The two great American games are football and poker. In it's own way each is a model of life and a preparation for life. Football is the game of team effort towards a goal. It emphasizes joint effort, role specialization, teamwork, and a striving for a common goal. It is no accident that football jargon pervades the business world vocabulary.

Poker is the game of individuals striving against other individuals. It emphasizes internal dynamics of the individual, the choices that make him a winner or a loser, and his understanding of his competitors.

How do you start winning at poker? There are some things you have to get under your belt. You have to understand the game well enough to make realistic assessments of how likely you are to win a particular hand. Most players learn this fairly early on - they learn what the odds are, what a good hand is, and are able to make a reasonable assessment of what other players are doing. Most of the books concentrate on these mechanics; they are important but it really isn't necessary to try to get that last little edge. Some players meticulously keep a book on their fellow players, noting each little habit and gesture. This is a good thing to do; it will give you a little edge. But it`s not a big deal; you can rely on your native feel of what people are doing and what they are about.

The mechanics, once you have grasped them, are not important. There are two important things to understand. The first is that poker is a money game. The books tell you about card odds. They are only the first step. The important thing is pot odds, how much is it going to cost you to play vs how much you are going to win. You can`t change the card odds. You can change the pot odds.

The whole secret of poker is to get people to put a lot of money into the pots that you win and not put much money into the pots that other people win. Some people think that the way to win is to play tight, to only play the very best hands. Wrong. When people see you playing tight they don`t stay with you unless they have very good hands. You win small pots. Some people think that the way to win is to play wild, to get a lot of action going so that there are big pots. Wrong. You win more pots that way but you also put a lot of money into other people`s pots.

What you have to do is to get people to put money into your pots. You manipulate them to get them to stay in. You push the betting agressively when you have them on the hook. When the odds are on their side losers call; winners raise.

The other big thing in playing poker to win is to choose to be a winner rather than a loser. Losers come in two flavors, the passive callers and the wild men. The passive caller stays in too long, hoping against hope, knowing that he`s bucking the odds. He doesn`t raise when he should, calls when he shouldn`t. He knows he`s playing like a loser but he does it anyway. The wild man likes action and excitement. He plays hands when he shouldn`t, raises when he shouldn`t. He looks for excuses to be in the action. He knows he plays too many hands and pushes them too hard but he does it anyway. If a person has played any length of time and is a loser it is because he has chosen to keep his losing habits, being a loser is acceptable to him.

But what, you say, do you do if the other players are better than you? The answer is very simple: Don`t play in games where other players a lot better than you are. That`s the winner`s answer - play in games that you can beat.