It's All About Winning

When I was young, I used to watch sports whenever I had the opportunity. Growing up in Seattle was tough as a sports fan, because none of the city's professional teams ever could win. Everyone in Seattle always used to say that the Seattle Mariners were two years away from winning the World Series. It got to the point that I started cheering for certain players to do well because I couldn't count on the team to do well. In 1989, Ken Griffey Jr. entered the major leagues and I started tracking his performance. There were many mornings that I would wake up and check the box score. On many occasions, the Mariners had lost, but Griffey had gone 3 for 4 with a home run and a double. Instead of being upset about the loss, I would look at the positives and get excited about winning in two years. I was like a mother cheering on her superstar kid. Years later, I discovered that winning was more fun even if the game was boring. A great pitching duel ending up in a win was better than a game with 20 home runs. A win was a win.

Poker is very similar. Sometimes you can have most of the chips in the first three days of a tournament, and you may have knocked out 30 people along the way. Everyone comes up to you and mentions how many chips you have. This is like hitting home runs. Meanwhile, you keep your eye on someone who is still alive but has an average amount of chips. Eventually, you get down to the final table and the average guy is still in. At some point, he doubles up a couple of times and is now a threat. The blinds get larger, you (the chip leader for days) now lose a small pot, and your chip lead is gone. After a few hours at a final table, anything can happen, and the guy with all of the pizzazz (you) doesn't win (but does pocket a ton of money); instead, the average guy wins the tournament. This seems to happen all the time.

One huge debate in poker, especially in no-limit hold'em, revolves around the question: What is the best tournament strategy? Should you coast, stay alive, and hope something good happens, or should you try to accumulate chips and dominate play? Both strategies work. Of course, if you can do both in the same event, that's the best of both worlds. However, when it is all said and done, all that matters in the long run is winning. All of the fame, the big money, and extreme confidence come from winning first place. After a few months when people look back to see who won, they don't think about how many pots the winner stole, or how lucky he got. All they remember is that he won.

Good players always think about what they did right or wrong when winning or losing. Could they have won more chips on a hand or saved a few by not making a bad call? All of that is good, but it really comes down to individual situations against individual players. You can always hope to make the right moves, but in the end, it is all about winning.