I was visiting my hometown yesterday, but only for a few hours. The reason for the short visit was to pick up my new car and drive it back to Linköping, but I also got to have dinner at my sister’s (the younger of two older sisters) and her family, and I had brought with me two books on poker since I know that she and her fiancé are both interested in the game and want to learn how to beat it. So I brought “Getting Started in Hold ‘em” and the Swedish “Pokerhandboken” (”The Poker Handbook”). I would have settled for only Getting Started but the other book has the advantage of being in Swedish, and some of the concepts may be easier to deal with in the native language. Anyway.

We had dinner - barbeque, yummie - and then I sat with them for 50 hands of micro limit online play to see if I could give them some pointers. I realized how hard it is to teach this stuff on the fly.

“No, you should fold that… The reason is that.. Wait, everyone folded, okay never mind you can actually raise with it if… No you shouldn’t just call, if you’re going to play it at all you should raise, because… Crap the small blind re-raised, okay just call now…”

I tried, in the hands where we folded preflop, to explain some of the actions of the hands that we did play, I tried to get some basic pointers in about how coldcalling is bad preflop, how position matters, how you should play big hands aggressively and try to get in cheap with hands like small pocket pairs, etc. And I thought to myself, “this game is HARD.” All of the thought processes that are automatic to anyone who’s played for awhile are so complex and situation-dependent that most of what I said must have come across as self-contradictory and confusing. I was stuttering a lot.

I tried, in between hands, to explain the concept of equity, I tried to explain pot odds, how you should fight for the big pots and let the small ones go. After the brief 20 minutes I had to spare before driving back home, I feel like I’ve accomplished only to make the game seem unnecessarily complicated and difficult. Hopefully Ed Miller - the author of Getting Started - will do a better job of explaining this stuff than I did.

On the bright side, she called me at work this morning and excitedly told me that she had gotten AKs and had done as I said and raised preflop, and then someone went all-in on the flop and she had called, “just like you told me to”. Apparenly, the other guy was bluffing so she doubled up. I’m pretty sure I didn’t actually tell her to call an all-in bet with AK unimproved on the flop, and I have no idea what the situation was like, but it seemed to have worked out this time. I’m afraid that I may have created a monster.

Here’s to her future success as a poker player.

Good luck, sister dear.

Fredrik