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When you first try to get good at a game like Street Fighter 2 (and really, Street Fighter 2 was the *first* Street Fighter. But anyway...) you start out by sucking really badly. You not only suck against the guys who are already good (and most likely, Asian), you suck against the scrubs of the world. The Random Guys. The Button Mashers. And this is the worst. The very worst. You spend your days pumping quarters into this machine. You spend your evenings reading geeky strategy articles. You practice the forward-down-forward. And your age 8 cousin beats you by randomly smashing the light kick and medium punch. You are enraged. This game has no skill! This game is bullshit. That move is cheap. The first steps toward competence all involve sucking. You spend 20 minutes trying to eek out your first fireball while your nephew smashes down his 4,000th short kick. To your balls. But maybe you just suck at life? Maybe you aren't that smart. Maybe you aren't that skilled. Maybe this thing that you have spent so much time on...maybe you just genetically suck at it. Or worse, your failings as a human being make you suck at it independent of your genetics. This may sound silly, but anybody who is highly competitive understands this feeling. This thing, whether it be Chess or Street Fighter or Poker or Magic or Starcraft -- winning at this thing has a hold on you. And there are 30 different directions I could take this stream of poopness rant. What does Street Fighter Teach us About Life? One of the hardest things I have ever learned is that I set myself up to fail to give myself an excuse. That is what it means to root for the underdog. That is a hard thing to realize, and an even harder thing to type. To say, to believe. The Big Street Fighter Tournament I played. I lost because of cheapness. I agreed on a structure with the other player. We made a deal: I would play on the left side (his weak side) and he would not throw. That was the deal. Only a loser agrees to a structure with his opponent. I threw that game into the toilet so I could bitch about my loss with indignant anger. It is easier to feel slighted than to admit true defeat. This underdog stance, it is an eternal excuse to live in mediocrity. No loss is our fault. When we suck, when we fail, it is due to circumstance. To cheapness. To a flagrant violation of the imaginary rules of the game that we ourselves invented. And we invented these rules to give ourselves an excuse to lose. None of this is original. This is all parroting of the great and glorious John Rizzo's brilliant article about Bruce. Read that article. You may not be a Magic Player, but I promise you know who Bruce is. Bruce is everything in you that wants to fail. I just alt-tabbed over too the Rizzo article and it took a bit of wind out of my sails. He's already said what I'm trying to say. OK, so I'll continue from there. How to win at Texas Hold'em by Hardgeus: 1) Play limit. 3-6 or 4-8. Unless you have like a hojillion dollars to blow. Then you can just lean on everybody with your giant bankroll. Otherwise just play limit. 2) Pre-flop, don't play unless your cards equal 20 or you are in the big blinds with nothing to do but check. Face cards are 10. Ace is 11. 10 is 10. There you go. Fold everything else. 3) Post-flop fold if you don't make something and somebody bets into you. If you don't have a face-card pair against 3 or less players, fold. If there are more than 4 players, fold on less than 3 of a kind. 4) Bet heavy on straights or flushes if you're gutshot, or have a face-card flush. 5) You will win more doing this than 99% of the people there. There, that was easy. A note on randomness I read an article on the Internet once, so it must be true. It was about a professor of statistics (or whatever the class is called) who had his students go home and either a) flip a coin 100 times and write down the results or b) write down fake coin flips 100 times. He was able to determine who actually flipped the coin with 99% accuracy. How can this be? The fakers, the liars, the people who pretended to flip the coin all had a relatively even dispersion of heads and tails. It was pretty much 50/50 from the get-go. But the people who actually flipped the coin -- there was craziness afoot. Sometimes 6 heads in a row, sometimes 8 tails. Sometimes perfect patters that played taps. But it was always crazy. The fakers? Pretty much always 50/50 in any sample set. Something truly random almost always looks like the work of a phantom hand. Permalink to this post. |
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