All In (6 page)

My wife sighed. “How much longer do you plan on watching this?”

I pressed the guide button. “It's over at eleven, so just a little while longer. I really want to see who wins.”

Another sigh. About fifteen minutes later, Sue stood up, stretched, and said, “I'm tired. I'm going to bed. Are you coming?”

“I'll be right behind you as soon as this is over.”

“I'll probably be asleep when you come to bed.” She gave me a quick kiss and walked toward our bedroom.

I didn't mention poker to my wife again for a few weeks, until she brought it up.

“What's that thick book you're reading?” she said to me one night.

I was sitting at a small desk in our bedroom, where I often did late-night reading for work. “This?”

“Yes. That doesn't look like one of your normal books.”

“It's, uh, it's called
Super System
by Doyle Brunson.”

“
Super System
? What kind of book is that?”

I sort of cleared my throat, swallowed hard, then said, “It's a, uh, a poker book.” In fact, this book is considered
the
book on how to play poker. I've heard all the pros got mad at Brunson back when he wrote it in the 1970s because he gave away so many of their secrets.

“Daddy,” Sue said, “you know how much I hate gambling. Almost every night at the casino, people play at my blackjack table and lose their grocery money for the following week. Or worse. And I see what that does to them while I deal the cards. They don't want to go home after they lose; they don't want to have to explain to their spouses why they won't be able to pay any of their bills for a long time. I cannot bear the thought of you going down that same road.”

“Mommy, believe me, I would never do anything like that. I don't plan on becoming a gambler. Right now, I find the game of poker interesting, and I want to learn more about it. That's all.”

“Okay,” she said, but I could still see the fear in her eyes.

I didn't press the issue, but I had been serious when I'd made my announcement that Saturday night. I also knew I had a lot to learn. On the nights when my wife worked, and after all our children were in bed, I flipped through the satellite channels until I found poker. Instead of watching like a fan, I took notes. I also paid attention to the announcers' comments, especially Mike Sexton's and Vince Van Patten's from the World Poker Tour.

And I read books about poker. In addition to Doyle Brunson's book, I read Phil Hellmuth's
Play Poker Like the Pros
, which I'd heard was also required reading for anyone serious about poker. It was as if I'd gone back to school except now, instead of my college and grad school biology and psychology classes, my subject was poker.

The more I read and watched, the more convinced I became that this was the sport for me. However, I never betrayed my wife's trust in me. My involvement in poker would not go beyond reading books and watching televised matches if my wife remained opposed to the idea of my playing in a tournament or cash game.

After a month and a half of studying the game, I presented my plan. “Mommy, you know I'm disciplined with money. You know I never take funds we need as a family and waste
them. We both work too hard for that.”

She agreed.

“So here's what I want to do. I would like to try my hand at poker. I really think I can be successful at this game. I want to take 5 percent of my take-home pay each week, just $50, and use that to enter some tournaments. I promise you, I won't spend more than this. In fact, that is the only money I'll take with me into the card room when I play.”

My wife knew I was telling the truth. “Okay, Daddy, you can do this. I'm behind you. You've been successful at everything else you've done. I know you can do this as well.”

This was a special moment for me. Her trust meant everything to me. Now I just needed to get in the game.

When I won the World Series of Poker in 2007, I stunned everyone in the Amazon Room of the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino, along with ESPN's announcers and the experts at the poker magazines. Yet probably no one was more surprised than the poker players who competed against me in my very first tournament in the fall of 2005. I spent most of that day completely lost, making one rookie mistake after another.

At one point, one of the players at my table turned to me and said, “This isn't a kiddy game, you know, buddy. Maybe you should go home and learn how to play before you enter a tournament.”

I have to admit, this gentleman was right. I probably should have gone home and studied a little more before I tried playing in a tournament, even one with a $25 entry fee, or buy-in. Though I'd read several books about poker and watched hours of tournaments on television, I'd paid so much attention to strategy that
I'd failed to pick up some of the basics of the game, especially the terminology.

On my very first hand, I was in the third position at the table, which meant I was the first person to act. The small blind and big blinds were on the table.
⁴
I had to decide whether to (a) raise, which meant bet more than the big blind, (b) call, which meant place a bet equal to the big blind, or (c) fold, which meant throw my cards away and not play this hand. Those were my only options.

In this moment on my first hand, instead, I said, “I check,” which meant I wanted to keep playing in the hand without making any kind of bet at all.

“I'm sorry, sir,” the dealer said, “you must either raise, call, or fold.”

Now here's where this story gets really embarrassing. I didn't know what it meant to call.

“Okay, I raise.” It was the only term I knew.

“How much?”

“Uh, twenty.”

Everyone at the table groaned.

“The minimum raise is twice the big blind,” the dealer said.

“Oh, I'm sorry. Please be patient with me. I'm a rookie.”

“I can tell,” one of the other players said, laughing.

I didn't respond. For the rest of the tournament, I paid close attention to the terms and phrases the other players used. Only when I heard an opponent say “call” and then put in the same number of chips I'd just bet did I figure out what that term meant.

Not knowing the right words to use was the least of my
problems that day. In No Limit Texas Hold 'Em, each player is dealt two cards and places bets based on those cards. After the first round of bets, the dealer burns one card, which means he sets it aside and it's not used in the hand; then he lays three cards faceup. Every player's hand is based on two hole cards combined with the three flop cards on the table. Players then bet on the flop. The dealer burns another card and deals one, called the turn card. Then come another round of bets, another burned card, and the final community card, also known as the river. A player's hand is based on the five best cards he can make with his two hole cards and the five cards on the table.

