I am trying to devote a lot of time to my book these days. So I am just dropping an excerpt from my draft in here. This particular one deals with the idea of comfort zone as it applies to strategic decisions. Needless to say, the book will have much more information about this.

People play the style of game they’re comfortable playing. Aggressive people play aggressively, and passive ones play passively. People who like to gamble play a gambling style, and people who like sure things play more submissively until they make the nuts.

And many people cherry-pick the literature. They buy a bunch of poker books, then select from them the concepts that support or reinforce their comfortable position. Unfortunately for them, many books, including this one, present an integrated method in which all of the recommended plays form a complete system. Taking a concept or play out of this system may not be as effective as using it as part of an integrated whole.

For example, Doyle Brunson’s classic book Super System presents a method for playing power no limit hold’em in a deep stack environment. In it, Doyle tells us that when he wins a pot he always plays the next hand. So some people who read the book and do not play deep stack no limit, or even follow any other of Doyle’s principles, think that this one idea is very cool, since it gives them a reason to play a lot of trash hands and blame it on Doyle. They enjoy playing hands so they find an authority who gives them an excuse, while ignoring all of the other things they have read about tight-aggressive because they is not how they want to play.

But playing too many hands is not the only way players fall into a comfort zone. Perhaps the most common is simply calling.

When somebody bets, it seems incredibly comfortable to call. It’s a nice middle of the road compromise action. You look at your hand and think, “Well, I don’t want to fold because I may win. I don’t want to raise because I may not win, and if I don’t I’ll have wasted all of this money in raising. So I’ll call.”

That seems like a viable alternative. But it doesn’t avoid a decision; it makes a decision. It makes a decision to call, but it appears like it avoids the two more drastic alternatives. By doing that, it’s comfortable. Calling is comfortable.

People call before the flop when it’s wrong because it is comfortable. They don’t want to fold and then feel bad that they missed a chance to win a lot of money. They certainly don’t want to raise because they’re hand is not “as good as it should be” to raise, so they call. In the middle of a hand, they call, and at the end of the hand, they call. That’s an example of being comfortable.

Some people are very comfortable playing tight. It fulfills what I believe is the same emotional need to not commit money to a pot you might lose. The vast majority of people are unwilling to commit money to a pot they might lose; they want to see first if they are going to win it. So you get a phenomenon like this, where a guy makes a flush on the turn and there’s a bet and a call and he calls, because another flush card might come and somebody might make a bigger flush. He would feel badly if he raised and the people then called and drew out on him one way or another. He wants to wait until the river to make sure his hand is good, and then he’ll raise. Of course, by doing that he costs himself any number of opportunity bets, but people don’t look at the game in terms of lost bets by the other guys that they might have won had they taken action; they look at the game in terms of lost bets by themselves.