Poker One-Liners

• 30.06.2025 12:34 pm
• headhunter
• 0 Comments

Poker has lots of quickies – some one-liners carrying lots of wisdom

Actually, some do. This is why we dedicated an entire piece to one

Some of my all-time favorites are:

• “Small hands, small pots; big hands, big pots” which is highly uncredited
• “If you can’t spot the fish in the first half-hour, it’s you.” That is quite popular
• "Never go broke in unraised pot" by Doyle Brunson's

One-offs more often than not, emanate from the poker greats or simply trickle down through the games culture.

Similar to clichés, they are held in esteem for their inherent truth.

However, some are short on the wisdom the purport to hold. Surprisingly, they are the most widely used and belived.

Below we'll go over some of them;

I do hope that by going over them you'll cease using them.

1. “I crushed the game last night at ____ (fill in the poker room or online poker site of your choice).”

While you may have supposedly crushed the game, go slow on the self-indulgence. If you really think about it, nobody really owes you a special accolade for just one big win.

Where I usually play, there's a school (figuratively speaking) for semi-fish. There are average players, nothing too special.

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. Poker is too big to sustain the piscine; they would go flat broke within a very short time.

The partial fish obviously rarely win but they are necessary to keep the game interesting and lively.

One of the chaps (a partial fish), got hold of an unbelievable set of cards the other day.

The famous "hit in the head with the deck" phrase got a new meaning right there and then. He won a whopping 2 greenies and well over four thousand coconuts; all profit.  That was no mean feat.

You won't believe what happens next, he goes out and brags on how he "crushed the game." Moreover, he now thinks he's some sort of poker great just because of recording one of the biggest wins in we've witnessed in quite  a  while. Apparently, he couldn't believe his own luck he had to attribute it to skill.

Getting Lucky Is Okay

The truth is, the chap just got lucky, nothing special. It's perfectly okay to get lucky.

He had hit 2 sets when he got into big pots with underpairs. Against all odds, he actually hit a monster runner-runner flush which managed to chop down a flopped set of aces, and practically all of his made hands held up.

If at all this ever happens to you, quietly satck your chips and don't even let it cross your mind that you are channeling Chip Reese.

The verdict: nobody can crush a game in one session.

If at all you make a big win, its simply luck. While you may have outplayed yourself, it was all down to luck. The fact is; you tend to play much better when everything is going your way. Therefore, don't think for one moment that it was your brilliance that got you out with 1,000 big blinds. You were just plain old lucky.

Crushing a game requires that you trounce it for 5 or more big blinds very hour for over 500 hours. You should note that the 50 hours are too small a sample to be considered accurate. In addition, the kind of players  with such records  wouldn't even dare say they crushed a game.

2. “I outplayed the guy that hand.”

This phrase is usually used when an average player plays at the same table with a pro. This is normally in reference to the fact that they got into a hand with the great player, made a good read then ran a bluff which somehow made the pro lay down their best hand.

In essence, he's referring to the fact that he outplayed the pro. This again is superficial just like the "I crushed the game" phrase.

It really doesn't hold water since the only thing you did was to make the right move at the opportune time and won. To make matters  worse, the hand you won with wasn't the best.

Think about this;

1. The fact is, the best players usually lay down their best hand more frequently than weaker players. It's nothing to be ashamed of. If conditions dictate it is the best move to make.

It could be as a result of the pot being small, the player being out of position or simply a case of the play up till having ambiguous elements  making the bluffer impossible to read.

2. Again, outplaying someone would require you to do it for a long period of time. It's not a one off thing. It takes thousands of  hands and hundreds of hours for a player to confidently claim that they are beating a game. The same can be said of outplaying an opponent.

While the movie Rounders popularized the term "outplayed", I can't quite point out where the term "crushed" came from. In the movie, the star Mike McDermott (Matt Damon) who in real life is quite a decent poker player, manages to push Johnny Chan, his opponent, out of a hand in a very high stakes game in Atlantic City at the Taj. The win makes him imagine that he's good enough for prime time. After all, he had outplayed Chan on one hand.

Whenever you get the urge to utter any of these lines or any other  preposterous clichés people blurt out as they play poker, do yourself a big favor and shut your trap.

Shut up.