Chess has no uncertainty

Poker gets compared to chess, and a number of chess players play it more or less well. There is a resemblance: both have an opening – in poker that is preflop, the betting before any shared cards – and in many situations it plays itself. There is far less to memorise in poker than in chess.

But chess has no uncertainty. Both sides see the whole board. Working with uncertainty is what makes poker poker, and it is what makes you a winning or a losing player.

To me the game is closer to boxing and to sailing. Boxing, for the apparent simplicity of the rules and the combinations, for the constant concentration it demands, and for the rhythm over a distance: long stretches of quiet waiting, then a sudden sharp exchange. Sailing, because the core skill is moving forward when the wind is not blowing where you want to go.

Poker is as much about arithmetic – and its sister, combinatorics – as it is about communication, spoken and unspoken. Expected value drives your decisions, but every calculation rests on incomplete information. Communication is how you narrow the gap.

Live, you try to read the other man from what he does with his body: tells, an amusing science of its own. Online you have almost nothing but the language of the game itself. The job is to act – or, at the right moment, not act – so that his response narrows the hands he can be holding down to one or two.

My coach put it like this: your job preflop and on the first two streets is to make the last one easy. Play passively for no reason and you arrive at the river, usually the most expensive round of betting, with nothing to do but guess.

Online also lets you gather a large body of data on an opponent. Working through it quickly is a separate and very valuable skill.

One of the central ideas in poker is the bankroll – what you can afford. Poker is the only sport where losing is a working part of a winning strategy. The great majority of correct decisions win only slightly more than half the time. So if you want to win a lot where you are the favourite, you have to be willing to pay a lot on the days when the man playing worse than you simply runs good.

The bankroll is the lungs of the game, the depth of your breathing. You play for buy-ins you can afford to lose over a distance without threatening your finances and without it sitting on your mind.

One more thing follows. Poker is played for money – ideally for amounts that matter to you but would not hurt you. Play for nothing and it becomes a different game, far less absorbing, because without money a whole set of the forces that define it stop working.

That is why the micro stakes, where a couple of dollars is enough to sit down, tend to be noise: the play is close to random. People bet at nothing in particular, as though following Pasternak – «you must not tell defeat from victory». That is bad poker.