The other day while at my local card room in Seattle, I won a heads-up pot worth around $100 against a single opponent. I don’t remember the details of the hand but my opponent was really miffed by the runout. A few hands later, he lost another big hand. Shortly afterwards, he leaned over to me and started whispering to me, conspiratorially.

“Something’s wrong with these cards tonight, man. This is some kind of setup.”

I’m barely understanding what he’s even implying but I just nod at him mindlessly.

“Like, did you see that hand? The ace comes on the river? The EXACT card where it would be perfect for me to call and lose a ton of money? Naw. This place must be setting up the cards in a certain way to make this shit happen.”

I finally grok what he’s saying. He thinks that the poker room is engineering the cards in such a way to maximize the drama and, in this case, his losses. It’s a ludicrous idea but on some level I can understand why someone would believe this. Sometimes you get so unlucky that you think there just has to be something else at work.

Fast forward two weeks. I’m in the Monarch Casino in Black Hawk, Colorado. The poker room is hopping. Every single table is full. I buy in for a $1/$3 No Limit game.

I’ve been playing for a few hours when I pick up pocket 3’s in middle position. A player in UTG+1 position puts in a raise to $20 or so. I call along with one other player. There’s about $60 in the pot.

The flop comes: A45 rainbow. The original raiser puts in a big bet of about $40. Typically I’d fold in this situation but with the gut-shot possibilities, I decide to call one time and see what develops on the turn.

It’s heads-up and to the turn and it’s a miracle card: a 2, giving me a wheel/straight, but putting a flush draw on board. The original raiser slows down and checks it over to me. I decide I’m not letting him see a free river and put in a bet of $100, around 2/3rds pot. Admittedly this was too big of a bet (and I probably should have checked it to let the raiser bet into me on the river), but to be honest I was not on my A-game. I was still in the process of figuring out all the new rules at this Colorado poker room, which had different rules for straddles, different chip denominations, and different max bet sizes than I’m typically used to.

The original raiser gets super upset and folds. He understands intuitively that I’ve just hit a miracle card and that his hand (likely AK, AQ, or KK — he never showed) is no good. And he just starts going on this massive rant.

“I can’t win a hand! Every single time I play a good hand against someone, they always hit a miracle card and beat me! Every single time! My aces keep getting cracked! My poker hands are cursed.”

He goes on like this for a good 5-10 minutes, aggressively questioning my skills, then directing his anger at other people at the table, who also somehow start hitting great river cards and sucking out on him, throwing him further on tilt.

It’s an unpleasant thing to see someone lose their composure at the table. You can’t tell the person to calm down because that will often only antagonize them further. So the only thing you can do is wait it out and hope for their emotional outburst to blow over, maybe occasionally assuaging them. “Yeah, man, that’s brutal,” you might say, throwing in a subtle nod for good measure.

Eventually, the player busts out and leaves. The remaining players at the table all have a good laugh about him. One player commented on how that guy just didn’t seem to understand that poker can be a brutal, heartbreaking game. To me, it’s weird that someone would sit down at a game without that understanding.

As I reflected on these games, I thought about why people need to tell themselves stories about other forces at work that are dooming them to lose horribly. In reality, the cards don’t give a shit about you. They’re fed through a machine that randomizes their order. The dealer shuffles and cuts the deck without any knowledge or care about your personality or your financial circumstances. It’s sometimes said that anytime a card deck is shuffled, the cards have never appeared in that order in the history of the universe. There’s something about the indifference of the cards that stands in stark contrast to the passion with which people believe they’re not indifferent, that they care a great deal about you, actually, and they’re here to make sure you specifically have a bad time, for some reason.

To quote Maria Konnikova, author of The Biggest Bluff:

Poker isn’t just about calibrating the strength of your beliefs. It’s also about becoming comfortable with the fact that there’s no such thing as a sure thing—ever.

The lack of a sure thing is difficult to live with. Uncertainty is difficult to live with. When people say “the casino has it out for me” or “the cards have it out for me,” they’re attempting to replace uncertainty with the comfort of some kind of certainty, no matter how tenuous.

Sadly, there’s no comfort to be found.

This poker hand from Poker Go’s High Stakes Poker recently came to my attention (FYI: It’s 3 years old).

The hand features Phil Hellmuth, Doug Polk, and James Bord. The effective stack size is Hellmuth’s ~$97K. Hellmuth has QTo and raises it to $1,100 pre-flop. James Bord calls with 22 and Doug Polk also calls with T7o (probably a bit of a light call, but in position maybe it’s not so bad?). They go three-ways to a flop with $3,900 in the pot.

