Want to get good at poker? Maybe it’s time to close down your online game – at least for a little while – and reach for a board game. After all, it’s no coincidence that some of the world’s greatest poker studs honed their gambling skills by doing something other than playing cards. Most obviously, there is a contingent of famous pros – Dan Harrington, Erik Seidel and Gus Hanson among them – who have found that succeeding on the backgammon felt transmits handily to similar results at the poker table.
Beyond the financially practical reason to be good at backgammon – if you see a rich, drunk guy hankering to play the game, you’ll do well to be versed at it – there is a strategic component. “The big part of backgammon is making good doubling-cube decisions,” says Steve “Zee” Zolotow, a very successful poker pro, who has won multiple bracelets and made a lot of money at backgammon as well. “You do things that raise your equity when you’re ahead and allow you to lose less equity when you’re behind. The same kind of thinking applies to poker when you’re an underdog to win a hand but the pot odds are right.”
Skin defence
Beyond the mental muscles that backgammon helps build it talso works as an effective skin toughener. It trains you to handle negative deviations in a way that few other games do.
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“You get used to the reality of bad luck,” continues Zee, pointing out that rolling dice before every move, in a totally transparent game, makes it impossible to keep from having numerous bouts with nauseatingly rotten fortune.
But it’s not just backgammon that will prime you for the green baize. Before Johnny “World” Hennigan made a name for himself as a great 7-Card Stud specialist, he was tearing up the billiards competition in Philadelphia (where he was known as Flakes). It is said that Phil Ivey honed his reflexive decision-making skills at videogames; Howard Lederer stumbled across poker while he was on a quest to become a Grand Master at chess; while Chris “Jesus” Ferguson was winning strategy-intensive war simulations long before he knew how to riffle chips. “Me, my brother, and our friends played board games like Tactics II and Panzer Blitz,” he remembers of his childhood in California. “We had battles on the board and there were strong strategic components [that laid the groundwork for his interest in game theory, and which strongly informs his poker style today].”
Most intriguing of all is a current rage for the kid’s pastime paper, scissors, stone. I first heard about poker pros competing at this game when a pal mentioned that members of Dutch Boyd’s posse, The Crew, like to play it to tune up for big tournaments. I was sure that my leg was being pulled. Then, during the 2005 WSOP, I got into a discussion about it with Phil Gordon. He described it as “the ultimate psychological battle” and explained that “it all comes down to how many levels you are capable of x-raying” – perfect training for poker.
A couple of days later 64 pros – including Gordon, Boyd, Annie Duke and Scott Fischman – put up $200 apiece for a charity paper, scissors, stone tournament, and Dutch’s brother, Robert Boyd, won the whole thing by throwing scissors to Kevin Keller’s paper. The loss is particularly tragic, in light of something that Gordon (who’s obviously analysed the hell out of this game) had told me the day before: “Most people overplay rock, so you need to go paper a lot.”