We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us

by: Lou Krieger©

“We have met the enemy and he is us,” is a 35-year old catch phrase injected by cartoonist Walt Kelly into the mouth of Pogo, a philosophical possum who lives in the Okefenokee Swamp and is the feature character of the comic strip that bore his name. People have so much reverence for Kelly that the town of Waycross, Georgia — located just north of the Okefenokee — holds an annual Pogofest each March. Although Walt Kelly is no longer living and the comic strip has passed into history, so many people love Pogo and Walt Kelly that the annual Pogofest serves as a gathering place for them all.

Like so many others, I loved Pogo for the simple yet profound truths that jumped out of its panels on a regular basis. “We have met the enemy and he is us,” is the most famous and most frequently quoted Pogoism, and it’s applicable to most every area of life and human endeavor. I don’t know whether Walt Kelly played poker or not, but that statement certainly got to the heart of the game’s psychology.

As poker players, it’s no secret that we are frequently our own worst enemy. We do it to ourselves repeatedly, in oh-so-many ways. And what’s worse, we seldom realize it. We can be our own best friend too, but we’re our own worst enemy a lot more often. In our competitive zeal, in our zest for doing battle with other players, in our compelling need to impose our will on opponents, in our psychological need to outplay them and in our longing to be recognized by our opponents as the toughest, trickiest, and most inscrutable player at the table, we ignore the obvious: We usually beat ourselves. We are the enemy. He is us.

So what do we do when we’re the enemy? Where do we take aim? We can’t very well shoot ourselves, or give up poker, can we? I suppose we could, but those prospects aren’t very appealing. In fact, they’re just awful choices, and if you ask me, I don’t know whether I could live with either of them.

But there is something else we can do. We can look at ourselves honestly, and if we do, we’re likely to see some flaws creeping into our game. By identifying them, we will have taken the first step toward eliminating whatever emotional and psychological demons conspire to make us our own worst enemy.

Love Is In the Air: It sounds like a line from a Frank Sinatra song, doesn’t it? While love is grand, it’s also a two-edged sword, and love has been the ruin of many a poker player. No, I’m not talking about some femme fatale with a come hither glance smoldering her way into your heart and into your wallet at the poker table. I’m talking about some of the hands poker players are fond of falling in love with — hands that cost money because they’re not at all what they seem to be at first glance.

I had a friend who was in love with J-9, especially if the jack of diamonds was involved. He’d call a raise cold to enter a pot with J-9, believing it was lucky for him and that he was going to win far more than his fair share whenever he was dealt those two cards. How and why did this come about? An early success imprinted those cards in his memory and led him down that particular slippery slope.

It was one of those kill-pot hands where the stakes were doubled and he called an early bet, only to be raised and so he called the raise too. Then another player reraised, the betting was capped, and our hero was sitting there with Jd-9d while presumably confronting pairs of aces, kings, A-K, and whatever else players like to cap the betting with. The flop was J-J-9, and guess who won a huge pot? There were bets and raises galore, and at double the usual stakes my buddy won the biggest pot of the day. It was so big that two hands later he was still stacking his chips when he was dealt J-9 again. So he played. He flopped the nut straight and won that pot too. It wasn’t quite as big as the first one, but it was big enough so that he was still stacking chips a few hands later.

Ever since that fateful day, which was quite early in his poker-playing career, he’s been in love with jack-nine. Although he’s a fairly logical guy in everyday life, he persists in clinging to a false fixed belief that a jack and a nine are inordinately lucky for him. As a result, he continues to read magic into what is nothing more than a mediocre Texas hold’em poker hand, one best played suited from late position, and only then if there’s been no raise. If those conditions haven’t been met, it’s an unplayable hand and ought to be thrown away. But to my friend, jack-nine ranks right up there in the pantheon of truly majestic Texas hold’em starting hands along with pocket pairs of aces and kings.

While my friend won two enormous pots with this hand way back in his salad days, he’s probably a lifelong money loser with J-9 because he persists in playing this worthless piece of cheese as if it were a pair of aces. But he doesn’t see this. All he recalls are the times he drags a big pot with his favorite hand, and he’s sure he’s still got his mojo working.

