Poker gems, #160

Andrew Black, interview with Bluff Magazine, June, 2008, issue, pp. 41-42, available online here:

You overestimate some aspects of your game and underestimate others. In fact, the whole game is designed to just confuse the hell out of you. It’s a typical situation: a guy comes along and it seems like he’s got a pretty good game and a good head on his shoulders, but one day he plays really badly and he wins a tournament. His mates come up and they say, “Aren’t you great? Aren’t you brilliant?” Now he think that’s the way to win a tournament, but actually, when you break down his game, he got lucky. I know people who are regarded as being amongst the top players in the world who will not be regarded as such in a few years, because I know how they played, and they played badly. The history of poker is littered with that kind of person. This happens at every level of the game. It happens at the lower limits, too, and I know that because I was at the lower levels for ages.

So, what you have at the end of the day is this mass of information which just keeps changing. It makes chaos theory look straightforward. The solution to finding your way through all this can only begin when you start to look at yourself and see where you’re at.