Poker

This is the 16th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

How does one learn poker? I often get asked this question, and over the last few months, I’ve been approached a number of times by people asking me to coach them. Each time I’ve turned them down, explaining quite honestly that I’m still learning the game myself, and am not competent to coach anyone. But how am I learning and how did I learn? If you’re a beginner to the game, maybe falling in love with its complexities as I once did, where do you start?

Poker is a deep enough subject to be taught in universities, the way game theory or mechanical engineering or computer programming are. The problem is that its body of knowledge is recent and dispersed. There were a handful of books a beginner could learn from ten years ago, and they’re mostly redundant now. The explosion of online poker in the last decade led to an exponential increase in the analysis and understanding of poker. Despite this, there is no existing equivalent of a college course on poker anywhere, no syllabus one can follow.

Anyone who teaches you poker will be doing so in a piecemeal manner. For example, a typical online coach will ‘sweat’ you – ie, watch you play – and comment on aspects of your play as he watches. Or he might review your hand histories and tell you things you could have done differently. But the ideal way to teach a subject is to teach fundamentals first, then proceed, in a modular fashion, through different levels of complexity. None of the various training sites for poker have managed, or even attempted, something of that sort.

I learnt poker when I stumbled upon it online, played with play money for a while, then got interested and bought some books, and finally took tentative steps into live poker. I was lucky that during my learning curve, the games were very soft because everyone else in India was also new to it, and I ran good in my early days. In other words, I learnt while being profitable. That is almost impossible today.

If you’re learning the game, here’s my advice to you. Number one, understand that this is a game where luck plays a huge role in the short term, and any skill you develop only manifests itself in the long run. So do not be results-oriented, but process-oriented. Having said that, don’t use this as a crutch and delude yourself into thinking you’re better than you are.

Two, be self-critical. In other fields, if you don’t improve, it’s okay, you get away with it, the world is mediocre. In poker, if you stop learning, you lose money. So question every action that you take, even when you are winning. Don’t be defensive.

Three, keep working on your game. Ideally, for every three hours of playing, put in one hour of analysis. This will expand your thought processes and bring clarity to your play.

Now, what do I mean by working on your game? There are three facets to this. First, you take in information. Read books and watch training videos. Ed Miller’s books are excellent for learning cash games, and Jonathan Little and Betrand Grospellier have written the most state-of-the-art books available for tournament play. For game theory, check out Matthew Janda and Will Tipton. As for videos, see Vanessa Selbst and Andrew Seidman’s videos on Deuces Cracked, Janda’s theory videos on CardRunners, Andrew Brokos’s on Tournament Poker Edge and everything on Run It Once, Phil Galfond’s amazing site.

Second, interact with the community, and get exposed to cutting-edge thought. Forums, especially Two Plus Two, is where the modern game was born. Become a participant, keep testing your assumptions, learn from your peers.

Third, do lots of analysis at home on hands you play. There are some fantastic tools out there, like The Odds Oracle by ProPokerTools, which helps you analyse and understand equities, and Flopzilla, which helps you understand how different ranges connect with different types of flops. These are as essential for a poker player as a gym is for a bodybuilder. Put in the hours.

While learning about poker, I also learnt a lot about myself – and some of those lessons were difficult ones. But let’s leave that for another day.

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For more, do check out the Range Rover archives.

This is the 15th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

An epic battle took place a couple of days ago at a local game I play. A gentleman I shall call Fearless Builder was raising blind every hand to 8bb. He’d get two or three callers, and then the guy to his right, Action Builder, who had limped earlier, would make it 50bb, also blind. Fearless would call blind, and then the table had to decide what to do. We were all waiting for hands to take them on – anything ahead of their obviously wide blind ranges – and an affable chap at the table, who I shall call Persian Emperor, started getting cards.

He had KQo one hand, stack of 250bb, he ripped it in. Both Action and Fearless called blind. Action had K6o, Fearless had T6o. Fearless won. Emperor rebought for 250bb. An orbit later, same scenario, he was all in with JJ. Fearless called blind with 89o, hit two pair, took it down. Another orbit later, Emperor gets in 300bb with KK. Action and Fearless call blind. Flop is J94r. Action shoves blind for side pot, Fearless calls blind, another 400bb each. Action flips over 84o. Fearless shows 22. Emperor sighs in relief. Turn 2. River 2. The table erupts.

