The Seventh-Best Player in the World Is Still the Sucker

Everything anyone does at a poker table conveys information, Negreanu tells Lex Fridman. He splits that stream in two: the conscious layer, including verbal tells and the things people say when asked a question, and the subconscious layer — posture, the eyes, the throat, the pulse — which is harder to fake. He uses both. The real multiplier, he says, is how comfortable the other person feels. Relaxed players give off more.

Phil Ivey works the opposite direction. Ivey wants you to know he is watching; he wants you afraid, because discomfort produces leaks. Sitting with him is intimidating, and that is the point. Lex frames the contrast as rule by fear versus rule by love, and Negreanu laughs that nobody had put it that way. His version is simpler: don't worry, he will take your money, but you are going to enjoy it.

Talk at the table is also reconnaissance. Ask a man what he does and you start building a profile. A criminal-defense lawyer spends his days twisting the truth, so he may be comfortable bluffing; a Sunday-school teacher may treat a bluff as dishonest and almost never try one. Deeper still is the person's view of life. Players who already believe they always lose with a given hand are easy to play. You do not need to beat them. You only need them to believe you did. "You can just help them make it true." Negreanu keeps phone notes on physical tells and tendencies for everyone he plays. Against a stranger he stays as close to optimal as he knows until the sample appears, then he switches to exploitation.

Lex asks about the Oreo cookie tell in *Rounders*, the Brian Koppelman film Negreanu loves. That device, he says, was built for a general audience: eat the cookie or don't, one meaning or the other. At the highest level you will not see anything so blatant. You get posture, timing, small habits. At lower stakes, whether someone drinks water after they bet is often enough. People almost never eat a burger in the middle of a hand. They will grab a glass they do not need, trying to look relaxed and pull your attention off the decision.

The movie still got the logic right. Matt Damon's character eventually names the tell, which table etiquette says you should not do. The script gives him an excuse: he is short on time and needs to rattle Teddy KGB. Negreanu treats that as a fair exception, not a lesson in showing off what you have found.

The harder problem is psychological. Laying down a truly strong hand, he says, is incredibly difficult for most people. Pocket aces are the best starting hand in hold 'em; then the board runs seven, eight, nine, a jack, a six, and the hand you loved is no longer good. Recreational players marry the cards. They have $40,000 in the pot, the opponent bets another $20,000, and the brain says it has to get the forty back. Professionals recognize a dangerous spot and jump ship. Each street is a new investment. What you have already put in is gone.

In Negreanu's era, players put opponents on a hand: king-nine, or jacks, or something in that neighborhood. Nobody talked about a range. Now the starting point is a grid of every holding. The first player to act can have any of them. A raise to $3,000 deletes the junk — a two-three does not do that — and leaves big pairs, ace-king, and the rest of a tight band. Each decision on the flop, turn, and river cuts the grid again. By the river you may be down to a few hands.

Lex wonders whether a chaotic surprise can make a range expand. It should not. You cannot acquire new hole cards on the turn. If you suddenly think a player might have a holding you had ruled out, you misjudged the range earlier. The work is to shrink from the full scope toward a couple of possibilities, and to notice when you were wrong rather than invent new cards.

The other shift is that you no longer play only the two cards you hold. You play the range you represent. Under a game-theory-optimal approach, a river bet is a mix: some of the range has it, some of the range is bluffing, and the mix is balanced so that calling and folding both print about zero expected value. EV is the long-run profit of a play. Professionals try to make as few minus-EV plays as they can, except when they are planting an image. Showing a big bluff tells the table you are capable of it. In your own mind you may never do it again. That is a leveling war, and it can spiral: he showed it so he will not; he knows I know, so he will.

If Negreanu knows you think he bluffs too much, he stops bluffing at a 50-50 mix and starts value-betting closer to 70-30. If you always fold because you think he has it, he veers the other way and bluffs 70 or 80 percent of the time. The mix is not sacred. It is an answer to the model he has of you. That is the live debate in short: GTO versus exploitative play.

Game-theory optimal means setting up a strategy that cannot be exploited no matter what you do. The analogy is rock-paper-scissors at 33 percent each. Nothing beats it. Nothing wins with it either. Exploitative play notices that this opponent loves rock and throws paper more often. The moment you deviate, you have a hole, and if the opponent knows you adjusted, the leveling war starts. At the highest online levels, players try to stay close to GTO because no human will ever compute like a computer. The human job is to say: against a robot I would do X; I am not playing a robot.

