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No self-respecting poker player would dream of playing the game without a basic knowledge of strategy. Yet many players think nothing of sitting down at a poker table and risking prodigious amounts of money without understanding the human side of the game. Comprehending what goes on inside the minds of our irrational, flesh-and-blood opponents is just as important to winning as any mathematical formula. What’s more, the ability to look inward and recognize how your own thoughts and feelings influence the way you play, both for good and for ill, is crucial if you want to win at this game in the long run.
Having a feel for the psychology of the game helps you in two ways. First, the better you can read your opponent’s thoughts and feelings, the better you can read his cards. But even more important, a deeper awareness of your own personality enables you to play at your absolute best and side-step common pitfalls such as tilt. Opponents come and go, so we begin with the one player you can never get away from: you.
Knowing Yourself
Poker players are some of the most delusional people on the planet. We don’t play too many hands, we just like to see flops. We didn’t raise at the wrong time; it was the opponent’s fault for not folding when he was supposed to. For every mistake we make at the poker table, there is an equal and opposite rationalization to explain it away. And when all else fails we can blame bad luck.
Competition and Ego
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Competition brings out the fragile ego in all of us, but there is something about poker that makes losing even harder to take. Nobody enjoys losing money, but something even more important than money is at stake: pride. Poker is steeped in machismo, and to admit your opponent might be stronger, smarter, or just plain better than you is to admit a terrible weakness. The poker mind will go to incredible lengths to avoid such a revolting thought.
Make no mistake, confidence is essential. You can’t be a winning poker player without it. To withstand the brutal swings you must have faith in yourself. But when does confidence cross the line to become overweening pride? That’s where self-knowledge comes in. At the poker table, the ability to be uncompromisingly honest with yourself is worth its weight in gold.
Easier said than done, of course. Losing hurts, and to couple that hurt with the realization that the loss was your own fault is like pouring lemon juice on a cut. It will always be easier to blame a tough loss on a luckbox opponent than to contemplate the possibility we didn’t play the hand right.
Tilt and Poker Self-Delusion
No discussion of poker self-delusion would be complete without discussing tilt. When an otherwise intelligent, educated poker player begins to play below his skill level because of emotion, he is on tilt and almost invariably destined to lose a lot of money. Players on tilt throw their money away – by the handful or in a steady parade of small losses – because they’re making decisions based on anger and frustration instead of thinking things through. Tilt is the ultimate expression of poker self-delusion because players on tilt almost never admit that anything is wrong.
Step one is recognizing that you’re on tilt. This is no small task. A big part of accomplishing this is learning to recognize your tilt triggers, those irksome things that upset you enough to put you on tilt. A trigger can be anything from an obnoxious opponent to a particular type of loss – anything that gets under your skin and stirs up your emotions in a negative way.
Step two in overcoming tilt is to leave the game. Even if it’s just for a short while get up and do something else, anything else, so long as it doesn’t involve throwing your money away in a poker game. If you learn nothing else about yourself as a poker player, figuring out what puts you on tilt – and how to get away from the table when you are tilting – will save you a fortune over the course of your poker career.
Your Own Playing Style
To delve deep into your poker psyche, you need to think about your own poker playing style. It comes down to why you play poker in the first place. Do you play to socialize? Because you enjoy the thrill of competition? To prove something? Whatever the reason, or combination of reasons, your style of play is going to reflect that.
Self-honesty is the silver bullet. It does you no good to learn correct poker strategy if you won’t use that knowledge when it counts. You can read books, study hand histories, buy fancy software to calculate percentages for you – but nothing and nobody will ever make you into a first-rate poker player but you.
Knowing Your Opponent
Between the recreational player who thinks nothing of losing money so long as he can have fun doing it, and the hard-core nit who hangs onto every chip for dear life, there’s a staggering variety of poker players out there. If you want to play the game at a higher level, you must be able to read them all. Only by reading your opponent can you put him on a range of hands, and only by putting him on a range of hands can you hope to make the correct decision most of the time.
The Four Basic Poker Playing Styles
The psychology of reading your opponents is as much as art as a science. Sure, we have the four major categories:
- Tight-passive
- Loose-passive
- Tight-aggressive (TAG)
- Loose-aggressive (LAG)
These groups are also commonly known as the rock, calling station, shark and maniac. The majority of your opponents can be pigeonholed into one of these groups. It’s crude, but it’s a place to start. Yet there’s much more to reading your opponent than just slapping a label on his forehead.
