The best advice

There are a lot of pieces of poker advice that can and have been boiled down to a single, memorable line. Some of my favorite one-liners include:

• Don't go broke with just one pair.
• Don't go broke with a queen in your hand.
• Don't go broke in a limped pot.

I appreciate such aphorisms, because they tend to come to mind easily in high-pressure situations, and push a close decision one way or the other. Many times I have remembered one in a crucial moment, heeded it, and ended up glad I did, or disregarded it and lived to regret it.

But it occurs to me that even as compact and distilled as these lines are, they still might be wordier than necessary. It seems to me that we could replace them with one more generalized bit of poker advice:

Don't go broke.