When you believe in things that you don't understand, then you suffer

When I was cashing out at Planet Hollywood a couple of nights ago, the nice man behind the counter asked me if $50 bills were OK with me.

When I first moved to Vegas I was baffled by why casino cashiers always asked this before paying me in $50s. I have since learned that it is an old and well-established Vegas superstition that carrying fifty-dollar bills is unlucky, and many people refuse them.

Several times I have asked cashiers their experiences with this denomination. I did again at PH Monday, and his response was typical. He said that if he doesn't ask and just starts counting out the bills, people will often react with horror, sometimes stepping back and saying something like, "Get those away from me" or "I don't even want to touch them." I asked him what percentage of customers reject them, and he guessed that it was something like 80%. Again, this is consistent with what other poker room cashiers have said when I've asked.

Even Daniel Negreanu, usually a pretty rational, thoughtful fellow, appears to buy into this crap. He wrote in his poker blog for November 29, 2006, "Superstitions are stupid, but $50 bills are unlucky. That’s just a well known fact…." (See http://tinyurl.com/2lm7yt.) Of course, there could be a tongue-in-cheek element here, but it seems likely that the writer at least partially believes the truth of his statement.

All of which makes me wonder this: What the hell is wrong with you people? Have you all lost your ever-lovin' minds?

Did just seeing the photo of the bill at the top of this blog entry make you cringe with fear? If you are one of the apparently millions who subscribes to this looney theory, can you please explain to me the exact physics involved? That is, what is the nature and location of the force in the universe that scans people's wallets, determines who is carrying which bills, then messes with the random number generator on the Shufflemaster in specific ways so as to cause a string of second-best hands to be dealt to any person it detects carrying pictures of Ulysses S. Grant? Seriously--isn't that what you have to believe is going on to put any stock in this particular piece of insanity? How can you invest even three seconds of critical thought into this notion and still cling to it?

I'll make this blanket assertion: If your way of thinking about poker includes garbage ideas like this, you will never, ever become a winning player. Period. If you clutter your brain with thoughts about whether you're wearing your lucky underwear, whether you should really be playing on the 13th day of the month, whether this dealer is one that always delivers you bad beats, whether just having gotten your hair cut has sapped your good luck, etc. ad infinitum, then you haven't got room left for rational analysis of the factors that really do matter, such as pot odds, stack sizes, table image, tells, and position.

Now, I happen to think that it's kind of dumb and pointless that we have $50 bills; there just isn't much practical need for a denomination between $20 and $100. (The same is true for the $2--which is part of why it never caught on.) But as long as the bank will take it as part of my deposit, any poker room cashier is welcome to unload their otherwise unloved 50s on me any time, any day. You people who won't accept them because of fear of some curse, well, you're just plain stupid--that's all there is to it.

I don't know if Stevie Wonder is a poker player, but he certainly nailed one element of it: Superstition ain't the way.