Some of the best poker coaches I’ve ever had have been people who couldn’t teach me a thing about poker strategy. Take comedian Louis CK for example. Regardless of how you feel about him as a person, from a comedy perspective, he’s regarded as one of the greatest ever. While listening to him discuss the craft of comedy recently, I was struck by how much of the advice was applicable to poker as well.
Here are three tips he shared for comedians that would undoubtedly benefit poker players to hear as well.
Don’t Give Up On A “Bit”
In the interview, Louis spoke about how when he has a new joke that isn’t working, rather than eliminating it, he runs it back again the next night. And the next night. And the night after that. He might change the wording, the timing, the intonation, or move it to different spots in his set. He keeps working it over and over again until he gets it right.
Young comics, he says, do the opposite. They try a joke once and if it doesn’t kill, they throw it away and write something new. This keeps them stuck in perpetual mediocrity where they never learn how to make something work.
Many poker players do this very same thing. They try a new play—maybe a light check-raise, maybe a thin value bet—and when they get snapped off or run into a big hand, they are reluctant to ever try the play again.
But the question isn’t whether it worked this time, but whether the theory was right. Maybe it was, but the execution was off. Maybe it would have been right in a vacuum, but the opponent-type was the wrong one. Maybe it was just the sizing that needed adjusting. Or the speed with which you made the bet.
Whatever the issue was, you’ll never figure it out if you don’t force yourself to keep running the same bit, iterating again and again until everything finally falls into place.
Become A Master Of One
Louis discussed how when he’s trying to write a new set, he doesn’t try to do it all at once. Instead, he’ll focus on just getting the first five minutes as tight as possible, then the first ten, then the first 15, etc. Meanwhile young comics try to write a whole hour at once and then wonder why none of it is any good. He says you can’t develop everything simultaneously. You have to get one chunk solid before moving to the next.
I’ve been playing poker for more than two decades and it took me far too long to figure this out. I spent most of that time trying to improve everything at once. My preflop ranges, my flop play, my turn barreling, my river calls, my three-bet bluffs, my check-raising frequency. You name it, I was trying to work on it.
But because I was trying to improve everything at once, I never really got great at anything. It wasn’t until I started isolating one aspect at a time for extended periods of time that my game really started to evolve.
Don’t Make Your Passion A Prison
Louis shared a story about using the same opening joke every single night for a decade. He thought that because it killed, he had to keep it in, but said it “felt like **** coming out of my mouth.” Eventually he realized that it didn’t matter how well it did if it made him miserable.
As poker players we often face the same problem. We play in specific games or focus on a particular game format because we’ve determined that it’s the most profitable one, even if we don’t feel the joy in it.
But while it might make us the most money in the short term, what Louis ultimately learned is that being deeply unhappy with your work is not a sustainable career path, nor a healthy way to spend your life. Sometimes the highest-EV play is to walk away from the easier money in search of something that makes you feel more alive, or to just explore for a while until you can rediscover the passion that brought you to the game in the first place.
If Louis’ advice was for poker players rather than comics, that’s what it would likely say: iterate instead of abandoning, go deep instead of wide, and always make sure to keep the flame of your love for poker alive.
