There is another similarity between Poker and the NFL. This has more to do with cash games, though it has a role in tournament play also. It’s critical hands or critical downs. And in these key hands or plays if luck is on your side you’ll be a bigger winner than a loser. Whether you play online poker on a pc or play poker online on a mac there are always memorable hands that you can probably recite action by action, bet by bet, raise by reraise, or check by check. Using our memories are a little clearer on the ones that got away than the hands we scooped.
In tournament play, the short run luck is on a double up hand at a final table is far more significant than an hand in the first level. Sure you bust out with both, but you don’t get many opportunities at a final table and you have plenty of chances to play the first level of a tournament. Also, the final table has huge swings in the money awarded for each spot higher you finish. There are competing dynamics at play… you want to win all the chips but you also want to survive elimination.
The better players will tell you the bold get rewarded with more first places than the passive, and that’s true to extent but any time you are risking something you are playing with your tournament life. How many times have you seen a player with half the stack of another double up through him and a couple of hands later eliminate the formerly big stack. Oftentimes, the big stack had the best of it the first time but his hand didn’t hold. You could point to the aggressiveness of the short stack for his advancement, but at the same time the big stack’s aggressiveness caused his elimination.
In cash games the critical hands are a little different. Let’s say you have 500 in poker chips in front of you and your opponent has 250, another opponent has 300, and they both call all in preflop. You have aces. You of course call, with the potential to add another 550 to your stack and only have to risk 300 to do so, AND you have the best possible starting hand. You face pocket KK and AK–couldn’t ask for a better spot. You are a huge favorite. The flop comes out AQ8. Turn a jack and river a 10. Your opponents chop the pot and win part of your 300. Now you are left with 200 in chips. Instead of having 1150 you have 200.
Before you can reload, the very next hand you get AA again. Before the action gets you two players shove, one with 750 and the other with 1200. You call and this time you triple your money to 600. Above where you started from. Later that night you cash out a modest winner but then you think back to that swing hand. Had the river not been a 10, how much could you have won?
Well, if your hand held you would have entered the second hand with 1150. You won have won 750 from one opponent and 1150 from the other: so + 1900. In total, you would have had 3050 in poker chips. The 600 you cashed out for a modest winner, suddenly doesn’t feel so significant because you lost that one big wing hand, you ended up not taking down an additional 2400.
In part iv, we’ll examine the similarity to this in football.