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Maryann Guberman has been a writer and editor with many gaming publications, including Sports Form, Card Player, Poker World, Player's Panorama and Systems and Methods. She also has written and edited numerous books on gambling.

Feb. 14, 2009

Murphy's Poker Laws

Life would be so rosy if we could be eternal optimists. However, while we're on this journey we're always going to drive over speed bumps, hit patches of ice, encounter storms, and face emotional distress. Maybe that's what people refer to when they claim that poker is a metaphor for life.

I'm not sure poker's a metaphor for life because poker's a game; life isn't.

However, with poker being part of life, it's fraught with the same kind of ups and downs and we can't help but thinking about some of Murphy's laws when it comes to our game.

Last evening, for example, I was watching the World Series of Poker Europe on ESPN. The wise-cracking color commentator, Norman Chad, said something about a hand that could have been a direct descendant of Murphy. To paraphrase, he commented, "He played the hand exactly right and lost."

Sound like Murphy? (Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way.)

I don't care how many times we play our cards and our people correctly; the effort is never going to result in the perfectly expected outcome all the time. In fact, when I watch this tournament poker, I begin to think positive outcomes from correct play are a rare occurrence.

Okay, it's probably selective memory plus special attention and editing to critical hands but watching kings full get hammered by aces full, a straight on the flop turn to disaster on the river with a case jack, and aces up going down in flames to trip deuces, well, it's heartbreaking and it's eye-opening.

I know the math experts will pound away at us with their perfect logic to let us know that seeing things like a straight flush draw come in on the river and other phenomenal finales are par and average and happening as expected but I don't buy it. These things happen too often because Murphy tells them to. He's the guy who lets wild amateurs into poker to play like crazy demons who skew the odds. Murphy's the guy who helps outnumber the live-playing pros with online phenoms who think poker's a game and not, as Phil Hellmuth bemoaned in before going down in flames at the 2008 WSOP, "...To me it's life."

Most people look at the negative side of Murphy's Law, which in itself is shrouded in mystery and doubt, and don't realize there's an upside that really should be included.

Presumably, Edward Murphy made a statement that eventually became his law when he was involved in g-force experimentation and the use of straps to measure the impact of speed on a body. Apparently one of his assistants connected the wires backwards so all measurements came back as zero. It's believed that Murphy uttered some kind of phrase regarding the assistant and his mistake that eventually became his law.

The phrase might never have surfaced in any of its ancestry if it hadn't been for John Stapp who was involved in the same g-force experiment. Somebody asked him why nobody ever got hurt while they were doing all this testing and he told them his group always took Murphy's Law into consideration, meaning it was important to consider all the possibilities (possible things that could go wrong) before doing a test, and then act to counteract them.

Quite a difference, then, between the universal interpretation of Murphy's Law and the actual exposure of the first use to the public, and quite possibly this is how we should look at those uncountable bad beats we see on TV and in our own play.

At any given time, no matter how perfectly we play our cards (and our people) something is going to go wrong. With that in mind, the best thing we can do is anticipate all the negatives and prepare to counteract them. That means measuring the pot odds, the expected return, the chances of winning, the possibility of forcing a fold, or any and all the outcomes that might happen.

Hey, nobody said it was easy, especially not Murphy.