GTO, by design, ignores history. The optimal play in a vacuum does not care that this person bluffs too much in this spot. Exploitative play is built from that history, which is why Negreanu prefers it. In a high buy-in, professionals look similar because the good version of the game looks similar. In a $1,000 or $1,500, he can often sketch a profile in half an hour. One clue about how someone played a single hand can tell him how they will act in a vast set of scenarios. Television streams have also flattened styles, the way chess openings did: people copy the raise size they saw on a broadcast. Then an outlier arrives and confuses everyone.

Lex brings up Magnus Carlsen playing suboptimal openings to drag opponents out of memorized theory. Negreanu's live example is Michael Addamo, who tore through tournaments with sizings nobody else was using. Most top pros construct ranges and bet sizes in a similar way. Addamo had studied a different form of the game. He was in his comfort zone; everyone else was not. A solver would label some of the plays clear mistakes. They were not mistakes if the table was too passive. Where someone would make it $1,000, he would make it $22,000. People often knew he had nothing. They were still afraid to call. Then they took a stand and he turned over four of a kind.

What Negreanu stole from watching him was a willingness to go for all of it. Addamo will give up a guaranteed $2,000 to bet $50,000. He loses the two thousand seven or eight times; one call for fifty and the line is profitable, and it also writes an image that people are afraid to play against. That image knocked Negreanu out of a huge event in about an hour. He was on the button with ace-king and raised. Addamo called from the big blind. The flop was nine-seven-five. Check, check. The turn was an ace. Addamo checked, Negreanu bet $3,000 into $6,000, and Addamo raised to $36,000. Negreanu called. The river paired the five. Addamo thought, then bet $225,000 into $75,000 — three times the pot. In theory he should never have a hand that can do that.

Negreanu called with ace-king. Addamo turned over six-eight for a straight. The river was actually a bad card for him: Negreanu's calling range on the turn is full of sets and two pair that just made a full house. Addamo went for it anyway because he knew his image as a wild bluffer, and because he thought Negreanu in these spots is curious and calls too often. A small or medium bet would have made sense. The size he chose is, in theory, indefensible. "It wasn't a mistake, it was above the rim." Addamo was in his twenties. The easiest opponent, Negreanu says, is straightforward and passive. This one puts you in the blender.

Bet size is how you talk about a range. A polarizing example: $1,000 in the pot, you bet $10,000. That says you have the nuts or nothing. You would not do it with a pair of nines. Bigger bets narrow and polarize; smaller bets can be a wide slice of the range. Playing without looking at your cards is a different question. Against weak tournament fields Negreanu thinks he could survive. Against world-class players you have given up the most basic advantage, hand selection, and you may have invested thousands with a two-three. His favorite junk hand is ten-seven, a superstition he will not let turn into a call-off. Poker players like to say it is unlucky to be superstitious. They are all a little superstitious anyway.

Lex had been watching Negreanu's World Series summer through the internet: stretch after stretch of 70-30 and 80-20 all-ins going the other way. That is the mental tax of tournament poker. In a field of a thousand, one person gets all the chips. You will deal with bad luck and disappointment in almost every event, and the streaks can make you question yourself. At 47, Negreanu says he has gotten better at asking whether he is losing because of luck or because the decisions are bad. Variance confuses both sides of the table. A winner thinks he is great until the cards break even.

He recounts a study meant to model the gambling brain. Mice run a maze with three tubes. Cheese three times in a row. The fourth time, an electric shock. The mouse goes back, gets zapped, and keeps going back until it dies, because that is where it found cheese. Beginner's luck works the same way: you overgeneralize the wins and live in a delusion that this is how it is supposed to be. Lex's own Vegas story is the inverse. He made four of a kind in a bad-beat-jackpot-style game, won a pile of money, felt himself starting to believe he was good, and walked away. Negreanu thinks that was a smart decision.

Then the line that opened the episode comes back as a thesis. You can be the seventh-best player in the world. Sit with the other six and you are the sucker. Dan Bilzerian is not a top-level television player, Negreanu says, but he probably makes more money than they do because he plays people far below his skill. Lex asks whether the fifty- or hundred-million claims are real. Given what Negreanu knows about private games and the businessmen in them — including a night where the right Bitcoin-rich amateur can be taken for $20 million — he has no trouble believing it.

