For all their training and experience, most poker players (and most traders for that matter) fail to appreciate the value of “infinite patience.” The impact on P&L can be astonishing…

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You must learn to allow patience and stillness to take over from anxiety and frantic activity… The good player is patient. He is observant, controlling his patience, and organizing his composure. When he sees an opportunity, he explodes.
— Jim Lau

I played in a decent-sized cash game Saturday night. It was No Limit Hold ‘Em (my personal specialty) at $3-$5 blinds and $10 to come in.

Average stack size at the table was in the $1,500 – $2,000 range. Most of the players had $500 in chips, give or take, with a thick sheath of crisp $100 bills behind. The larger pots were always a pleasing visual mix of red and green.

There’s just something satisfying about wagering a few Benjamin Franklins with a casual flick of the wrist — something I had occasion to do three or four times over the course of the session.

I settled in with $900 around midnight and left with $1,400 some four and a half hours later. The game was still going strong when I racked up.

Somewhere between a cranberry juice and a calistoga — I never partake of free alcohol at the table, though lots of players do — I mentally revisited an old question: What gives me an edge over these guys?

Understand, these were not tourists. Being a local, I knew virtually every single player in that game, by sight and past experience if not personal acquaintance. They were long-experienced players to a man… or woman. (There were two sharp females in the game.)

The playing styles varied widely. From grinders to maniacs to serial bluffers, it was all there. (No calling stations though.) Something like 150 years of bad beat stories were represented all told.

And yet, for all that, I knew I had an edge over ALL my opponents. Every single one of them.

How so? It wasn’t in the ability to calculate odds, or run a cool bluff, or defend a hand or read a situation or anything like that. I can do all those things well, but for the most part so can they. These abilities are de rigeur at the higher levels of poker play. They are necessary, but not sufficient, qualities for being a winning player.

No, the reason I had an edge over a table full of battle-scarred opponents — including one or two who have been playing cards since the time I was in diapers — is because I had mastered the art of infinite patience, whereas they had not.

Infinite Patience = Inestimable Value

As Michelangelo once said, “genius is infinite patience.” Another way to put it: Patience is the art of “waiting without tiring of waiting.”

Waiting without tiring of waiting is a very hard thing to do. (Until you have mastered it, at which point it becomes effortless.) The mastery takes practice and cultivation and exceptional emotional control. The average untrained individual has no real chance at doing it — not for a sustained period anyway — any more than your typical couch potato could hop up and run ten miles on a whim.

They may look the same on the outside, but on the inside, the difference between “run of the mill” patience and “infinite” patience is Grand Canyon sized. You could even say it’s… well… infinite. One is struggle, the other is release. One is tension, the other is relaxation. One is strife, the other is peace. And so on…

Most individuals — and most poker players, even the deeply experienced ones — have not truly mastered the art of infinite patience. This lack of mastery costs them threefold: in lost profit, lost opportunity, and emotional discomfort.

I know this to be true, because I’ve seen the ramifications of “coming up short” — having run of the mill patience but not infinite patience — over and over again at the tables.

It’s the 5% that kills you

Classic real-life example: A guy I know named “Dave” (just to assign him a name) considers himself a savvy, patient player. He’s read all the books… knows all the odds… knows all the platitudes and the do’s and don’ts and bread and butter plays and blah blah blah.

And Dave really is a savvy, patient player — ninety-five percent of the time. As with most players, it’s the other five percent of the time that kills him.

Look at it this way. A reasonable estimate  of hands dealt in casino poker play — what Tommy Angelo calls ‘table poker’ — is 35 hands per hour. (This assumes the dealers are trained professionals, that the players are versed in poker etiquette, and that the table is equipped with a shuffle machine.)

So if my poker friend Dave plays, say, ten hours of poker a week, that means he see 350 hands a week on average.

If he is a patient, savvy player 95% of the time, that means Dave is going to play well for 332 of those hands (350*0.95=332.5). But the other five percent of hands… the 17 or 18 hands where Dave loses his cool and does NOT play well… are going to murder his long-term results.