The flop comes J98 with two spades, giving Hellmuth a straight (the nuts) and Polk a slightly lower straight (the second nuts).

Hellmuth checks it to Bord who bets $2,000. Polk raises to $7,000 and Hellmuth jams all-in for an additional $90,200. Bord folds, leaving Polk to decide whether he wants to put in additional $90,200 and call Hellmuth’s massive bet. In concept, I don’t think a re-raise by Hellmuth is unreasonable, but jamming $90,200 into a pot that’s only ~$13,000 means you’re really limiting the types of hands that are going to call you (competing straights and maybe sets or flush draws? If that?). That said, with two other players, it’s understandable Hellmuth would want to fold out as much equity as possible.

The most interesting part of the hand comes from the table talk. Here’s a transcript, as best as I can re-create it:

Polk: Phil, I’m considering making a very big lay down here. Very, very big laydown.

Hellmuth: I mean, I could easily have, y’know?

Polk: What could you easily have?

Hellmuth: I don’t know.

Polk: You just bet a lot into very little.

Hellmuth: I could have a set.

Polk: Could you have a set? I don’t think you’d have a set here. C’mon Phil, you’re better than that.

Hellmuth: I could have the blockers? Two 10’s?

Polk: Oh, now you’re busting out blockers? God, if I fold this and I’m wrong, oh my fucking lord.

Hellmuth: I could have the Ace-Ten of spades?

Polk: I think I’m going to fold. I mean, I think I’m either dead — and I think I’m dead a lot given this — or you just have a ton of equity against me. So like, I think I can just…God, wow, this is going to look so dumb…This is completely absurd. He has to get through [Bord] and then he has to get through me. No, this is just a fold.

Credit where it’s due: Polk’s laydown is epic. This is one of the best laydowns I think I’ve ever witnessed. It takes a true professional to know when you’re beat, even when you have the second best hand possible.

But it also feels pretty likely that if Hellmuth had kept his mouth shut, Polk would have called. Hellmuth’s table talk is ridiculously unconvincing. It’s clear he’s just grasping at straws. I actually think table talk in this situation might’ve been effective, but you have to be thoughtful about it. Hellmuth was taking a random stab and didn’t think through the full implications of what he was saying. The result was Polk ended up convinced that Hellmuth had the nuts or something close enough to it that it merited a fold.

One of the most important concepts in poker is the following: Does your bet (or bluff) tell a plausible story? In other words: Would a person that has the hand you’re trying to represent play that hand in the same way? What’s clear from this video is that sometimes you have the opportunity to literally tell a plausible story to your opponent. And if you don’t have one, it’s probably best to just keep your mouth shut.

The other day while playing poker I met a contractor who I’ll call Diego (not his real name).

At the poker room I frequent, there are a lot of “regs,” or regular players who are there seemingly all the time. They know the staff by name and vice versa. Many of them at this particular room are younger (e.g. 30s and 40s), so I suspect they play for a living. But as a result, it’s easy to tell the difference between a reg and a visiting, recreational player (or “rec”). I’d never seen Diego before, so he was probably visiting the poker room for the first time.

Diego was a tall handsome Black man in his late 40s or 50s wearing a Carhartt jacket. When I showed up at that day at around 5:30 a.m. and it was clear that Diego has already been there for hours. Diego was what I’d call a Loose Aggressive player (also referred to as LAG). He would almost always call preflop and often blast an overbet on the flop or turn.

As 5:30 a.m. turned to dawn turned to 8 a.m., it became clear that Diego had some commitments that day. He shared about how he had a contractor job that morning where a massive house needed to be painted. He didn’t have to paint the house but he needed to show up with all the paint at a specific time. Everyone at the job was depending on him. But he was going to be late.

Diego probably had around a $2500 stack when I showed up (the max buy-in at the table is $1000), which had dwindled down to $1000. At that point, I ended up in a 3-way all-in against him where I hit a flush against Diego’s two-pair and another player’s straight. This took him down to around $500.

As time went on, things became more and more uncomfortable. Diego’s phone started blowing up. It was clear he was literally supposed to be somewhere right now but he was continuing to stay and play. At one point, he stepped away from the table to take a very lengthy phone call (presumably from an angry employer/co-worker), then came back and resumed playing like nothing was happening. Diego was down hundreds of dollars and he was not going to leave until he ran his stack up high or left with nothing.

