Saturday, December 30, 2006
How I Became a Poker Player
Learning the rules of poker is actually one of my clearest early memories, and I have no idea why, because I don’t think I was especially interested at the time, and I know I promptly forgot them. But I distinctly recall sitting on the hardwood floor of a Baltimore row house as my aunt showed me how to play seven card stud, explained what hand beats what, etc. I was about six years old at the time.
A few years later, I started playing penny ante games with my grandparents. Gambling has always been popular in my father’s family. His uncle, a 450-pound cross-dressing homosexual stand-up comedian, was a real character, one who deserves his own story really, but among other things he loved gambling. He took me to the dog track when I was five years old and placed my bets for me. Uncle Tubby had a heart as big as his stomach and was always extraordinarily generous with his winnings, sending my grandparents on vacation or buying me gifts whenever he won big at the track, but he would argue like hell if he thought he was getting cheated at penny ante poker.
Dad was the big winner in those days, but my grandmother saw to it that I always came out ahead at the end of the night. Hell of a lesson to teach a kid about gambling, if you think about it. According to my father, he grew up too poor to get any kind of allowance, but his mother gave him a quarter every week to pay his tuition at St. Joseph’s High School, which he used to win spending money at lunchtime poker games. Then again, next to the fish pond, the poker table is probably the place where a father’s exploits grow largest when recounted to his first-born son, so take that with a grain of salt.
In high school, some friends and I started a regular poker night, and that was the first time I really began to think about the game. It was dealer’s choice with a nickel ante (occasionally bumped to a dime if the dealer was stuck), and every game was played no limit. It didn’t much matter how you did in the game, because most sessions ended with a round of suicide sevens that was guaranteed to reverse everyone’s fortunes. But I played for pride and wanted to win, so I bought Ken Warren’s “Winner’s Guide to Texas Hold ‘Em.” I probably learned something from that book, though I don’t really remember what.
The Big Game
Browsing the stacks of a used bookstore one day, I found a 1970’s era “Hoyle’s Guide to Poker”, in which the author declares that seven card poker (a game played to make seven-card hands, such as quad eights over trip Kings) was getting to be all the rage and would soon supplant the popular five card versions of Stud. It was my first introduction to the concept of odds, and armed with this, I decided to sit in on my grandfather’s game the next time I visited him in Florida.
This was .25/.50 dealer’s choice, where the dealer was expected to choose some variation of Stud or Omaha and only the wives were allowed to declare wild cards, over the groans of their husbands. The first time I check-raised, my grandfather’s best friend, a former teamster and WWII Marine, stared daggers at me and declared, “I’ve seen men shot for less.” Although Grandma covered my $40 in losses, I felt like [censored] the next morning.
The Bigger Game
In college I became best friends with Logan, a guy from Brooklyn who also enjoyed poker, and we were roommates sophomore through senior year. We’d occasionally host or attend a poker night somewhere, generally playing for nickels and dimes but having a good time.
Freshman year I blew through all the cash I had saved up from working at 7-11 the previous summer (unfortunately I did not blow it on poker), and tuition gobbled up the next summer’s earnings, so sophomore year I was dead broke. My limited meal plan didn’t enable me to average two hots per day in the dining hall, so I would scour the campus for any student organization giving away pizza or other free food at an event that evening.
So when Spring Break rolled around, the only way I was going to see a beach was if I visited my grandmother in Florida. My grandfather had died the previous summer, but I knew I’d still be welcome at his card game. My grandmother doesn’t do the interweb, so I told my aunt that my dorm would be kicking me out on Saturday and so that’s when I needed a flight. She bought the tickets, I printed out the e-mail confirmation, packed my things, left my dorm (which would be closed for the next week) and spend two hours on buses and trains to get from the south side of Chicago to O’Hare Airport on a Saturday morning, only to have the check-in agent tell me my flight didn’t leave until tomorrow. I could only stare at him in disbelief, with two suitcases in hand, $25 in my pocket, an empty checking account, no credit card, and nowhere to sleep.
I ended up going back to the train station and giving a panhandler a $5 bill in exchange for $2 in quarters. Not knowing anyone’s phone number, I was forced to call information, then cold call the few people I knew in Chicago who did not live in college dormitories. Finally, I reached Craig, my debate coach, who let me crash on his couch.
As luck would have it, a few of his public policy grad student friends were coming over for poker that night. The game was .25 ante with a $3 maximum bet on any street, no matter which game the dealer chose. I really wanted to play and had nothing better to do, so although the stakes were beyond intimidating to me, I borrowed $50 from Craig to supplement the $25 I had on me and bought in.
Interestingly, the super-high stakes forced me to play pretty well. Not surprisingly, the game was extremely loose and bad, and I was playing like a giant nit. To this day, I still remember taking $75 off of Craig’s friend Fati in a single hand of Shipwreck Kings, when I had five Aces to his five Kings and 12 bets went in on seventh street before he finally just called.
Unfortunately, he was playing on credit (none of these guys had a lot of money, and they gambled all the time on cards, Golden Tee, etc., so they generally passed debt back and forth between themselves), and to this day, Fati owes me $97. Despite getting stiffed, however, I pocketed better than $150 after paying Craig back at the end of the night.
After that, the Florida game was small time to me, but I’m still very glad I played. I had been close to my grandfather since the day I was born, and the year I spent in Chicago was the longest I had ever gone without seeing him. He died very suddenly from a brain tumor that no one knew he had, and it was quite jarring to me to learn one evening that I would never see him again. No sooner had I walked into the rec room where the game was held than the man who expressed his dissatisfaction with my sandbagging last year rose from his seat to shake my hand somberly. “Your grandfather was my best friend,” he told me. “We were closer to each other than we were to our wives, and not a day goes by that I don’t curse him for leaving me all alone down here.”
I spent most of the session up a little over $10, but got greedy on one of the last hands of the night, when I declared I was going both ways on a Stud/8 showdown and lost the pot to a rivered 6-low. Tilt ensued, and I finished the night stuck $3, which my grandmother reimbursed.
Tournament Poker
It was fall of 2003, the beginning of my third year of college. Chris Moneymaker had not yet won the WSOP, but the first rumblings of the poker boom were already underway. Logan, now my roommate, heard about a $10 no limit hold ‘em tournament held in the lounge of a neighboring dorm on Tuesday nights and Sunday afternoons. Intrigued, we stopped by and were hooked instantly.
The Tuesday night game drew 40-50 players, mostly fish, but in retrospect, there were a few regulars who really knew what they were doing. Making the final table was a rare but unrivaled thrill for us: the first memorable bad beat of my life put me out of one of the smaller Sunday tournaments in 3rd place. A pretty bad playef who had luckboxed his way into a monster stack and thought he was hot shit raised my big blind from the button and I flat called with AA. I check-raised an 853 flop and he shoved instantly with 87s, only to turn a 7. I was floored, particularly by the fact that that nasty turn (I had no idea what the odds were of him catching up, I just knew I had mother[censored] Aces!!!) had cost me about $50.
Super/System
For Christmas that year, my father’s new wife (his third) gave him a copy of Doyle Brunson’s Super/System. He lent it to me for the weekend before I returned to Chicago, and I devoured it. Everything that Doyle said about No Limit Hold ‘Em made so much sense to me. I remembered clichés about aggression from Warren’s book, but Doyle gave them content and put them in the context of a coherent strategy.
