Twelve lessons poker can teach you about life

Photo Credit: Flickr/Jam Adams

For centuries, writers have waxed about the poetic "beauty" of baseball and other team sports, marveling at the virtues and invaluable life lessons they teach children. Poker, in contrast, typically viewed as a shady, smoky pastime, never gets the same lyrical love. This is a shame, because when it comes to teaching important lessons about life, poker has baseball, hoops, and any team sport beat. If someone lives their life mindful of these dozen lessons from the green felt, they'll do just fine.

1. Sometimes, you have to fold. You know the feeling: you're pretty sure that you’re beat, but a glimmer of hope keeps you from ending a bad situation. Sometimes what you have isn't enough to win, and no amount of bluffing or optimism will change that. Sometimes, you’ve just got a pair of jacks. You don't want to give up because you've already invested a lot in what you're holding, but in your gut, you already know it's not good enough; you know you probably can’t win. You can hang your hopes on getting extremely lucky, or on something miraculous to happen, but even a long-shot flash of good fortune may not be enough. It's the same at the poker table as it is in relationships and careers. When you can learn to let go of something that has no chance, you free yourself to move on to something else that does.

2. It pays to have a plan. Thomas Edison once wrote: “Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.” Uncertainty shapes both life and poker. Some variables are beyond your reach. The key is to have a plan. Thinking ahead before you commit to something is important, even if you eventually learn that that plan wasn’t such a good idea. If you raise pre-flop on the button with a pair of fours, what’s your plan if someone re-raises you, or if three face cards come on the flop? If you decide to quit your job and start a business, what’s the plan if you don’t have customers in three months or if you have more clients than you can manage alone? The questions aren’t as important as having the right mindset to answer them when they arise.

3. Being aggressive is usually a good thing. Poker is about making decisions. You often have to decide whether to call a bet, raise it, or fold your hand. Winning players often bet more than they check, and raise more than they call. They don’t just react to a situation, they change it. Losing players, more often than not, check and call too much, hoping to win without much conflict or risk. As a result, they often fold hands they would have won with, or they get beat by opponents who stick around and get lucky. Life seems to follow the same pattern: people who shrug off fear and take chances tend to do better than those who wait, passively, for good things to happen. You can ask for a promotion, move to a new city, or finally ask out that woman in your building... or you can stay in a job you hate, buy a lottery ticket, and wait until someone else takes out that hot neighbor.

4. Things work out better if you study and do your homework. Your parents and teachers were right. Some people live on instinct and always go with their gut, but for most of us, time spent reading, studying, and making careful observations is an investment in winning. You can play better poker knowing the odds of drawing to a flush, the percent chance you have at catching the ace or king you need on the river, or how likely it is that your pocket pair will make three-of-a-kind on the flop. Good poker players also study their opponents, watching betting patterns, and taking mental notes of how they play. Instead of watching the NFL game away from they table or texting a friend on their cell phone, they notice who bluffs too much, who rarely plays without strong cards, and whose hands shake when they're holding aces or kings. You can sometimes win without giving yourself an advantage of information, but usually, you’ll be more successful at the poker table, and at life, knowing your odds and what you're up against.

5. No matter what you do, some days everything will go wrong. Preparation and planning are important, but they won’t spare you from the brutality of bad luck and variance. If you flip a coin, you have a fifty-fifty chance of it landing either tails or heads. Sometimes, if you flip a coin three times in a row, you’ll get heads three times. Unlikely, but it happens. You might flip a coin ten times and get heads each time there as well — less likely statistically, but not impossible. In fact, if you flip a coin a thousand times, you’re bound to have several stretches where heads or tails lands ten or more times in a row. In short: bad luck happens, and it can happen in bunches. Just as you can have a day where you spill coffee on your shirt, wreck your car, and get dumped before dinner, you might have a night where you lose with aces in back-to-back hands, then flop a flush that gets beat on the river by a one-in-twenty long shot. It can feel like a conspiracy, as if supernatural forces are twisting the universe you crush you. And yet, in reality, nothing is after you other than the cold, remorseless cruelty of chance. The lesson: bad luck, like good luck, will come in streaks. Learn to take both in stride.

