#167: “Karma Police, Part I: This is What You Get”

What do you deserve?

If you believe in Karma, then you deserve exactly what you get (or will eventually get), you reap precisely what you sow and you will, over your life, run at EV. If you don’t, then well done for having a brain. The law of cause and effect is not some metaphysical weighing scales, rewarding good deeds and punishing bad behaviour. It doesn’t even assign a value to your actions. Everything you do is cosmologically equal. Now, this might all seem very negative but I don’t see it that way. Just because there is no ‘ultimate justice’, that is not to say you shouldn’t do nice things for others – you definitely should – but you should do them because they are good things in and of themselves and not because you expect the universe to pay you back. Admittedly, this is a pretty simplistic interpretation of karma, an umbrella term which covers many variants across several belief systems. Many faiths put the onus of redressing the balance on the afterlife. However, for my purposes, I would like to deconstruct the neo-spiritual, white trash, ‘My Name is Earl’ version of karma and how it pertains to poker.

Very few poker players can ever say that they deserve their success. Recreational players who hit a big one are outliers; statistical anomalies who have run so much above expectation that they are spectacularly undeserving of their spoils. Pro players whose careers were kick-started by a massive bink are also undeserving; they too have run so much above expectation early on that they can afford to absorb periods of bad variance that would have decimated the roll of another player of equal ability. They might also have parlayed their early success into a sponsorship deal which provided them with yet another financial safety net unavailable to their less fortunate counterpart.

As I, myself, transitioned from a losing style to a break-even style and on to a winning style during my apprenticeship in poker, I was rewarded with early positive outcomes that encouraged me to keep developing. I remember winning my first $22 45man on Full Tilt back in June 07 and naively thinking ‘yeah, I might just be able to do this poker pro thing’. That turned into the first month where I made a ‘wage’ amount of money from poker and from there, it snowballed into what has thus far been a 5-year career. I look back now and know I was an idiot with no real basis for such confidence. I had clearly run way over expectation and had I not, such was the precariousness of my financial situation that I would surely have quit disheartened. A little over two years later, I played my first proper live event, having qualified online. My game was good but over the three days, I won the vast majority of my races and was the beneficiary of some cooler flops. I also cracked Kings with AK all-in pre-flop early on Day 2. Had I not, I would surely have enjoyed a lovely holiday in Barcelona but instead, I chopped the event and my bankroll got an 80K injection.

The more you play, the more likely it is that you will get what you deserve but there are no guarantees – and certainly not in the world of big field MTTs. SNG grinders probably get what they deserve in a year and mega-volume online MTT beasts might come close after several years. Live tournament players would need several lifetimes. Yet, it is live where the biggest transfers of wealth take place. Every year, the WSOP Main Event winner takes away a prize so big that no matter how much they play for the rest of their lives, they will always be an outlier. Players are understandably drawn to these types of tournaments because they combine the opportunity to apply their skill edge in the most profound way with a high variance big buy-in punt for a life-changing amount of coin. However, these are the nut-worst type of tourneys to play if your priority is ultimate justice. You will never play enough of them to get what you deserve. That is not to say you shouldn’t play them – you definitely should – but you should play them because you have a massive expectation and not because you expect that expectation to be actualised.

It is important to note at this point that I am not saying that somebody is undeserved of their success based on their person. This is a judgement made strictly in equity terms. Losing players might also be unworthy of their failures. On a circuit of MTTs with steep payout structures, it is entirely possible to run atrociously over a sustained period despite playing a +EV style. You can make deep runs over and over but ultimately the money is weighted so heavily onto the final table and, within that, the top 3 that you must finish in those spots your fair share to avoid a catastrophic loss of equity.

Bottom line: Poker players will never get what they deserve in the short term and they may not even get what they deserve in the long run. The fluctuating fortunes of a generation of poker players, all fighting a never-ending war against variance will continue to produce sequences of outcomes that reward some and shit on others. There will be heroes and icons, some deserving, some not. There will be those that go broke, some deserving, some not. While I always prefer to see a hard-working pro get his just desserts (mainly because it re-enforces the notion that we play a skill game), there will sometimes be a Moneymaker, Gold or Yang who cleans up. When that happens, I only hope that they appreciate just how lucky they are and use the money to look after those around them. Otherwise, they make me want to start believing in karma just so I can imagine them being reincarnated as they ingrate neighing donkey they truly are.