The Pros Speak: Andy Black

Posted by The Captain | Filed under The Pros Speak

Andy Black is unlike any other poker player you’re ever likely to meet. He is, in fact, unlike any other human you’re likely to meet. And that’s what makes spending some time with him so fascinating.

Raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Black took a path less travelled and headed south to Dublin where he eventually earned a law degree at Trinity College. Again, however, he veered “off course”, choosing to pursue his passion for poker rather than his love of law. Following two heart-breaking appearances at the WSOP Main Event in the late 1990s, Black turned his back on the game he loved and disappeared from site for five years. He disappeared to England, nursed his wounds, and took up Buddhism. It was a break that served him well.

Bright, gregarious, and maybe just a little nuts, Black is, if nothing else, an original thinker. We were lucky enough to corner him for a brief conversation and, well, we’ll let Andy speak for himself. Enjoy a look at poker and philosophy from one of the game’s brightest minds:

Things happen at a very rapid pace as a result of technology. This is true with life in general, and in poker. Exposure and experience can be gained very quickly more so now than ever. As a result, it’s easy to lose perspective – lose touch with what’s important. Arguably, anytime something happens very quickly, there’s danger of something being lost even though some things can be gained.

Especially with the rise of the Internet, there’s so much out there that people don’t feel the need to discriminate between what matters and what doesn’t. With this, there are a lot of people that are missing out on the details or finer points in life. They become focused on one thing – not necessarily just poker – and then miss out on everything else going on around them. They develop tunnel vision and miss out on other things that are equally valuable.

Of course there are some people who are able to be balanced and integrated, and still totally focused on one particular thing. But for most people - the majority - and I count myself among those, we need a range of activities or at least a range of ways of doing things to remain reasonably sane. In any case, as an individual, you’ve got to step back and figure this out.

One problem is trying to work out what’s missing in life – and in poker as well – is the fact that it’s not there to begin with. It’s a real paradox trying to work this out. But when something is missing, it creates a couple of problems. With so much choice, it becomes overwhelming – there is so much input that it becomes very difficult to stay focused on what is there, let alone what’s missing.

The thing to do is to work out what you need to make yourself sound – whole and sane – and to move forward. I attempt to apply this to poker – and I do say attempt. With poker, the biggest obstacle to overcome in this context is losing your “beginner’s mind” after you’ve been playing for awhile.

Think about when you started playing how incredibly exciting it was: you had these cards, these chips, these other people at the table – and you wanted to get their chips. Think about how amazing it was when you were making these decisions for the first time: if I bet this or if I check here… Again, it’s all incredibly exciting. This is why most of us continue playing cards – it’s a riveting experience.

But after time goes by, you tend to forget that. And if you get unlucky, it’s very difficult to look at it and realize that maybe you didn’t do anything wrong. Instead, you end up adjusting your game and becoming less imaginative/less creative. It’s like getting beat holding a pair of Kings - that’s happened to me. Five major tournaments in a row, I got done with Kings. It’s easy to lose perspective when these things happen and not look at what you need to do to get on with it.

The elephant graveyard for poker players is to forget to look for the things that are missing. And you don’t notice them because they’re missing: maybe your not being aggressive enough, maybe your not being conservative enough – whatever it is; we could give the whole list of all things poker. But it’s so difficult to figure this out. As a result, you find yourself miserable and just grinding it out tournament after tournament. And you don’t realize that something is missing.

What’s even more dangerous, you might be unfortunate enough to win something playing badly, and then you are really screwed. Because then, you actually end up making the same mistakes for the rest of your life – and this does happen – just because that’s what “won that tournament” that one time.

No matter what, you’ve always got to maintain perspective. The thing that you have to do – and this is half of the battle – is admit to what’s going on: that something’s missing. For most people, in a sense, it can be the whole battle. You really have to admit to yourself that you need to make changes in how you play. And you have to admit that very deeply and realize that you’ll continually need to make changes. For me, the longer I play the more shifts I realize I need to make. I have to stop and look at it in terms of “I’m doing this well, but I could easily do it better. How do I make this happen?” You’ve got to be brutally honest with this without beating yourself up over everything. Once you’ve done that, the next question is: “What do I do next?”

There’s a great Buddhist story which I think applies to this – in Buddhism, it’s about getting out of the suffering in this world and on the path to enlightenment. But the story is this: you find yourself in a battle and somebody fires an arrow, and the arrow hits you in the eye. What do you want to do? What’s the thing to do now?

Most people start to ask “Why did someone fire the arrow? Where did it come from?”

This is absolutely wrong. The very first thing you’ve got to do is get the bloody arrow out. In a sense, bad beat stories are the same: “what the…why did…how did it happen?” That’s what a bad-beat story is. You need to get past that immediately and get the “arrow” out of your eye. And there are loads of people going around with “arrows in their eyes” – I’m doing this all of the time, and I don’t even know that it’s there.

You need to stop, figure out where you’re at and be honest with yourself. Admit that you need to adjust something, and start applying the necessary antidotes. This is where it all has to come from: realizing where you’re at. Otherwise you’ll end up all messed up in one way or another.

This is not a perfect process - for most people it’s quite clumsy. There are exceptions, like Phil Ivey or Patrick Antonius, who seem like they were designed to play poker – they never lose focus. Maybe they’ve even been playing poker for thousands of past lives. But, I’m not like that and you just don’t meet many people that are.

For the rest of us, we need to continually evaluate what needs to be done. When our actions are not in accordance with how things are, we suffer. Taking care of these things is a lifetime’s work and it’s very personal. From a Buddhist perspective, if there are 10 billion people on the planet, there are 10 billion routes to enlightenment. By that, if there are 10 million poker players out there, there are 10 million ways to become a great poker player.

And it’s easy to get lost if you limit the scope of your efforts to improve or remedy the problem. Limiting possible courses of action is a mistake. Figure out where you’re at/what’s wrong, look at what you need to do, and fill in what’s missing. Step back and look at how you do in a game or, even more so, how you run over a period of time. This will pretty much tell you where you’re at in the big picture.

Actually doing this can be extremely difficult, but it’s great as well. In the end, just try to keep an honest picture of things, continue to make the necessary adjustments, and don’t be too hard on yourself.

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