poker but I never gave it much weight at first.

If you spot a connection between football and poker then there is nothing to say that it is just in your mind unless you speak about this with someone else. I was spotting connections with all sorts of games and even business as well. At first, I thought that these “connections” were not really connections at all but just a figment of my imagination.

But then I started to read about game theory and a whole new world of understanding opened up for me. The books that I was now reading were actually confirming my thoughts about everything being connected in some way. I had used tactics used by martial artists when I was playing poker because it felt right (I don’t mean hitting my opposition) but I still hadn’t had any confirmation that what I was doing and thinking was correct and the right way to go.

These books on game theory were teaching me that everything is connected even if it is only subtle and that when you attempt to learn a subject then you should not learn it in isolation from other subjects because they are all joined together in subtle ways. In the past I would study poker as a separate subject to betting exchanges and horse racing but I was reading many books on other subjects that had poker knowledge in them or at least it seemed that way to me.

When I read game theory, it was fantastic. It was almost like believing in the lost city of Atlantis and then finally discovering it to be real. But when you get there, you then find that others have discovered it before you. So what do I mean about other fields being connected with poker. Well the connections are all around you when you are aware of what to look for.

For instance there is a very good book that I highly recommend that you buy, in fact there are two books both by an author called Larry Phillips. They are “Zen and the Art of Poker” and “The Tao of Poker”.
In these books, Phillips teaches you to look at poker in a different way…a Zen way.

Whenever I watch the movie “Enter the Dragon” with Bruce Lee, I see countless connections to poker that years ago I simply would not have seen. On the boat going out to the island, there is a very aggressive New Zealander who is bullying the crew with his martial arts skill.

He approaches Bruce Lee and asks him what his style is. Lee replies that “it is the art of fighting without fighting” which totally confuses his opponent!

But only when you watch Lee in action do you realise that he often waits for his opponent to make the first move unless he is fighting someone with whom he has a personal grudge. I noticed that this style of letting your opponent come onto you can be used in poker.

Judo is another martial art where you use your opponent’s strength and weight against them and I use this concept a lot in poker games. I use it when people try to bully me and especially another big stack. In part two I will discuss big stacks against big stacks.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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