The poker room is a stultifying environment because you can’t provide practical advice for people. If I could, I would’ve probably said to Diego, “Hey man, it seems like you gotta go. Why not step away now while you still have a few chips?” But if I did, I’d risk angering the rest of the poker table, who probably see easy money seated in front of them, and potentially Diego himself, who doesn’t want his judgment questioned. As a player, all I can do is watch silently as the unfortunate situation plays out.

Eventually, Diego decides to go all in against a player who has pocket Kings and gets knocked out. He finally decides to step away from the table. He says goodbye to several of the players who he’s been battling with for hours, then vanishes. For many of us, it’s a relief. There is a palpable lessening of tension as Diego’s energy and desperation is gone. Who knows if he’ll ever be back.

The player to my left turns to me and says, contemplatively, “You know, Diego now has me questioning every time a contractor has showed up late to my house.”

Today we’re going to try something a bit different: a poker hand analysis. I’m going to describe a hand and then ask my brother, who I consider to be one of the best poker players I know, to analyze it. Hopefully this will become a regular feature here at Dave Chen Poker.

In poker, a “cooler” is a hand where one player has a strong hand but loses to an even stronger hand. It’s generally considered very unlucky. So was the following a cooler? Or was I just a total moron? Let’s discuss.

Before I get into this, I have to explain two idioscyncrasies about poker at this particular room I play at:

• By law in Washington state, no single bet in any poker can be larger than $300. So if you have more than $300 in your stack, you can’t go “all in.” You can raise $300 (for instance, if a player bets $50, you can raise to $350), but you can’t bet more than $300 on any given street. It really changes the nature of the game and as a result, larger stakes games can feel more like limit than no-limit.

• There can be no more than 4 raises per “street” or round of betting. After that, it’s “capped,” meaning no one can raise any further.

Here’s the situation:

I’m playing at 1/3 no-limit. I have about $750 behind, making me one of the larger stacks at the table (max buy-in at this poker room is $300, so I’m doing relatively well). I pick up 33 on the big blind and I’m on the straddle for $7. A player to my left ($400 behind) raises to $15 and then a player on his left ($1000 behind) 3-bets to $35. Everyone else folds.

Typically I’d fold 33 to a 3-bet, but the amount is so low that I feel it’s worth it to try to hit a set. I call $35. The original raiser then 4-bets to $75. And the 3-bettor to his left attempts to shove “all-in” for $300 on top.

This is a critical moment. I throw my cards into the middle of the table face down. I’m not going to call that bet.

But then, something happens.

The dealer says: “You can’t raise $300. It was already capped at $75.” Everyone slowly realizes the significance of what he’s saying. 3-bettor can only call.

I ask sheepishly, “Can I take my cards back?” The dealer allows it, I think under the rationale that the action has changed. No one complains.

For just an additional $45, I can see the flop and potentially hit a set against two other people and win a big pot. How can I say no? I call.

We head 3-players to the flop, which comes: Q38 rainbow (all different suits). I’ve hit a set (also known as three of a kind), one of the best hands possible on this board. I check it and the second player checks to the 3-bettor, who (finally freed from his shackles) bets $300, the maximum. Really feels like he has pocket Aces, Kings, or maybe AK? And an outside possibility he has a set of Queens that’s better than my set?

At this point, I feel like I should’ve either raised or folded. But given that I had one of the best hands possible, I decided maybe I could just call and continue checking it down and this guy would keep betting into me. So I call his $300 bet. The other player folds. It’s now heads-up.

The turn comes and it’s a K. The board is now Q38K, with no flush draws. The King is an extremely dangerous card. It’s extremely possible this player has pocket kings, meaning he’d have a set that beat mine.

I check it to the villain and he moves in for $300 again. At this point, I only have a little over $400 behind. It’s time for me to move all in or fold. And perhaps extremely stupidly, I moved all in. My opponent calls.

I ask him: “Do you have a set?”

He seems shocked by the possibility. “No,” he mutters quietly.

The river comes. It’s an Ace.

My opponent flips over his cards. He has AA. It’s set over set, his aces over my 3’s. My opponent has hit a 2-outer on the river to beat me for my entire stack. I start to feel light-headed.

And as he realizes what’s happened and how extraordinarily lucky he has been, he whispers, “Now I have a set.”

Michael’s Analysis

Preflop: A clear fold on the first action. You have 33 out of position and you’re not closing the action. You should be worried about exactly what happened: one or both of the players reraising again and you having to fold your $35. As-played (after you’ve called and been raised), calling the additional $40 and closing the action once you’re capped to a 4-bet is a no-brainer.