To being with, try thinking of these categories not so much as four separate boxes but rather as points on a spectrum. Or to be more precise, two spectrums. One spectrum runs the gamut from ultra-milquetoast passive to chip-spewing aggressive, while the other spectrum begins with the tightest of rocksand ends in loosey-goosey land. Job one is to figure out where each of your opponents weighs in on the passive-to-aggressive and tight-to-loose scales.
Everything we do – the way we move, speak, dress, groom ourselves, adorn ourselves, etc – says something about our personality. Aggressive players tend to be very forceful in every aspect of their lives: dressing in bright colors, speaking loudly, using language that’s harsher and more blunt, buying in for excessively large amounts. These players want to intimidate. They need to be the center of attention. And in a poker game nobody is more intimidating or attention-grabbing than a maniac. Easy to spot, tricky to play against, maniacs have a singular talent for putting their opponents on tilt.
Conversely, passive poker players refrain from conflict. Social by nature, they’d rather not rock the boat or rub anybody the wrong way – a considerable disadvantage in a game where the object is to take your opponent’s money. Tight players tend to be very deliberate and conservative in everything they do, dressing moderately, stacking chips neatly, talking seldom. Loose players are more freewheeling and impulsive, liable to be impatient, chatty, and sloppy with chips.
Beware of stereotyping, however. Few players will fit neatly into any given category. As for stereotyping according to age, gender, race etc, that’s a dangerous trap. While it’s probably true that the average 21-year-old male is going to play a lot more aggressively than the typical 50-year-old female, there are always exceptions and you should never lose sight of that.
Adjust Your Play Accordingly
Once you’ve got some sort of psychological read on your opponent, put that knowledge to use and adjust your play accordingly. Against a maniac, know there will be some wild financial swings in your future if you remain in this game. If you can’t handle that, leave. If you can, tighten up, reraise with your good hands, and above all don’t let him put you on tilt. If your opponent is too passive, be more aggressive. If your opponent is too loose, value-bet more and bluff much less. For every flaw, there’s an optimum way to exploit that flaw and it’s your job to find it.
Putting it Together
Once you have a good understanding of yourself and your opponent, the real psych-out games can begin. This involves higher levels of thinking. Level 1 players only think about their own cards, while level 2 players at least ponder what their opponent is holding. Playing at level 3 means you consider what your opponent thinks you have. Obviously this is impossible without having a read on your opponent and more than that, a grasp of how your opponent is reading you.
Your Table Image
You must be aware of your table image. Then if you can put yourself in your opponent’s shoes, figure out how he’s making decisions – and not how you would be making decisions if you were in his place – you’re ready to play poker at a higher level. To go even higher, level 4 asks the question: “What does he think I think he has?” Assuming your opponent is also playing at a high level of thinking, the mind games between the two of you can go on almost indefinitely.
Poker’s Ultimate Mind Game is the Bluff
There are several factors that play into a successful bluff, but ultimately the bluff lives and dies based on the player it’s aimed at. If he senses what you’re up to, if he’s got a stronger hand than you figured, if his confidence is inflated by a few recent wins, you’re done. It’s not just about bluffing weak players; it’s about bluffing players who are feeling weak in that moment.
Some of this is purely tactical. Before pushing out any bluff you should always consider position and stack sizes. But part of knowing when and who to bluff is pure psychology. Any time you get the sense that your opponent’s spirit is weakened – because he just endured a tough loss, perhaps – that’s often a good time to strike. By the same token, be aware that any time you’re in a sheepish frame of mind and playing more passive, opponents are more likely to aim bluffs in your direction.
Conclusion
Psychology is no substitute for cold hard poker math. But psychology can add an incredible depth to your game, and to your wallet, when it’s used in conjunction with solid poker strategy. It creates a one-two punch that is virtually unbeatable. By opening up your eyes to the human side of the game, even as you continue to calculate odds, there’s no reason you can’t have the best of both worlds.
Related Lessons
By Barbara Connors
Barbara lives in the Coachella Valley of Southern California and became a serious student of poker in 2001. She particularly enjoys writing about the psychology of the game.
