The Cards Have It Out For Me
David reflects on the nature of fate.
The other day while at my local card room in Seattle, I won a heads-up pot worth around $100 against a single opponent. I don’t remember the details of the hand but my opponent was really miffed by the runout. A few hands later, he lost another big hand. Shortly afterwards, he leaned over to me and started whispering to me, conspiratorially.
“Something’s wrong with these cards tonight, man. This is some kind of setup.”
I’m barely understanding what he’s even implying but I just nod at him mindlessly.
“Like, did you see that hand? The ace comes on the river? The EXACT card where it would be perfect for me to call and lose a ton of money? Naw. This place must be setting up the cards in a certain way to make this shit happen.”
I finally grok what he’s saying. He thinks that the poker room is engineering the cards in such a way to maximize the drama and, in this case, his losses. It’s a ludicrous idea but on some level I can understand why someone would believe this. Sometimes you get so unlucky that you think there just has to be something else at work.
Fast forward two weeks. I’m in the Monarch Casino in Black Hawk, Colorado. The poker room is hopping. Every single table is full. I buy in for a $1/$3 No Limit game.
I’ve been playing for a few hours when I pick up pocket 3’s in middle position. A player in UTG+1 position puts in a raise to $20 or so. I call along with one other player. There’s about $60 in the pot.
The flop comes: A45 rainbow. The original raiser puts in a big bet of about $40. Typically I’d fold in this situation but with the gut-shot possibilities, I decide to call one time and see what develops on the turn.
It’s heads-up and to the turn and it’s a miracle card: a 2, giving me a wheel/straight, but putting a flush draw on board. The original raiser slows down and checks it over to me. I decide I’m not letting him see a free river and put in a bet of $100, around 2/3rds pot. Admittedly this was too big of a bet (and I probably should have checked it to let the raiser bet into me on the river), but to be honest I was not on my A-game. I was still in the process of figuring out all the new rules at this Colorado poker room, which had different rules for straddles, different chip denominations, and different max bet sizes than I’m typically used to.
The original raiser gets super upset and folds. He understands intuitively that I’ve just hit a miracle card and that his hand (likely AK, AQ, or KK — he never showed) is no good. And he just starts going on this massive rant.
“I can’t win a hand! Every single time I play a good hand against someone, they always hit a miracle card and beat me! Every single time! My aces keep getting cracked! My poker hands are cursed.”
He goes on like this for a good 5-10 minutes, aggressively questioning my skills, then directing his anger at other people at the table, who also somehow start hitting great river cards and sucking out on him, throwing him further on tilt.
It’s an unpleasant thing to see someone lose their composure at the table. You can’t tell the person to calm down because that will often only antagonize them further. So the only thing you can do is wait it out and hope for their emotional outburst to blow over, maybe occasionally assuaging them. “Yeah, man, that’s brutal,” you might say, throwing in a subtle nod for good measure.
Eventually, the player busts out and leaves. The remaining players at the table all have a good laugh about him. One player commented on how that guy just didn’t seem to understand that poker can be a brutal, heartbreaking game. To me, it’s weird that someone would sit down at a game without that understanding.
As I reflected on these games, I thought about why people need to tell themselves stories about other forces at work that are dooming them to lose horribly. In reality, the cards don’t give a shit about you. They’re fed through a machine that randomizes their order. The dealer shuffles and cuts the deck without any knowledge or care about your personality or your financial circumstances. It’s sometimes said that anytime a card deck is shuffled, the cards have never appeared in that order in the history of the universe. There’s something about the indifference of the cards that stands in stark contrast to the passion with which people believe they’re not indifferent, that they care a great deal about you, actually, and they’re here to make sure you specifically have a bad time, for some reason.
To quote Maria Konnikova, author of The Biggest Bluff:
Poker isn’t just about calibrating the strength of your beliefs. It’s also about becoming comfortable with the fact that there’s no such thing as a sure thing—ever.
The lack of a sure thing is difficult to live with. Uncertainty is difficult to live with. When people say “the casino has it out for me” or “the cards have it out for me,” they’re attempting to replace uncertainty with the comfort of some kind of certainty, no matter how tenuous.
Sadly, there’s no comfort to be found.
Love this.
Also, on the turn, you’re right about it probably being too big :). But in those cases (obviously dependent on other factors) but best to go smaller to villain to call with their weak holdings and reraise with the strong holdings to let em telegraph their hand.
I used to think this was a pretty unique thing to the poker/gambling world but as I've grown up I've seen people with this exact attitude towards anything that doesn't go their way, from their job advancements to the stock market. Must be a stressful yet oddly reassuring way to live.