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Just Showing Up
by: Lou Krieger©

One of my favorite expressions is the oft-quoted: "Ninety percent of success is just showing up." Do you want to guarantee that you'll succeed in life? Just show up. Go to school, study hard, get a degree, land a job, work hard, keep your shoulder to the wheel, and you've just about guaranteed yourself a nice, middle-class livelihood.

Just showing up works in poker too. Showing up means more than just getting up to play poker each and everyday. If you want to ensure that you become a winning player - and that's nothing to sneeze at, because even if you never go on to be a tournament legend or a TV star, you'll be better by far than the estimated ninety percent of poker players who are lifelong losing players - you have to keep working on your game.

Just Showing Up

One of my favorite expressions is the oft-quoted: "Ninety percent of success is just showing up." I don't know who said it first, and a recent, quick, less-than-thorough online search returned nothing useful to me.

None of that really matters. What does matter is that if you view this phrase in its broadest context, it is applicable to much of life, including poker. Do you want to guarantee that you'll succeed in life? Just show up. Go to school, study hard, get a degree, land a job, work hard, keep your shoulder to the wheel, and you've just about guaranteed yourself a nice, middle-class livelihood.

There's no guarantee that you'll become rich, famous, or noteworthy in your field, but it pretty much ensures that you'll be able to live reasonably well, raise a family, and if you came from less-than-middle-class circumstances, it's certainly a step up the ladder from where you started out.

That's me, to be sure. I ran so hard and so fast from my own upbringing that all my adult life I've had recurring dreams about it. In my dream there's a large hand, maybe 40 feet across, and it's under the black top pavement in the neighborhood where I grew up. It's as though the street was made of latex and stretching so that I could see the outline of the hand rising up and reaching out to pull me back where I lived as a kid. Up above the rising hand, there's a neon sign in a window saying, "Watch out for the street. Once it has you it never lets you go."

Although I'm dreaming about a Brooklyn that probably doesn't exist anymore, it's the Brooklyn I grew up in. I can see the subway, elevated as it runs through Brighton Beach, where guys in underwear shirts sit on their fire escapes - the poor man's terrace - in four-story walk-ups drinking beer.

I showed up every day so I could get out. I didn't want to spend my life hanging around the candy store placing bets with Slim the bookie. I wanted more. I knew the American Dream was out there somewhere and I was determined to find it. My roadmap was the subway. A short ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan showed me they were two different worlds, and I wanted a ticket to the other one.

My secret was simple. I had only trick in my bag but it worked. I went to school, studied hard, and kept at it until I earned a graduate degree that was my entrée into a very different reality than the one I knew growing up.

Just showing up works in poker too. Showing up means more than just getting up to play poker each and everyday. It means you need to keep your nose to the grindstone and your shoulder to the wheel. If you want to ensure that you become a winning player - and that's nothing to sneeze at, because even if you never go on to be a tournament legend or a TV star, you'll be better by far than the estimated ninety percent of poker players who are lifelong losing players - you have to keep working on your game.

Even if you were a whiz five years ago and have been playing regularly, but not studying and upgrading your poker skills during that time, guess what? The world has probably caught up with you. Thousands of players, their games honed by hundreds of hands per hour online and more tournament practice on the internet in a week than you can conveniently get in three months at live casinos, have caught and passed you.

In poker, everything is relative. When their skills rose, yours dropped by comparison. You may not be a lifelong winner any longer. If you aren't thorough about the records you keep, you have no way of knowing, except for the reloading you have to do online to keep your account funded. And if you play in traditional casinos, you can go on deceiving yourself for a long time about whether you're winning or not.

If your opponents are getting better, you have to work at getting better too. Improvement won't happen by accident. You have to work hard to outrun that large hand reaching out to pull you back to the miasma of losing poker players.

Here are some things you can do to raise your game.

Read Books: You might as well read everything. If you're an experienced player, you should be able to sort wheat from chaff. New books are released every week. Read them. The cost of a book is not really a cost at all; it is an investment in your future. Even if one book covers the same ground as another, it may present an idea in way that makes it clearer to you, and in so doing, it is not redundant at all. Just witness all the golf instructional books written over the years that teach the same things, but in different ways. Some presentations work best for these readers, others for those.

Study Group: Join a study group. I make a point to attend the Wednesday afternoon Poker Discussion Group in Las Vegas whenever I'm there. I always learn something from it. I also try to get together with guys like Barry Tanenbaum, Jim Brier, Dr. Al Schoonmaker, and others so we can discuss whatever poker ideas come up. It's a big help. If you can't find enough poker players where you live, try to make contact with online players whose game you respect, and build a group that's supportive, helpful, and discusses poker on a regular basis.

Use the Internet: While the off topic content seems to have dominated the bandwidth on the internet newsgroup rec.gambling.poker in recent years, there are sill interesting questions posted and good points made by smart, savvy players. There is also no shortage of poker forums and web-based sites where poker tips abound. It's easy to pick up on them. If all you did was read RGP, join Poker School Online, follow some of the discussions on the Two + Two website, and read Pokermagazine.com, your game would profit in short order. You don't even have to agree with all the ideas presented there. Just read the ideas, think about them, and review your own playing style in light of some of the posts made by other skilled and knowledgeable players and you're off and running.

Think about the game: If you spend time at the poker table without analyzing your opponents' play and you don't make an effort to understand why they make the choices they do, you are allowing useful information to pass you by without availing yourself of any of it. If that's not enough, building a mental book on how your opponents play can be profitable in the long run and in the short run too. An opponent's action can also provide insight into your own game; all you have to do is take the time to consider his play and think it through.

This should suffice for starters. All I'm asking you to do is to keep your antenna up, keep your batteries charged, and keep yourself plugged into the game at a deeper and more analytical level than simply sitting down and playing poker on autopilot. That's what showing up is all about. And if you show up today, and you show up everyday, success will find you simply because you're working longer and harder than the vast majority of people you run into at the poker table. Doing this keeps the wolf from your door. The hand won't reach up to pull you back; the street will have to let you go, and that hideous neon light will be extinguished.

Lou Krieger

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