My poker epiphany

I’d been quite happy being a donk and I’d been playing live sessions about once a fortnight or so for about 6 months when I had a chance encounter. I was on the tube (the subway system) in London when a gentleman tapped me on the shoulder and asked if my name was AC. I said it was and he introduced himself. I immediately recognised his name as I’d sat next to him in a class at school – maybe 12 or 13 years previously but I told him I still remembered him. We exchanged contact details and arranged to meet up a week or so later.

We met for a beer and caught up about our school days – general stuff about who we were still in contact with, what anyone else was doing and how our lives had changed over the past dozen or so years. As we caught up I mentioned that on the night we’d met on the tube I’d been off to play poker. He said that didn’t surprise him as I was always good at maths (we’d sat next to each other in maths class when we were 17 or 18) and that I must do fairly well at it. When I said that I wasn’t very good he was surprised and he asked why not. I explained and he said he’d send me something to read. It would literally change my outlook on my game.

He sent me a copy of a thesis he’d written in university – whilst it didn’t explicitly involve poker many of the discussion points were from game theory. I read this and a few others that he suggested over the next couple of weeks. Then it happened. It was like a lightbulb going off in my head – I finally “get” poker.

Now this blog is meant to be a light hearted look into the life of AC including travels, drunken idiocy (there will be quite a bit of that) and quite a lot of poker so I’ll leave you for now with the best bit of advice I gathered from my old classmate: It’s like high school maths – if you can’t show your workings then you might as well have guessed.