Needless to say, I returned to the Chicago tournaments with an irrational and expensive addiction to suited connectors. I distinctly recall being berated by one of the better players there when, early at a final table, I raised 65s UTG, there was a re-raise all in, the good player called on the button, and I shoved over the top of both of them. He thought forever, folded AK, and flipped the hell out when the all in’s pocket 9’s, which would have lost to his flopped A, held up.
Hoop Dreams
That spring, Logan took second place in a Sunday tournament, topping both my highest finish (third in a Sunday tournament) and my biggest cash (fourth in a Tuesday tournament). It was a record he would hold for more than a year as we both worked actively to improve our games and finally take down one of these bitches.
It occurred to us that the most money would be won or lost during the heads up portion of the tournament, and neither of us had any idea what we were doing, so we ought to start practicing. From that point on, we probably averaged an hour a day playing heads up $1 freezeout tournaments, sometimes starting with evenly matched stacks but often taking turns starting with a 2:1, 3:1, or 4:1 chiplead to simulate tournament conditions more accurately. As may be obvious, our goal at the time was not to make money, it was to win the damn tournament.
Our dreams were put on hold early in our senior year, however, when one of our regulars who also an editor for the school newspaper ran a front page story about the game and openly questioned its legality. Sure enough, the school shut us down the next week, and Logan and I were both pissed and confused about why this winning player would draw attention to the illegality of the game. It became clear, however, when a friend of ours who was dating one of the Alpha Delts passed along a rumor that the newspaper editor, who was also the president of Alpha Delt, wanted to start hosting the tournament at his frat and selling alcohol.
[censored] that. Logan and I boycotted the tournament and encouraged a few of our friends to do the same. The game never really took off, and it looked like that would be the end of the poker tournaments at the University of Chicago.
Online Poker
We were hooked now, though, and decided to explore this “online poker” thing we had heard so much about. Too paranoid to play with real money, we opened play money accounts on Pacific Poker and had some fun, though it quickly grew boring. Imagine our excitement when Pacific one day dropped $25 into our accounts for no reason! We couldn’t cash it out, of course, but why would we want to?
I sat down immediately at the .01/.02 table, moved up to .10/.20, and cashed out $25 twice before going on a sick run to get my account up to $125 (over the course of a few weeks). I decided to cash out $50 and take a run at $1/$2, because $75 is more than enough to start playing $1/$2, right? BUSTO. I was disappointed, but didn’t really care, because it hadn’t cost me anything to play and I’d already cashed out $100.
The only thing that bummed me out was that I was out of action. Once you’ve played for real, there’s no going back to play money. Logan and I still played our heads up games and hosted the occasional poker night, but he graduated early, and it looked like I was going to spend spring semester pokerless.
Then I heard about freerolls.
Pacific wasn’t offering freerolls at the time, but a site called Poker Room had them twice daily, with thousands of fish battling it out for $500 in prizes. Registration opened an hour and a half before the tournament and filled up within minutes. I used to set my alarm or run home from class in order to make it in under the wire, and if I was too late, I’d sometimes spend half an hour clicking the “register” button in the hopes that someone would unregister and forfeit his seat (this was generally successful if you were patient).
Eventually I cashed for $10 in one of these puppies, dropped $5.50 into a 10-man sit and go, won that, and then blew it all at $.25/.50 while waiting for the afternoon freeroll to start. Bummer. Eventually I got fed up with the Poker Room freerolls and decided to see if Pacific had started offering them. They had, and it wasn’t long before I won one for $75. I wasn’t going to repeat my mistakes, so I started grinding it out at the $5 sit and goes, which had a very favorable structure and were preposterously soft. I of course knew very little about sit and go strategy, but I knew that as long as I could get 7 of these clowns to bust out before I did, which was rarely difficult, then I couldn’t lose!
It was a great, low variance way to build a roll (not that I knew those terms at the time, but intuitively, I got the concept), but believe it or not, one tabling $5 sit and goes gets kind of boring. I craved the excitement of the big tournaments, but I was scared to drop a precious $5 or $10 into anything with several hundred players, where in all likelihood I would win nothing. I took the occasional shot, and sometimes I was able to stall into the money, but my short stack play was preposterously weak tight (I’m pretty sure I was raise/folding AQ with like 15 BB’s left in a $5 tournament because you’re not supposed to call a reraise with it.)
One day, though, I realized that only the No Limit tournaments got so huge. The morning $2.75 fixed limit game rarely got more than 100 runners, and I won it on one of my first shots, cashing for $87. As usual, I was playing weak tight, but Pacific sucks at balancing tables and adjusting the button when players bust out, so at the last few tables I think I dodged the big blind like 5 orbits straight, eventually tripled up with AA, and the rest was history.
One Last Shot
Three weeks before graduation, I ran into an old friend from the dorm tournament who told me that starting next week, a new dorm would be hosting. To say I was eager would be an understatement. This time I approached my old adversaries with a new confidence born of hundreds of hours of experience online. Best of all, the Alpha Delt president had the nerve to show up, and Doyle Brunson helped me to bust him:
Alpha Delt raises in middle position, I reraise 7:spade: 8:spade:, he calls. Flop 5:spade: 8:club: A:spade:. Alpha Delt leads out, I shove on him, he calls with AK, I river the 8 to KO him. He’s pissed, and though I’m now chipleader, I’m really just happy to have busted this d-bag.
As you’ve probably guessed by now, I went on to win one of the largest tournaments this game had ever seen, cashing for $200 even. Though this probably wasn’t even enough to make me unstuck in the long run in this tournament, I was walking on air. Liquor stores were closed, but I called up a friend who lived nearby. She had a bottle of wine that we drank to celebrate, and I ended up walking home half drunk through the south side of Chicago at 4 AM with $200 tucked in my sock.
Going Pro
I never explicitly decided to become a professional poker player, and truthfully I still don’t really consider myself to be one. I’m just a guy who graduated from college with a philosophy degree and no job prospects (is that redundant?). Actually, that’s not quite true. All through college, I had worked for the Chicago Public Schools teaching, judging, coaching, and eventually running their debate league. I had also been in a long-distance relationship for three years with a friend from high school who went to Boston University.
When I graduated, I was offered a full time job with good benefits in Chicago working with the debate league, which I absolutely loved doing. But I also had the opportunity to move to Boston and live with my girlfriend, which is what I opted to do. While applying for jobs, I grinded it out at $5 and eventually $10 sit and goes on Pacific Poker.
But no jobs were panning out, and as anyone who’s lived in Boston knows, you can’t really make rent (even half of rent on a one bedroom apartment) one-tabling sit and goes. I still did some contract work for the Chicago Debate League, maintaining their website among other things, but it wasn’t enough to make ends meet, and I was damn near out of options. Then I got an IM:
Logan: Hey, play the 10K Guarantee [a $15 daily tournament on Pacific] with me.
Me: I dunno.
Logan: C’mon.
Me: Alright.
We both built up nice stacks early on, and at some point agreed that if either of us took first, he’d give the other $500 (first prize was over $2500). Logan busted and left to go to the library, joking that he expected me to make him $500. A few hours later I left a message on his voicemail: “Where the [censored] are you? I need you to tell me whether you want your $500 cash or a check.”
Ten minutes later he called me back. “You’re [censored] kidding me.”
“Swear to God.”