Flop: Calling is probably best. I’m very surprised to read you were considering a fold. You got exactly what you wanted: a set on an extremely dry board. QQ is the only possible hand that could’ve played this way and is beating you. You are ahead of AA, KK, AQ (unlikely), and AK (very very unlikely). Folding would be massively negative EV. There’s an argument to be made for raising — this guy clearly overvalues top pair/overpair hands, and would be extremely unlikely to fold. You’d fold out very unlikely AK’s, but everything in his value range would probably continue and you could get it in on the turn. Calling is probably slightly better to keep in AK or any other random bluffs (again, probably almost 0 of these at these stakes, so calling/raising are close IMO), plus the board is extremely dry so there are very few scare cards that could come. Maybe the board pairing, or a straight card. I’d say the decision is read-dependent but I lean towards a call.

Turn: You have to call even though the K sucks. Too much in the pot to consider folding.

Sorry about the cooler.

On a fundamental level, playing poker well is about denying yourself. On multiple levels.

In a very basic sense, you’re not supposed to react to anything. You pick up your two hole cards. Don’t react. The flop is dealt. Don’t react. You completely miss your open-ended straight draw. Don’t react. You send hundreds of dollars into the middle as a bluff. Don’t react. Your mind is racing with thoughts and analyses. But outside you’re trying to stay as cool as a cucumber. Give away as little information as possible — anything else might give a slight edge to your opponent.

But it goes beyond that. Poker is also about resisting false narratives that may form in the moment. Narratives that may prove extremely enticing.

Let’s say you’re on a heart flush draw against an opponent who’s bet big against you. You don’t have the odds to call, but you decide to make a risky move anyway. You move all-in, your opponent calls, and you spike a heart on the river. You win a huge pot. As the dealer pushes the massive pile of chips towards you, you’re engulfed by a sense of invulnerability and euphoria. “Not only am I good at this game, I can do anything!” you think to yourself.

The problem is, no you can’t.

What happened was, you bet all your money on a 19% chance you’d hit a heart and ended up getting there. But every hand is an independent event. No single victory necessarily says anything about you as a person. The same is true of an unlucky loss.

As a species, I think we’re hardwired to form narratives out of observable events. I just hit three big hands in a row so the wind is at my back. I just lost for two hours straight so I must be irredeemably terrible at this game. I just got the job offer of my dreams so my life might be finally turning around. I can’t pass this test no matter how hard I study.

Poker is about resisting those narratives with every fiber of your being. It’s about taking each hand as it comes and understanding that all outcomes are equally likely right now as they were a few minutes ago.

That’s the terror and the beauty of it. You’re not invincible. But you can always make the right decision in any given moment.

Resist the easy narratives.

Poker rooms are often palaces of silence.

If you go into any poker room, most of the time, all you’ll hear is a Pandora playlist playing in the background and the relentless shuffling of chips. There are many good reasons not to talk while you’re playing poker. While it requires other players, poker is fundamentally a solitary activity. There’s no teamwork involved and any communication you have with other players is often intended to manipulate them; your sole objective is to get everyone else’s money.

Players also don’t talk because they don’t want to give away “tells,” or some kind of verbal/physical signal that reveals the strength of your hand. Everything in poker can be accomplished without speaking. You place chips in the middle to bet. You tap the table to check. You collect the chips when you win. No verbal interaction is required.

I’m not saying I haven’t been at a poker table that’s sociable, but I am saying that I’m frequently the most talkative person at the table because I’m there to learn about the culture of poker and fascinated by the personalities that I meet.

Most people at the poker room aren’t like me, though.

One poker vlogger I enjoy is Gary Blackwood. His play is solid but he also has an amazing upbeat attitude that he somehow manages to maintain despite going through some pretty heavy downswings during a given play session.

In a recent video (I couldn’t find the exact one — his most recent upload is above), Gary mentioned that he identified a tell from an opponent: Whenever the opponent was bluffing, he would count out chips for his bet and then state the dollar amount in the form of a question.

“Wow, that’s a pretty obvious tell!” I remember saying to myself. “It’s ridiculous that that player wouldn’t know that about themselves. They’re just sending all kinds of information out there!”

I think you know what’s coming next in the story.

The other day in the poker room, I find myself in a situation where I had to bluff. I start counting out my chips and all of a sudden I hear the words leave my mouth as I push the chips in.

“$55?”

I shocked myself. I was literally doing the exact same thing as the guy in the video. I found it to be a fascinating experience from a psychological perspective. Maybe there’s something in the way that we bluff that can’t help but express uncertainty. Like, on a deep core level, I’m really saying to my opponent and to the world, “Here’s a dollar amount that I think is high enough to get you to fold? Hopefully?”

