The strange grammar of poker

Every specialized field develops a language all its own. Poker is no exception. But even after being fully immersed in the game for well over a year now, and pretty intensely involved in it for a year or so before that, some of what is generally accepted as correct lingo still falls hard on my ears.

The first phrase I remember catching my attention as being just plain confusing was the phrase "dead to," as in "He's dead to a jack or a queen." This means the opposite of what one would initially tend to think. I first understood this to me "If a jack or a queen comes, he's dead; otherwise he'll win." But it's actually used to mean just the opposite: "He has to catch a jack or a queen, or he's dead." The syntax there still doesn't make sense to me.

The next one I started encountering was "running good." This has a specific meaning, which is "getting lucky." It is not to be confused with playing well, which is an entirely different concept. And the adverb good appears to be universal, even though it sounds like a grammatical clinker; nobody ever says that he is "running well." Of course, that bleeds over into the other half of the poker equation, so that people tend to say things like "I've been running good and playing good." Or this, from Kristy Gazes's blog: "70% of the time I ran bad, 20% of the time I played bad...." (http://www.kristygazes.com/tips/Jul+2007) I've mostly gotten used to the first half of sentences like those; I will probably never get used to the second half, because "good" and "bad" as adverbs (instead of "well" and "badly") are just never going to sound right.

One that I've heard much more commonly from high-level professionals than from the low-limit players I usually associate with is the use of "winner" and "loser" as adjectives, rather than nouns. You have to learn to think of them as synonyms for "up" and "down," or "ahead" and "behind." As I've mentioned several times recently, I've been re-watching all of the past episodes of GSN's "High Stakes Poker," and this comes up all the time there. "I want to be able to quit winner for a change," and "I was doing OK, but I just got loser," are a couple of examples of this peculiarity. In one episode, commentator Gabe Kaplan says that the stage is set for action, because "all the right people are loser." What he meant was that when people are losing, they tend to play more hands and bet harder and faster, in a desperate attempt to get back to even, and in the situation at hand it was the already loose, crazy players who had gotten behind and were likely to make it a wild ride for the whole table. In an episode of "Cash Poker: The Ultimate Gamble" (crummy syndicated show), Bob Bright has been losing quite a bit, then hauls in a large pot, and Gabriel Thayer, seated next to him, comments, "You might be winner now." Mike Matusow, in an interview during another episode of "Cash Poker" was asked how he was doing, and replied, "I'm $28,000 loser." In Doyle Brunson's book, My 50 Most Memorable Hands, he writes, on p. 143, about his worst year in poker, 2004: "I got loser, and instead of taking a break like I usually do when I go on an extended losing streak, I kept playing and I lost the staggering sum of $6 million." That's "getting loser," all right!

Though I'm quite a stickler for correct grammar, I understand that words and phrases and expressions just develop within an insular community, and one can't fairly judge them to be "right" or "wrong" by reference to standards for non-specialized English. This post, then, isn't intended to scold the poker world for these odd terms and usages (as if that would do any good anyway). It's just to note that, well, they're kind of weird and unconventional, and they take some getting used to.

But there are some on which I have to take a grumpy stand. For now, I'll exercise restraint and finger just one flagrant violation: "I'll put you all in."

Sorry, but you can't. Only I can put all my chips into the pot. What you can do is put all of your chips in. But I'll decide whether to put mine in, thank you very much.

I really don't get why this particular verbiage has survived and thrived, when it's so obviously wrong. If you are up against just one opponent, it is shorter, more accurate, and less affrontive to simply say, "I'm all in." The effect is the same (because an all-in bet between two players is effectively only the amount of the smaller of the two stacks). Now, if there are three or more players still in the hand, and you want to bet enough that a call on my part would have me all in, but not go all-in yourself, then the thing to do is ask for a count of my stack, and bet exactly that amount. Alternatively, you can announce to the dealer, "I bet the amount that Seat 4 has in front of him," which has the same effect. (The former route is safer, though, because with the latter you may get a nasty surprise, if Seat 4 has some high-value chips or bills hidden where you can't readily see them.)

I'm certainly not the first one to chafe at this phraseology. I think the first place I read something that let me know that I wasn't the only one bothered by it was here: http://www.poker-babes.com/strategy/pet-peeves.html. Since then, though, I've heard a few players at the table argue about it when somebody says it to them. That, I think, is pretty pointless, and probably counterproductive. It slows down the game and results in a stupid argument that nobody is going to win. If somebody is susceptible to a reasoned explanation of why they shouldn't use those words, it is far more likely to happen from reading something like this post than from a confrontation across the green felt in the middle of a hand.

I'm also never going to yield on the common but grating "I should have went all-in." I even heard Daniel Negreanu say this during an episode of "High Stakes Poker." Geez, people--can't we even manage to conjugate the most common verbs in the language correctly? This particular piece of abuse of English just makes me shudder with revulsion. Nothing and nobody will ever get me used to it, or make me accept it as part of "the strange grammar of poker." Some things are just plain wrong.