Ultimately, Logan wouldn’t accept the $500, saying it was too frivolous of a deal, but I insisted on giving him $100. Having bought myself a little financial breathing room and a lot of confidence, I moved up to the $10 sit and go tournaments and started putting more effort into studying poker. The rest is history, or at least a story for another time.
A few years later, I started playing penny ante games with my grandparents. Gambling has always been popular in my father’s family. His uncle, a 450-pound cross-dressing homosexual stand-up comedian, was a real character, one who deserves his own story really, but among other things he loved gambling. He took me to the dog track when I was five years old and placed my bets for me. Uncle Tubby had a heart as big as his stomach and was always extraordinarily generous with his winnings, sending my grandparents on vacation or buying me gifts whenever he won big at the track, but he would argue like hell if he thought he was getting cheated at penny ante poker.
Dad was the big winner in those days, but my grandmother saw to it that I always came out ahead at the end of the night. Hell of a lesson to teach a kid about gambling, if you think about it. According to my father, he grew up too poor to get any kind of allowance, but his mother gave him a quarter every week to pay his tuition at St. Joseph’s High School, which he used to win spending money at lunchtime poker games. Then again, next to the fish pond, the poker table is probably the place where a father’s exploits grow largest when recounted to his first-born son, so take that with a grain of salt.
In high school, some friends and I started a regular poker night, and that was the first time I really began to think about the game. It was dealer’s choice with a nickel ante (occasionally bumped to a dime if the dealer was stuck), and every game was played no limit. It didn’t much matter how you did in the game, because most sessions ended with a round of suicide sevens that was guaranteed to reverse everyone’s fortunes. But I played for pride and wanted to win, so I bought Ken Warren’s “Winner’s Guide to Texas Hold ‘Em.” I probably learned something from that book, though I don’t really remember what.
The Big Game
Browsing the stacks of a used bookstore one day, I found a 1970’s era “Hoyle’s Guide to Poker”, in which the author declares that seven card poker (a game played to make seven-card hands, such as quad eights over trip Kings) was getting to be all the rage and would soon supplant the popular five card versions of Stud. It was my first introduction to the concept of odds, and armed with this, I decided to sit in on my grandfather’s game the next time I visited him in Florida.
This was .25/.50 dealer’s choice, where the dealer was expected to choose some variation of Stud or Omaha and only the wives were allowed to declare wild cards, over the groans of their husbands. The first time I check-raised, my grandfather’s best friend, a former teamster and WWII Marine, stared daggers at me and declared, “I’ve seen men shot for less.” Although Grandma covered my $40 in losses, I felt like [censored] the next morning.
The Bigger Game
In college I became best friends with Logan, a guy from Brooklyn who also enjoyed poker, and we were roommates sophomore through senior year. We’d occasionally host or attend a poker night somewhere, generally playing for nickels and dimes but having a good time.
Freshman year I blew through all the cash I had saved up from working at 7-11 the previous summer (unfortunately I did not blow it on poker), and tuition gobbled up the next summer’s earnings, so sophomore year I was dead broke. My limited meal plan didn’t enable me to average two hots per day in the dining hall, so I would scour the campus for any student organization giving away pizza or other free food at an event that evening.
So when Spring Break rolled around, the only way I was going to see a beach was if I visited my grandmother in Florida. My grandfather had died the previous summer, but I knew I’d still be welcome at his card game. My grandmother doesn’t do the interweb, so I told my aunt that my dorm would be kicking me out on Saturday and so that’s when I needed a flight. She bought the tickets, I printed out the e-mail confirmation, packed my things, left my dorm (which would be closed for the next week) and spend two hours on buses and trains to get from the south side of Chicago to O’Hare Airport on a Saturday morning, only to have the check-in agent tell me my flight didn’t leave until tomorrow. I could only stare at him in disbelief, with two suitcases in hand, $25 in my pocket, an empty checking account, no credit card, and nowhere to sleep.
I ended up going back to the train station and giving a panhandler a $5 bill in exchange for $2 in quarters. Not knowing anyone’s phone number, I was forced to call information, then cold call the few people I knew in Chicago who did not live in college dormitories. Finally, I reached Craig, my debate coach, who let me crash on his couch.
As luck would have it, a few of his public policy grad student friends were coming over for poker that night. The game was .25 ante with a $3 maximum bet on any street, no matter which game the dealer chose. I really wanted to play and had nothing better to do, so although the stakes were beyond intimidating to me, I borrowed $50 from Craig to supplement the $25 I had on me and bought in.
Interestingly, the super-high stakes forced me to play pretty well. Not surprisingly, the game was extremely loose and bad, and I was playing like a giant nit. To this day, I still remember taking $75 off of Craig’s friend Fati in a single hand of Shipwreck Kings, when I had five Aces to his five Kings and 12 bets went in on seventh street before he finally just called.
Unfortunately, he was playing on credit (none of these guys had a lot of money, and they gambled all the time on cards, Golden Tee, etc., so they generally passed debt back and forth between themselves), and to this day, Fati owes me $97. Despite getting stiffed, however, I pocketed better than $150 after paying Craig back at the end of the night.
After that, the Florida game was small time to me, but I’m still very glad I played. I had been close to my grandfather since the day I was born, and the year I spent in Chicago was the longest I had ever gone without seeing him. He died very suddenly from a brain tumor that no one knew he had, and it was quite jarring to me to learn one evening that I would never see him again. No sooner had I walked into the rec room where the game was held than the man who expressed his dissatisfaction with my sandbagging last year rose from his seat to shake my hand somberly. “Your grandfather was my best friend,” he told me. “We were closer to each other than we were to our wives, and not a day goes by that I don’t curse him for leaving me all alone down here.”
I spent most of the session up a little over $10, but got greedy on one of the last hands of the night, when I declared I was going both ways on a Stud/8 showdown and lost the pot to a rivered 6-low. Tilt ensued, and I finished the night stuck $3, which my grandmother reimbursed.
Tournament Poker
It was fall of 2003, the beginning of my third year of college. Chris Moneymaker had not yet won the WSOP, but the first rumblings of the poker boom were already underway. Logan, now my roommate, heard about a $10 no limit hold ‘em tournament held in the lounge of a neighboring dorm on Tuesday nights and Sunday afternoons. Intrigued, we stopped by and were hooked instantly.
The Tuesday night game drew 40-50 players, mostly fish, but in retrospect, there were a few regulars who really knew what they were doing. Making the final table was a rare but unrivaled thrill for us: the first memorable bad beat of my life put me out of one of the smaller Sunday tournaments in 3rd place. A pretty bad playef who had luckboxed his way into a monster stack and thought he was hot shit raised my big blind from the button and I flat called with AA. I check-raised an 853 flop and he shoved instantly with 87s, only to turn a 7. I was floored, particularly by the fact that that nasty turn (I had no idea what the odds were of him catching up, I just knew I had mother[censored] Aces!!!) had cost me about $50.
Super/System
For Christmas that year, my father’s new wife (his third) gave him a copy of Doyle Brunson’s Super/System. He lent it to me for the weekend before I returned to Chicago, and I devoured it. Everything that Doyle said about No Limit Hold ‘Em made so much sense to me. I remembered clichés about aggression from Warren’s book, but Doyle gave them content and put them in the context of a coherent strategy.
Needless to say, I returned to the Chicago tournaments with an irrational and expensive addiction to suited connectors. I distinctly recall being berated by one of the better players there when, early at a final table, I raised 65s UTG, there was a re-raise all in, the good player called on the button, and I shoved over the top of both of them. He thought forever, folded AK, and flipped the hell out when the all in’s pocket 9’s, which would have lost to his flopped A, held up.
