Fire The ป๊อกเด้ง ไฮโล Coach
Recently I heard about the firing of a certain NFL head coach. The particular coach that got fired had led another team in another city to a Super Bowl win a few years ago. He subsequently quit, and was then hired by a different team in a different city. When it was first announced that he had been hired as the new coach, the whole city bristled with excitement. Everyone was certain that the new coach would resurrect his new team. He was going to be the savior. Well, you can probably guess what happened. The team proceeded to have 3 or 4 disastrous seasons. The make-up of his new team was much different than his Super Bowl winning team. He basically did not have the personnel to win with.
The more I thought about it, the more I felt empathy for the coach. One of the reasons I felt sorry for the newly fired coach was because I realized that there seemed to be so many parallels between the life of an NFL coach, and that of a professional tournament poker player.
I thought of some streaks I have had in the ป๊อกเด้ง ไฮโล tournament poker world where I just couldn’t win. It seemed like my cards were vastly inferior to what other players were receiving. I understood that the coach probably had been dealing with the same type thing but instead of inferior cards, he had been dealing with inferior players. I thought maybe the coach actually had a little advantage over me, from the standpoint that it might be easier to justify why he had been losing. Everyone could see his personnel was inferior, whereas we poker player sometimes hold inferior cards, and unfortunately we’re the only people who see them.
I wonder how many fired coaches over the years have had the same feeling I have, that is when they’re playing or coaching their butts off, and they aren’t winning. Knowing deep down in their hearts that given better players or cards, they could get the job done. Let’s face it– sometimes your players, or cards, just stink.
The more I thought about it, even more parallels popped into my mind. It occurred to me that some coaches are very offensive minded. They seem to stock their teams with a lot of good offensive players, and their teams win their games by scoring a lot of points. They are not that concerned with defense. Some good tournament poker players also are offensive minded. We call them “rammer-jammers”. They get there with a minimum amount of defense and a maximum amount of offense. If these poker players were NFL coaches, they would be throwing the long bomb on every down.
On the other hand, other successful coaches stress defense. They have the defensive players and their teams win those low scoring battles. You know the ones that sort of “bore you to tears”. Once again, the parallel in poker is there. There are some good tournament players who are defense minded. Their motto is “a saved bet is a won bet”. They just seem to stick around and stick around and next thing you know they’re chopping the prize money. If these defense-minded players were NFL coaches, they would give the other team the ball the entire game and win, by running back fumble recoveries.
By this time, I had satisfied myself enough to realize that there were many similarities between the two occupations. I decided that in the future, I would use this as the analogy, when I try to explain to people who want to understand the life of a tournament poker player.
I’m sure all the players who have participated for any length of time in poker tournaments have, like me, been asked many times some of the following questions. “Oh, you play poker tournaments? What’s it like? How much of it is luck? Do you win all the time?”
Now, I think I will have the answer. I’ll start out by just saying, “Playing poker tournaments is like coaching in the NFL.” Then I’ll go through all the things I talked about above and conclude by saying, “The big difference is we don’t make as much money as the coaches do; but then on the other hand, nobody can fire us.” For What it’s Worth