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The Biggest Winners Are the Biggest Losers

Let’s be honest with each other: isn’t there a clandestine charm in checking the poker sites’ lists to see the previous day’s biggest winners – and biggest losers?

Sure there is. But have you noticed something? Both lists contain the same names, just not simultaneously. The guys who won the most yesterday show up as the biggest losers tomorrow. How’s that for a weird coincidence?

The art of playing aces

It’s a bit like picking up your hole cards in Texas Holdem and finding two aces. You know that you hold a potential big winner, but also that premium hands often lead to big losses.

With aces you’ll have to raise at least two or three times before a fold can even be considered, and often you’ll be forced to play the hand for the rest of your chips. On the contrary, with a hand like 8-3 you’ll just muck the cards and move along, losing nothing and winning zero.

In eastern religious traditions there’s a principle of wisdom called the middle way. It’s often interpreted as a command to seek moderation in everything, which may sound quite meek to some westerners.

But another way of seeing this rule is that a balanced life requires you to be in touch with both extremes of everything, rather than always staying in the middle.

Variation is the spice of life

In this view, a balanced follower of Tao would typically alternate gluttonous outbreaks with periods of austere diet; luxurious vacations with low-key cocooning; public-transit commuting with a late-model weekend car.

Is this what high-stakes poker players do? Living in balance with the universe by regularly visiting both ends of the poker world’s largest win-loss scale? One day winning millions of dollars just to lose similar amounts the day after?

Probably not. Big wins matched by big losses is just a natural consequence of playing poker with big money on the table. The variation is directly related to the bet size. As a $0.5/$1 player, how could you ever expect to either win or lose a million dollars in a single day?

Nevertheless, the insight that big winners are also big losers puts the fuss about today’s colossal poker winnings in perspective.

Note to historians: In August 2007, being a poker pro was still a hard way to make an easy living.

/Spinner

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 6:16 am and is filed under Other, Poker, Texas Hold'em. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.