Today’s poker tip is about the unpredictable nature of luck. Luck is an innocuous that thing that shows up like an unannounced, but good natured gate crasher at a party. The problem is that people rarely know when and where luck will show up to turn their lives upside down. People buy lottery tickets in hopes of having the proper holding if luck comes calling; others are just walking down the street, going about their normal business when luck chooses to jump out from behind a shrub and yell “boo”. The best example of this would be the fabled pizza delivery guy who showed up at Marilyn Monroe’s door at the particular moment when she was feeling lonely, precocious, and really sexually charged all at the same time. He never made it back to work, possibly lost his job, but has a story to tell for the rest of his life.
Too many people treat poker more like the person playing the lottery then they do the guy who showed up at Marilyn’s door and got the biggest tip in the history of underpaid agents of the fast food delivery industry. The lottery style player invests money to see more flops then he has any business being a part of. They do this in the hope that their offsuit 2-9 will get lucky with a flop that is something like 9-9-2. When you are relying on luck to get you by, you are not playing poker, your simply playing long odds.
Players should be more like the pizza delivery guy. He was competently going about his workday, when he got the call to deliver a double cheese and pepperoni to the home of the world’s biggest sex symbol. At that point he got presumably more than he bargained for.
In poker your workday involves limiting the role that luck will play in your game by playing smart. The best poker tip here is to competently play your game, and when the occasional moment of luck happens you will be in position to exploit it.
That is the poker tip for today.
