Jim Reid is a longtime lover of poker, a member of the PokerOrg Player Advisory Board, and host of the popular RecPoker podcast.
Hey gang! Another week in the books, another week closer to the WPT World Championship, another week of coaching from Matt Affleck - damn, you just gotta love it, don’t you?
Actually, ‘loving it’ was something that came up in my conversation with long-time player, producer and grinder Rob Perelman on the RecPoker podcast this week: Now that he’s playing for fun again, does he still ‘love’ the game?
I always say when playing poker you should be either: 1) loving the experience, or 2) making money. If you aren’t doing at least one of those (ideally both!) then you can probably find a better way to spend your time.
I hear from a lot of pros that over the course of their ascent into the upper echelons of the poker world, they have lost their love of the game by the very process by which they have made a living from it: by removing the awesome wonder and magic of the game and replacing it with the cold hard math and science of probabilities, by bringing a kind of practical stoicism to the highs and lows of variance, and by disconnecting themselves emotionally from the outcomes of their actions and instead focusing only on their processes.
This is as much a survival tactic as it is a competitive advantage: to emotionally survive the volume of play that is required as a professional, you truly must divorce yourself from the results of your play. Lady Luck is fickle, and her whims are beyond your control, so you focus on what you can control. You study. You grind. You study. You grind. You turn the magic into mathematics, and you solve what you used to wonder at.
Boy. I mean… ugh, that just sounds terrible.
The wonder and the magic
I’ve been playing poker for a lot longer than I’ve been a student of the game. I taught myself some fundamentals back in the day, but it wasn’t until I joined RecPoker that I started actually studying poker, talking about it strategically and academically with friends, thinking about the entirety of the game, and developing strategies and exploits that spanned more of the branches of poker’s decision trees.
Of course, as a recreational player it’s always been a pleasure to come back to poker from time to time and find all its puzzles and mysteries waiting there for me. And folks, I have a confession: I’m afraid I love discussing and dissecting poker even more than I love playing it! And that is a LOT!
Studying with friends - even the boring old math and science of it - is so energizing to me that it feels more like play than like work, although I’m sure it helps that I don’t do it all day, every day, like a job. So I hope I can continue to improve as a player, but slowly enough that I can still enjoy the wonder and magic of this great game. The idea of solving poker is a tragedy to me.
A guiding light
That being said, one of the reasons I recommend coaching, even for less-experienced players (especially for less-experienced players!), is that you can spare yourself all the time-consuming and frustrating missteps on your path to improvement, and just skip merrily ahead to the good stuff at the end!
That’s one of the things I love about working with Matt Affleck: sure, if given the right tools I might eventually come up with some of the amazing processes and insights he is sharing with me in our weekly sessions. But how long would it take me to get there on my own? Months? Years?
I’m not working on this stuff all day, every day. If I want to run on ahead, I need someone to show me the path; it would take me forever to find it alone. They can’t walk it for me, but they can shine a light ahead and tell me where not to step. That’s immensely valuable, and not just for pros.
So tune in next week for a very strategy-tip-heavy column as I pack my bags (and my brain) as full as they can be, and fly back to Vegas for my next magical adventure!
Check back next week for more from the hardest working ‘Rec’ in poker, Jim Reid.