It doesn’t have to be J-9. You can be your own worst enemy with any favorite trash hand. On the Internet newsgroup, Rec.Gambling.Poker, a pocket pair of fives carries a mystique all its own. It’s called “Presto” and how it got that name is a long story that I won’t bore you with here. The “power of Presto” actually began as a joke of sorts, but quickly developed a life and a mystique of its own because just about everyone who plays a pocket pair of fives and wins with it usually posts an item to the newsgroup regaling readers with another tale about Presto’s magical power. ESPN even showed Greg Raymer, arms raised high in the air, shouting out “presto” at the final table of the 2004 World Series of Poker when he dragged a pot with a pair of fives. Greg shouted it jokingly, and the remark itself seemed to go right by the commentators and probably most of the viewing audience except those who read RGP on a regular basis, but hey, presto does have its own mystique and karma about it, and who knows how many RGPers actually believe in its power.

I’m sure J-9 and Presto aren’t the only two hands poker players have fallen in love with. There are 169 different starting hands in Texas hold’em, and I suppose each and every hand, even the weakest among them, has an adherent or two. When it comes to lucky poker hands, there’s something for everyone, and it’s only human nature to reinforce our false fixed beliefs and myths by recalling the good things that happen when we play those weak hands that fascinate us.

When we recall only the good times, we conveniently forget all the times we lose money with these turkeys, and I suppose they all look pretty good when viewed retrospectively through our memory’s looking glass.

The sad, cold truth is that not every hand that some player considers lucky is going to win in disproportionate measure, and a pair of aces will beat the living daylights out of J-9 and Presto the vast majority of the time, even if you happen to remember it differently. If you’ve got a favorite hand, but it’s one that’s really a dog regardless of whatever magical qualities you’ve assigned it, just look at the hand for what it is and play it accordingly. Your wallet will love you for it.

If He Did it, So Can I: To some people, bad plays are an incredibly powerful advertisement for themselves. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen someone win a pot with a trashy hand like 10-3, and then see another player put his money on similar cards because he saw someone else win with it. Thinking players realize that the result of any given hand is no way to assess whether it was played correctly or not. You can do everything right and someone can still draw out on you. But that’s poker, and in the end better players benefit from poor decisions made by those who have a tendency to gear their style to whatever occurred recently, regardless of whether it was just some fluky outcome determined by the random turn of a card.

Another manifestation of this sort of thing happens when a player gets a big pair snapped off and says something like, “I can’t win with aces, so I’m gonna play 9-7.” And he does. For about five or six hands this player is on tilt in a big way, and he’s ready, willing, able, and eager to toss his money into the pot on any two cards that come along.

These sorts of failings seem to befuddle players who take an inordinately short view of poker. They are swayed, moved, and even manipulated by what's happened lately. But poker is a long game, and results can be both skewed and deceiving when viewed in the short run. If this shortcoming hits home, you’ll probably have to muster up the will power to never stray from what you know to be appropriate starting standards regardless of how many players are winning pots with hands like J-6.

Not Me; Not Me: “I am justified.” “I am not guilty.” “It was not my fault.” “Change the deck.” “Blame the dealer.” “These games are fixed.” “This imbecile always wins; why can’t I?” “Why, dear God, does this always happen to me?” “If not for bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck at all.” “I just can’t win with aces; from now on I’m gonna start raising with hands like J-9 and 7-6.”

Does this sound like you? Have you ever thrown cards, pounded the table and shouted out something like that, or even turned inward and said it to yourself? You know what you’re doing here, don’t you? Whenever you utter any of these or dozens of other similar statements that reflect your frustration, you’re abandoning your locus of control over the very game you’re playing. You are, in essence, walking away from whatever ability you have to take the right steps and make the right plays — the kinds of things you have to do to be a winning poker player in the long run.

It’s tough making do in life or in poker when our first instinct is to deny accountability and blame others for anything and everything we don’t like. It’s all too easily done, and all too many of us do it in poker and in life. When we look outside of ourselves for a place to point the finger, blaming forces outside our control is often easier than taking responsibility for our own actions and holding ourselves accountable for the results we achieve.

Flopped a flush draw that didn’t pan out? Flopped six or seven of them in a row that never came to fruition? Whom should you blame? The dealer, the cards, the casino itself? All of them make good targets. After all, they can’t prove they didn’t do it.

