Today we will begin a look at being or becoming a poker pro, which has been a bit of a topic on the forum. Here is my take on the subject.

Plusses: There are many plusses for my chosen profession. These include:

· Naming your own hours.
· No bosses.
· Potential for huge scores.
· Meeting interesting people.
· Low start-up costs.
· Using your mind.
· Doing something you enjoy.

Let’s take a quick look.

Naming your own hours. I know a number of pros who gamble for a living for exactly this reason. Most pros (including the ones I am thinking of) make very little money, but enjoy considerable freedom, and that lifestyle makes the effort worthwhile.

No bosses. Assuming you can play from your own bankroll, you will not have a boss. Again, this is very pleasant as you are not beholden to anyone for your salary or annual increase or even to keep your job.

Potential for huge scores. There is a Holy Grail in poker and it is multiple major tournament wins, followed by fame, fortune, sex, TV exposure, adulation of the mob, an inflated ego, self-promotion and a ghostwritten book. And millions of dollars. It happens about as often as a Pop Warner football player becomes a Super Bowl quarterback, but it does happen. And it could happen to you.

Meeting interesting people. If you play live, you will be spending countless hours at the table. You might as well talk to the customers. Just yesterday, I had a nice talk with a former backgammon world champion from Europe. Sometimes you even get good advice about an investment, option or sports bet.

Low start-up costs. Unlike several other businesses you might decide to get into as a self-employed person, you can pretty much go into business whenever you wish. You do not have to find a storefront or office, buy furniture, hire staff, contract for utilities, or even advertise for customers. You just have to show up and pay rent while you are using the cardroom. And you can go into business for very little money.

Using your mind. There is great satisfaction from earning your living by simply doing something better than your competition. And it is fulfilling to use your brain to avoid doing “real work.”

Doing something you enjoy. Presumably people who become poker professionals do so because they love poker. (If not, they will be very sorry after a while). Millions of people are making a living doing something they at best tolerate and sometimes actively detest. So earning a living from an activity you truly love to do is very rewarding.

Okay, those are the positive things I can think of right now about being a professional poker player. And they are very seductive. Next week, I will continue this with a discussion of the negative factors about being a poker professional.

My interview over Internet radio is now scheduled for Thursday, October 26, at 6:00 PM. You can listen in live by going to www.holdemradio.com . Just connect to the site, hit the “Listen” button and listen. Lou Kreiger and Amy Calistri are the hosts of this broadcast, and will conduct the interview.

You can also listen to it (and all of the other interviews) in the show’s archives a few days after it airs, and as an i-Tunes podcast. Once it’s posted to the archives, it will be under “Keep Flopping Aces” on the h0ldemradio.com site.

Here is another excerpt from the book draft. There is no guarantee that this will appear in the book in any form. The concept is important to me, and describes the balance we need to achieve to beat middle limit games.

I want to take a moment and explain FUD. FUD is a term that was developed by a guy who used to run IBM in the 60s when a number of competitors to IBM were coming up with rival computers. In general, every rival computer that came out to compete with IBM was better than an IBM computer, because it had to be better. Who in the world would try to make a computer that is worse than IBM to compete with IBM?

IBM’s marketing strategy to hold down all those competitors with better machines was called FUD, which stood for fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The idea was to convince the market and individual buyers and particularly corporate officers that if you buy a non-IBM machine, who knows what might happen. Maybe it will get bad service. Maybe it won’t be good. If you go with IBM, you know you are getting a great machine, great service, great parts, and great support. If you go with anybody else, who knows what might happen. We used to have an old slogan that said, “Nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM computer.”

A poker player’s best friend is FUD. In order to be a top poker player, you must have the same attitude: that you want to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt amongst your opponents. You want them to be afraid of you. You want them to not understand you. You want them to never know exactly where you are. Opponents who are afraid, confused, and disoriented tend to become predictable. Theycan’t make a move against you because they don’t know where you are, so they tend to do things like check and call, only bet when they have real hands, and bluff less. That’s what you want. You want to have predictable opponents.

Rocks inspire fear, but they don’t inspire uncertainty and doubt. When a rock raises, opponents think, “Oh. I better avoid him. I’m not going to play my QT offsuit against this guy. I will fold my K9 suited in the blind. I will make a big sacrifice.” They have the fear factor, but they don’t have any uncertainty or doubt because people are very comfortable that they know what the rock is playing.

Loose-aggressive players, or even just loose players, inspire uncertainty and doubt. They[play a lot of hands, so people don’t know exactly where they are at, but they they are not inspiring fear. People don’t get nervous because a loose-aggressive player plays, or even raises, or a loose player plays, because it’s just part of the overall flow of the game that he’s going to play a lot of hands and he’s going to play or raise with AK and A5 and KQ and J9 suited, so nobody is fearing his raises or plays. Nobody thinks, “Oh, my God, he’s in the game! I don’t want to play.”

What we want to do is achieve a balance between fear and uncertainty and doubt. We want to be tight enough to inspire fear, but we want to be varied enough that there is a certain amount of uncertainty and doubt in the minds of the opponents, which will in turn do two things. One, it will help make them more predictable, because opponents that are uncertain tend to be more predictable. Two, it gets our big hands, which we hold most of the time, paid off.

What we want to do is create enough action that there is at least a modicum, if not more, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of the opponents as to whether we really have a hand this time. At the same time, we almost always want to have a real hand. We don’t want to act like an idiot, so we don’t want to create uncertainty in that way.

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.