A Lesson from Daniel Negreanu

Masterclass.com is a marvelous collection of world authorities talking about what they know best. I am very impressed with their teachers.  I had heard about a 2-for-1 sale they were offering in early April, so I signed up. Usually it’s $180 per year for full access to thousands of hours of instruction, but the recent sale allowed two people to sign up for the same $180. The combination of the sale and lots of extra time due to the stay-at-home rules was enough to seal the deal for me. I sent an email out to a number of people I thought might be interested in partnering with me on this, and several responded with interest. The ones I couldn’t use, I hooked up with each other.

My primary interests are writing, comedy, and games of skill — and they have several courses in each of those categories. I’ll eventually get to classes further down my list of interests, but the courses on cooking and interior decorating will probably never make the cut for me. 

So, I found myself in a poker class hosted by Daniel Negreanu. He’s very knowledgeable. When I finish his course, I’ll take another by Phil Ivey. 

I believe most players consider Ivey a better player than Negreanu. (I’m not qualified to judge.) The biggest difference between them to me is that Negreanu has written a lot and regularly does interviews. Up until now, Ivey has kept his knowledge to himself, but now he’s sharing it. That’s pretty exciting to me.

I absolutely am not changing from video poker to regular poker at this time of my life. There are several reasons for this, but the one showstopper I can’t get around is that it’s very difficult to see the cards in the center of a standard poker table unless I’m sitting directly next to or across from the dealer. And it’s fair to predict than in a few more years, my eyes will be worse than they are today. That’s just part of the aging process.

But I’m taking the classes because when smart, knowledgeable people discuss playing strategically, sometimes the lessons translate over to my life as a video poker player. What I recently listened to Negreanu say wasn’t that, but it was something that translates over to my life as a video poker teacher.

And that was Negreanu discussing moving up in stakes. 

What Negreanu said was that once you move up in stakes, you don’t have to stay there. That was it. No big deal. Except I don’t think I’ve ever thought to say that as a video poker teacher.

Keeping in mind the caveat of never playing a game unless you have the advantage, let’s assume you normally play for quarters but come across a juicy dollar game. 

You’re nervous about it, of course, because if things go badly you can lose four times as fast. So, much of the value of that game is wrapped up in rare hands — like 40,000-to-one royal flushes, or maybe 16,000-to-one aces with a kicker. 

It’s not that rare to get buried quickly at the higher stakes. Here’s the important lesson:  If things go badly at the start, drop back down to quarters until you build up your bankroll again. 

The good dollar games will probably be there in six months or a year or whenever you’re ready to move up again. But you must maintain a bankroll to stay in the game. Don’t lose enough at the dollar game that you no longer have the wherewithal to play the quarter game.

Your ego can get involved in this. Once you’re playing the higher stakes successfully, “with the big boys” as it were, it’s psychologically difficult to admit you aren’t good enough to stay there.

But that isn’t the point. It’s not that you aren’t good enough, it’s that you aren’t rich enough! Losing streaks are a fact of life in video poker and other gambling games. If one pops up just when you move up in stakes, that’s unfortunate. But don’t turn misfortune into a disaster.

If you want to think of this as not being lucky enough to stay in the bigger game, go ahead. It’s quite possibly true that you just weren’t lucky enough at that particular time.

The vast majority of losing players insist they are simply not lucky enough to win at the game. For many players, however, luck has very little to do with it. Those players simply are not skillful enough or perhaps not disciplined enough to succeed. 

But if you’re good enough, you’ll drop down to the lower stakes and end up succeeding well enough to move back up. 

I knew this principle and have applied it to my own career, but I’ve never seen it articulated before quite like this. Thank you, Daniel Negreanu.