Mysteries

  Poker is a game of solving mysteries. How will your hand develop is a mystery. Will your opponent fold, call, or raise is another mystery. Is your another opponent bluffing, or is his hand really that strong is yet another. Mysteries are constantly developing and being solved during the course of a game of poker.  But your job really isn't to solve mysteries. You're not a detective. The problem with playing like a detective is that a detective solves the mystery after the fact. He or she doesn't begin work until the mystery has played itself out, and his or her job is to find out exactly just what happened and why. Poker is different.  In poker, you're more like a psychic than a detective. You're not solving mysteries - you're predicting their solutions and acting accordingly. This distinction is very important. A good detective waits until he or she has all the evidence before acting. In poker, you don't have that luxury. You have to act with incomplete and possibly incorrect evidence. You have to account for that possibility, and your decisions are all the more difficult because of this.  The mysteries of poker don't wait for you to solve them. You need to be able to predict their outcome and be there for their ends.