• That last 5% could easily take Dave from ‘strongly profitable’ to ‘weakly profitable’.
• Or worse, from ‘weakly profitable’ to ‘breakeven’…
• Or worse still, from breakeven to losing over the long haul.

Can you see the trading parallel yet?

The Frustration Catch 22

The other tricky thing is, patience is required most when one desires to apply it least.

Again: Patience is required most when one desires to apply it least. Think about that for a minute.

You know those times at the table (or in the markets) where you would rather punch someone in the face than sit calmly? When embracing zen cool and withdrawing from the field of battle is the absolute LAST thing you could possibly feel like doing, a notch below jabbing yourself in the leg with a fork?

Yep, you guessed it. Those are the times when patience pays off more than any other… because abandoning patience at those times is precisely what wrecks your P&L as a poker player and a trader.

It’s a real bitch kitty. The times when you are struggling and snarling the most — when you LEAST feel like applying patience — are when you are most likely to do damage to your bankroll by letting your discipline slip.

When Emotion Trumps Discipline

Back to Dave again. Let’s visit him on a typical poker night. Dave has been exercising exemplary patience (on the surface level anyway) for the past three hours straight. He has maintained composure after experiencing an epically crappy run of cards, even as the slightly toasted tourist in the two-seat has been yukking it up and raking in the chips.

Then, finally, Dave gets a real hand: Ace-King suited in position. Better yet, he’s in against the toasted loud-mouth tourist, who limped in under the gun. Dave raises to $40 and gets a call.

A king and two rags fall on the flop — perfect.  Now Dave has top pair, top kicker. The tourist checks, and Dave pushes a full column of red chips — $100 — over the line. Smooth. Bold. Confident. The tourist calls the $100, sticking around and gambling it up with garbage. Harmony has been restored to the universe… Dave can taste the sensation of dragging a big pot.

But then, bad news. A flush card — a third heart — comes on the turn, and the tourist bets big from under the gun — $150.

Shit.

Based on the way the hand has played thus far, Dave can know with a fair degree of certainty that his opponent was chasing a flush. (Tourists just love to chase.)

With nothing better than top-pair top-kicker, against a maniac who has been running hot and chasing every draw (with no small degree of success), the wise thing to do here is to back away… to preserve capital, let discretion be the better part of valor, and fold.

But Dave can’t do that. If he were in his “95 percent” place, cool-headed logic and smart play would prevail. But that’s not where Dave is right now. After being so cruelly denied by the universe — taunted and mocked by the poker gods — he is in the 5% zone and seeing red.

“I’ve been sitting here for three @#$#@ hours… and I finally get a real hand after having the patience of Job… and now this @#$#@ is going to suck out on me?!? Hell no!

And so, through an emotional red haze that blots out his better instincts, Dave calls the tourist’s big bet on the turn.

The river is a blank… the tourist pushes all-in for his last $250… and now Dave figures he HAS to call. He is emotionally and financially pot committed.

You can guess what happens from there. The initial read was spot on. The tourist caught his piece-of-cheese jack-high flush draw on the turn. It was an incredibly stupid play to make, but in perfect keeping with the observational cues of a player who has been making stupid plays all night — and hitting.

Dave’s once proud stack is now demolished, having disgorged an extra $400 (via his turn and river calls) that never should have been put in play. The proper read after the turn, based on clear observation and experience, says to “let it go.”  But Dave couldn’t.

Let’s add one last bit of context for that $400 give-up that never should have happened:

• Dave’s preferred game is $1-$2 blind no limit (the example above is from a $1-$2 game).
• When he is playing well (i.e. not tilting), Dave’s average net ‘table wage’ is $20 per hour.
• In the context of table wage — $20 an hour — this ONE LAPSE cost 20 hours worth of profits.
• In the context of table time (10 hrs per week), that’s two weeks worth of play.
• Is it any wonder Dave has never moved to higher stakes?

