There are many downsides to getting older. Your body aches more. Your sleep gets worse. There are more expectations that you’ll have it all figured out. But one place where I’ve been thrilled to find I’ve only gotten better with time is at the poker table. Here’s why poker in my 40s is better than it was in my 20s and why I am sure it’ll be even better in my 60s.
You care less what people think.
For most of my life, I didn’t realize I was doing this, but looking back now, I can see that in my early days, so much of my mental energy went into managing what other people thought of me, both in life and at the poker table. I’d resist running big bluffs that I thought would make me look stupid. I’d make crying calls on the river because I didn’t want my opponent to windmill a bluff in my face if I folded. I stayed trapped in stakes I could beat rather than risk losing it all and having to admit defeat to the people in my life.
But the older I get, the fewer ***** I give about what anyone thinks of me. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time dodging other people’s opinions, but maybe it’s only through time that you can understand nobody thinks about you as much as you think they do. And even if they are, as long as you’re happy with yourself, you eventually realize their opinions don’t matter anyway.
You’ve gone through actual suffering.
Once you have enough health scares, once you’ve buried enough people, once you’ve experienced big failures and losses, your sense of what actually matters becomes highly calibrated. Suddenly losing a couple of buy-ins in a poker game doesn’t seem like such a big deal. Going through enough crises in the real world gives you the kind of perspective that helps you sit back during a bad session and feel grateful that that’s your biggest problem at the moment.
Your pattern recognition is automated.
The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius once wrote the following: Look at the past—empire succeeding empire—and from that, extrapolate the future: the same thing. No escape from the rhythm of events. Which is why observing life for forty years is as good as observing it for a thousand. Would you really see anything new?
Some days, I can’t explain how I know the dude in seat 7 is bluffing, but I know. Something about his timing, his posture, the way he reaches for his chips. I can’t consciously process every intricate detail of every single hand, but somewhere deep down in my psyche, dozens of data points have been collected and analyzed, and the results themselves become clear as day: bluff.
This is what Aurelius meant, and why poker becomes significantly easier the older you get. After enough repetitions, you’re not learning anything new; you’re just getting better at recognizing patterns you’ve already seen.
You know the rollercoaster ends.
In my 20s, running badly for a few consecutive sessions felt like the world was ending. My mind would question whether games had gotten too tough or I’d lost my edge. Every downswing felt like maybe this was the end.
But the more swings you face, the more times you see things level out again. Once you run worse than you ever have before, and then run even worse than that, you start to realize that this is just the way variance works. All of it, both good and bad, comes, stays for a while, and then ends. The heater cools off. The downswing turns around. And everything stays more or less the same.
This might be the biggest edge older players have. We might not always be smarter or more skilled, but we’ve seen this movie many times and know exactly how it ends. This, too, is what Aurelius meant. The more times you ride the rollercoaster, the less stressful the highs and lows feel.
Why it’ll be even better at 60
I sometimes play with a couple of guys in their sixties and seventies, who make me look forward to being a poker player at their age. They may not know what GTO means or even what a solver is, but they have this sense of intuition and calmness at the table that’s hard for us younger folks to replicate.
Nothing surprises them anymore. They’ve seen every cooler, every bad beat, every type of player, every situation. They don’t get tilted. They don’t complain about things outside their control. They just play their game, session after session, year after year, decade after decade, getting better each step along the way.
So while there’s obviously value in solver work and training videos, I’d happily trade it all for another twenty years of pattern recognition and not giving a damn what anyone thinks.
