#146: “Rock, Maniac, Donk”

There is a phenomenon within the poker community whereby the loose players call the tight players ‘rocks’ and ‘nits’. In retaliation, the tight players call the loose players ‘maniacs’ and ‘spew-monkeys’. It used to be a complement to be called a rock but within the modern poker paradigm these days, it is more of an insult.

In the complex game of ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’ (or ‘Rock, Maniac, Donk’) that is poker, the rocks are probably best at exploiting the deficiencies of the weak passive players, the maniacs are best at exploiting the tightness of the rocks and if you want to exploit the looseness of the maniacs, you either have to become more maniacal than them or adopt a style that’s even tighter than the rock (become a nit!). The latter strategy generally bothers the maniac as it turns him into a spew-monkey. Of course, it isn’t quite as simple as this. There is far more subtlety and nuance to poker and the best players are chameleons, capable of playing all styles, making timely gear-changes and adjusting to game-flow.

Recently, however, I have noticed another layer to these exchanges. I have heard one or two loose players refer to the nittier guys as ‘cowards’. I, too, have been accused of cowardice for my generally risk-averse nature. It is an interesting choice of word. ‘Coward’ carries allusions to fear and the desire to be non-confrontational. But nits aren’t afraid. Rather, they are cautious. They aren’t non-confrontational either. They are just selectively confrontational. As my friend and self-confessed nit, Padraig ‘Smidge’ O’Neill said recently to a loose player who was jibing him about always having ‘it’ and one day getting called by him when he doesn’t have ‘it’: “I’ll probably have it that time too”.

I find it interesting too that, in my experience, some of the guys who like to indulge in this type of name-calling are staked players. They are also guys who live at home, come from affluent backgrounds and/or have no dependents. Poker is a different animal when it’s your own money on the line and you do it to pay your mortgage and put your kids through school. Face that challenge, staring into that particular abyss and I challenge those same people to play with the same reckless abandon.

Some players have the stomach for big swings and some players take the lower variance route. The former generally come to the game with an appetite for risk and a need to gamble that can be satiated by poker. The latter generally come to the game with a fiscally conservative businessman’s outlook – they don’t fear risk but they prefer to manage it, like an actuary. They realise that playing cautiously is not dumb. It’s what separates a lot of good poker players from professional poker players. Managing oneself and one’s bankroll is more important than playing the cards if you want to have longevity in this industry.

Don’t get me wrong, I do admire the more fearless guys who take bigger risks than I am willing to take. I salute their courage when they take a shot in a game that’s bigger than they can afford to lose. I celebrate their victory in the ‘Big One’. But I have also staked and bailed out some of those same guys when they went busto for living and dying by that same sword.

Poker attracts people who want to get rich fast. Poker attracts people who aren’t willing to work hard. For those people, there will always be bad role-models – outliers who succeeded in a short space of time with little effort. I prefer to look at the guys who take the financial lessons of the real world and apply them to poker, who set realistic targets and then execute a specific plan with discipline in order to achieve those targets. They are the guys who grind every day, 50 hours a week for years, building up their bankrolls. No short-cuts. No half-measures. Just old-fashioned elbow grease. Within that schema, no one event is allowed to have significant enough negative impact so as to knock you off your ultimate course.

To paraphrase a line from my good friend Jono Crute when describing his hero, newly crowned EPT Champion Mickey ‘mement_mori’ Peterson: “I wanna be that guy. He is the guy who would be just as successful in all the parallel universes”.