And to think that “95%” at first sounded impressive! Now you see why that “last 5%” is so devastating in P&L terms. Those 17 or 18 hands a week, when Dave just “can’t let go,” wind up seriously wrecking his long-run profit potential as a player.

Now: If Dave were a trader, guess how well a “95%” philosophy would serve his trading account…

Mosquito Bites Add Up Too

What’s more, those “last 5%” P&L hits are not always emotionally melodramatic (like the above example). Sometimes they are smaller and mostly irritating, like a mosquito bite.

But those mosquito bites can add up fast…

In a live poker game, there is an illusion that bite-sized losses don’t matter. After all, they’re “just chips.” This illusion is maintained and sustained by both the players and the house, because it encourages action and keeps the game profitable.

And so, inevitably, the thinking runs like this: Who cares if you throw away $30 on a complete chase? You’ll make it back on the next orbit when you hit. This type of logic prevails to an astonishing degree, even among experienced players. Few of them consider that $30 is six percent of a $500 stack. Make a dumb “six percent” move ten times, and sixty percent of your stack is up the flue!

Even a measly one-chip bet — $5 being the standard unit — represents one percent of a $500 stack. One percent is small, yet it really isn’t. Those one percents can add up fast.

And of course, at the end of the day, it’s all about expectation.

• Every play you make has a mathematical expectation, though the odds are often intuitive (depending not just on “hard” inputs, like straight mathematical percentages, but also “soft” inputs, like player tells, situational dynamics, implied odds, psychological nuances, and so on).

• This “expectation dominance” means you should look at every play from the perspective of running it a statistically significant number of times. If I ran this play 1,000 times in a Monte Carlo simulator, would the net result be meaningfully profitable?

• If the Monte Carlo answer is “no,” then to run the play even once is to hurt your long-run results. A short-term gain if you get “lucky” is outweighed, over time, by the encouragement of bad habits.

Very few players think about this. That’s because it takes a strange and unique breed to be intimately aware of the math from a risk management standpoint, yet also possess the killer instinct necessary to opportunistically engage in calculated aggressive fashion.

Without a heightened sense of risk control, you’ll never be a truly great player. And yet, without killer instinct and a taste for the game — i.e. having a little “gamble” inside — you’ll never sit down at the table in the first place.

Greatness, then, is a study in yin-yang — a  compendium of artfully opposed traits. The truly skilled poker player, and all the more so the truly skilled trader, is not just a fighter. He (or she) is also an artist, a statistician, and a student of human nature, all rolled into one.

When You Have It, You Know It

So, back to this “infinite patience” thing. As you have probably figured out by now, very few poker players truly possess infinite patience — even the ones with ample experience and talent.

What’s more, even most “good” or “experienced” players are stunningly ignorant of the concept’s vital importance. They are hopelessly unaware of the fact that their lack of infinite patience — their inability to wait without tiring of waiting, which shows up in the form of critical slack at the margins — is quite possibly their greatest handicap (assuming they have already worked hard on all the other key things).

The same is true in the trading and investing arena. Whatever your game, if it’s a competitive free-flowing endeavor with plenty of “action” and a natural emphasis on patience and emotional control, then it may well be that that last 5% — that critical slack at the margin — is what kills you (or otherwise dilutes your results).

Think of it like a direct tax on your P&L, because that’s what it is. Every dollar you give up on the margins, via sloppy thinking, emotional indulgence, or all-around subpar play, is a dollar that could have gone straight into your pocket but didn’t, because your patience was not infinite (and your resolve thus not complete).

I’ll talk more about infinite patience in future pieces. But for now, a final question: How do you know when you have it? How do you recognize the presence of “infinite patience” within yourself?

Well, it’s a lot like what the Oracle in the Matrix said:

I’m going to let you in on a little secret… [Having infinite patience] is just like being in love. No one can tell you you’re in love, you just know it. Through and through. Balls to bones.

Patiently yours,

JS

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