Emperor gets up to go. ‘Can’t believe how bad I’m running,’ he says. ‘No point playing any more.’ Fearless, who was down 500bb when he started playing blind and is now up 2000bb, says, ‘I can’t believe how good I’m running. I should go buy a lottery ticket.’ Their sentiment is understandable – Emperor did run bad and Fearless ran like God – but the conclusions they drew from this is flawed. Both might have been joking, of course, but I have heard too many people speak in terms on running good (or bad) in the present continuous sense, as if a narrative has been set for their session by some higher power, and they’ve managed to identify it and must adjust. ‘I’m running good today so I’ll play every hand.’ That kind of thing.

The truth is that we can identify streaks of luck only in retrospect. If luck favours us through a session, we can look back on it as ‘running good’, but to assume that we are in the middle of a streak and will continue being lucky is fallacious. The deck does not have a memory, and nothing is pre-ordained. Every hand is new.

Cognitive psychologists call this the Hot Hand Fallacy. It is ingrained in us because we have evolved to be pattern-seeking creatures, and are daunted by randomness. If we suffer four bad beats in a row, we are naturally wary when we get our money in good again, although we shouldn’t be. If a perfectly weighted coin falls ‘heads’ five times in a row, there is no logical reason to believe that it will come up ‘heads’ the sixth time. Coins don’t have memories, and nothing is destined.

Interestingly, I also see players around me display the opposite tendency: the Gambler’s Fallacy or the Monte Carlo Fallacy. If we give in to this, then when a coin falls ‘heads’ five times in a row, we believe that the sixth flip must be ‘tails.’ Similarly, I see players who haven’t hit a flush draw the last eight times they had one believing that it ‘is due’, just around the corner. It isn’t, of course. Everything is random.

Logically, Emperor should have rebought and continued playing. He had run bad, but that didn’t mean he would continue doing so. (Hot Hand Fallacy.) A regression to the mean was inevitable – though not necessarily in the next hand. (Gambler’s Fallacy.) In the long run, though, if he continued playing, Emperor would surely win – but losing so much money does cause emotional turbulence, and perhaps Emperor was right to quit before he got tempted to play blind.

These fallacies apply not just to gambling but to life. We lose hope too soon sometimes when we run bad.  Equally, we often become arrogant, ascribing to skill or destiny what was merely good fortune. Life is, by default, a gamble we were forced into, and we owe it to ourselves to not be affected by past events, and to always do the right thing.

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Here’s a piece I wrote four years ago on the same subject: Throw a Lucky Man into the Sea.

For more, do check out the Range Rover archives.

This is the 14th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

What is the difference between a good poker player and a bad one? I’ll take a shot at an answer: good players pose tough questions to their opponents. They bet, raise, 3-bet, float, call down, check-shove, use every weapon in the poker arsenal to take their opponents out of their comfort zones and induce errors. Bad players, on the other hand, fail to ask tough questions even of themselves.

As we play hundreds and thousands and millions of hands, we tend to develop certain standard ways of dealing with different situations. The immediate result of an action does not reflect the correctness of the play, so it is easy to develop bad habits, and to reflexively slip into flawed patterns of playing hands. Ideally, whenever a player is about to take any action at a poker table, he should ask himself, ‘Why am I doing this?’ This sounds banal and obvious – but you’d be amazed at how often players are not sure why they’re betting in a particular spot.

A poker book I recommend to beginners, Easy Game by Andrew Seidman, deals with this in its first chapter. (Like Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love and Don DeLillo’s Underworld, the first chapter alone is worth the price of the book.) It is called ‘The Reasons for Betting’, and makes the point that many of the justifications people give for betting are invalid and flawed. ‘I’m betting because I think I have the best hand’ or ‘I’m raising for information’ are terrible reasons to throw chips in the middle.

Consider this hand from a game I was at yesterday. My friend, on the button, called an early-position raise with KQo. The flop came KT3r. The original raiser bet, and my friend announced a raise. His opponent shoved, and my friend had to fold. I asked him why he raised. ‘For information,’ he replied. ‘To find out where I was at.’

This is terrible thinking. There are two primary reasons to bet or raise: for value, or as a bluff. To get a worse hand to call, or a better hand to fold. In this case, my friend’s raise made sure that only better hands in his opponent’s range continued, and worse hands folded. Put simply, he inflated the pot against hands that beat him, and lost the chance to pick up value from worse hands on later streets. In that spot, he should just have called. Anything else – folding or raising – is a losing play.