I won the hand but I learned that you can’t count on yourself not to give off tells, even if you are aware that they exist. Sometimes, diligent focus is required to counteract the information your body and your voice wants to give away.

Poker was always something that I enjoyed but I was never any good at.

In summer 2023, I decided to take another stab. I spent a few months studying pre-flop opening ranges and dabbled in a few cash games. Then, in November 2023, I went to a local poker room, played a small multi-table tournament with over 50 players, and won.

That victory gave me enough encouragement to believe poker was something worth exploring further. Since then, I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing poker, studying hands/ranges, watching YouTube videos, and generally immersing myself in the culture of the game. This newsletter will share my stories and reflections from that journey.

Expect this newsletter to be incredibly random. Some editions will only be a quick 1-paragraph story, an Instagram reel, a nerdy hand analysis, or a brief reflection. Other times there will be a more substantive update. Basically, hope for everything and expect nothing!

The Hard Line

Here’s a thing that happened to me recently.

In order to explain this story, I need to tell you a few idiosyncrasies about my regular poker room:

• They have a “hard line” on the poker table. This means that once you move your chips past the line, they are considered part of the bet. So for instance, you can’t grab $50 in chips, move them over the line, and then just drop $15 into the middle. The whole $50 is now part of the bet.

• There is no string betting. If you are moving chips past the hard line, it must be done in one continuous motion. So for instance, you can’t move $50 into the middle, then move another $50 into the middle to bet $100, unless you declare $100 verbally first. Only the first $50 will count.

• They have a “high hand” jackpot. Every 30 minutes they give away hundreds of dollars to the highest hand in the poker room. Usually it’s a full house, four of a kind, or straight flush. Importantly: Players cannot coordinate on hands and still be eligible for the high-hand jackpot. For instance, you can’t say to another player “I have a pair of kings, can you please call so we can see if I hit the high hand?” or else you are disqualified.

Got all that? Phew.

I’m in a 1/3 game and I pick up A9suited in middle position. I raise it to $15 and get re-raised to $30 by the button. Everyone else has already folded but I’m happy to see a flop heads-up, so I call. I have $300 behind and my opponent has around $150 left.

The flop comes Ten Ten Ten. I check it to the raiser and all of a sudden he goes all in. BUT. He does it in two separate motions. He had a massive stack of $1 chips and a massive stack of $5 chips. In one motion, he moved the $1 chips over the line. Then, he separately grabbed the $5 chips and moved them over the line.

I probably wasn’t going to call in this situation but I wanted to know exactly where I stood. So I asked the dealer, “Was that two separate motions? What’s the actual bet?” The dealer agreed with me that it was ambiguous at best. He calls the floor manager over to run it by him.

It’s a busy night at the poker room. Every table is full and there are food carts flying everywhere (This poker room serves food, as do all poker rooms in Washington state). The floor manager takes awhile to make his way over to the table. Eventually, after awhile, my opponent gets impatient. In an act of mercy, he reveals (or “tables”) his hand: he has Ten 7 suited and had hit quads on the flop — a monster hand that would likely win the high hand jackpot. He wasn’t angry — just impatient, and wanted to get the hand over with. Of course, I folded right away.

Unfortunately, revealing your cards in this circumstance is seen as “coordinating” on the high-hand jackpot, instantly disqualifying him from a jackpot that he would have won (eventually). When the dealer explained this to him, he was shocked. He had no idea about this specific rule. And he definitely wouldn’t have tabled his hand if he was aware of it.

I felt enormously guilty because I felt like I set in motion a sequence of events that cost him his jackpot. Moreover: I probably wasn’t going to call his bet anyway! But my personal philosophy is to understand what situation you’re in before you act on it, which is why I asked for the count in the first place.

For the entire rest of the evening until my opponent left, I shut the hell up and did not speak. To be fair: he didn’t blame me at all for his mistake. But apologizing at the poker table is seen as gauche and I didn’t know if apologizing profusely would inflame him further.

It’s strange how the primary incentive of being at the poker table is to remove all outward traces of your humanity. Don’t react to anything you say, lest you be giving away a tell. Don’t apologize for taking someone’s money, even if you got super lucky. For some people, this self-denial is an enormous challenge that they can never come to fruition. For others, it’s a perk, not a downside.

The broader lesson is this: Always understand the rules of the situation you’re in, even when you think you already know. This man has probably played tens of thousands of poker hands in his life. But he wasn’t fully aware of the rules of this specific poker room and in the end, it cost him dearly.