Back to Black: Andy Black and the Zen of Poker

No, I wasn’t cursed. It was something within me. The dominance I had in a number of tournaments was ridiculous. But something got into my head. I remember in the early hours of the morning before the Premier League fi nal, I just thought, “I can’t do this.” All my fears came to the surface — the fact that I’d been here so many times and messed up near the end. There was this fear of the present; that I’d mess up again, and of the future; that I’d carry on messing up forever (laughs). But sometimes to work through things you have to… I don’t know… confront them, and perhaps something broke through there. But winning is a distraction. Part of the reason people don’t improve their game is that they’re living in the future. They’re hoping and aspiring to win something more. Once you’ve won something, it’s over. You have to return to the present and concentrate on your game.

Well, I’m not sitting there any more feeling like the guy who doesn’t know how to fi nish these things off. The irony about this blow-up thing is that, for the fi rst ten years I played poker, fi nishing was what I was good at. Sometimes with poker, you gain one part of your game and lose another part; you develop a new part and somehow another bit goes out of the window. Then you rediscover the fi rst bit and lose the other bit. It’s interesting the way people pretend to themselves that this is not happening to them — which I think is what most people do — and the way they con themselves is by complaining about other players instead, or about their “bad luck”. Either that, or people just carry on playing their game — which maybe pretty good — but they never seek to develop it because they think it’s good enough. These are all mechanisms to avoid being honest with yourself about the fact that your ability in certain areas of the game comes and goes. If you look at some of the older players around the clubs, something that might typify them is that they become a bit rigid, a bit stagnant. How did they get there? Well, they got there gradually. So you get these younger guys who are in the middle of their poker careers and they’re blissfully unaware that they’re moving towards stagnation.

What I’m best at is being honest with myself, and also realizing that honesty is a process. It’s not necessarily going to be pleasant to look at the fact that you’re doing the same thing again and again. It’s easy to see the mistakes others make but it’s much harder to recognize the parts of your game that you’re ignoring.

You just have to break it down all the time. A simple example is this: a couple of years ago I realized I would lose my chips every time I moved tables. And this happens to a lot of people: they throw up their hands and say they were unlucky to be moved — any excuse, other than the fact that — hold on — maybe your decision making process is changing because you’ve moved tables. You spent a long time working on the other players, but now things have changed. I realized that — well — things might have changed for me, but they’ve also changed for everybody else. I’m the unknown factor, so they’re trying to adjust to me and I’m trying to adjust to them. Whoever adjusts fi rst wins. It’s pretty simple. So I started working on that. I starting working on where I was making the mistakes and I came up with this system. I would tick boxes in my head. Is the guy capable of doing this? Do I have any physical read on him? There were about fi ve boxes and I realized that when I was making a mistake I never ticked more than one box. So I focused on ticking all the boxes. Now I don’t have to do that because I do it naturally. And that’s good because it frees me up to work on something else. Although it’s possible I might forget how to do that one day and have to retrain myself all over again.

Yeah, I guess it was. I’ve read a lot of nonsense in the press saying that Stuey got lucky against me. This is not the case. He outplayed me. He was so magical; it was as though when I was putting in the chips, he was putting in the chips. I can’t explain that. It’s almost as though people found themselves in a memerized state and he had them on a string. You had this sense that he could do anything, so it was almost impossible to work out what he was going to do. I think I’ve learned to do that sometimes now. I mean, I’ll stick a fourth raise in on the river if I think I’m right. I don’t give a shag about what cards I have. And that’s what Ungar did. He was a genius. He mesmerised people. He certainly mesmerized me.

Yes…probably. I’ve never been asked about that before… but yeah… when I think about it. There was this sense that I was just fair game and I couldn’t see myself ever being that good. I mean, I don’t think that now, but certainly I did then.