Every single time you put money in the pot, you should ask yourself why you are doing so. What impact does it have on your opponent’s range? Does a bet from you serve the purpose of being either a bluff or a value-bet? (You could also ‘merge’, or put in a bet that profitably aims to both get better hands to fold and worse hands to call. But this is advanced, and the wannabe Tom Dwans around me who use that term are generally misapplying it to thin-value bets.) Seidman also advances a third reason for betting, the ‘capitalisation of dead money’, which he defines as ‘making the opponent fold, whether his hand is better or worse, and collecting the money in the pot.’ But he warns that this is ‘rarely a primary reason for betting’, and I’d advise beginners to stick to betting just for two reasons: for value, or as a bluff. Not for information, or protection, or an assertion of how macho you are.

In life, as in poker, we often fail to ask ourselves basic questions. We sleepwalk through large chunks of our lives, doing the expected things, studying phalana in college, doing dhimkana job,  getting married, having kids, following the script. We get stuck in routines, imprisoned by inertia. We rarely ask ‘Why?’ And when we fail to do so, then, as in poker, we lose a little something.

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For more, do check out the Range Rover archives.

This is the 13th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

In a local poker room where I sometimes play, there is an inscription on the wall that says: ‘It’s unlucky to be superstitious.’ As this is the 13th installment of Range Rover, it’s an auspicious time to take on this subject. Sportspeople tend to be notoriously superstitious: cricketers, for example, often have particular rituals they do not deviate from before going out on the field, such as wearing the left shoe first, or looking back up at the pavilion before going out to bat. When a crucial partnership is going well, the players in the dressing room may be stuck to their seats while it’s on so as not to disturb the fragile equilibrium of the universe. It’s quaint and sweet and does no harm – not in cricket, at least.

In poker, beliefs lead to actions, and actions lead to money won or lost. An irrational belief, thus, can have expensive consequences. I play a local cash game sometimes with a group of builders, and one of them believes that 23 is his lucky hand, and that it will never let him down. He has lost a minor fortune because of his faith in that hand, and it is worth asking, how did he arrive at this belief, and why does he persist with it even when it’s obviously counterproductive?

At the risk of simplifying, I’d say that there are two key cognitive biases that lead to the birth and nourishment of superstitions. The first is a tendency to mistake correlation for causation. A man walks under a ladder in olden times, is attacked by a horse a little later, and boom, walking under ladders becomes a no-no. Black cat crosses path, wife runs off with neighbour; break a mirror accidentally, relative dies; call someone from behind as they’re leaving their house, they lose their job. We are pattern-seeking creatures, which is an important reason for our being the dominant species on this planet, but we often tend to go overboard, and ascribe causation where there is none. This is how superstitions are born.

Superstitions are sustained by another cognitive bias called the confirmation bias. Basically, we ignore all evidence against whatever irrational belief we have, and pounce on anything that seems to confirm it. If you believe a black cat crossing your path is bad luck, you’ll ignore all the times it happens and you have a good day, but pounce on the one time it is followed by some unfortunate event as evidence for your belief. My builder friend probably arrived at his superstition about 23 when he won a big pot early on with that hand. (Correlation-causation.) Since then, he shrugs off all the money he loses while playing that hand, but cites the pots he wins with it as evidence in its favour. (Confirmation bias.)

Poker players might have superstitions like having a favourite hand, or a particular seat ‘running hot’ during a game. But the flawed thought processes that lead to superstitions apply to every aspect of poker. For example, I used to overplay small suited connectors out of position until recently, a tendency that surely began when I cracked aces with it at some point. So I started overestimating the implied odds, considering the big pots I won with them as validation, and ignoring all the times I bled money getting into difficult marginal spots with them out of position. My mistaken belief had the same anatomical structure as a superstition, and I could only eliminate the leak when I came to terms with the cognitive frailties that gave birth to it.

To excel in poker, we have to draw conclusions from limited information, and put our opponents on ranges based on patterns of past behaviour. This is perilous, and it’s important not to get lazy, to constantly revisit our assumptions, and to think of the game in probabilistic terms, with few certainties. As for black cats, them kitties should not be feared, but cuddled.