Hoop Dreams
That spring, Logan took second place in a Sunday tournament, topping both my highest finish (third in a Sunday tournament) and my biggest cash (fourth in a Tuesday tournament). It was a record he would hold for more than a year as we both worked actively to improve our games and finally take down one of these bitches.
It occurred to us that the most money would be won or lost during the heads up portion of the tournament, and neither of us had any idea what we were doing, so we ought to start practicing. From that point on, we probably averaged an hour a day playing heads up $1 freezeout tournaments, sometimes starting with evenly matched stacks but often taking turns starting with a 2:1, 3:1, or 4:1 chiplead to simulate tournament conditions more accurately. As may be obvious, our goal at the time was not to make money, it was to win the damn tournament.
Our dreams were put on hold early in our senior year, however, when one of our regulars who also an editor for the school newspaper ran a front page story about the game and openly questioned its legality. Sure enough, the school shut us down the next week, and Logan and I were both pissed and confused about why this winning player would draw attention to the illegality of the game. It became clear, however, when a friend of ours who was dating one of the Alpha Delts passed along a rumor that the newspaper editor, who was also the president of Alpha Delt, wanted to start hosting the tournament at his frat and selling alcohol.
[censored] that. Logan and I boycotted the tournament and encouraged a few of our friends to do the same. The game never really took off, and it looked like that would be the end of the poker tournaments at the University of Chicago.
Online Poker
We were hooked now, though, and decided to explore this “online poker” thing we had heard so much about. Too paranoid to play with real money, we opened play money accounts on Pacific Poker and had some fun, though it quickly grew boring. Imagine our excitement when Pacific one day dropped $25 into our accounts for no reason! We couldn’t cash it out, of course, but why would we want to?
I sat down immediately at the .01/.02 table, moved up to .10/.20, and cashed out $25 twice before going on a sick run to get my account up to $125 (over the course of a few weeks). I decided to cash out $50 and take a run at $1/$2, because $75 is more than enough to start playing $1/$2, right? BUSTO. I was disappointed, but didn’t really care, because it hadn’t cost me anything to play and I’d already cashed out $100.
The only thing that bummed me out was that I was out of action. Once you’ve played for real, there’s no going back to play money. Logan and I still played our heads up games and hosted the occasional poker night, but he graduated early, and it looked like I was going to spend spring semester pokerless.
Then I heard about freerolls.
Pacific wasn’t offering freerolls at the time, but a site called Poker Room had them twice daily, with thousands of fish battling it out for $500 in prizes. Registration opened an hour and a half before the tournament and filled up within minutes. I used to set my alarm or run home from class in order to make it in under the wire, and if I was too late, I’d sometimes spend half an hour clicking the “register” button in the hopes that someone would unregister and forfeit his seat (this was generally successful if you were patient).
Eventually I cashed for $10 in one of these puppies, dropped $5.50 into a 10-man sit and go, won that, and then blew it all at $.25/.50 while waiting for the afternoon freeroll to start. Bummer. Eventually I got fed up with the Poker Room freerolls and decided to see if Pacific had started offering them. They had, and it wasn’t long before I won one for $75. I wasn’t going to repeat my mistakes, so I started grinding it out at the $5 sit and goes, which had a very favorable structure and were preposterously soft. I of course knew very little about sit and go strategy, but I knew that as long as I could get 7 of these clowns to bust out before I did, which was rarely difficult, then I couldn’t lose!
It was a great, low variance way to build a roll (not that I knew those terms at the time, but intuitively, I got the concept), but believe it or not, one tabling $5 sit and goes gets kind of boring. I craved the excitement of the big tournaments, but I was scared to drop a precious $5 or $10 into anything with several hundred players, where in all likelihood I would win nothing. I took the occasional shot, and sometimes I was able to stall into the money, but my short stack play was preposterously weak tight (I’m pretty sure I was raise/folding AQ with like 15 BB’s left in a $5 tournament because you’re not supposed to call a reraise with it.)
One day, though, I realized that only the No Limit tournaments got so huge. The morning $2.75 fixed limit game rarely got more than 100 runners, and I won it on one of my first shots, cashing for $87. As usual, I was playing weak tight, but Pacific sucks at balancing tables and adjusting the button when players bust out, so at the last few tables I think I dodged the big blind like 5 orbits straight, eventually tripled up with AA, and the rest was history.
One Last Shot
Three weeks before graduation, I ran into an old friend from the dorm tournament who told me that starting next week, a new dorm would be hosting. To say I was eager would be an understatement. This time I approached my old adversaries with a new confidence born of hundreds of hours of experience online. Best of all, the Alpha Delt president had the nerve to show up, and Doyle Brunson helped me to bust him:
Alpha Delt raises in middle position, I reraise 7:spade: 8:spade:, he calls. Flop 5:spade: 8:club: A:spade:. Alpha Delt leads out, I shove on him, he calls with AK, I river the 8 to KO him. He’s pissed, and though I’m now chipleader, I’m really just happy to have busted this d-bag.
As you’ve probably guessed by now, I went on to win one of the largest tournaments this game had ever seen, cashing for $200 even. Though this probably wasn’t even enough to make me unstuck in the long run in this tournament, I was walking on air. Liquor stores were closed, but I called up a friend who lived nearby. She had a bottle of wine that we drank to celebrate, and I ended up walking home half drunk through the south side of Chicago at 4 AM with $200 tucked in my sock.
Going Pro
I never explicitly decided to become a professional poker player, and truthfully I still don’t really consider myself to be one. I’m just a guy who graduated from college with a philosophy degree and no job prospects (is that redundant?). Actually, that’s not quite true. All through college, I had worked for the Chicago Public Schools teaching, judging, coaching, and eventually running their debate league. I had also been in a long-distance relationship for three years with a friend from high school who went to Boston University.
When I graduated, I was offered a full time job with good benefits in Chicago working with the debate league, which I absolutely loved doing. But I also had the opportunity to move to Boston and live with my girlfriend, which is what I opted to do. While applying for jobs, I grinded it out at $5 and eventually $10 sit and goes on Pacific Poker.
But no jobs were panning out, and as anyone who’s lived in Boston knows, you can’t really make rent (even half of rent on a one bedroom apartment) one-tabling sit and goes. I still did some contract work for the Chicago Debate League, maintaining their website among other things, but it wasn’t enough to make ends meet, and I was damn near out of options. Then I got an IM:
Logan: Hey, play the 10K Guarantee [a $15 daily tournament on Pacific] with me.
Me: I dunno.
Logan: C’mon.
Me: Alright.
We both built up nice stacks early on, and at some point agreed that if either of us took first, he’d give the other $500 (first prize was over $2500). Logan busted and left to go to the library, joking that he expected me to make him $500. A few hours later I left a message on his voicemail: “Where the [censored] are you? I need you to tell me whether you want your $500 cash or a check.”
Ten minutes later he called me back. “You’re [censored] kidding me.”
“Swear to God.”
Ultimately, Logan wouldn’t accept the $500, saying it was too frivolous of a deal, but I insisted on giving him $100. Having bought myself a little financial breathing room and a lot of confidence, I moved up to the $10 sit and go tournaments and started putting more effort into studying poker. The rest is history, or at least a story for another time.
Labels: narrative, personal, poker
Ten Ways to Improve Your Bubble Play
Why are tournaments so profitable for a smart poker player? It’s because you are always getting a giant overlay. In a 180-man Stars tourney, for instance, you are competing against no more than 100 opponents, and quite often less. In other words, there are at most 100 other players trying to win the tournament. The rest are just trying to cash, and might as well be playing a different game altogether. These players are not competing with you for the top prizes.
In the early stages, they are playing to accumulate, just like you are. Their strategy is not intrinsically wrong, though their play may be.
In the money, most of them are happy to be there and will gamble up, and are too short to do anything else anyway. Again, their strategy is not intrinsically wrong here.
On the bubble, however, they are folding much too often and leaving a ton of money on the table. You need to put yourself in a position to scoop up as much of it as possible, as this is far and away the best opportunity you will have to accumulate chips. Here are some tips on how to do that:
1. Raise. Even if you know this already, you probably aren’t doing it enough. Never open limp. Not under the gun, not on the button, not ever. The odds are just too good that you will win it without a showdown.
2. Fold. Just because A9 is ahead of your range when you push over a late position raise doesn’t mean you should call. There are a lot of players on the bubble who know you are stealing but are too afraid to push back, and there are a lot more who think the correct strategy is to wait for big hands and then ‘punish’ your raise. If it starts happening all the time, then you can loosen your calling range (and in fact find yourself in some very +EV spots of a different sort), but the first time someone comes over the top, they’ve probably got a hand. You can steal back the chips you are folding away in a single orbit, whereas one or two thin calls could cripple your stealing ability. There is so much easy money to be had without going to showdown on the bubble that you shouldn’t be eager to get there.
3. Target the Weak. The decision to open raise is determined by three factors, in order of importance: who is in the blind, your position, and your cards. You should start identifying likely play-to-cashers before the bubble even begins, and continue paying attention to who is not defending blinds and who seems to be making big laydowns.
4. Size Up the Competition. The play-to-cashers are not the competition. At this point, they are just giving away free money, and all you have to do is take it. But you still have to play poker with the other play-to-winners, who are also trying to scoop up all that dead money. These players will be a lot more willing to re-steal, steal raise, etc., and you need to adapt accordingly.
5. Look at the Chat Box. The dialogue in the chat box gives you a lot of clues about who is playing to cash and about evolving table dynamics. I’ve seen players say things like “I would have called if it weren’t the bubble”, “I’m folding JJ here”, and “Yes! Yes! Yes!” every time they win a pot. It’s like they want me to run them over.
Players will also comment on how often you’ve been raising, or threaten to call “next time.” Pay attention to these clues, as they can help you to make tough decisions when facing a re-steal.
6. Spread It Around. Most players take it personally when you raise their blinds. If you abuse the same player often enough, he will feel like he has to stand up to you, and you will have baited him into playing correctly. Conversely, many play-to-cashers will recognize that you are stealing but not particularly care as long as they don’t feel singled out. So if you raised weak-tighty #1’s blind the last two orbits, go after the player on his right this time.
7. Protect Your Blinds. If you call or re-raise out of your blind a few times, most aggressive players will back off, as there is usually much easier money to be found. Play-to-cashers will occasionally make weak attempts to steal as well, usually min-raising or open limping from late position. They will often back off of even reasonably strong hands when seemingly pot committed when faced with the prospect of bubbling out.
8. Protect Their Blinds. A good, aggressive bubble player on your right can really cramp your style, as he will always be steal-raising ahead of you. But don’t look at this as a thorn in the side, look at it as an opportunity: he is putting a lot of money into the pot that he can’t defend. His only options are to keep raising and donating to you, or to stop raising and let you get back to picking on the weak players’ blinds; it’s a win-win for you. If the play-to-cashers won’t defend their blinds, you should do it for them.
9. Make the Last Bet. Just because a player decides to see a flop with you does not mean he has a big hand. With so many players stealing, re-stealing, and defending, there are a lot people seeing flops without especially strong hands. More often than not, they are hoping to get a cheap showdown or bully you off of your marginal holding. If you play your draws aggressively, you’ll find that most players are no more willing to go to the felt after the flop than they were before. You just need to structure the betting in such a way that you are the one pushing all-in, because it is a hell of a lot harder to call a push with a marginal hand than it is to push with a marginal hand.
10. Come Stacked. Although the bubble is a profitable time even when you are short-stacked, a 3x raise from the table chipleader has a lot more fold equity than an 8x all-in from a short stack. Ninety percent of the time I choose accumulation over survival, but most tournaments have such juicy bubbles that it can be correct to structure your pre-bubble strategy around getting to the bubble with a stack that will allow you to steal. This may mean taking gambles when you’re short in hopes of doubling up to a healthy stack, or it may mean passing on thin gambles when losing the pot would leave you unable to steal on the bubble.
In the early stages, they are playing to accumulate, just like you are. Their strategy is not intrinsically wrong, though their play may be.
In the money, most of them are happy to be there and will gamble up, and are too short to do anything else anyway. Again, their strategy is not intrinsically wrong here.
On the bubble, however, they are folding much too often and leaving a ton of money on the table. You need to put yourself in a position to scoop up as much of it as possible, as this is far and away the best opportunity you will have to accumulate chips. Here are some tips on how to do that:
1. Raise. Even if you know this already, you probably aren’t doing it enough. Never open limp. Not under the gun, not on the button, not ever. The odds are just too good that you will win it without a showdown.
2. Fold. Just because A9 is ahead of your range when you push over a late position raise doesn’t mean you should call. There are a lot of players on the bubble who know you are stealing but are too afraid to push back, and there are a lot more who think the correct strategy is to wait for big hands and then ‘punish’ your raise. If it starts happening all the time, then you can loosen your calling range (and in fact find yourself in some very +EV spots of a different sort), but the first time someone comes over the top, they’ve probably got a hand. You can steal back the chips you are folding away in a single orbit, whereas one or two thin calls could cripple your stealing ability. There is so much easy money to be had without going to showdown on the bubble that you shouldn’t be eager to get there.
3. Target the Weak. The decision to open raise is determined by three factors, in order of importance: who is in the blind, your position, and your cards. You should start identifying likely play-to-cashers before the bubble even begins, and continue paying attention to who is not defending blinds and who seems to be making big laydowns.
4. Size Up the Competition. The play-to-cashers are not the competition. At this point, they are just giving away free money, and all you have to do is take it. But you still have to play poker with the other play-to-winners, who are also trying to scoop up all that dead money. These players will be a lot more willing to re-steal, steal raise, etc., and you need to adapt accordingly.
5. Look at the Chat Box. The dialogue in the chat box gives you a lot of clues about who is playing to cash and about evolving table dynamics. I’ve seen players say things like “I would have called if it weren’t the bubble”, “I’m folding JJ here”, and “Yes! Yes! Yes!” every time they win a pot. It’s like they want me to run them over.
Players will also comment on how often you’ve been raising, or threaten to call “next time.” Pay attention to these clues, as they can help you to make tough decisions when facing a re-steal.
6. Spread It Around. Most players take it personally when you raise their blinds. If you abuse the same player often enough, he will feel like he has to stand up to you, and you will have baited him into playing correctly. Conversely, many play-to-cashers will recognize that you are stealing but not particularly care as long as they don’t feel singled out. So if you raised weak-tighty #1’s blind the last two orbits, go after the player on his right this time.
7. Protect Your Blinds. If you call or re-raise out of your blind a few times, most aggressive players will back off, as there is usually much easier money to be found. Play-to-cashers will occasionally make weak attempts to steal as well, usually min-raising or open limping from late position. They will often back off of even reasonably strong hands when seemingly pot committed when faced with the prospect of bubbling out.
8. Protect Their Blinds. A good, aggressive bubble player on your right can really cramp your style, as he will always be steal-raising ahead of you. But don’t look at this as a thorn in the side, look at it as an opportunity: he is putting a lot of money into the pot that he can’t defend. His only options are to keep raising and donating to you, or to stop raising and let you get back to picking on the weak players’ blinds; it’s a win-win for you. If the play-to-cashers won’t defend their blinds, you should do it for them.
9. Make the Last Bet. Just because a player decides to see a flop with you does not mean he has a big hand. With so many players stealing, re-stealing, and defending, there are a lot people seeing flops without especially strong hands. More often than not, they are hoping to get a cheap showdown or bully you off of your marginal holding. If you play your draws aggressively, you’ll find that most players are no more willing to go to the felt after the flop than they were before. You just need to structure the betting in such a way that you are the one pushing all-in, because it is a hell of a lot harder to call a push with a marginal hand than it is to push with a marginal hand.
10. Come Stacked. Although the bubble is a profitable time even when you are short-stacked, a 3x raise from the table chipleader has a lot more fold equity than an 8x all-in from a short stack. Ninety percent of the time I choose accumulation over survival, but most tournaments have such juicy bubbles that it can be correct to structure your pre-bubble strategy around getting to the bubble with a stack that will allow you to steal. This may mean taking gambles when you’re short in hopes of doubling up to a healthy stack, or it may mean passing on thin gambles when losing the pot would leave you unable to steal on the bubble.
Labels: poker, poker strategy
Profitable Situations
Introduction
How much would you pay for a program that allowed you to see your opponents’ hole cards? Wouldn’t it be even better if you had a program that gave your opponents whatever hole cards you wanted them to have? And if you had such a program, you wouldn’t just give them all garbage so that you could steal their blinds; you would want to give them second best hands and then value bet them to death. In other words, you would want to create situations where your opponents held slightly worse hands than yours, because these are the most profitable situations in poker.
Well here’s the thing: you already have this ability. To some extent, you are in control of the cards that your opponents hold. Whenever an opponent enters the pot, he is doing so with some range of hands that is determined by the action in front of him, his position, his stack size, table conditions, his mood, etc. As the hand progresses, however, you will have the ability to narrow his range depending on the line that you take. Unfortunately, you can’t make him throw away the nuts, and in general it will be hard to get him to pitch any of the hands at the top of his range. This is why you should play your big hands fast most of the time: there is little danger of shaking Villain off of a big but slightly worse hand, which means that you are primed to win a large pot. Conversely, playing a medium strength hand too fast is generally bad because it allows Villain to throw away everything you beat and take your money when he’s got you beat.
Different games have different types of profitable situations, some more obvious than others. In NLHE, there is set over set, set vs. overpair, set vs. top pair, overpair vs. top pair, etc. In Omaha, there is the nuts with redraws vs. the nuts without redraws. In O/8, there is the nut high vs. two opponents going low, the nut low with a flush draw vs. the nut low, etc. In 5 card stud, there is a concealed pair that allows you to beat the open pair your opponent is showing.
The important thing is that a profitable situation is more than having a good hand; it is having a good hand while your opponent has a slightly less good one that he nevertheless has reason to think is best. Ideally, you would want his hand to be exactly one ranking below yours (ie K-high flush when you hold the A-high flush), so that you can apply maximum pressure.
Obviously, there are many other types of profitable situations, such as those where you can bluff Villain off of the best hand a large amount of the time, but right now, I’m concerned only with those where you are trying to get maximum value at showdown.
To cash game regulars, a lot of this may seem obvious, because cash game play is all about creating profitable situations. In tournaments, especially at the lowest buy-ins, you can usually study some starting hand guidelines, memorize a push-bot chart, and get by alright, because a lot of your profit will come from players who fail to adapt to tournament-specific bubble or short-stack situations. But there is a lot more money to be made if you know how to get full value out of your hands and not just how to play an unexploitable short stack game.
Fundamentally, good players make money at poker because they know how to recognize and/or create profitable situations. They win the most from second best hands because they know how to keep those hands in the pot and win bets from them.
Creating Profitable Situations
Whenever I have a made hand (ie one that could potentially win unimproved at showdown), I consider my opponents’ possible holdings, and then I categorize them into hands I want him to have (because he can/will pay me off), hands I don’t want him to have (hands with a lot of outs that won’t pay me off unless they catch; hands that are already beating me) and hands that don’t matter (those that missed the board completely and are now hopeless; those so good that he will never get away from them, and that I will have to pay off).
The key to making the most of profitable situations is thinking about the hands that are most likely to pay you off and how they will respond to a bet, check, or raise at any given time. In other words, you shouldn’t be betting just because you have a decent hand and there is a flush draw on the board. Your move should have a very deliberate purpose: “I am betting because I expect the following hands to call and the following hands to fold.” Or, “I am checking because if I bet, Villain will fold the following hands that could pay me off later.”
In order to create a profitable situation, you need to take a line that will allow you to win the most from the hands you are beating. If your hand is big enough that it can beat a lot of other hands that Villain may mistakenly think are best (ie I have 77 or AJ on an 7JA flop), you can just bet out. If it’s checked around to you with A5, I recommend checking it through simply because no reasonable opponent is going to make a mistake against you on that board. Checking behind creates a situation where Villain may take a stab with a worse hand, or may be more inclined to check/call middle pair on the next street, as a bet will look more like a steal.
In the first situation, you hand is already disguised, so you can go ahead and play it fast, because Villain is likely to come along with a hand like top pair. In the second, your hand is slightly worse than the one you are representing by betting the flop. It’s not bad enough that you need to bluff, but it is not good enough to bet for value. The only reason to bet (though this is often a sufficient reason) is that the pot is large enough already and/or the board is draw-heavy enough that you want to win it right now, or that you opponent may make the mistake of drawing with bad odds.
There are three key principles at work here:
1. On balance, the more money an opponent puts into the pot, the better his hand is likely to be at that time; however,
2. The larger the pot, the less good an opponent’s hand is likely to be at all future decision points.
3. Betting or raising ranges tend to be wider than calling ranges.
In other words, many players will put 3-4 BB’s in the pot with a wide variety of hands when stacks are deep. Once 12-15 BB’s per player go in pre-flop, many people’s ranges narrow considerably (though it matters how the money goes in). However, once the flop comes out, a player who would check-fold a whiffed AK in a 12 BB pot might semi-bluff all-in at a 40 BB pot. Certainly, he is more likely to semi-bluff push than to call an all in.
Variance and Profitable Situations
Often, you will have a choice about what kind of profitable situation you would like to create. For instance, on the first hand of a NLHE tournament, you are dealt 99 UTG. You could play this fast, hoping to get value from lower pocket pairs or top pair on a rag board or win it with a continuation bet on the flop against overcards. Or, you could limp in, trying to flop a set and win a big pot against two pair or top pair.
In the former case, you’ll win a smaller pot a lot more often, you’ll occasionally win a huge pot when you make a set versus top pair, but you’ll occasionally lose a large pot against a better pair or get bluffed off of the best hand.
