Poker One-Liners We Can All Do Without

“I Crushed the Game Last Night at ____ (fill in poker room of your choice).”

If you “crushed the game” you should really not give yourself much credit. No one deserves any special accolades for a single big win. In the room where I play we have a school (metaphorically speaking) of semi-fish. They’re actually reasonable players – not particularly gifted, not truly awful. The game is too big to support the genuinely piscine; they would go broke too quickly.

Our partial fish just lose more than they win but, of course, without them the game would wither away. One of these scaly folk must have stepped in something on his way in the other day. He caught cards that you would not believe. It gave new meaning to the phrase “hit in the head with the deck.” He walked away with two racks of greenies and over 4,000 coconuts in profit.

Not bad for a fish. So, what do I hear from him next time I see him? I hear that he “crushed the game.” And not just that he crushed it. He now seems to think he’s the best player in town because he recorded one of the bigger wins we’ve seen in months. Interesting. He got so lucky that he didn’t believe it either, so it must have been skill.

Example: You call a raise from the big blind with 7 7 , see a 7 3 3 flop, and get all-in against an overpair. By the river, you’ve stacked your opponent, winning a huge pot. That’s not long-term domination of the table; it’s one fortunate setup that happened to go your way.

Nothing Wrong With Being Lucky in Poker

Frankly, he didn’t crush the game. He just got very lucky. And, you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that.

He hit two sets when he got involved in big pots with underpairs. He hit a monster runner-runner flush that chopped down a flopped set of aces, and virtually all his made hands held up.

If this sort of thing happens to you, just stack the chips quietly and don’t, for a second, try to convince yourself that you’re suddenly channeling Chip Reese.

My take on this: No one “crushes” a game in a single session.

If you log a big win you got lucky. You may have played well (when you’re winning you tend to play better than when you’re losing – an important topic we’ll discuss on another day) but it wasn’t your brilliant play that got you out with 1,000 big blinds; it was luck.

If you really crush a game, you beat it for five or more big blinds an hour for at least 500 hours – and, frankly, that’s too small a sample to be really confident it reflects your true win rate.

Moreover, players who win at that rate will never be heard saying they crushed a game.

“I Outplayed the Guy that Hand.”

This one is heard most often when a so-so player finds himself sitting at a table with a respected, top drawer player, especially when that opponent is a pro.

When you hear it you can usually piece together what happened. He got into a hand with the pro, made a good read and ran a bluff that got the pro to lay down the best hand.

This, he believes, means that he outplayed the guy. And, like the “crushed the game” line, it’s true in only superficial ways and false in all the deep and meaningful ones.

Example: You open-raise to 2.5 big blinds with K Q from late position, and a tough pro on the button 3-bets. You sense weakness and 4-bet bluff, forcing the fold. Even if you made the right move at that moment, it doesn’t prove you can consistently outmaneuver that player.

Yes, you outplayed him in that you made the right move at the right time and won with a hand that wasn’t the best. So what?

Here are two things to think about:

One, solid players lay down the best hand far more often than weak players. There is no shame in dumping a hand that could be best when the conditions call for it.

The pot could be small, the player could be out of position, the play up till then could have had ambiguous elements to it that made the bluffer difficult to read and so forth.

Two, “outplaying” someone is like “crushing a game” in that it isn’t done in a short time span.

Just like it takes hundreds of hours and thousands of hands before anyone can begin to feel confident that they are truly, unambiguously beating a game, it takes a similar amount of time and experience before someone can conclude that they can reliably outplay an opponent.

I’m not sure where the “crushed” bit came from but the “outplayed” line was heard, famously, in the movie Rounders.

The hero Mike McDermott, played by Matt Damon (who, as most of you know, is actually a pretty solid poker player), pushes Johnny Chan out of a hand in a high-stakes game at the Taj in Atlantic City.

He later exults in how he now thinks he is really ready for prime time since he outplayed the great Chan on a single hand.

When I hear someone say that they outplayed someone on a hand I think, like Daniel Negreanu said when asked what he thought when Phil Hellmuth sat down in his high-stakes cash game, “Yum, yum.”

Do yourself a favor the next time one of these lines (or any number of other silly things people say at poker tables) starts moving from your brain to your tongue:

Shut up.

Refining Your Long-Term Edge

Players who routinely claim to crush a game or outplay an opponent based on a single session often overlook the long-term nature of poker. Consistency across months of play, rather than a few lucky moments, defines real skill. When you collect large samples of hand histories and session data, patterns emerge that either confirm or challenge your self-assessment.

Many experienced professionals maintain precise records of their winnings, losses, and key hands. This process not only reveals how often you run hot or cold but also highlights the importance of managing your psychological state. By balancing emotional responses to big wins and tough beats, you develop resilience that benefits your results over time.