Yes, I’ve probably seen people play better than him. But you have to judge things in their time. I think if Ungar was around now, he’d play better than he did then. He’d have better resources and he’d adapt. But then again, maybe he wouldn’t. You have to remember that, as good as he was, he was unsuccessful for a lot of his life. He struggled a lot of the time. He lost a lot in No Limit cash games because once he went behind, that was it — that’s the fatal fl aw of a lot of the most creative players.

You overestimate some aspects of your game and underestimate others. In fact, the whole game is designed to just confuse the hell out of you. It’s a typical situation: a guy comes along and it seems like he’s got a pretty good game and a good head on his shoulders, but one day he plays really badly and he wins a tournament. His mates come up and they say, “Aren’t you great? Aren’t you brilliant?” Now he think that’s the way to win a tournament, but actually, when you break down his game, he got lucky. I know people who are regarded as being amongst the top players in the world who will not be regarded as such in a few years, because I know how they played, and they played badly. The history of poker is littered with that kind of person. This happens at every level of the game. It happens at the lower limits, too, and I know that because I was at the lower levels for ages.

So, what you have at the end of the day is this mass of information which just keeps changing. It makes chaos theory look straightforward. The solution to fi nding your way through all this can only begin when you start to look at yourself and see where you’re at.

You have to realize that all of the criticisms I make when I talk about other people’s games, I make them because I was like them for the fi rst ten years I played poker. I say it from a depth of experience. I was just this guy who had a bit of a talent and just turned up; I didn’t work on my game, my lifestyle was shite… I was confused as to why I didn’t do better, but deep down I knew.

Buddha said we are all mad. Everybody’s mad. I associate myself emotionally and psychologically with the idea of the court jester. In literature, the court jester was traditionally the wisest person, but he was also a bit mad. Certainly, the common approach to poker — that of the poker face and holding everything in — I can’t live like that. The truth is that, if you play poker, that’s your life. You’re sitting there for hours on end. For me to actually restrain myself all of that time would drive me even madder. So really, behaviour that others might perceive as mad is really just a ruse to retain my own sanity.

I’m resting and preparing for the Series. The Series is designed to melt people’s brains. Not that many players play the whole thing. Mainly what you’ve got are your weekend warriors and your satellite qualifi ers, but if you decide to splash out and play more than just a No Limit Hold’em tournament — which not that many European players do — you’re faced with a very diffi cult situation. You’re playing the whole thing and you go from playing a $5,000 Deuce-7 Rebuy with 70 of the best players in the world to a $1,500 No Limit Hold’em event against 3,000 people, and that can do your head in. Then you’ve got all the Vegas stuff — the fact that you might be behind for the trip, that your head’s being fried by the hotel system; you probably haven’t seen daylight in days, and when you do it’s 116 degrees outside. And all the time, all around you, you’re surrounded by other people whose heads are pretty wrecked too. There are people who are on serious tilt everywhere and all the conversations are just bizarre. So to negotiate all that — well, it’s like playing an incredibly whippy links course with really, really heavy rough and you’re not allowed a big driver in your bag. It’s really diffi cult, and this isn’t talked about a lot. People talk about how to play poker and the theory involved, but what really does people in at the World Series is the fact that their brains are melting.

It’s a start, you know. I mean, it’s not enough, I’ve realized that.

Well, yeah, it is. But the problem is that someone who drinks Red Bull all day for a month might win the event. But in the long term, that on its own is not enough. It’s the difference between wanting to play your best and just hoping that everything falls into place by accident. I mean, I’ve already got the schedule; I’ve divided it into six weeks and I know roughly the transitions I have to make from tournament to tournament, depending on how I do in each, and I’ve never done that before. I’ve always just gone in and got confused by the blizzard of tournaments, but this time I’ve mapped it out.

Last year I played as many events as I could. I made a couple of fi nal tables and I broke even, but I was burnt out. This year, I’m not staying in a hotel — I’ve hired a villa, and I’ve got a camper van, which I’m parking around the back of the RIO, so I’m going to go there on all the breaks, and I’ll have a Buddhist friend with me to help me out. I’m just not going to enter into the madness. Not that I’m scared of the madness, of course…