Tag Archives: poker

Chumming at poker, work, and life

Posted on by

When you need chips (cheques) while playing poker, you tell the dealer. If the dealer does not trade your cash for cheques, he will call out the amount of cheques needed at the table. The person who brings these cheques is called a Chip Runner. There are two other common positions in a card room. One of these positions is the brush. The brush takes down your name and assigns you to play at a table. The third position and questionably the most important position is called the Floor. The Floor is the poker room manager or their designated stand-in. The floor makes decisions that the dealer can not or will not make about disputes over play, or other table matters.

In smaller poker rooms, or during slow times Chip Runners, the Brush, and Floor may all be the same person. This was one of those slow times. There was a player who was friends with the Floor on a player to poker room basis. The player was playing almost every hand and replacing his lost chips for the minimum amount each time. This meant that every ten to fifteen minutes the dealer was calling out for more chips and the Floor/brush/Chip runner would make the trip to the table to exchange cheques for cash.

The Floor arrived for the fourth time in an hour to deliver chips to the player. Frustrated the Floor asked the player, “Are you going to quit chumming soon? I found this question very funny as did some of the other players! Chumming is a fishing term. You throw something in the water to attract fish. While looking for the food they were attracted to fish will hopefully bite on your bait and become hooked. Generally the bait is worth a lot more than the chum being used.

What the floor was implying was the player was chumming with chips. The Floor was cautioning the player to slow down before the player ran out of money to buy chips with. Because he was going through his money so quickly, it was becoming difficult to impossible to win his money back. For players like this those words have no meaning.

Incorrect Chumming is something many of us do. We generally chum using different baits than money. Supervisor to employee relationships is a favorite chumming area for a number of people. They go through their working year showing up late, arguing over little things, and generally making life difficult for their boss. Then when it comes time for raises to be given out, these same people are angry that they either did not receive a raise, or received a very small raise.

Relationships too are where many people chum when they should not. One party or the other does not respect the other person enough to be responsible in their actions. Be it dating someone else, not arriving when they said they would, or not doing something they said they would do, such as return a phone call, it is a form of incorrect chumming. On the other side of the relationship, some people chum with promise baits they have no intention of giving fulfilling.

Incorrect chumming covers a whole area of things we do, but I think my few examples make clear what chumming is, and it is easy to decide whether we are incorrectly chumming or not. Chumming the right way can lead to a happy life full of reward and pleasure. Incorrect chumming is certainly a recipe for disaster. If you chum, chum responsibly.

Share

Play poker to effectively improve your life skills

Posted on by

Everyone should learn to play poker. Playing poker teaches life skills. Playing poker gives a player immediate feedback for important life areas such as decision making, focus, and life management. On a lower level poker can teach anyone basic logic and math skills.

I have found and other poker players have also confirmed that the game of poker has changed or improved major areas of the rest of their lives too. What you learn at the poker table, or in some cases are forced to unlearn carries over into other parts of life that seem to be unrelated.

Decision making and poker go hand in hand. When you play poker, you have to make constant decisions about your hand. A poker hand is a good hand for one round of play, and the next time you are dealt the same hand you throw it away and are glad you did. During the play of the hand, other players actions cause you to evaluate your hand and go through the decision making process again. After some time the decision making and constant evaluation of your next action becomes second nature.

As this process is ongoing, decision making and constant hand evaluation carries over to personal life. One day you realize you are making life decisions based on different criteria than in the past. You find you are using a new toolset, different criteria, and thinking about the consequence of action or non action before you make it.

For a good poker player focus becomes an important poker playing skill. A good player will focus on the game in general and the other players in particular. Just as in life, everyone at the table goes through mood changes which changes their decision making, and focus. A player with good focus picks up on these subtle changes and turns them into an advantage. Over time focus spills over into personal life. You start noticing situations that may be important that before poker you never payed attention to. Your work life will become more interesting and satisfying as you are more attuned to opportunity and challenge which used pass by unnoticed.