Is it ethically wrong, as someone who loves the game, to play people much worse? Part of why Negreanu turned pro was to make his mother proud. He does not think she would be proud of taking Grandma Betty's last five dollars and her pension. He plays high stakes against people who can afford it and who know who he is. He is not a hustler pretending to be bad. He has thought about the other path: play down his skill, get into the Los Angeles private games, and he believes he could make $20 million a year. It feels greasy. He does not like kissing anyone's ass. A rich man who sits with a million, gets drunk, and loses it gets no empathy. If Grandma Betty is a billionaire, send it.

The 2022 World Series cost him about $1.1 million over 48 days. He vlogs every day and could have edited out the worst of it. He is proudest of the resilience, including the moments where he looks broken. He smashed a selfie stick on camera, threw it in a corner, then turned the lens on himself. He felt he was playing well. For about two weeks, every time the money went in at 60, 70, 80 percent, he lost. You start to think you cannot win if you never win those spots. Twenty years of practice is what lets him wake up the next day. The stick-breaking tournament was a $500,000 hit on the last card.

He is not supposed to think he deserves to win. Part of him did, after two weeks of getting run over. David Peters raised on the button, a player jammed from the blind, and Negreanu went with pocket tens against queen-ten of spades. The flop was king-nine-three with one spade, the turn the eight of spades, the river another spade. He was ahead until the last card. Social media treated the stick as a violent act. Justin Bonomo, he says, equated throwing it on the ground with violence against women and with making women unsafe at the table. For the rest of the series, people sat down and joked that they felt unsafe.

The strategic answer, such as it is, is to ignore results. He maps the seven weeks, spends less mental energy on a $1,500 and goes fully engaged at $250,000. Focus belongs on the decisions. In chess the best move usually wins; in poker it often loses. Forty or fifty high-variance tournaments is a small sample. If you do not run well in the biggest buy-ins, you have a losing summer. The mental game he cares about most is self-awareness: is this luck, or is there something to learn? He treats a breakdown in a hand as the place where the next breakthrough lives. Golf is the analogy — the goal is to make the mistakes smaller.

The lowest point was earlier. In his early twenties he arrived in Las Vegas with $3,000, sure he was the best, and was broke in 24 hours. At about 3 a.m. at Binion's Horseshoe he lost his last chips, went to the bathroom, came back, and the other seven had left. In Toronto he had been the big fish. Here they had been playing because of him. He did not have cab money back to Budget Suites and walked, behind Paradise and Twain, asking whether he was good enough. That night he does not have hope. He lets himself feel the despair. A night's sleep, and the voice is back: get back on the hobby horse. Instagram culture wants you to act as if nothing bothers you. He thinks that is nonsense. Swallow the feeling and it sits in the stomach. You do not throw a selfie stick every pot. You also do not pretend you are fine.

A day in his life is two different lives. Off the felt he gets up at 10, hits the gym at noon, and hunts 15,000 treadmill steps while a show or a laptop runs. He is vegan, counts calories and macros, and aims for about 150 grams of protein and 60 grams of fat. He built six daily meal plans on a spreadsheet and rotates them so he never has to decide what lunch is. During the World Series that structure is thrown out. He came in around 157 pounds, expected to gain about ten, and left at 165. Sleep is the non-negotiable. Eight hours is the default. Tournaments can end at 2:15 a.m., home at three, in bed at four. He is a gifted sleeper and a gifted napper: bust at 4 p.m., 45 minutes in a private room, then the next event. At 2 a.m. he does not want a broccoli salad. He wants chocolate, candy, and chips. He tried forcing workouts through the Series once and only sacrificed sleep. He treats those six or seven weeks as a beating his body can take, because he can get the weight off in six weeks after.

Meditation, for him, was mostly placebo. He did it for long stretches, believes other people get real benefits, and did not see specific results. What he will do before a series like Poker Masters is watch footage, take phone notes, and write a game plan full of curveballs — not GTO, but spots where this field is making a mistake. The work is harder at 47. He quotes a boxer on 4 a.m. runs in silk pajamas. He does not need to win. He is still self-motivated, and he is still fueled by doubters. For fifteen years people have told him he is washed. He enjoys proving them wrong, even if he knows the fuel is a little unhealthy.

The game changed under the people who thought they had finished learning. In the early-2000s boom, a cohort of stars got their egos out of whack and stopped keeping up with young players, new software, and solvers. Negreanu decided early he would never be that guy. In the late 1990s he was the young buck three-betting into Tom McEvoy and Brad Daugherty, who scoffed. He still hires younger coaches who see his blind spots. Look every six months and ask if it is working. Once you feel you have mastered it, everyone else starts to pass you.

When he started, the only way to learn was to sit down and play, then scribble hands in a notepad. He grew up comparing notes with John Juanda, Allen Cunningham, and Phil Ivey. They had theories, never correct answers. About five or six years before this conversation, solvers arrived and brought a new personality type into the game. His era was street hustlers and pool players. The new era includes people who treat poker like university, including a German contingent analyzing data. Card sense used to be the only door. Work ethic and a solver can now make someone very good without that gift.

Humans still use solvers badly. You typically give the engine three sizes — one-third pot, two-thirds, one-and-a-half — and it tells you what to do with each hand inside those walls. A real solver might prefer seven times the pot, or 10 percent. Nobody memorizes that king-jack with the king of diamonds is 13 percent. You bucket thousands of variables into a handful of lines and try to stay inside them. Live poker stays interesting, he says, because nobody will ever mimic a solver at the table.

The outputs that matter are the ones that violate intuition, the way AlphaGo shocked Go. A solver may tell you to fold king-queen — a pair of kings with a queen kicker — and call a pair of fours with an ace kicker, even though kings are the better hand. Your queen blocks the queen-jack bluffs in the opponent's range, so kings become a worse bluff-catcher. The fours block nothing. The way to study, Negreanu says, is not to memorize the answer. Ask why. When solvers first appeared he was intimidated and hired a data scientist and a poker savant. They spent six to eight hours a day in the software until he could feel what the engine wanted. He still sends them spots. He also understands Magnus refusing to live in the engine. Do not become a slave to the sim. He ribbed Landon Tice for a play that was correct against a robot and wrong against the human in the seat. No person is perfectly balanced. If they under-bluff, calling at the "optimal" frequency is itself a mistake.

Same rules, different sport. Online you cannot see a face, so fundamentals and GTO weigh more, and the volume is enormous: ten or twenty tables at once, the long run arriving in a hurry, a database that says this player sees 40 percent of flops and bets 80 percent of rivers. Live, you do not have that file. Negreanu likes the convenience of playing from the couch. He prefers one or two tables and can handle four; past that he cannot track what just happened. Twenty-tabling is robotic. You are not thinking about the hand from fifteen minutes ago. You may not remember it.

He agrees with Lex that some of the magic is the low sample. The World Series of Poker Main Event is the pinnacle because it is rare, public, and heavy. Armchair quarterbacks always know what you should have done, because they can see the hole cards. He does not love the young-generation habit of being balanced in every spot and randomizing — red card do it, black card don't — because that is no longer a decision. At a Main Event final table you should not be randomizing. Some of the kids still are.

The hand that stuck with him was 1998: Scotty Nguyen heads-up against Kevin McBride for the championship, Michelob in hand, and on the river, "You call, gonna be all over, baby." An amateur under the lights heard a way for the pressure to stop. He called. Scotty had the full house. Table talk of that kind is less common now. Against Ivey, Negreanu does not engage at all, because Ivey reads the forest through the trees. He has been thinking about when he is at his best: not stiff, not over-checking the theory, just himself. Coaches who taught him GTO also sanded down some instinct. The most dangerous version of him, he says, is a deep understanding of the theory plus the comfort of being himself at the table.

Until someone knocks him off the podium, Negreanu's king of poker is Phil Ivey. Not because of one game. Hold 'em, Omaha, stud, triple draw — Ivey has been dominant in each, in tournaments, in the mixed high-stakes game in Bobby's Room, and online against the wizards, with millions in every arena. The tenacity reminds Negreanu of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, intensity included, and he suspects some of the mannerisms were learned from watching those two. He does not have Ivey's focus. Ivey sees where the hands go, the eyes, the pulse, things Negreanu does not know he is giving off — and then has the guts to act. A famous hand in Australia: flop jack-jack-nine, Ivey check-raises with six-seven, nothing, gets re-raised, and shoves. If he is called he is cooked. He was sure the other man was not strong. Invent a new game tomorrow, three cards, jacks wild, six of hearts wild, and Negreanu's horse is still Ivey. That is card sense. This generation asks a computer. His generation had to figure it out.

Doyle Brunson's case is longevity. Late eighties, and the last time Negreanu played with him he seemed better than in the years before. Brunson's people dealt ace-king versus sixes a hundred times on a notepad because no machine would tell them which was a favorite. He is not beating the best in the world today. He is the best 88-year-old by a mile, and he has been the cowboy through the mob years, the movies, and the online era. Phil Hellmuth wants to be called the greatest and only hears the second half of the sentence. He has the best World Series resume on earth. That is not nothing. He is not, in Negreanu's view, the best no-limit hold 'em player today, and he is not beating the best mixed-game players. He has never used a solver. What he has is belief, a style that bullies average players, and a hatred of losing that keeps him trying. Ivey never has to say he is the best. His peers say it.

Negreanu's own case, offered reluctantly, is that he wanted to be well-rounded. In his day you did not make the Hall of Fame on one game. In his mid-twenties he was in $4,000/$8,000 games where you could win or lose a million in a day, and he built multimillion-dollar bankrolls before sponsorships existed. The strength he names is self-awareness: the humility to admit a table is better than he is and learn from it. Mike Matusow and Hellmuth, he says, pooh-pooh the new math because they do not understand it. On a scale of one to ten he would generously give that understanding a one. Among specialists he likes Addamo; among the near-perfect GTO online crushers, Linus Loeliger; among the multi-game respected, Timofey Kuznetsov; and Jungleman, Dan Cates, who won the Poker Players Championship back to back in a Macho Man costume and stayed in character. Daniel Colman beat him heads-up in the million-dollar One Drop — Negreanu took $8.7 million, Colman $15 million — and then vanished to ski in the Alps. Burnout is real. Reaching the top is easier than staying.

At 47 he thinks the dominant factor in his results is mental state, so he builds in absence. When he is off, poker is not on the radar: fantasy hockey, chess, golf, hockey on television. After the Series he played nothing in August until the itch returned. If he does not want to play, he will not be at his best. The daily vlog during the Series is not a chore. He wanted to be an actor as a kid and is comfortable with a camera, which helps in filmed events. The vlog is his version of a journal, a brain dump, and a form of accountability. Alone, you can shrug off a mistake. On camera you have to say what you did. He is 47, life is good, he does not have to be in the tournament. If he is over it he can dump the chips and go home. He cannot, because he has to answer to the vlog. It keeps him in line.

The Main Event is the hardest to win because of size: 7,000 or 8,000 players, $10,000 to enter, landmines everywhere, and a Philadelphia Eagles jersey you have never seen. High-roller fields are 30 or 40 people you already know. Structure is four Day Ones, noon to midnight, bag the chips, redraw, tables breaking and filling, six or seven days to a final table that television now splits into three more. You are grinding a week and a half. Game-theory balance is the wrong obsession here. Plenty of people are playing a bucket-list item. They are scared. You may share a table with someone for three hours and never see them again. Make the play that makes sense. Against high-roller regulars you have to take thin plus-EV stabs and bluff off stacks. Against amateurs you do not need those high-variance heroics. Build slowly. Better spots will come.

The amateur mistake he sees most is thinking the pros bluff more than they do. Ivey shoves the river and someone wonders if this is a crazy play. It probably is not. The other amateur error is the opposite: too weak, waiting for the nuts, getting there, and not getting paid. You will not win this thing without some aggression and some pots you do not have. At a final table the independent chip model, ICM, takes over. Five left, you are third in chips, two players are short, you look down at ace-king against a shove, and you might fold — because one of those short stacks busting is a $300,000 pay jump for sitting still. Wanting first place and wanting the most money are conflicting goals. Negreanu is trying to win. That is financially suboptimal and also an edge, because everyone else is handcuffed. He watched Addamo bulldoze people who were protecting a pay jump.

For anyone trying to get better, he does not want notes on the pocket aces that lost an all-in. He wants the hand you were not sure about. Write it down. Run it through a solver if you are ready, or talk it through with players at your level. Similar spots will come back. Michael Acevedo's *Modern Poker Theory* is the book he points at for players who have left the novice tier; streams and his own MasterClass are the more palatable versions. *Power Hold'em Strategy* still holds for average buy-ins and the small-ball approach he coined. At the top you have to bluff more. Heads-up is a different sport: you put money in every hand, king-two is playable, and you cannot sit in the weeds. Nine-handed you throw away nine-three and get a break. Heads-up for eight or ten hours is the octagon.