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Previously on Range Rover:

Beast vs Human
Unlikely is Inevitable
The Colors of Money
Finding Your Edge
Raking Bad
Om Namah Volume
Make No Mistake…
Kitne Big Blind The
Sweet Dopamine
The Balancing Act
The Numbers Game
The Bookshop Romeo

This is the 12th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

One of the most important lessons I learnt as a live cash game player was to treat all cash games as one long session that lasts a lifetime. This helps us avoid the two classic bad habits that a live pro can develop: playing too tight when one is up during a session, to preserve profit; and playing too loose and recklessly when one is down, to recover losses. Ideally, you should try to play each hand in the most profitable way you can, without regard to whether you’re up or down, or what stage of the session you’re playing in. That is analogous to a batsman playing ‘one ball at a time’ in cricket, as the cliché goes. But it is easier said than done.

We might pride ourselves, as a species, on our superior intelligence, but however much we aspire to be perfectly rational creatures, we are wired to be emotional beings. Theodore Dreiser once described civilization as “still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer guided by instinct, scarcely human in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.” I’m not sure if Dreiser played this great American game, but in every session of poker that I play, Beast battles Human. It’s fascinating as a spectator, and frustrating as a participant.

It’s easy to say that we should approach every hand with the same cool-headed dispassion, but there is a fundamental difference between the start of a session and the end of it. At the start, most players usually have between 100 to 250 big blinds. By the end, it is common for the average stack to be 1000bb, and for a couple of the big stacks to be approaching or surpassing 2000bb. In technical terms, decisions get harder as stacks grow bigger: at 100bb, I’m always content to raise with a pair-and-flush draw and go buckwild; at 1200bb, near the end of a 22-hour-session, I’m inclined to be more careful. I’ll gladly go broke with AA at 100bb; but if I stack off with it at 1200bb, I probably made a big mistake somewhere. Stack sizes make decisions exponentially more complex, and the consequences of mistakes more brutal.

But that’s a banal point. Of course it’s technically harder to play big stacks than small ones. But it’s the mental aspect that makes this a tough game. Remember, there is real money at stake here, and a bad day in poker feels much worse than in any other profession because in poker you actually lose money. In no other profession, if you have a bad day on June 25, can you lose your entire salary for April and May as well. Losses are felt viscerally, and taken personally. We rant at the guy who gives us a bad beat. We feel smug and superior when we’re running good. As a session progresses past the 12-hour mark, and people start getting tired, the beast starts taking over. We crave action, revenge, retribution, dominance. We want the biggest dick in the room.

I have seen grown men cry at a poker table. I have seen respected middle-aged businessmen tear up playing cards and demand a change of deck and dealer. I have seen (and felt) anger and humiliation and contempt and loathing and desperation. If sport reveals character, poker plonks a mirror in front of us and says, “Here you are, your ugly majesty. Where are your clothes?”

The longer the session, the deeper the stacks, the more there is at stake, the harder it gets. In your tumult of inevitable emotions, you’re supposed to be calm and rational, and exploit the infirmities of others. You’re supposed to do math, set up metagame, play ‘optimally’. You’re supposed to fight the beast – but the beast is who you are.

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Previously on Range Rover:

Unlikely is Inevitable
The Colors of Money
Finding Your Edge
Raking Bad
Om Namah Volume
Make No Mistake…
Kitne Big Blind The
Sweet Dopamine
The Balancing Act
The Numbers Game
The Bookshop Romeo

This is the 10th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

If you read a lot of fantasy fiction, you would be familiar with parallel universes. In this real world, unfortunately, life is mundane and singularly singular, even if we do have the escape of fiction to console us. That said, there is one kind of person who does, indeed should, inhabit parallel universes: the poker pro. Poker players reside in three worlds, with three separate currencies: namely real money, Sklansky dollars and G-Bucks.

On Planet Earth, we play in real money: the dollars or rupees we actually win at the poker table. On Planet Sklansky, we play in Sklansky dollars. Named after David Sklansky, these measure the amount of money you would have won from a pot based on your equity in it. For example, you are in the big blind, and the small blind goes all in with 30bb. You have AKs, so you snap. He has AQo. He hits a queen and wins the pot. Now, you lost 30bb in the first universe you inhabit. But you had 75% equity, which translates to 45bb in a 60bb pot. Given that you put it in 30bb, that means that you made a profit of 15 Sklansky dollars in the second universe. The hand was played profitably.