6. You’re going to lose. Everyone loses. Good players win more than they lose, but everyone loses sometimes. It’s unavoidable. Doyle Brunson loses. Phil Ivey loses. Michael Jordan lost hundreds of basketball games in his career. The key is to handle losing calmly, without getting unhinged or rattled. Bad players unravel, go on tilt, and start making bad, reckless, costly decisions. Good players stay focused, shrug off a setback, and prepare to win the next hand they’re dealt.

7. Things can always get worse. If you got divorced, lost your job, and discovered you owed the IRS $15,000, it’s still not be a good idea to decide to drive yourself home after a doing six tequila shots at Hooters. As bad as you might feel, nothing says you can’t sink lower. The same holds true in poker. Just because you lost three straight pots to a drunk, first-time player who got lucky each time, it doesn’t mean something horrible can’t happen to you the very next hand, especially if you start making your own situation worse by playing badly and getting reckless. Bad luck has a way of sticking around, especially if you feed it with bad judgment.

8. Patience pays off (usually). When Tolstoy wrote that “the two most powerful warriors are patience and time,” he wasn't talking about poker, but the idea applies to cards as much as anything else. The biggest mistake inexperienced poker players struggle with is impatience. They call bets with mediocre hands, raise with junk, and impulsively push all-in with bluffs. They want to play every hand and aren't willing to wait for the profitable situations where they will have the advantage. Good poker players typically cash in on impatient opponents. They don't might waiting until they have a strong hand to get their money in the middle of the table against an impatient player who risks everything on a loose gamble.

9. When you make a mistake, don't keep making more. The "first rule of holes” says "if you’re in one, stop digging." The rule of holes applies to life and poker equally well. In business, it’s called the “sunk cost” fallacy: someone figures “I can’t stop now, otherwise what I’ve invested so far will be lost,” despite the fact that whatever has been invested already is already gone. In poker, players will often compound their mistakes in an effort to “get their chips back.” So you raise preflop to $6 with Ace-Four, and two people call. You miss the flop, but bet — $10 — and get called again by both opponents. Almost certainly, your weak hand is no good, but since you’ve already put $16 into this pot on a bluff, you tell yourself that to get those chips back, you should try once more. So on the turn, you bet $30. Your opponents call and suddenly, you discover most of your stack is in the middle of the table with a hand that can’t win. Congratulations: you’re now neck-deep in a hole. Many people follow the pattern of bad players in their daily lives, repeating mistakes again and again, ignoring habits and tendencies that got them in losing situations in the first place. Good players try to figure out what went wrong. If the just got unlucky or outplayed, that’s life. If they made mistakes, they work to correct them in the future. It’s the right way to approach poker, but also the right way to approach everything else.

10. One lapse in judgment can negate 20 things you did right. You can make every right move at a poker table for five hours, and then one impulsive bad decision can undo everything you’ve accomplished. You’re better off learning this lesson at the poker table than away from it. One badly-timed bluff or bad call will cost you a stack of chips, but there’s no way to measure the potential cost of driving drunk or cheating on your spouse.

11. You can do everything right, yet something terrible can still happen. An old poker adage says “There are two theories about how to avoid bad beats: Neither one works.” Sure enough, you can get all your chips in as a commanding favorite, with your opponent clinging only to the hope of two remaining cards in the deck, and yet somehow, despite the 20 to one odds against him, he hits his card, smirks, and rakes in all the chips. Bad beats are part of the game, and part of life. Someone who smokes, guzzles trans fats, and drinks tequila for lunch can live to 100, but a vegetarian nonsmoking jogger can die of a heart attack at 30. The lesson here isn’t that you shouldn’t do the right things to give yourself the best odds of success — you should — but that we need to accept that even if you do everything all right, nothing is guaranteed.

12. It's OK to believe in miracles. The flip side of #11 is this final lesson. Sometimes, you’re the one who made the huge mistake, who ran into someone else’s monster hand, who fell into a trap. You may have attempted a daring bluff that got called, and now face a devastating loss, barring a freak instance of incredible of luck. And yet, despite the odds, the miracle card arrives. It can restore your faith in a higher power, or at least some semblance of fairness in the universe. Life can deal miracle cards as well. You might be in the right place at the right time to meet the person of your dreams. You might be out of work and broke, but get a job offer out of the blue that changes your career. Some people actually win lotteries. The lesson from this: sometimes miracles can happen, even to you. Just don’t bet on it.