Chuck Blount on poker: When you’re winning big, you never should walk away
Chuck Blount on poker: When you’re winning big, you never should walk away
By Chuck Blount
For MySA.com
Ted Forrest, one of the most feared poker players and proposition gamblers in Las Vegas, once sat at the same 7-card stud table for 72 consecutive hours before calling it quits. Hall of Famer Johnny Moss played in a juicy Dallas game for four consecutive days, and legend has it he made multi-day sessions a frequent practice.
While those examples are extreme, long playing sessions are commonplace and can mean one of two things: Either a player is sunk and desperately trying to get even, or he is sitting in the perfect game with inferior opponents and winning all the money.
I don’t have much to say about the losing scenario other than to reiterate that it’s a terrible idea with an absurdly low chance of success. The Los Angeles Clippers have a better shot at winning an NBA championship.
As for the second scenario, one must learn to love caffeinated beverages because it’s almost as unforgivable to leave a game that you are winning easily as it is to stay when you are losing.
Traditional casino logic doesn’t have a lot of useful application at a poker table, because there is no house advantage built into the game that makes you a loser over the long haul.
A slot player who takes $50 to a machine and hits a $10,000 jackpot after a few pulls should take the money and run. Slots run on a computer program, and there’s never been one made that’s coded to pay out more than it takes in (or even break even). All slots are programmed for you to lose, so if the player let that $10,000 jackpot ride, it eventually would erode down to nothing.
In poker, it’s all about the game itself and how well you play it in relation to the competition. The past is wiped out with every hand, and the odds remain the same.
Any player can sit down at a table with random opponents at their desired limits and discover the conditions of the game (quality of opponents) lend themselves to big profits. These are the games that you want to play, and you want to take advantage of them when you find one because they don’t come around every day.
Let’s assume that you are a pretty well-versed player and you stumble upon a crazy $1-2 no-limit Hold ‘Em table at the local casino and you buy in for $200. It’s filled to the brim with players that you quickly observe bet large figures with relatively weak hands and love to show off their triumphant bluffs.
You take advantage of this and four hours into the session you are up $225, which grows to $400 in seven hours with the table keeping the same dynamic. The table is a bona fide cash machine, and every indication is that it will continue to be so because it’s now obvious that you are better than the rest of the players in the game.
To cut off your gaming session now because you are showing a 200 percent profit would be foolish. Continue to take advantage of the opportunistic table and continue to maximize your profits with further time at the table. You may take a bad beat and get knocked down a few pegs at some point, but you want to stay involved in any game that you hold an obvious advantage in for as long as possible.
You may end up being really, really late for dinner, but it sure beats being too early.