Playing poker is also great for life management skills. Poker provides immediate feedback on many areas of every day life. Playing poker teaches money management by default. Play every hand, and within minutes you will find yourself out of money and leaving the game. Play too few hands, and you still lose your money, only slower. Play the hands you should play and play them correctly, and as time goes by you realize you have extra money.

Where I think poker really makes valuable life changes in life management is in anger management. At a poker table emotions are something every returning poker player quickly learns to manage. One learns quickly that letting your temper take control of your chips, leaves you angry and broke. The feedback is immediate and apparent when you play angry poker.

Being too emotional also receives immediate feedback. After winning a pot or two in quick succession many new players forget that it was a turn of events that made them successful and not superior poker skills. When players forget this they often turn a good win into a devastating loss. Often an inexperienced player starts playing on emotion, loses all their chips, and digs into their wallet or purse for more money with the idea of recouping their losses.

Recouping losses that resulted from emotional play leads to more loss, and eventually they run out of money, and emotionally crash and burn. Some players realize a day or too later what happened, others never do. Those that realize what happened to them start working on their emotional play. Changing emotional play at the poker table also changes life management skills from making emotion based decisions.

For a few people, poker has negative connotations. For many players, poker has improved their lives in ways they never would have had the opportunity to have exposed to so quickly and clearly. Where else can one immediately see the results of incorrect decision making, lack of focus, and life management skills and not derail their whole life?

Share

Holdem, vision, perception, and groceries

Posted on by

Here I am writing about something that I thought I would never be doing again. Playing poker…. I wrote a few months ago that Holdem had become too serious and the players were playing at least as well I do. What this did was turn Holdem into a matter of luck, who was going to be the luckiest in the next few hours. When I wrote that post I was absolutely certain  I was not going to be playing Holdem again.

As life would have it, some things never really change, even though most things do. Some weeks ago the weather was terrible for longer than I can sit in the house and do nothing. I had been using Holdem simulator software for fun, and I had changed the way I was playing. It was making a difference even though it did not seem correct for the table conditions I thought I was playing against at the poker room.

Poker is like chess, or any other game of skill, where the players are evenly matched at the beginning. For every strategy there is an equally effective counter strategy. My problem with my game was the game had changed and my strategy did not. For those of you who play Holdem, I started out again at $2-4, and now have a bankroll to move up to $4-8. I am showing a win in most sessions, although that is all relative, and means little other than I can play a little bigger when I wish.

It is always easier to see what is going on from the outside, when we are not personally involved in the situation. I think this is a lot like our eyesight. Over our whole development as human beings it was important for men to see a long distance and not close up. For women it was more important to have fine detail vision for close up tasks. I imagine this was because of the division of the tasks that were done. The men hunted, and the women gathered, made clothes and such.

My thinking is my little hiatus from Holdem gave me a chance to step back an look at the situation from a distance. What I had been doing was using my fine vision and expecting different results from doing the same things. The results over time may not have been that bad, but they were not have been optimal.

The same is true in our work. If you look around with a detached manner at the people in almost any work place, you find people using their fine vision performing their activities. Because they are looking at a very small picture of their work, they are missing out on the bigger rewards that they should be working towards.

For example, if you there are two similar stores of any type in your vicinity that both have the same products, say a grocery store, you usually have a favorite. Using our fine vision, reasons why we prefer one store over the other are varied. The prices are cheaper, the store is newer, parking is easier, and the list goes on and on.

This is usually the reason people feel they like one business better than another, but it is not always the truth. It may well be that if on the same day, if I walked into one grocery store and bought twenty items, and then drove to the store I did not like as well, and bought the same twenty items, the second store may have the same or cheaper prices.  So there goes any arguments for why we prefer one grocery store over another.

What really goes on is with our fine vision we enjoy the way the stock people or cashiers talk to us when we interact with them. Using our distance vision, and distancing ourselves from the situation it is easy to see the only real difference is service. If our favorite cashiers leave the store, we may find we do not like our favorite store as much anymore. In fact, the prices (really the way we are being treated) are getting higher, and the competitions prices start to look better to us. What a difference a little distance makes in how we perceive our world.

Share