There's a fairly rare neurological condition known as "unilateral neglect," usually the result of a stroke, in which the patient loses the entire concept of either "left" or "right." Such people cannot see things in one half of their visual field, cannot turn toward that side, cannot even comprehend that there is another half of everything that they are not perceiving. They eat only the food that is on the half of the plate they can see. A woman with this condition will apply makeup to just half of her face.
Back in the days of my health-care career, I saw a man with this condition in the hospital a couple of days after he had had a stroke. He was eating his breakfast. His left hand was plopped down in his cereal bowl. I suggested that he might want to move it somewhere else. He insisted that it was not his hand! He genuinely could not grasp the fact that he had a left side of his body, so even when he turned his head so that he could see the hand in his bowl, he concluded that it must not be his. It was one of the saddest, but most fascinating, things I ever witnessed.
Patients with this condition, when presented with an empty circle and asked to fill in the details of the face of a clock will commonly make a drawing like those pictured above--either just half of the numbers in approximately their correct position, or all 12 numbers crammed into one side.
What does all of this have to do with poker? Well, not a lot, really, except for a bizarre incident that happened a couple of days ago at Harrah's, which reminded me of all of those distorted clock face drawings I've seen in textbooks.
I was one of the players on the list for $1-$2 no-limit hold'em. They were ready to start up a new table and called off the names. When this happens, sometimes it takes forever for the players to assemble and get going; other times there's a mad rush because everybody wants to grab their favorite seat. This time, it was sort of in between.
I took seat 9, on the dealer's right (Harrah's plays 9-handed, rather than 10), my usual favored place. The two seats to my right were occupied by two Russian friends. The first one to the table had been an elderly gentleman, who plopped down in seat 5, squarely in front of the dealer. Other people filled in seats one, two, three, and six, but the guy who took six left his chips there and went off to the restroom.
The last one to arrive was a young woman. Strangely, she pulled the chair out from the four-spot and wedged it in between number five and absent-guy's seat six. Why did she do this, instead of just taking the four seat where it was? Well, I don't know, but I have a strong suspicion. She quickly proved herself to be a smart, aggressive player, all business, clearly there for no reason other than to make money. Chips tend to flow around the table clockwise; that is, I will generally win more chips from the players in the seats just to my right than from other places at the table. This is because I have a positional advantage on them most of the time. Therefore, all else being equal, I'd like to have the softest, easiest targets on my immediate right. I think that this young woman made a stereotyped judgment (which turned out to be correct) that the elderly man was going to be the easiest player to bully, and she wanted him on her right. If she had taken the four seat, he would have been on her left, from which position it would be hardest to win his chips.
Anyway, when Mr. Six came back to the table, we had the bizarre picture of six of the nine players all crammed into the right half of the table, and only three players on the left half. This clearly wasn't going to work. The dealer tried to get the five seat to scoot to his right and become seat four. But he wasn't moving. He was a lot crankier about it than he needed to be, but he had two excellent points. First, he had been the first one there. Second, he chose that position because he had poor eyesight and it was the only seat from which he could clearly see the community cards. In my opinion, all players should be willing to defer to a need such as that.
I wouldn't really have minded moving, but that wouldn't have helped, because the two Russian guys on my right did not want to shift from seven and eight into eight and nine. (Most people dislike the one and nine or ten seats, next to the dealer. I'm weird; they're my favorites.)
The dealer gave up trying to manage the situation and called for the floor. Floor guy, unfortunately, doesn't ask the obvious question: "Who was last to arrive?" Instead, he just sees that the older man and the young woman are both spaced correctly for seats five and six, so he tells the guy crammed into what had been position six (now back from the restroom) to pick up his chair and move over to four.
A young woman in seat two tried to help by pointing out that the aggressive woman was the cause of the problem, because she was last to arrive, and had picked up a chair and squeezed it in where she didn't belong. The floor guy quite rudely cuts her off in mid-sentence. He doesn't want to hear it. He snidely says, "Thank you, I'm handling it."
Eventually, the guy who had been in the restroom agrees to move over, so it gets sorted out, but it was an embarrassing, juvenile situation for a while.
Clearly the chief culprit was the late-arriving young woman whose focus (apparently) on picking a victim for her aggression overrode all sense of fairness and propriety.
The poker book that has been most influential in how I approach the game is Barry Greenstein's Ace on the River. Most of what he writes about just isn't found anywhere else, particularly discussions about various aspects of the life of a professional player. He suggests that several strategies which are actually cooperative rather than competitive are good for professional players to embrace. He specifically includes (p. 159):
Not obsessively getting the best seat position. If you are jumping aroundThe young woman from Harrah's, I think, needs to absorb some of Greenstein's lessons.
the table, continually competing with other players for best position on live
ones [i.e., the most unskilled players], you will make the game into a circus
and cause the live ones to feel uncomfortable.
Incidentally, did you recognize the movie quotation that formed the title of this post? If not, see the scene it comes from here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA1sx-vyWVk. In addition to the distorted clock-face drawings, this classic Mel Brooks scene was what came to my mind when I saw nearly everybody sitting on one side of the table. Sadly, Leonardo da Vinci was nowhere in sight.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment