The tokens of value

I know a limit holdem cash player named Bob. Bob judges players by their stack size. He thinks someone with a lot of chips must be a really good player, and someone without very many chips must be a bad player.

Bob knows that in limit games people can buy in for as many chips as they want. Bob gets really angry at that. He thinks everybody should be forced to buy in for the same amount, so that he can tell how good they are by how many chips they have in front of them.

We've tried to teach Bob that variance is a pretty big deal in limit games, and that someone with a large chipstack might just be playing a lot of hands and running very, very well. Bob doesn't buy it.

Bob gets very frustrated that he doesn't consistently have a large chip stack himself, because Bob thinks he's pretty good. And Bob is actually pretty good at playing limit holdem, on a basic level. What he's not good at is figuring out who's a good player and who isn't, because he only looks at their stacks and not their playing style.

And what he's really not good at is seat selection. Bob knows that it's very profitable to sit to the left of a bad player, so he's constantly changing seats to be to the left of the shortest stacks at the table. He often leaves seats to the left of big-stack players who are far worse in order to do this, which is one of the things that makes me happy to play with Bob.

Like a lot of players, Bob's in the "break-even-or-lose-a-little" category in the long term. But he could easily be a winner if he figured out that how many tokens somebody has at any given time really has nothing to do with their value.

Don't be Bob.