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Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Monday, May 29, 2006
Poker lesson from the movies
Recently I went to see "Mission: Impossible 3" at the movies. My son and I decided to see something that my wife, who was out of town visiting her dad, would not have been very interested in seeing, so we picked an action flick that looked like a fun way to spend a couple of hours.
There is a scene in the movie fairly early on where Tom Cruise's character has just captured the villain and is trying to get some information out of him. The villain, played superbly by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, is telling Tom, "Do you have a wife, or a girlfriend? Because if you do, I am going to find her, and hurt her, and make her scream your name." You can see Tom getting more and more upset as the bad guy taunts him with these threats. Eventually Tom opens the bottom hatch of the airplane in flight, where the interrogation is taking place, and holds Hoffman over the open doors while screaming at him to tell him what he wants to know.
What does this have to do with poker? Well, as I was watching this scene, and what Hoffman's villain was doing to Cruise's good guy, I kept thinking to myself, "Tom, he's trying to put you on tilt! Don't fall for it!" It reminded me of players who trash-talk at the table, or in the on-line chat box, and who are probably in at least some cases doing it for the main purpose of tilting another player or players at the table. I consider myself fairly immune to such tactics; I probably put myself on tilt more often than someone else does, by allowing myself to get upset when I lose a hand that I feel like I shouldn't have, or get sucked out on by some donkey who shouldn't have been playing the hand that won. But other players' comments seldom affect me to the point where my game suffers.
So, my point is, don't let the villain get under your skin and affect your ability to play your best game. If you do, then you have given up a portion of whatever advantage you may have had.
There is a scene in the movie fairly early on where Tom Cruise's character has just captured the villain and is trying to get some information out of him. The villain, played superbly by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, is telling Tom, "Do you have a wife, or a girlfriend? Because if you do, I am going to find her, and hurt her, and make her scream your name." You can see Tom getting more and more upset as the bad guy taunts him with these threats. Eventually Tom opens the bottom hatch of the airplane in flight, where the interrogation is taking place, and holds Hoffman over the open doors while screaming at him to tell him what he wants to know.
What does this have to do with poker? Well, as I was watching this scene, and what Hoffman's villain was doing to Cruise's good guy, I kept thinking to myself, "Tom, he's trying to put you on tilt! Don't fall for it!" It reminded me of players who trash-talk at the table, or in the on-line chat box, and who are probably in at least some cases doing it for the main purpose of tilting another player or players at the table. I consider myself fairly immune to such tactics; I probably put myself on tilt more often than someone else does, by allowing myself to get upset when I lose a hand that I feel like I shouldn't have, or get sucked out on by some donkey who shouldn't have been playing the hand that won. But other players' comments seldom affect me to the point where my game suffers.
So, my point is, don't let the villain get under your skin and affect your ability to play your best game. If you do, then you have given up a portion of whatever advantage you may have had.
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