Money Money Money!

Author: Poker Penguin

Summary: When you sit down at the poker table, your money stops being money.

To be a truely successful poker player, I believe that money can only be viewed as a way of keeping score. If I paused to think about the fact that I have maybe two month’s wages, in my bankrolls, or that I just lost a pot the size of my week’s wages then I’d probably quit. I mean, money is something you have to struggle for and value, and save.

I remember reading a story about a poker pro whose wife was in a car accident and rang him at the table. He asked “is anyone hurt?”, when he found out there wasn’t, he wanted to get back to the game. She started to tell him about the $1500 damage to the Jaguar. His response was “Honey, at the moment, I’m stuck four beautiful Jaguars”. Money is a tool at the poker table, nothing more, nothing less. Of course it has real value. We wouldn’t be playing otherwise.

Until recently, I think the big hurdle in my game was thinking about Poker-money in terms of what it would buy in the real world. This meant that 2-4 scared me. Despite a relatively adequate bankroll, I couldn’t make the step up. Then I did when the game looked too fishy to ignore. After the traumatic loss of 75BB (see how it’s not money anymore), I had an epiphany. I hadn’t just lost $300, I had temporarily given 75BB in to the custody of fish.

This new attitude was rewarded the next day when I chased a certain pair of fish into a 3-6 game, and ran up a win greater than my total loss for yesterday. It’s not money, it’s chips. In a limit game, it’s Small Bets and Big Bets. The aim is to amass more of these than you started with.

Why do I think that ignoring the value of money is a good idea? Especially when better players than I are telling you to tighten up by counting the real value of that “just one bet” you’re calling. Because I believe that to play tight-aggressive, and to make correct semi-bluffs / value bets, you have to ignore the real value of money and focus soley on its role in accumulating more money.

In this respect, I think a good poker player is like a trader in the financial markets. We move large sums of money around in the hopes of making smaller sums. Sometimes it goes right, other times it goes wrong. But overall, we hope to make more on our good trades than we lose on our bad trades.

Is top pair top kicker against a calling station with a potential flush on the board really worth risking an hour’s wages? It’s not exactly what I’d call an hour’s worth of entertainment. But, it is a good use of a Big Bet.

So yeah, don’t think about how much money you’re betting, just the number of bets and it might improve your game.