Related Lessons
Spring 2003, Vol. 35, No. 1
By Raymond H. Geselbracht
'You know I'm almost like a kid— I can hardly wait to start.'
| Truman's worn and scratched poker chip case was transferred from the White House to Truman's post-presidential office and then came to the Truman Library. (Harry S. Truman Library) |
When Harry Truman was asked in a televised Person to Person interview in 1955 what he did to relax, he responded, 'Well, my only relaxation is to work.' This was no doubt almost true, but Truman forgot to mention something he loved to do, something that took a lot of time, demanded close attention, consumed a certain amount of emotional energy, and must have caused him some anxiety from time to time. But it probably couldn't be considered work. Truman forgot to mention that, for relaxation and to enjoy the company of friends, he played poker.
It's not clear when Truman started playing poker. The first record of his enjoyment of card playing, not specifically poker, is in a letter he wrote to Bess Wallace on February 7, 1911, when he was twenty-six years old. He had just started courting Bess and wanted to tell her all about himself. He was a religious person, he said, but 'I like to play cards and dance . . . and go to shows and do all the things [religious people] say I shouldn't, but I don't feel badly about it.'
Although it is hard to imagine that Lieutenant, and later Captain, Truman went through his two years of service during World War I without playing poker, the first clear record of his poker playing is of games played in the early 1920s, when he was a county judge (or, more correctly, county commissioner) in Jackson County, Missouri. Several of his poker buddies told stories in later life about playing poker with Judge Truman. The games were played across the street from the county courthouse, in a room on the third floor of a building at 101 North Main Street in Independence. In about 1924, the poker players decided to become a club, called the Harpie Club because harmonicas, or French harps, were played at a lighthearted dedication ceremony. Judge Truman was apparently the honorary and unofficial head of the club. There were about eighteen members, mostly veterans of World War I, and also many county employees.
The club met for a poker game usually one night a week. Games had a ten-cent limit with three raises. Truman probably played regularly with club members until he left for Washington to become a U.S. senator in 1935. He got immense enjoyment from the games and apparently never took them too seriously. One club member, Bruce Lambert, called him a 'chump' who always stayed to the end of a hand. 'He wanted to see what your hole card was, and knew anyone got a kick out of winning from him and he accommodated . . . but if he could whip you he got a big kick out of it,' Lambert said in a 1981 oral history interview.
Truman came to one Harpie Club meeting, held at a member's home this time, while he was President. Of course, things were different now than they had been in the early days. The presidential entourage was all there, and club members wouldn't sit down until Truman did. But a poker game got going nonetheless. Truman was lucky this night and accumulated a big pile of chips in front of him. But then a Secret Service man came up to the President, tapped him on the shoulder and said it was time to leave. 'The President jumped up hastily,' one of the poker players, A. J. Stephens, remembered in a 1966 oral history interview,' and said, 'Good-bye boys,' and shot out the door, leaving all those chips, which were cashable for money. I wonder to this day who got the money.'
Truman almost certainly played poker with his army reserve buddies during summer encampments in the 1920s and 1930s. He looked forward every summer to escaping from the sometimes serious worries of his political and business life in Kansas City and being a soldier with his friends out in the countryside, riding horses, playing war games, sitting around under the tent at the end of the day. The large collection of Truman's war gear preserved at the Truman Library includes three well-worn decks of cards, circumstantial evidence of warm evenings passed in games of chance. Harry Vaughan, who later became President Truman's military aide, was probably a regular player in these games, and he might have started playing poker with Truman as early as 1918. In a 1963 oral history interview, Vaughan remembered a tactic that Truman particularly enjoyed. 'He liked to bluff and he did it on numerous occasions, but don't count on it. . . . It was of greater delight to him to chase me . . . out of a hand and then show me that I had him beat; that was worth a month's pay. And he did it all too frequently.'
Poker, like everything else, took on for Truman an aura of providence in the thrilling, frightening weeks and months that followed the shock of President Roosevelt's death on April 12, 1945. Six weeks later, on May 26, Truman left the White House for the first time since becoming President. It was a modest outing, to the Burning Tree Club in Bethesda, Maryland, to have dinner with some present and former members of Congress.
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After dinner, a poker game started, and Truman did all right. 'Luck always seems to be with me in games of chance and in politics,' he reflected. But now that he was President of the United States something was different for him, whether he was playing poker or leading the nation. 'No one was ever luckier than I've been since becoming the Chief Executive and Commander in Chief,' he reflected in a May 27, 1945, handwritten note. 'Things have gone so well that I can't understand it; except to attribute it to God. He guides me, I think.' Presumably this sense of divine involvement in his poker games diminished as time went by and he got used to being President.
