Phil’s Laak of Sleep
My first thought when I read about Phil Laak’s recent accomplishment of setting a new world record of 115 hours straight playing no limit poker wasn’t amazement at the feat of remaining awake and alert enough to play a mentally strenuous game for five days and nights. I thought of how tough it must have been to combat a table of players who would all have a good reason to go gunning for him.
For the attempt he sat in a lower limit 10-20 NL game. A world where 10-20 NL is low stress poker already puts me out of my element. The 1-2 NL game I recently started playing is right at the cusp between exciting poker and stress I’m not willing to put myself through while trying to enjoy my weekend. The flamboyant player drew a lot of attention with the attempt, and I imagined a slew of players wanting to sit in and take a pot off him. The difficulty of staring at a five card board during hour ninety-something and trying to determine if I had a flush or a straight or even a pair only occurred to me later. My first worry, as I imagined being in Phil Laak’s place, was some tourist jumping in the game eager to bluff me. What if someone tries to put me all in, right away? Will I have the courage to call?
How am I already worried about that? It’s not even me.
This is the kind of reticent attitude I let hold me back when I’m playing poker. It happens when I’m a short stack, it happens when I find myself a chip leader. My imagination always finds a way to worry about how I’ll react in the face of aggression. If I heard about a tourist who flew out to try and sit at the table and be a part of Phil’s Guinness world record event, I would have worried it the other way. I would have imagined the difficulty of predicting the play of someone whose lack of REM sleep was acting as a hallucinogenic. What if he tries to put me all in, right away? Will I have the courage to call?
I do this in no limit games all the time. One way or another, I catch some luck and become a force. I win a big hand when my flush card comes, then soon after, I pick up aces and play them strong. I have a lot of chips and the attention of the table. Then I get a hand like pocket nines. Do I follow up my dominant image with another raise? Nope. I worry someone’s gunning for me and is going to put me all in. So I limp in to hit a set. They sure are in for it when they try to bully me then. But someone behind me makes a raise, and I put them on tens or better so I can escape unscathed. Unscathed except that my passive play opened the door for someone else to make a move.
My inherent notion is that the attention aggressive play and the momentum of winning a couple hands draw from the rest of the table is a liability, when it is an advantage. Phil Laak probably had the attention of everyone in the Bellagio poker room. Undoubtedly, the excitement of the moment had him far from sleepy, despite his avoidance of any stimulants during most of this marathon, but lack of sleep can wreak havoc on your mental state, limiting concentration, leading to irritability, confusion. Simply not misremembering his hole cards is a feat by itself. He couldn’t have been playing his best poker, but he was a force at the table and players were reacting to him. Probably many of them were not playing their best poker against him. They might have started coming in too often, hoping to capitalize on his lack of acuity. Maybe they made river calls thinking there was a good chance he was two or three cards away from the straight he was representing.
Good poker play never exists in a vacuum. Poker play is always relative to the conditions of the players at the table. Phil wasn’t functioning at an optimal level, probably from day three on, but he was aware of it, he was aware the table was aware of it, and it sounds like he made it an advantage instead of a liability. Maybe that was how he managed to finally go home and sleep up over six thousand in chips.
Author: Greg Hershel
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