When you limp, you let a lot of worse hands outflop you. You might even fold the best hand on the flop to a semi-bluff. When you make your set, it will be harder to win a huge pot, because players are less likely to fall in love with top pair in a limped, multiway pot. However, you rarely lose a big pot, and with more players seeing the flop with you, it is more likely that someone will make something to pay you off.
Raising 99 UTG and limping 99 UTG are both profitable situations, the central difference between them being variance: how often do you want to win/lose the pot and what size pot do you want to play? In my opinion it varies a lot based on the stage of the tournament you are in, but my purpose here isn’t to debate which line to choose. The point is that however you choose to play it, you need to think about what kinds of hands you want your opponent to have and how to win the most when he has them.
I am also suggesting that sometimes it is correct to pass on small edges in order to set a trap and possibly create a profitable (sometimes very profitable) situation down the road. You are undoubtedly giving up some value by limping 9’s UTG, because you are not charging worse hands for the chance to outflop you. However, it is much harder to have a profitable situation after the flop holding 99 out of position in a heads up pot than it is to have one in a multi-way limped pot.
A very similar situation occurs when you limp A:spade:5:spade: behind a couple of limpers on your button, and the flop comes A:diamond:8:heart:9:heart:. If you bet here, the best case scenario is that someone correctly folds their draw and you win a small pot. Someone may “make a mistake” calling a 2/3 pot bet on a draw, except that you are going to have check the turn, giving Villain a free look at the river and turning his call into a good one. A bare 8 or 9 will almost certainly fold, and better Aces will call. Granted, you give up some value by giving someone with middle pair a free chance to catch five outs on the turn, but hopefully this will be compensated for by winning a turn and/or river bet from an unimproved middle pair. If the turn is a scary one like T :heart:, then you can get out cheaply, with little harm done. Once again, this line enables you to lower your variance by trading one profitable situation (top pair on a draw-heavy board) for another (a somewhat disguised top pair).
Using Your Reads
Setting up a profitable situation requires estimating an opponent’s range and how he will play various hands within that range. The more you know about an opponent, the more inclined you should be to play pots against him, especially when you are in position. In particular, you should focus on the mistakes different players at your table, especially those to your immediate right and those in the blinds when your are in late position, tend to make. Do they overvalue top pair? Stack off with weak overpairs? Never giver credit when a draw hits? Give up too easily when scare cards hit?
Remember how we agreed that you would pay quite a bit of money for a program that allowed you see your opponent’s hole cards? Well, you should be willing to take some risks anytime you feel you can put Villain on a very narrow range. As long as stacks are deep, make some speculative calls pre-flop with suited connectors, small pairs, etc. You can do the same on the flop with a gut shot, middle pair, etc. if you know that a lot of cards will allow you to take the pot away later or that Villain will pay off big when you hit.
Similarly, if you are confident you are ahead AND you have a very good idea of what Villain has, you should be less inclined to end the hand, even if you are out of position. Building a pot is good when you know about what your opponent has, but fold equity is worth very little.
Reverse Implied Odds
It’s the first hand of a NLHE tournament. You have AA UTG. Villain has 22 on the button. Who’s in a profitable situation? Villain is. You are never going to win a big pot unless you make set over set, but you will lose a big pot virtually every time he makes his set.
This seems obvious, but it’s an important thing to think about when you have a big hand. Just because you have the nuts doesn’t mean you want any and all action. You want to play big pots against second best hands, not against speculative hands that will either lose small pots or win big ones. I see so many players making tiny raises and re-raises with their rockets, seemingly giving little or no thought to what kinds of hands they want in the pot and what kinds they don’t. Conveniently enough, the kinds of hands that will pay you off big on the right flop are also the sort that can take a fair amount of action pre-flop: other big pairs and broadway hands that can make top pair good kicker.
Thus, your primary consideration should be building a big pot against second best hands, not trying to string along speculative hands that will only play a big pot against you when they outdraw you. In other words, there's more to creating a profitable situation than getting dealt a pair of bullets.
How much would you pay for a program that allowed you to see your opponents’ hole cards? Wouldn’t it be even better if you had a program that gave your opponents whatever hole cards you wanted them to have? And if you had such a program, you wouldn’t just give them all garbage so that you could steal their blinds; you would want to give them second best hands and then value bet them to death. In other words, you would want to create situations where your opponents held slightly worse hands than yours, because these are the most profitable situations in poker.
Well here’s the thing: you already have this ability. To some extent, you are in control of the cards that your opponents hold. Whenever an opponent enters the pot, he is doing so with some range of hands that is determined by the action in front of him, his position, his stack size, table conditions, his mood, etc. As the hand progresses, however, you will have the ability to narrow his range depending on the line that you take. Unfortunately, you can’t make him throw away the nuts, and in general it will be hard to get him to pitch any of the hands at the top of his range. This is why you should play your big hands fast most of the time: there is little danger of shaking Villain off of a big but slightly worse hand, which means that you are primed to win a large pot. Conversely, playing a medium strength hand too fast is generally bad because it allows Villain to throw away everything you beat and take your money when he’s got you beat.
Different games have different types of profitable situations, some more obvious than others. In NLHE, there is set over set, set vs. overpair, set vs. top pair, overpair vs. top pair, etc. In Omaha, there is the nuts with redraws vs. the nuts without redraws. In O/8, there is the nut high vs. two opponents going low, the nut low with a flush draw vs. the nut low, etc. In 5 card stud, there is a concealed pair that allows you to beat the open pair your opponent is showing.
The important thing is that a profitable situation is more than having a good hand; it is having a good hand while your opponent has a slightly less good one that he nevertheless has reason to think is best. Ideally, you would want his hand to be exactly one ranking below yours (ie K-high flush when you hold the A-high flush), so that you can apply maximum pressure.
Obviously, there are many other types of profitable situations, such as those where you can bluff Villain off of the best hand a large amount of the time, but right now, I’m concerned only with those where you are trying to get maximum value at showdown.
To cash game regulars, a lot of this may seem obvious, because cash game play is all about creating profitable situations. In tournaments, especially at the lowest buy-ins, you can usually study some starting hand guidelines, memorize a push-bot chart, and get by alright, because a lot of your profit will come from players who fail to adapt to tournament-specific bubble or short-stack situations. But there is a lot more money to be made if you know how to get full value out of your hands and not just how to play an unexploitable short stack game.
Fundamentally, good players make money at poker because they know how to recognize and/or create profitable situations. They win the most from second best hands because they know how to keep those hands in the pot and win bets from them.
Creating Profitable Situations
Whenever I have a made hand (ie one that could potentially win unimproved at showdown), I consider my opponents’ possible holdings, and then I categorize them into hands I want him to have (because he can/will pay me off), hands I don’t want him to have (hands with a lot of outs that won’t pay me off unless they catch; hands that are already beating me) and hands that don’t matter (those that missed the board completely and are now hopeless; those so good that he will never get away from them, and that I will have to pay off).
The key to making the most of profitable situations is thinking about the hands that are most likely to pay you off and how they will respond to a bet, check, or raise at any given time. In other words, you shouldn’t be betting just because you have a decent hand and there is a flush draw on the board. Your move should have a very deliberate purpose: “I am betting because I expect the following hands to call and the following hands to fold.” Or, “I am checking because if I bet, Villain will fold the following hands that could pay me off later.”
