Poker Strategy 
/ Marcus Bateman / 11 May 2011 / Leave a Comment 
“You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf “
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Control is a central part of the human experience. We see wild forests and create ordered fields, we see fast cars and make speed limits, we see large groups of people and call the riot squad. The human brain generally struggles with all behaviour that is outside of our control - order and pattern creation is simply too inbuilt into our minds.
Then something like poker comes along. We have some control; able to fold, call or raise at given moments. Outside of this basic control we might as well be in a living world of pure chaos, with bizarre moves by our opponents, endless bad beats and impossible variance, and constant uncertainty about when games will start or end and what shape they will take when they do.
Arguably the central principle which makes poker a profitable game for some and a losing game for others is in how people respond to this uncertainty. We have to learn to stay sane in the face of bad beats, decipher the bizarre play of someone else as best we can, and create and keep games running as long as possible. Often the divide between a good player and a weak one has little to do with how they play when winning, it's how they play when everything goes wrong.
It may sound an odd analogy, but a winning poker player is often very much like the captain of a ship in a storm, where simply being able to stay afloat and on course in the face of the chaos around them is a huge result in itself. Weak and strong alike get their ships home in calm seas - only the strong get home when the waves turn against them.
Poker is an exceptionally unpredictable and uncontrollable game. If it wasn't it would be called chess and very few would ever bet on it. From trying to shade a one out beat on the river, through to working out why your opponent keeps making huge check raises, all the way to getting to grips with a thirty buy in down-swing despite playing nearly perfectly, poker never really goes as expected. We are at the mercy of the bizarre shaped waves that keep rolling onto our shore, and as the Jon Kabat-Zinn so rightly points out, we can't stop these waves, but we can learn to surf - it is the beauty of poker at its heart, and here's to it.
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