Cheating is romanticized from Westerns. As a teenager in a game with a bunch of Italians, he knew they cheated and still beat them because they were bad at it. Two years before this conversation, an operator banned about 500 accounts and will not publish the methods, because that would be a playbook. Private games are another world: invisible earpieces, RFID on the cards, a truck calling the next hand. Greed usually catches them. He does not worry in a casino tournament. He does worry about private rooms. A man named Blackie Blackburn, at the Chimo Hotel, was a card mechanic who dealt a teenage Negreanu off a $13,000 bankroll. Edge sorting is the case that still angers him. Ivey asked for a game and for specific decks. The casino agreed. He never touched the cards. Faulty cutting on the eights and nines let him read the backs. The casino then did not want to pay. Ivey also used to fly a private plane through dozens of casinos in a night, collecting 20 percent rebates on losses, winning in the next town, and turning the casino's "big sucker" fantasy into free equity. Negreanu has no sympathy. They are not pouring free drinks from kindness. Casinos, he says, do not kick you out for winning unless they think you are cheating. Card-counters get caught because the eye in the sky keeps its own count: if you jump from $500 to $5,000 when the deck is rich in face cards, they know.

His mother expressed love by feeding people. You said you were not hungry; she put fifteen things in front of you; you ate, because everyone does. That hospitality became a business rule. He would rather you owe him than he owe you. He overpays people on purpose. Underpaid people under-deliver; people who feel overpaid do not say a special request is outside the job. He can take the worst of a deal. He does not like being indebted. Lex offers that somebody up there seems to keep the ledger. Negreanu does not argue.

Advice for the young starts with a bankroll analogy. In your twenties the roll is small and replenishable. That is the time to take risks and work ferociously, before you have a brand to protect. He is uneasy that so many kids want to be YouTubers, Instagram stars, or rappers; there are only so many of those seats, and a backup plan is wise. Do not pick a profession because you think it will make you rich. Pick what you love, because love raises the odds and the other path spends a life on something you hate. If we believe the lie that more is always better, we never arrive. He does not understand billionaires who still care whether the tax rate is 33 or 31. Money past a point becomes a sport, which is fine if you admit you love the game. The problem is using it to fill a hole it did not make. Poker people are prone to the Dunning-Kruger version of this: because you can figure out poker, you think you can figure out anything. He includes himself. Right time, right place. A few unlucky beats and he does not know where he would be. Most people who try to play professionally will fail. If a friend is stuck, he wants them to cut the monthly nut and drop down in stakes until confidence returns. Without an almost inflated confidence, you cannot do this.

Love, for him, has had the same ups and downs as everything else. He met his wife Amanda when he was 31 and she was 21. He was ready to lock it down and even bought a ring. She was living a Hollywood life in Los Angeles and was not. The split hit his confidence in poker and with other women and left him jaded. Years of workshops later, she came back to town, they went to dinner, and a few months after that they were married. He had a starter marriage in between. The skill that makes him dangerous with cards is judgment: gauging what you are good and bad at. Brought home, that lens scores everyone. Love, he finally decided, is no judgment. If she wants cereal for dinner, that is the best decision for her. Better-and-worse was a recipe for disaster. Their wedding line was that he would keep her safe and she would keep him wild. She is bipolar. He studied it, learned there is no cocktail that solves it, and found that the diagnosis made the marriage easier because he does not take a mood personally. Some mornings she tells him she is in a bad one and trying to get out. He leaves her alone. He wants to be a rock.

Lex closes with Kenny Rogers's "The Gambler." Negreanu takes the first verse straight: know when to hold, fold, walk, or run. Circumstances change. You bought Bitcoin and said it was going to the moon; maybe it is time to lay the hand down, in a market or in a relationship. "Every hand's a winner and every hand's a loser" he reads as the difference between victim and responsible. An event is neither good nor bad until you assign it value. It can be traumatic. How you respond is still a choice, and it is the only thing you control. Lex leaves with Doyle Brunson's line: poker is war. People pretend it is a game.