In order to create a profitable situation, you need to take a line that will allow you to win the most from the hands you are beating. If your hand is big enough that it can beat a lot of other hands that Villain may mistakenly think are best (ie I have 77 or AJ on an 7JA flop), you can just bet out. If it’s checked around to you with A5, I recommend checking it through simply because no reasonable opponent is going to make a mistake against you on that board. Checking behind creates a situation where Villain may take a stab with a worse hand, or may be more inclined to check/call middle pair on the next street, as a bet will look more like a steal.
In the first situation, you hand is already disguised, so you can go ahead and play it fast, because Villain is likely to come along with a hand like top pair. In the second, your hand is slightly worse than the one you are representing by betting the flop. It’s not bad enough that you need to bluff, but it is not good enough to bet for value. The only reason to bet (though this is often a sufficient reason) is that the pot is large enough already and/or the board is draw-heavy enough that you want to win it right now, or that you opponent may make the mistake of drawing with bad odds.
There are three key principles at work here:
1. On balance, the more money an opponent puts into the pot, the better his hand is likely to be at that time; however,
2. The larger the pot, the less good an opponent’s hand is likely to be at all future decision points.
3. Betting or raising ranges tend to be wider than calling ranges.
In other words, many players will put 3-4 BB’s in the pot with a wide variety of hands when stacks are deep. Once 12-15 BB’s per player go in pre-flop, many people’s ranges narrow considerably (though it matters how the money goes in). However, once the flop comes out, a player who would check-fold a whiffed AK in a 12 BB pot might semi-bluff all-in at a 40 BB pot. Certainly, he is more likely to semi-bluff push than to call an all in.
Variance and Profitable Situations
Often, you will have a choice about what kind of profitable situation you would like to create. For instance, on the first hand of a NLHE tournament, you are dealt 99 UTG. You could play this fast, hoping to get value from lower pocket pairs or top pair on a rag board or win it with a continuation bet on the flop against overcards. Or, you could limp in, trying to flop a set and win a big pot against two pair or top pair.
In the former case, you’ll win a smaller pot a lot more often, you’ll occasionally win a huge pot when you make a set versus top pair, but you’ll occasionally lose a large pot against a better pair or get bluffed off of the best hand.
When you limp, you let a lot of worse hands outflop you. You might even fold the best hand on the flop to a semi-bluff. When you make your set, it will be harder to win a huge pot, because players are less likely to fall in love with top pair in a limped, multiway pot. However, you rarely lose a big pot, and with more players seeing the flop with you, it is more likely that someone will make something to pay you off.
Raising 99 UTG and limping 99 UTG are both profitable situations, the central difference between them being variance: how often do you want to win/lose the pot and what size pot do you want to play? In my opinion it varies a lot based on the stage of the tournament you are in, but my purpose here isn’t to debate which line to choose. The point is that however you choose to play it, you need to think about what kinds of hands you want your opponent to have and how to win the most when he has them.
I am also suggesting that sometimes it is correct to pass on small edges in order to set a trap and possibly create a profitable (sometimes very profitable) situation down the road. You are undoubtedly giving up some value by limping 9’s UTG, because you are not charging worse hands for the chance to outflop you. However, it is much harder to have a profitable situation after the flop holding 99 out of position in a heads up pot than it is to have one in a multi-way limped pot.
A very similar situation occurs when you limp A:spade:5:spade: behind a couple of limpers on your button, and the flop comes A:diamond:8:heart:9:heart:. If you bet here, the best case scenario is that someone correctly folds their draw and you win a small pot. Someone may “make a mistake” calling a 2/3 pot bet on a draw, except that you are going to have check the turn, giving Villain a free look at the river and turning his call into a good one. A bare 8 or 9 will almost certainly fold, and better Aces will call. Granted, you give up some value by giving someone with middle pair a free chance to catch five outs on the turn, but hopefully this will be compensated for by winning a turn and/or river bet from an unimproved middle pair. If the turn is a scary one like T :heart:, then you can get out cheaply, with little harm done. Once again, this line enables you to lower your variance by trading one profitable situation (top pair on a draw-heavy board) for another (a somewhat disguised top pair).
Using Your Reads
Setting up a profitable situation requires estimating an opponent’s range and how he will play various hands within that range. The more you know about an opponent, the more inclined you should be to play pots against him, especially when you are in position. In particular, you should focus on the mistakes different players at your table, especially those to your immediate right and those in the blinds when your are in late position, tend to make. Do they overvalue top pair? Stack off with weak overpairs? Never giver credit when a draw hits? Give up too easily when scare cards hit?
Remember how we agreed that you would pay quite a bit of money for a program that allowed you see your opponent’s hole cards? Well, you should be willing to take some risks anytime you feel you can put Villain on a very narrow range. As long as stacks are deep, make some speculative calls pre-flop with suited connectors, small pairs, etc. You can do the same on the flop with a gut shot, middle pair, etc. if you know that a lot of cards will allow you to take the pot away later or that Villain will pay off big when you hit.
Similarly, if you are confident you are ahead AND you have a very good idea of what Villain has, you should be less inclined to end the hand, even if you are out of position. Building a pot is good when you know about what your opponent has, but fold equity is worth very little.
Reverse Implied Odds
It’s the first hand of a NLHE tournament. You have AA UTG. Villain has 22 on the button. Who’s in a profitable situation? Villain is. You are never going to win a big pot unless you make set over set, but you will lose a big pot virtually every time he makes his set.
This seems obvious, but it’s an important thing to think about when you have a big hand. Just because you have the nuts doesn’t mean you want any and all action. You want to play big pots against second best hands, not against speculative hands that will either lose small pots or win big ones. I see so many players making tiny raises and re-raises with their rockets, seemingly giving little or no thought to what kinds of hands they want in the pot and what kinds they don’t. Conveniently enough, the kinds of hands that will pay you off big on the right flop are also the sort that can take a fair amount of action pre-flop: other big pairs and broadway hands that can make top pair good kicker.
Thus, your primary consideration should be building a big pot against second best hands, not trying to string along speculative hands that will only play a big pot against you when they outdraw you. In other words, there's more to creating a profitable situation than getting dealt a pair of bullets.
Labels: poker, poker strategy
Introduction
One of my major goals for 2007 is to get my life in order. I've been a semi-professional poker player for about two years now, and the game has been very good to me, but it's not what I want to do with my life. I still haven't figured out exactly what I do want to do, but I've always loved writing, and recently, I've rediscovered that passion while writing on various poker-related subjects. I'm starting this blog to encourage myself to write more often and hopefully to share my work with a larger audience than has seen it so far.
There will probably be a flurry of posts early on as I put up material that I have largely written already. The pace will slow down as I shift to creating new content, and early on I have a modest goal of one substantive post per week. By 'substantive' I mean something entertaining and/or educational, not just bad beat stories or quick updates on how my week has been.
I'm very interested in comments about what's enjoyable to read, what's thought-provoking, what you would like to see more of, etc. Thanks for visiting, and enjoy!
There will probably be a flurry of posts early on as I put up material that I have largely written already. The pace will slow down as I shift to creating new content, and early on I have a modest goal of one substantive post per week. By 'substantive' I mean something entertaining and/or educational, not just bad beat stories or quick updates on how my week has been.
I'm very interested in comments about what's enjoyable to read, what's thought-provoking, what you would like to see more of, etc. Thanks for visiting, and enjoy!
Labels: personal
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