A few years ago before the GOP snuck the UIGEA into the Safe Port Act in the 11th hour, I would play quite a bit of online poker. I also frequented the 2+2 forum and read a lot of poker books. Some of those books were quite good, others were total crap. The same can be said for PUA/game publications. I don’t play much poker anymore, I’ve got better things to do. As I think RooshV has said, you can’t meet (attractive) women if you’re sitting at a poker table. A lot of the mental energy I spent on poker has been focused on learning game and of course correcting the errors and mistakes I make along the way.
On the surface, poker can appear to be a simple game. A player has only three actions. Raise, Call, or Fold. The first parallel I’d like to draw between Poker and Game has to do with something I once heard Howard Lederer say. I am going to paraphrase here. He said the idea was to play each hand as perfectly as possible. The cards will fall as they may, you might win, you might lose. The winning and losing don’t matter, how you play the hand is what’s important. Did you misread your opponent? Did you over bet? Did you call when you should have raised or folded?
I take a similar outlook with game. Perfection is the goal, but I also understand that it is inevitable that errors and mistakes will be made. I used to play a hand over in my mind after a loss. When I was playing online, I’d use a program to re-run the hand. I wanted to see where I could have played better, or if I’d just done everything correctly and gotten unlucky.
With poker and game (especially when first starting out) it is easy to become outcome dependent. Focusing too much on the desired result means I wasn’t focused enough on what was presently going on. Actions or signals get missed because I was too much in my own head and not in the moment. One of my poker psychology books talks about how we tend to internalize our failures more than our successes. In essence we feel the intensity of the pain of losing more than we do the joy of winning. Sound familiar? I know the rejections always seem to last longer in my psyche than the scores.
One could argue the fact that both poker and game use reading body language to glean additional information and that this is also a similarity. Superficially, this is true. But let me ask you. Would you rather be able to read the body language of a bunch of guys who work at hiding their internal state, or would you rather read the body language of a gal who hasn’t worked at hiding and isn’t consciously trying to hide her emotions and internal state?
Poker is competition mostly with men. Game is also competition. The obvious similarity is game is not competition with the opposite sex. It’s competition with all the other men who also would like to jump into our target’s pants. Most of the people I play(ed) poker with are colloquially called fish. They feed the sharks who have worked hard on improving their skill at poker. When fish get lucky despite playing poorly, they’re known as donkeys. Game also has their terms. Chode. AFC, and when a guy gets (un)lucky – beta provider.
