HOW GREEN IS MY WALLY?

HOW GREEN IS MY WALLY?
By John Vorhaus

Something to consider about no limit hold'em is how many hundreds (thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of people are coming into the game each day completely ill-equipped to play it correctly. Driven to a frenzy of enthusiasm by televised poker -- now airing on every channel but Disney and the Home Shopping Club -- inspired by dreams of easy money, and seduced by the ready availability of the online game, these Johnny (Chan)-come-latelies think that a couple of sitngos and a quick skim of Super/System II qualify them as rounders. They couldn't be more wrong -- to the tune of pretty much every penny they put into the game.

Right off the bat, then, you have to ask yourself if you have what it takes to go the distance. I'm not talking about money. Any jamoke with a day job can put together a bankroll. Nor am I talking about guts, though no limit hold'em does challenge one's fortitude. No, what I'm talking about is ambition: the willingness to work hard in service of perfect poker. Simply put, if you won't bust your ass to play the game right, the game will bust your ass for you.

Let me show you what I mean.

A typical no limit newbie finds himself in Las Vegas for a haberdashers' convention. Late one night, his business done for the day, his intestines distended by a heavy meal, and his mind muddied by fine wine (or what passes for such in Vegas), he slopes into the poker room of the new and fabulous Insidion Hotel and Casino. Excited to try the game he's seen on TV and even played once or twice with friends in someone's rumpus room, he sits down at the first no limit hold'em table he sees. This is of course a mistake in game selection, but game selection is yet to this newbie a concept as foreign as Zoroastrism or the ancient mariner's art of macramé, so let's let that go for now.

A garden variety Wally (Cally Wally; a weak, loose player), he fumbles his buy in a bit and eventually plunks down the table minimum. This is both good news and bad news for our Wally. Having bought in for the minimum, he stands to lose the least he can lose; however, having bought in for the minimum, he marks himself as either scared or green or both. He further reinforces his rookie image by immediately taking a hand under the gun, not waiting for his big blind or for the button to pass. He picks up pocket jacks, and blithely calls his way into the pot.

Waiting to act next is a cagey, experienced player we'll call Sandi Seabed. She studies him carefully. She can tell by the way Wally fumbled his buy in, by the way he handles his chips, by the way he didn't wait for the optimum time to jump in and by his overall fretful demeanor that he's out of his element, and depth. She makes a big raise, immediately putting Wally's feet to the fire. Wally doesn't much like that. He knows enough about hold'em to know that big pocket pairs are good cards, but not enough to know that -- big pocket pairs notwithstanding -- Sandi has a plan to outplay him on the flop. Further, he's not comfortable having to commit so many chips so early. Heck, his seat isn't even warm yet; his free drink hasn't even arrived.

But pocket jacks are pocket jacks, so Wally calls. The flop comes A-Q-3, and Wally is lost in the hand. Fearing those overcards, he meekly checks. Of course Sandi bets; she puts Wally all in. Poor Wally. He knows too little about card odds to judge whether it's likely that Sandi has an ace or a queen. And he knows nothing about his opponent, so he can't gauge whether she'd bluff here or not. All he knows is that if he calls here and loses, he'll have lost his entire buy in on the first hand. He will be miserable.

In the name of not being miserable, he folds.

In the name of messing with Wally's head, Sandi shows the 8-7 with which she drove him off the hand. Now Wally really feels lousy.

And his night just gets worse from there. Stung by the hurt and humiliation of having been bluffed off a big pot, desperate to ease the psychic pain he feels, Wally immediately starts overplaying his hands. Soon he's hemorrhaging at the wallet, pouring buy in after buy in into the game until finally, financially flatlined, he staggers away from the table and stumbles off to find the other haberdashers or possibly a slot machine where even if he loses at least he won't feel so punked.

Now, at this point all Wally has going against him is lack of experience. To be fair, he probably doesn't know enough about no limit hold'em to be aware of the many mistakes he's made, and that's fine. But if he comes back tomorrow night and the night after that and plays the same way, then that's not fine. If he thinks he lost by luck that first time -- Those darn pocket jacks, why didn't they hold up?! -- and counts on luck to see him through the next time, then he's just compounding his mistakes and dooming himself to a long, unsatisfactory relationship with the game. He stands at a crossroads. He can either assign himself the task of learning the game properly or assign himself the role of perennial loser.

Not a pretty picture, eh? Not one I'd want for myself nor, I know, one you'd want for you. So let me ask you a question: Considering your level of knowledge and experience, are you at this moment closer to Wally or to Sandi in ability, aptitude and approach to the game?

If you have even a modest history in poker, you probably consider yourself to be well past the sort of green gaffes a Wally would make. And probably you are. But in fact you're much closer to Wally than to Sandi -- I am, we all are -- for the simple reason that Sandi doesn't actually exist. Wallies exist; Wallies abound. But Sandi is an ideal, a paragon of poker who plays powerfully and correctly hand after hand, hour after hour, day after week after month after year. She's the end of the rainbow, the goal we aspire to but will never attain. No matter where we are in our poker journey, the first thing we must do is acknowledge that we're much closer to the beginning than to the end, because the beginning is well defined but the end remains, like the end of the rainbow, always out of reach. That's no problem, nor any cause for dismay for, as Robert Browning said, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp. Or what's a heaven for?" In other words, it's process, not product, that counts. Hold onto this idea and even if you're a Wally now, you won't be a Wally for long.