Truman's favorite poker venue while he was President was the presidential yacht Williamsburg. 'You know I'm almost like a kid; I can hardly wait to start,' he wrote to his wife, Bess, as he looked forward to a poker outing on the Williamsburg in the summer of 1946. The President, together with some of his regular poker buddies, and perhaps some special guests too, would typically board ship on Friday afternoon and sail on the Potomac River until Sunday afternoon. Truman liked an eight-handed game best. His cronies joined him around the table. Fred Vinson, secretary of the treasury and later chief justice of the United States, was his favorite poker companion. Other regulars included Clinton Anderson, secretary of agriculture and later a senator; Stuart Symington, a Missourian who served Truman in several positions, including secretary of the air force; and longtime friend Harry Vaughan, now Truman's military aide. Future President Lyndon Johnson sometimes joined these games too, his attention focused more on the political talk than on the cards. Truman's young naval aide and later special counsel Clark Clifford organized the games. Clifford had replaced a naval aide who told the President that he didn't drink and didn't play cards. Truman listened to this with interest and very quickly found the man a good job somewhere else. He liked Clifford better; his new naval aide did drink and play cards, the latter so skillfully that he usually won a little money.
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| A poker game aboard the Williamsburg, July 4, 1949. Clark Clifford is on Truman's left. Monrad Wallgren, former U.S. senator and governor of Washington State, is on Truman's right. This is probably the only time Truman allowed himself to be photographed playing poker while he was President. (Harry S. Truman Library) |
Poker was only one element in the regimen of relaxation and companionship aboard the Williamsburg. The President and his friends enjoyed long, leisurely meals, and hours spent telling stories about life, politics, and Truman's part in American history. When a poker game got under way, though, the players focused on their cards and their stake. Each player started the game with a $500 stack of chips, and if anyone lost it all, he could get a second $500 stack. About 10 percent of every pot was put in a 'poverty bowl,' which was distributed $100 at a time to players who had lost their second stack. This was a lot of money in the 1940s, but presumably over time no one ever won or lost very much. Truman once admitted to Bess, following a poker game played on the Fourth of July, 1947, not on the Williamsburg this time, that he had lost $3.50. The big winner that night, Truman's chief of staff, Adm. William D. Leahy, won about $40.
Winston Churchill joined in one of Truman's poker games during his visit to the United States in 1946. Churchill and the presidential party were on their way by train from Washington to Fulton, Missouri, where Churchill would tell the world about an 'Iron Curtain' that had descended upon Europe. This night, however, the great man's oratory was about his poker prowess gathered over forty years. Truman was worried about the honor of American poker players, and he and his companions felt they would have to play their best. As the game progressed, though, Churchill lost steadily, and his stack of chips dwindled. After about an hour of this disastrous play, Churchill left the room for a moment. Truman told his companions that they would have to let up some. 'But, Boss, this guy's a pigeon' one of the players, Harry Vaughan, burst out. 'If you want us to play our best poker for the nation's honor, we'll have this guy's pants before the evening is over.' The players did let up on Churchill some, but not enough to let him go back home claiming he had beaten the Yanks.
| Truman and Winston Churchill on the train in Fulton, Missouri, March 6, 1946, only a few hours following a poker game in which Churchill lost a substantial sum. (Harry S. Truman Library) |
Truman may have intervened on at least one other occasion to change a player's luck. Sometime in 1951 or 1952 he invited his assistant press secretary, Roger Tubby, to join in a game at the Little White House at Key West, Florida. Tubby was a young man with three children and a modest salary, playing against men with more money to lose and more experience with the cards. Truman noticed that Tubby's losses were mounting. It was his turn to deal. As the hand went on, the players dropped out one by one, until only Truman and Tubby were left in the game. Then Truman folded too, announcing that Tubby had won the sizeable pot. The players turned over their cards, and Tubby saw the hand that had kept Truman in the game to the end. 'He didn't even have a pair,' Tubby remembered in a 1977 article. 'He had just stayed in the game to make the pot big so I could get back my losses.' Or had Truman perhaps stayed in simply because that was what he enjoyed to do? In either case, Tubby's finances were improved.