The concept of G-Bucks, named after Phil Galfond, is a little more evolved. As Galfond defines it, ‘instead of taking your hand and seeing how it does against your opponent’s hand, you take the entire range of your hand and see how it does against his hand.’ (Your range against your opponent’s hand, and not your hand against his range, as some people misinterpret it.) Here’s an example from a recent hand I played:

I was at a cash game with a 500bb stack in the cutoff. An early-position loose-passive player with a similar stack raised to 5bb. I flatted with 75hh. The button, with a stack of 125bb, flatted, as did the small blind. The pot now had 21bb. The flop came Kh6h7c, giving me a pair and flush draw. It checked to me, I bet 15bb, the button made a small raise to 35bb, the other two guys folded, and, with effective stacks at 120bb, I shoved.

The button was a player who plays draws passively and has two seemingly contradictory leaks of always raising top pair for information and never folding top pair on a wet board. Given that I have little fold equity (FE),  I would only repop him with a value hand. My range here, thus, comprises made hands like AA, AK, 76, sets, and all combo draws such as straight-and-flush draws and pair-and-flush draws. I would never raise with a bare flush draw here, because I don’t have enough FE. The button tanked, said ‘I think you have a flush draw,’ and called. He had KTo, which held, and he doubled up. Now, let’s look at an earnings chart here.

In terms of real dollars, starting at the flop, I lost 120bb. In Sklansky dollars, as my hand had 52% equity against his hand, I gained 15.7bb. (The pot was 261, 52% of which is 135.7 minus my 120 that went in on the flop.) In the G-Bucks universe, though, I did really well: my range was 75.2% against his hand, which means I benefited by 76bb. He had made a huge mistake against my range, and though he got congratulated for his call by everyone at the table, I was quite pleased with myself.

In the long run, your score in these three universes will converge. But in the meantime, you will play much better if you focus on winning G-Bucks. Thinking of actual dollars won or lost makes you too results-oriented; and strange as it may sound, Sklansky dollars also focuses on outcome, in terms of which hand from your range you actually happen to have. You want to think in ranges, induce errors from your opponent and make as many G-Bucks as you can. Real money will follow, and you will have the best of all worlds.

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Previously on Range Rover:

Finding Your Edge
Raking Bad
Om Namah Volume
Make No Mistake…
Kitne Big Blind The
Sweet Dopamine
The Balancing Act
The Numbers Game
The Bookshop Romeo

This is the ninth installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

‘Where is your edge?’ When you play poker, it is useful to ask yourself this question all the time. You make money at a poker table only when you have an edge over the other players. But how do you find it, and how can you quantify it? One useful prism through which to view this subject is a concept I was first introduced to by Tommy Angelo’s magnificent book, The Elements of Poker: Reciprocality.

‘Before anything flows,’ Angelo writes, ‘there must be a difference. Between different elevations, water flows. Between different pressures, air flows. Between different poker players, money flows.’ Angelo defines reciprocality as ‘any difference between you and your opponents that affects your bottom line.’ He writes, ‘Reciprocality says that when you and your opponent would do the same thing in a given situation, no money moves, and when you do something different, it does.’

Let me illustrate that with an example: You have A9s on the button and call a UTG raise from a straightforward ABC nit. The flop comes A82r, and you have top pair, weak kicker and a backdoor flush draw. He bets, you call. The turn is an offsuit J, the river is another brick, and he basically triple-barrels. Now, given player profile, you fold either turn or river. But you know that had the positions been reversed, then playing against you with A9s, he would have called all three streets because he can’t fold top pair. This, then, would be one difference between you and him. This would be a winning hand for you, even though you lost money on it, because you lost less than your opponent would have in your place. Since over time, in the mythical long run, everybody will get all hands and experience all situations, that makes you a long-term winner over him. This is reciprocality.

Note that you should evaluate hands based on what the most profitable play was, not what the result of it was. For example, you call a UTG raise with JJ, and the flop comes AJ9r with an offsuit 2 on the turn and 6 on the river. The optimal play here is to get as much of your stack in as possible with middle set. Now, if your opponent has AA for top set, you get stacked, which is fine, because over time you make far more here against AK, AQ, AJ, 99 etc than you lose to AA. (You’re playing ranges, not hands.) Someone who is more timid, or likes to slowplay when he shouldn’t, might lose less money than you in this hand. But that doesn’t mean he won the reciprocality battle: you took the more profitable line here. The expected value (EV) of your actions matters, not the outcome.

Angelo makes the excellent point that reciprocality matters not just in terms of the hands you play, but in every aspect of the game. There’s information reciprocality: do you give off less information than your opponents? There’s bankroll reciprocality: do you manage your bankroll better? There’s quitting reciprocaility: are you better at figuring out when to quit a session? And so on. Even something seemingly unrelated to poker like having a healthy diet or getting adequate sleep could give you reciprocality brownie points that translate into profit. Hell, your edge in poker could lie in avoiding oily food and carbonated drinks.

