POKER BY NUMBERS

Exhale…push’em all in and sit back. You’ve done the math, calculated your odds and now it’s up to fate. Poker players must possess several qualities in order to be successful…none more important than the ability to step back and let the chips fall where they may.
You already know that poker is a game of odds. The longer you play, the more you tend to apply odds and probabilities to your game. When you first started playing you likely left a lot of your decision up to chance, lacking the knowledge or perhaps just the discipline to calculate your actual odds of winning and weigh them against the spoils of the pot. As your game progressed and you gained knowledge, you instinctively applied a different approach…opting to gamble less and calculate more.

Once you reach a certain level, all the odds, angles and expected values actually start playing tricks on you. Since you have studied and practiced, you feel like you have every angle down. It is very easy to forget that poker is still a game of chance. That’s what makes our game so beautiful, it’s not the smartest or best player that always wins. There is always the chance trump card, a miracle inside straight or quads on the river. Chance rears its head in many forms on the poker table, each time it adds another bad beat story to the books.

That is where poker by numbers comes in. You stop playing the hand and start playing long term. Chance becomes your advantage, realizing that you will profit over the long term by other players undying commitment to chance. Calculate each hand the best you can, take a breath and make your move. Each time trust that the powerful force of chance will eventually have to bend to the unstoppable laws of math.

No matter how much you play, how calculating you are, there is always a time when you have to succumb to chance and have faith. That is the key. Professionals keep from going insane when a miracle draw hits, by playing the numbers rather than the hand. Each all-in or hard call is written off instantly. Do your best, make your read and then let the chips fall where they may. You may not win that hand, but you have to hold true to the cardinal rule of poker…math always beats chance in the end. This is the rule that governs the very philosophy of every professional player. If you can’t expect that eventually correct play will win out over luck then you might as well take your buy-in and go join the other tourists on the slots.

If you take one thing from this article, I guess you could call it the moral of the story, it should be “That you’ve gotta have faith.” Poker by numbers means that you are never again going to be so upset by a bad beat that you go on an hour long tilt and lose it all. You can now rest easy, the Zen of poker has just been revealed. The outcome of one hand should mean nothing. You play by the numbers. Not the numbers of today, but the numbers overall, and there’s a certain calming effect in that. You know that when it’s all said and done, all the luck in the world isn’t going to help a poor player. The numbers always win.

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