After coming back to Missouri in January 1953, Truman made poker part of his very active retirement. He seems to have had two main groups of poker buddies. One was headed by Tom Evans, a politically active Kansas City businessman who probably became acquainted with Truman in the late 1920s or early 1930s. Evans became one of Truman's very best friends. In the 1930s, he started taking Truman to poker games at the exclusive 822 Club in downtown Kansas City. Truman was Tom Evans's guest. It's doubtful he could have afforded to be a paying member, and it's also doubtful the Republican businessmen who dominated the club would have invited him to join; at least until he became President of the United States. Then they made him an honorary life member. Truman wrote to thank the club president for conferring such an honor on him. 'If I can manage it,' he wrote, thinking of future poker games, 'I will make it costly for you.' Truman probably played with his 822 Club friends many times in the 1950s and 1960s. A photograph in the Truman Library's holdings shows him and Tom Evans sitting with others in a smoke-hazed room in the 822 Club suite, looking down intently at their cards.
The other poker group was headed by Eddie Jacobson, Truman's old haberdashery partner and lifelong friend. Jacobson would invite several of Truman's Jewish friends to his home on 72nd Street. One of the players, A. J. Granoff, remembered that the games were lighthearted affairs and that Truman greatly enjoyed himself. He 'was a lot of fun,' Granoff recalled in a 1969 oral history interview. 'He'd sit next to me, he'd lean over and look at my cards and say, 'I got you beat already.' Truman and Jacobson enjoyed teasing the somewhat prudish Granoff. 'Truman would . . . [try] to embarrass me by telling some off-color story,' Granoff remembered, ' and then claimed that I blushed. Maybe I did.' Then Jacobson might join in, and Granoff would blush again, and Truman and Jacobson would roar with laughter.
Truman would sometimes get together with a similar group of his Jewish friends at Oakwood Country Club in south Kansas City. Randall Jessee, a well-known television journalist in the 1950s, was present at one of these games. He noticed that Truman's old failing as a poker player was still with him. 'He stayed in every pot when he should have gotten out of a few,' Jessee recalled in a 1964 oral history interview. Truman just couldn't bear to fold; he wanted to be in to the end. He had a special weapon, though, which he used to improve the odds. It was called 'Vinson' after his favorite poker companion from presidential days. Jessee couldn't make anything of this strange game. 'It's low ball, high ball, I never did understand. [Truman] was pretty good at [it], because nobody else understood what we were doing. So every time we played Vinson, he would win. . . . It was dealer's choice. . . . So Mr. Truman, about every time he was dealer, he'd say, 'Well, we're going to play Vinson now.'
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Probably only a few of Harry Truman's poker venues are remembered very well today. There are most likely rooms scattered here and there in the Kansas City area where the future or the former President of the United States got together with friends and played poker; and chances are that Senator, Vice President, and President Truman enjoyed games at quite a few unknown or little known locations in and around Washington, D.C.
Truman loved poker for some of the same reasons that he loved politics. There was a vitality in the game that let him share in the lives of people he liked and see them as they really were, underneath whatever formalities they usually had to adopt when they dealt with a judge, senator, President, or former President. Poker also gave him a chance to make his friends happy in some small ways, which was very important to him. 'I've tried all my life,' he wrote to Bess in 1937, 'to be thoughtful and to make every person I come in contact with happier for having seen me.' There's no record of anyone ever leaving a poker game with Harry Truman feeling unhappy.
Note on Sources
Manuscripts and oral history interviews cited in this article are in the Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri. Letters from Harry Truman to Bess Wallace Truman are in the Papers of Harry S. Truman: Papers Relating to Family, Business and Personal Affairs. Truman's handwritten note of May 27, 1945, is in the President's Secretary's Files. Truman's letter to the 822 Club president, Will M. Drennon, May 9, 1945, is in the Miscellaneous Historical Documents Collection.
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Published memoirs consulted were Margaret Truman, Souvenir (New York, 1956); Clark Clifford, Counsel to the President (New York, 1991); Arthur Krock, Memoirs (New York, 1968); and Roger Tubby, 'A Remembrance of HST,' The National Observer, February 19, 1977.
Raymond H. Geselbracht is Education and Academic Outreach Coordinator at the Harry S. Truman Library. He has published several articles on historical and archival subjects, including articles on Truman's relationship with the Marx Brothers and on the courtship and marriage of Harry and Bess Truman. He has also published a map showing places in the Kansas City area that had special importance to Truman.
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| Articles published in Prologue do not necessarily represent the views of NARA or of any other agency of the United States Government. |