Seth Davies posted a video on social media talking about why high stakes players don’t celebrate when they win tournaments. Seth argued that what some see as being robotic is actually showing empathy and respect. You won this time, but you’ve lost hundreds of thousands of other times, so you empathize with the person you beat and want to show them respect. I responded jokingly, writing
When I win a tournament and it looks like I am in a fugue state. It is not because I want to eat a burger and take a nap. You are misreading me, I am actually actively trying to show respect to the guy I just beat
I had some more thoughts on Seth’s video, but I wanted a venue that was better suited for long posts than X: The Everything App, and I’m going to dump a bunch of them here in my week in review.
I’ll start with the main reason players don’t celebrate after winning big tournaments. You’ve trained yourself to not have a response to good things happening to you in a poker tournament. If you got visibility excited every time you rivered the nuts, it would affect your winrate. Keeping your emotions in check during the hand is something everyone understands, but it’s also important after the hand: When you win a big flip or make a big bluff or good river call, you feel your adrenaline spike, but you still have more poker to play. You need to wrangle that excitement so that you aren’t too amped up to think clearly if you end up playing a pot in the near future.1
In Seth’s replies, someone compared poker player’s measured responses to tennis players getting fired up after winning a big point. The difference is that in physical sports, adrenaline can help you perform at the highest level possible. In poker, you are constantly battling stress and adrenaline and practicing emotional control. I used to listen to “pump up” music before big days of poker, but I’ve realized that getting pumped up right before sitting in a chair for hours does not always prime yourself to play great poker.2 Now I mostly listen to the thing I want to listen to. I am about to enter a high stress arena where the outcome is often out of my hands; it’s nice to get in a positive mindset by listening to something I like. If you’re taught to control your emotions during hands and after hands, and then you play a one in 10,000 type hand— a hand where you win a poker tournament— it makes sense that you might forget to flip the “this time it’s okay to celebrate” switch.
However, even if I did remember to flip that switch, I think my celebration would be muted when I won tournaments, but it would not be due to the amount of empathy and respect I have for my opponent.3 For starters, they just came second in the tournament; they’ve cashed for a lot of money and are doing fine. I have a lot more empathy for the person who is down $500k on the trip grinding level 3 of a tournament while confetti cannons are going off to celebrate my victory. The primary emotion when I win a tournament is relief that it is over: Poker tournaments are very stressful; most hands are uneventful, but every hand could be the last one you play. That stress and tension accumulates through every square inch of your body as you're playing the tournament, until you’re knocked out of the tournament and that stress is released. Similarly, when you win, what you feel is often not an overwhelming manic joy worth screaming about, but a relief followed by a sort of euphoric bliss you want to bask in.4
Throughout a tournament, I gradually come to terms with what it feels like to climb the ladder. I've already had some sort of mini internal celebrations about cashing the tournament, reaching the final table, and making the top two. So while winning is very nice, it often feels like a pleasant, but natural conclusion to a long journey, as opposed to a shocking, unpredictable event. The other consideration I have is that sometimes you are playing someone heads up that you would not want to celebrate in front of— poker is also a customer service business, and you might not want to rub your victory in the face of certain customers. If you’re fortunate enough to win a tournament and want to celebrate, go nuts, but in order for me to do so, I’d need to override years of training, the relief of stress being released, the euphoric glow, the social reminder of not embarrassing a VIP, and after all that, the empathy and respect for the person I just beat.
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Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
Premium subscribers get the raw files of sims I used to write my POTDs, sims that are more accurate and appropriate than equivalent sims in the big public libraries, videos of me walking through the sims, and a text summary of how I ran the sims. This week I uploaded
Two 4BP sims, one using GTOLab ranges one GTO Wizard for POTD #116
Two flop sims and two turn sims for with lots of sizing options for POTD #117
PIO ICM sims where I have one bet size and one where I have many for #118
Four different nodelocked sims diving deep into POTD #119
A PIO ICM sim used for POTD #120
Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers
Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included on Substack. Today I’ll share #onemorething for POTD #120 where I write about the trap of thinking “I need to call, I’m getting such good odds”
POTD #120 #onemorething
I’ve had some stationy tendencies in my poker days, so much so that Daniel Dvoress and Nick Petrangelo nicknamed me “sticky fingers” because I am so sticky in pots. Everyone has different lessons they need to learn on their poker journey, and one issue that I had in this hand that has plagued me throughout my poker journey, is not calibrating the difference between good pot odds and great pot odds. If someone bets full pot, you only need 33.33% equity to call; if someone bets half pot, you need to be right 25% of the time; and if someone bets quarter pot, you need to be right 1/6th of the time. In this setup, that means if someone bets 25% of the pot, your pot odds only double compared to a full pot bet.
Paul’s river shove seems really small, and it is, but bluffing 22% of the time for chips or 1/3rd of the time for ICM value is still really quite a lot. What’s more likely? Paul Newey is bluffing here, or I roll a dice and it’s a one or two? It’s the same question that I posed in the blog, but when I write it out here the answer is very clear– Paul is not bluffing close to that often and I should fold.
Media
No media appearances for me, but in the Substack subscriber chat, which I’ve linked above, someone asked me for some podcast recommendations, and one of the podcasts I chose was Pablo Torre Finds Out. PTFO is a lot of things: Sometimes it’s a sports talk panel show, sometimes it’s an interview show, and sometimes they do investigative journalism. This week, they dropped another shocking investigation that starts with a far fetched premise: What if Steve Ballmer was paying Kawhi Leonard under the table to circumvent the salary cap? But the case is laid out so thoroughly in the podcast that I don’t think there is any credible case that this salary cap circumvention did not happen. I am writing this on Wednesday, and the case feels so open and shut that there could be punishments handed out before this publishes on Saturday (it feels like this, but I’d be shocked if it actually happened). As a Raptors fan, I’ll always appreciate Kawhi for bringing a title to Toronto; I’d have rather he stayed and won more titles, but seeing the Clippers steal him from the Raptors and flail for years has been a nice consolation.
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Bluesky
Online poker, where a propulsive beat can help you get through long days of clicking buttons, is different for me.
Of course. it could be for Seth or others. I am not speaking for everyone here, just myself.
This is one of the many things Uncut Gems gets right about gambling.