This is the 19th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.
I am in Macau as I write this column, indulging myself with a few days of recreational tournament poker. This is a welcome change from the live cash games in Mumbai, for a couple of reasons. One, I enjoy playing tournaments, which are a very different format to cash games, and a good way to recharge oneself. Two, I like the fact that I can just sit down at a tournament table and play poker, without having to worry about the game outside the game.
What is the game outside the game? Well, you know how poker works: you get cards, figure out ranges and probabilities and equities and all that other technical stuff, and use your chips to accumulate chips from others. You also set up what I call the game within the game, the metagame: you manipulate table image, set up different dynamics with different players, and try and win the levelling wars that ensue. All this is quite thrilling.
But there is a game beyond this that sometimes makes me uncomfortable. It is not talked about much in training videos and instructional books, and applies mainly to live cash games. It involves not the technical skills I’ve been writing about in earlier editions of this column, but the kind of soft skills a politician might require or a psychopath might have. You could, euphemistically, also refer to it as fish management.
In poker terminology, good players are ‘sharks’, who gobble up ‘fish’, the disparaging term used for worse players. Being a game of self-deception as much as deception, all the fish naturally think they are sharks. And everything is relative: every shark is a fish somewhere or the other. Every shark wants to play as much as possible with fish, and the game outside the game has two central aims: Making sure that a) Fish remain fish and b) Fish remain available to you.
To this effect, there are a number of essential fish-management rules. Some of them are sensible and seem like good etiquette – for example, ‘Never berate a fish for bad play.’ But there is nothing nice about the intent behind it: to make sure the fish keeps playing badly and gives you his money later. This intent is made explicit by other rules such as ‘Never give a fish your honest opinion about a hand.’
You’re supposed to validate every bad decision a fish makes. If he donks off 400bb with top-pair-no-kicker on a wet board, you’re supposed to sympathise, say ‘What a cooler’, and pretend he just got unlucky. If he asks your opinion about a hand, you’re supposed to always lie and confirm his faulty instincts rather than share your thoughts on the correct way to play it. When he plays badly and has a losing session, you comment on his bad luck; when he wins you comment on his excellent play. Basically, you fatten him up, and marinate the poor sod (or cod, as it were).
The other side of fish management is ensuring that they want to play with you, and you have access to their games. The cash game ecosystem in India, outside Goa and Sikkim, consists entirely of underground home games, and you want to get invited to the juicy games of the recreational players. You do this by pretending to be friends with them, showing a greater interest in their lives than you otherwise feel, even socialising with them after hours: basically, by faking it and being a hypocrite.
I find it hard to play this game outside the game. (You could say I’m a fish at it.) I value straightforwardness, and find it hard to lie to someone who asks for advice, or my opinion on a hand. And I cannot feign friendship with people I otherwise have no warm feelings towards. I love the deception that is an inherent part of every sport, but not the deceit at the heart of the game outside the game. In tournaments, thankfully, it is not required. You simply sit at the table and play poker. And that’s a relief.
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For more of my poker columns, do check out the Range Rover archives.