Tommy Angelo is a poker player, writer, and coach who's been shaping the game for decades. Tommy practices and coaches painless poker, and his books, articles and videos have helped serious poker players around the world.
What I’m about to say is hard to fathom, even though we all know it’s true: Your phone is an inanimate object. It just sits there, dead like a stone, until you decide to bring it to life.
What if, during your poker sessions, you deployed your phone for the sole purpose of playing better poker? I did that very thing, and now I’m reporting in with musings, takeaways, and a story.
All hail the smart phone
Phones score high marks for assisting us in three of our life-long poker ambitions:
Less tilt: Gazing into our screens, we eliminate the past and the future, which is where tilt lives.
More patience: Boredom can cost us money, as can the craving for action. Between preflop folds, phones can keep the boredom at bay and the cravings in check, and that keeps our VPIPs from creeping up.
Fun and growth: Folding a lot doesn’t have to feel dull or unproductive. Between folds, you can use your phone for engagement, entertainment, laughter, project stuff, self-help stuff, and of course, poker stuff. It’s all there, on your little window to wonderland.
The real reason why phones feel good
Before the internet, the best media distraction in public poker rooms was at 6am, when the exercise shows came on. Nowadays, we’re all packing customized amusement. The media and its consumption have changed, but the benefits are the same.
Phones give you a dose of the greatest anesthetic on Earth: nowness. Your attention is on what’s in front of you, and nothing else.
And look what that does for your poker. Your simmering impatience, gone. Your shame over paying off OMC, gone. Your anger over getting slowrolled by seat six, gone. All of your fears and worries – playing bad, running bad, looking bad – gone.
Only when your mind wanders into the past, as it does between hands, does your baseline unease resume. Phones provide enough nowness to dispel the past. That’s why they feel good.
In praise of texting
In the beforetime, if I wanted to communicate with someone who couldn’t hear my voice, I had two options: I could walk to a telephone and dial their memorized phone number and hope they were home, or, I could write them a letter, with a pen, or a typewriter, and paper, that I folded to fit into an envelope that I stuck a stamp on and wrote an address on and delivered to a mailbox.
That was it. If you wanted to say hi, you could call or write. And when you did, or when someone called or wrote to you, it felt really good.
Now we can do howdy-hos all day long that make us feel good, and when we feel good, we play good. This is how texting can be +EV, when it’s a chipper exchange, and brief.
But let’s say the texting has you agitated. Even then it can be +EV to type at the table, if you’re already tilted and spewy. Your bankroll needs you to tighten up right quick, and a sudden dose of texted drama can make that happen.
The cost of distraction
Phones are powerful medicine, with astonishing healing powers, but they do come with expensive side effects.
When we aim our eyes and ears at a screen, we starve our analytical mind – a mind hungry for intel on each opponent – and we deprive our intuitive mind, a mind that only functions properly when glutting on info.
Missed information is like money lost – money that can never be recovered. Consider the gorgeous geysers of information that we call showdowns. Each time I miss one due to distraction, it feels like my net worth just took a hit.
Wispy patterns of probability inform and inspire my highest-EV bluffs and my most confident mucks. My best requires that I am in tune with the ceaseless spikes of pain and pleasure going on around me.
If I don’t know who just shifted into tilt gear and who just put the brakes on their racing VPIP, then why do I have eyes and ears?
Bottom line: When my mind leaves the table, it leaves money behind.
Project Phone Fruit
Despite the cost, phone use at the table can still be +EV, compared to going without.
It’s a least-of-evils choice. I sometimes wonder: If I left my phone at home, would my poker score go up or down? It’s a moot question, since I want and need my phone with me at all times like any normal person.
But those opinionless contemplations did conjure up a new and profitable vision. I could see low-hanging fruit on the money tree. To pick it, all I had to do was treat phone use like any other aspect of my game and obsessively improve it.
And from that, a project was born:
Mission Statement of Project Phone Fruit
To analyze my behavior and implement changes designed to derive the maximum mental benefit from phone-usage at the poker table while keeping the lost-information-costs to a minimum.
In theory, if I taper back my phone minutes and convert that time to poker-flow time, the sum of the EVs of my plays will go up.
And that’s what happened. During my last four sessions, I was on my phone less which meant I was in the game more. Can I prove that my earn rate moved a few pips closer to perfect? Nope. But it sure feels like it did, and really, I don’t see how it couldn’t.
Here’s a look at my fruit basket, and four of the changes I’ve made.
No more phone on the table
It just doesn’t belong there. Nothing does, except what does. Once I decided to reduce my phone’s impact on my game, this was the easiest, sweetest fruit to pick.
No more detours
I don’t mind being a mindless slave to impulse, until it costs me money. If I’m so distractable that random phone activity is enough to keep me from watching the game, then that right there, the distractibility alone, is a sign that I’m not in my best mindset.
My intent now is to breathe life into my inanimate object only when I have a specific task to accomplish, and when that’s finished, put it away, right away.
Efficient listening
Ouch! That hand stung. But only because I’m tender. I could go for some max-volume rock-and-roll right now, to set me right.
In go the AirPods, cranked.
Yep, I’m okay in here. So what if I haven’t tipped the dealer in two hours. Just listen to that bass track. Friggin amazing.
When the music’s medicinal effect wanes, it becomes recreational listening, which I used to do, but no more. The new cycle is: I need help, I get it, and then back to the game.
Airplane mode
Duh.
A phone story
Full cash game. Public poker room. All young folks. A guy and gal play a pot.
They’re on opposite ends. On the river, he checks, and she checks behind with the nuts. That raises some eyebrows, and suspicions, especially those of Loud Larry in seat five.
The guy and gal both go straight to their phones and start typing and smiling. Larry is watching all this, heat rising. They both look at him and break out laughing.
“You think it’s funny?” says Larry. “There’s nothing funny about cheating.”
The guy waves the floorman over, who is only a few feet away. The guy hands his phone to the floorman and says, “Would you please read those last four texts between me and seat three?”
The floorman makes an odd face then starts to read:
GUY: Are any of these guys hotter than me?
GAL: I wouldn’t throw seat five out of my tent.
GUY: LOL!!
GAL: You’re so lucky I said yes.
Everybody laughed and smiled and congratulated the couple, with Larry the loudest.
You can find more from Tommy Angelo at tommyangelo.com.
Images courtesy of Jeremy Adams/Alexandre Boucher/Sigmund/Unsplash.