But that’s inconsequential. You’re the poker player, the man at the switch, the engineer driving the train, the pilot, the guy with the compass plotting the course. And if you wind up somewhere you’d rather not be there are only two things that could have gone wrong. You might have screwed things up, or it might not be anyone’s fault at all. And where the turn of a card is concerned, neither you nor anyone else has any control over that as long as the game is on the up and up.

If you’ve made all the right decisions, you can absolve yourself of blame. After all, whenever the pot odds exceeded the odds against making your hand, calling — or even raising — is the right decision regardless of whether you win or lose that particular hand. If you were to play that same hand over and over again, thousands of times, and you will if you play poker long enough, you’ll come out ahead at the end of the day. The simple truth is that it doesn’t matter at all whether you win or lose any particular encounter. After all, you’ll win some and lose others. What does matter is that whenever the ratio of pot’s size to the bet you’ve been asked to call exceeds the odds against making your hand, taking a card off the deck is invariably the right thing to do and will pay off in the long run.

If you lose this particular time, or even the next five or six times in a row, it’s not anyone’s fault. Poker has an element of chance ingrained in every part of the game, and neither you nor I can change that and it does no good to blame anyone for the momentary bad fortune dictated by the turn of a card.

What if you play a weak hand but flop two pair and think you hold a winner, only to find out that your opponent flopped a set, or made a straight or flush on a later betting round and beat you out of pretty good sized pot? What do you do then? It’s still not the dealer’s fault. Tearing the cards into little pieces won’t do any good either. Cards are just paper or plastic; they don’t think, they don’t make friends, and they seldom make enemies. They don’t have minds of their own and they aren’t conspiring to get you. Railing against randomness does about as much good as whistling by a graveyard. The casino has no interest in whether you win or lose either; their only concern is that you have a good experience and continue playing so you contribute your share of the rake or time collection charges.

When you deny responsibility for the results you achieve it’s not just a case of placing blame where it does not belong; it’s more insidious than that. If you blame forces outside of yourself for you bad luck, you won’t go through the process of self examination that’s so critical in correcting any flaws or leaks in your poker game. In addition, you’ll waste energy in anger directed at innocent sources, energy you could have put to better use by analyzing and correcting errors in your play.

This is so critical it’s surprising that so many players miss the point entirely. Blaming forces outside of yourself is a way of blinding yourself to the possibilities that you might have something to do with your poor results. If you refuse to look at yourself as a possible source of error or leakage in your game, how can you possibly correct any flaws in your game when you’ve turned a blind eye to them?

You can’t. As a result, you have a leak in your game that you refuse to see. If you don’t see your own flaws, if you refuse to engage in self analysis, you’ll never improve. You will persist in making the same errors day after day, week after week, and year after miserable year. You’ll also persist in parting with money you really don’t have to lose, and what’s worse, you’ll have no idea why. The best you’ll be able to come up with is a dealer or deck of cards to scapegoat. You might feel better for the moment, but your wallet won’t feel better at all.

Shrug Like Atlas: If you don’t know what to do, and can’t decide whether you’re the one to blame or it’s only the randomness of cards falling, do yourself a favor and assume that you’re the problem. Even if you’re uncertain about the identity of the guilty party at least this assumption leads down the path to corrective action. You can start examining your own game, breaking it down and tearing it apart where necessary in order to take steps to make changes and improve your play as a consequence. Any other assumption leaves you twisting in the wind, blaming everybody but yourself for your own shortcomings.

Poker’s not rocket science. It’s a game that can be taught and it can be learned, and if you don’t know enough to make yourself a long term winning player, there are really only two choices open to you: You can always decide that playing is so much fun it doesn’t make a difference whether you win or lose as long as your losses are within tolerable limits. But if losing leaves a dusty, bitter aftertaste in your mouth and won’t go away regardless of how you try to rationalize it, then it’s time to cowboy up and learn to play better. There are books, teachers, tapes, and a variety of internet resources that you can use to improve your poker game. Even reading a collection of old Pogo cartoons will improve your outlook. After all, when we’re our own worst enemy all we have to do is decide not to put up with our shortcomings and foibles any longer. And then do make some changes. It’s that simple. Really.