Reciprocality can be a useful prism through which to view the game. It can make you more observant and aware of your opponents’ weaknesses and mistakes, while helping you cut down on your own. Also, implicit in the concept is the realisation that what matters is not the cards dealt to us, but how we play them. In life, which is inherently unfair, we are dealt just one hand and have just the one lifetime in which to make the most of it. Whining about it is sub-optimal; get off your butt and do something today that makes a difference to your life.

Previously on Range Rover:

Raking Bad
Om Namah Volume
Make No Mistake…
Kitne Big Blind The
Sweet Dopamine
The Balancing Act
The Numbers Game
The Bookshop Romeo

This is the eighth installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

I’ve spent a lot of time inside casinos in the last few years – mainly in Macau and Goa – but there’s only one game I’ve ever played there: poker. In all other games, you’re playing against the house, and the odds are tilted in its favour. Whether it’s roulette or baccarat or slots, the house will always beat you in the long run. In poker, on the other hand, you play against other players, and it is a game of skill. For a rational gambler chasing an edge, it makes sense to only play poker inside a casino. However, you must be warned that this is not the whole truth.

Contrary to what some believe, poker is not a zero-sum game, where the winners win exactly what the losers lose. It is a negative-sum game. In every game of poker, the house takes a percentage of each pot. This is known as rake. And there is a maximum amount beyond which they cannot rake from any given pot – this is known as the cap. Now, the level of the rake has a decisive impact on how sustainable the game is. If the rake is too high, and even the skilled players cannot make a profit, then the game dies down. Abroad, over the years, the rake has evolved to that equilibrium where the house makes enough profit without taking so much money off the tables that the players disappear. This has everything to do with the cap, not the percentage of the rake.

The two main casinos in Goa where live poker is legally played are Casino Pride and Deltin Royale (formerly Casino Royale). These guys have had a duopoly on the legal poker scene in Goa for years, and their rake is therefore ridiculous: they charge 5% rake with a Rs 5000 cap. (Some casinos abroad take an hourly fee, but this hasn’t caught on yet in Asia.) The problem here is not the rake: casinos in Macau and Vegas also charge 5%, in some cases even more. The problem is the cap. In a 100-200 game, a 5000 cap amounts to 25 big blinds. This is, to my knowledge, by far the biggest rake cap in the world.  The standard cap is between 2 to 5 big blinds, and never, ever close to 25.

The rake, when it is too much, bleeds money off the table. If you win a big pot in a heads-up battle, since half the pot is the money you put in, you’re effectively being taxed at 10%. Everyone’s stack gets affected by this continuous taxation, and if after a few hours of playing you stack someone, his stack is much less than what it would have been if not for rake, so its effects go deep into the game. A friend of mine once played a heads-up game with an opponent in Royale, and they both sat with 1 lakh each. So there were 2 lakhs on the table. My friend stacked him three hours later and looked at his stack: 1.10 lakhs. The rest went to rake. I once played a session in Goa where after eight hours of play, all the players were stuck. Needless to say, I don’t play in Goa anymore.

The Goa guys get away with it because there is a steady tourist influx that is a captive audience on their boats and doesn’t know better. So they don’t have to worry about damage to the ecosystem. Underground games in the Indian cities have lower rakes than Goa, so winning in them is easier. Regardless, the effects of rake are such, worldwide, that most players are losers and most winning players are marginal winners. If you take poker seriously, you need to be aware of how the rake affects you. To be a big winner, you not only need to beat the other players, you need to beat the rake.

Since I began writing this column a few weeks ago, one of my big themes has been the lessons one can learn about life from poker. However, there is one sense in which life is dramatically different from poker, and indeed from all other sports, which tend to be zero-sum. Life is a positive-sum game. You don’t win at someone else’s cost, you generally win when they also win. Take free markets, for example: every transaction has two happy people at the end of it, believing they are better off for it. (John Stossel memorably called this the ‘double thank-you moment’.) No one rakes our happiness – so no moping around today, go and hug someone you love.

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Previously on Range Rover:

Om Namah Volume
Make No Mistake…
Kitne Big Blind The
Sweet Dopamine
The Balancing Act
The Numbers Game
The Bookshop Romeo