In an early hand in my first tournament, I had jack-eight of clubs as my hole cards. That's not very good. Today I'd almost always fold these cards, but in my first few tourneys I did what most amateurs do and played almost every hand. An eight turned up on the flop, which meant I had a pair of eights. The other two cards were both clubs. The turn card was something like the nine of diamonds, and the river was another club. When those still in the hand turned their cards, someone had a pair of queens. Thinking I'd lost, I turned my cards in disgust.

A woman next to me said, “Hey, buddy. You hit the flush. You won.”

“I did?” I was completely shocked.

Several of the players at the table muttered things that I could tell weren't compliments.

I embarrassed myself further a little later in the round when someone announced they were going all in.

“What exactly does that mean?”

The rest of the players laughed.

Later I threw away my hand after the river card, which was the same as folding. Only then did I look closer and realize I'd actually won. Unfortunately, by throwing down my cards I'd given up the hand and the pot.

By the end of the day, many of the players were getting irritated with me, not merely because I kept making silly mistakes but because the cards always seemed to fall my way. Some days are like that, even for rookies who shouldn't last past the third or fourth hand. The other players at the table couldn't believe it when I kept winning pots and ended up finishing in the money, which means earning part of the prize because I came close enough to winning the tourney.

I walked out with $282.

After driving home from the tournament, I burst through the front door and announced to the family, “We're going to Chuck E. Cheese's tonight.”

My kids were as happy as could be, but my wife wasn't quite as enthusiastic. She gave me one of those looks that said,
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. Now quit while you're ahead.

She still went with us to Chuck E. Cheese's.

Even as I celebrated with my family, I knew I'd been very lucky. On any given day, Texas Hold 'Em can be 90 percent skill or 90 percent luck. That day, it had been the latter.

The more important thing was that actually playing in a tournament had helped me understand how much more I had to learn. Again, I had one goal when I took up poker, and that wasn't to finish in the money at a local $25 buy-in Saturday
poker tournament. No, I wanted to play in the main event of the World Series of Poker with its $10,000 buy-in. I knew I had a long way to go.

Once the last piece of pizza had been eaten and the euphoria of cashing out wore off, I dove back into my poker education process.

In my first tournament, not being able to speak the language of poker had labeled me immediately as a rookie and prime target for experienced players to pick off, to say nothing of how my playing itself had been an embarrassment time and again. I didn't want to make that mistake again.

I turned to Phil Hellmuth's
Texas Hold 'Em
, which I read from cover to cover, focusing especially on the twenty-plus-page “Phil's Glossary,” which explains every poker term. Hellmuth also gave me insight into the personality of the players in any given poker room. Now he was speaking my language. The ability to read other players, to understand why they approach each hand the way they do, gives you a huge advantage at the table. Reading the other players goes beyond picking up on their tells, which are the telltale signs of whether they're bluffing or holding an unbelievable hand.

Today when I play, I spend the first thirty minutes to an hour just trying to figure out the personalities of the other players at the table. Most fall into three categories: passive, aggressive, and passive-aggressive.

The first are passive players. They play tight, which means they fold nearly every hand and play strictly when they have a pocket pair or two very high cards. Passive players focus solely on their cards and hardly pay any attention to the other players.

Aggressive players are the exact opposite. They play almost every hand and rarely fold. It doesn't matter what their hole cards might be. Whether they hold pocket aces or two-three off suit, they're in. Rather than focus on their cards, they try to play the other players. An aggressive player will bully others into folding out of fear that he's holding the nuts, that is, the best hand possible based on the cards on the table. From time to time, but not often, a very good player will be an aggressive player. Usually, aggressive players are beginners who still haven't learned the game. Even amateurs get lucky from time to time, though, which makes them dangerous at the table.

However, the most dangerous players of all are what I call passive-aggressive. These are the good players who know when to push and when to let up. As I said, the aggressive players are usually beginners; the passive players are often those who have been playing long enough to know that reckless play will get them beat but haven't yet perfected the art of reading other players. Passive-aggressive players are the ones who know what they're doing, the ones I want to learn from.

Knowing how each player approaches the game enables me to employ different strategies against each. This is a skill I'm still trying to master.

Looking back at my first try at poker, I realize I was the crazy, unpredictable player who played way too many hands. I know from personal experience that those players may get lucky from time to time, but they don't have the skills for continued success.

Most rookies and amateurs rely on nothing but luck.
They look at their eight-two same suit and immediately think they can hit a flush, so they push all in, convinced Lady Luck is on their side. Sometimes they hit the flush, or they get really lucky and a couple of eights and a two turn up for a full house. Long-term, that's the worst thing that can happen. Hitting a lucky hand or two makes them even more reckless. In the end, they almost always end up busting out. Still they keep coming back for more, especially in tournaments and cash games with very low buy-ins.

My approach to the game changed when I decided to treat whatever money I risked as the last money I had on earth. If the tournament had a $25 buy-in, that became my last $25.

Most of my life, I was extremely poor. I knew how hard money was to come by. Even though I had a good job as a psychologist when I started playing poker, trying to raise a family in Southern California was expensive. We Yangs do not throw money away.

I tried to always keep this same mind-set in tournaments. I never carried more cash into the card room than I needed for the entry fee. And I always left my credit and debit cards at home so I wouldn't be tempted to go beyond what I needed for the tournament.

Playing as if the money I risked was all I had in the world provided the discipline I needed to settle down at the poker table. It also gave me a huge advantage over players with the attitude that “it's no big deal; it's only twenty-five bucks.”