I just began rereading Tommy Angelo’s Elements of Poker, and in his introduction, I came across a sentence I underlined on my first read-through, a sentence that changed the way I approached my attempts to improve as a player even though I promptly forgot where I first encountered the idea. Angelo writes, “This book is about imagining idealistic extremes and then implementing practical methods of moving toward them.”
I’d heard generic advice about visualizing success before. It always seemed like vacuous mumbo-jumbo to me. What good would it do to imagine myself sitting alone at the final table of the World Series of Poker main event, a fistful of hundred dollar bills in each hand? How would that make me play better or bring me any closer to actually sitting at that table?
Turns out I had it backwards. It’s not about visualizing yourself as the winner. It’s about visualizing yourself winning, playing like a winner. It’s about knowing what it looks like and what it feels like to be playing your very best poker, and then about charting a course towards achieving that vision.
Many people, when they set goals, focus on the finish line. They want to run a marathon or lose 30 pounds or win the Sunday Million.
The problem is that, especially in poker, actually crossing that finish line is usually beyond your control. No matter how good you are, you could easily play the Sunday Million every weekend for the rest of your life and never win it, simply because of the variance involved in a large-field poker tournament. The same is true even for modest goals like winning a certain amount of money over a certain period of time – you simply don’t have the final say about whether or how much you win in a poker game.
A more realistic and helpful goal is to play in a way that gives you the best chance of winning. This should be your real goal in poker: to play your best at all times and let the chips fall where they may.
This is where the visualization (or “imagining”, to use Angelo’s language) comes in. Simply telling yourself to “play well” probably won’t translate into anything concrete. Instead, you need to have an idea of what playing well looks like. What are the things that you do when you are playing well? Or what are the things that others do when they are playing well, that you aspire to do as well as they do?
Never Tilt
This was a big one for me, and it’s certainly important for Angelo. Nobody wants to tilt, but it’s not very helpful simply to resolve to, “Stop tilting.”
The question to ask is, “What would it look like if you never tilted?” Imagine a poker player who never tilts. What is he like? How does he react to losing? How does he feel when he loses? When he’s losing?
Presumably, he never gets frustrated or upset. He never feels sorry for himself. He doesn’t complain about his bad luck, or ask the dealer to wash the deck, or tell bad beat stories. He quits when he’s ready to stop playing, and it has nothing to do with whether he’s up or down on the session.
The converse of this is that the tilt-free player doesn’t react to winning, either. He doesn’t brag, he doesn’t celebrate, and he doesn’t think more highly of himself or his abilities when he has a good night. Watching him from a distance, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether he just won or lost a big pot, or whether he folded pre-flop without investing a penny. When he finishes a session, you can’t tell from his mood whether he won or lost.
Of course no one is entirely free of tilt and frustration. That’s what makes this an “idealistic extreme”. The idea is to imagine the ideal of entirely tilt-free poker, and then to do your best to approximate it. That means acting as though you were this tilt-free player, and discouraging yourself from any of the bad habits listed above.
Many players seem to feel entitled to gripe about bad luck, after a session if not during. They expect sympathy when they take a bad beat, and they want to celebrate when they win. After all, everyone else does it, right?
Yes, everyone else does it, and everyone else tilts. Your aspiration isn’t to be like everyone else. You want to be like the tilt-free player, and he doesn’t do any of those things. You can start by discouraging yourself from those bad habits, rather than indulging them like a guilty pleasure. If nothing else, your friends will be happy not to have to listen to any more of your bad beat stories.
The Fundamental Theorem of Poker
David Sklansky’s Fundamental Theorem of Poker represents another sort of poker ideal, that of the player who always knows exactly what his opponents have:
“Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see
all of your opponents’ cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose. Conversely, every time opponents play their hands differently from the way they would have if they could see all your cards, you gain; and every time they play their hands the same way they would have played if they could see all your cards, you lose.”
What would this ideal player do that you should imitate? The most obvious thing is that his decisions are always based on how his own hand stacks up against that of his opponent. He never plays by rote, there are no “standard” situations, and his decisions are never based solely on his own cards. Even when he has the nuts, he’s not just blindly throwing chips into the pot, he’s thinking about how to extract the most money from the two cards he knows his opponent holds.
To approximate this ideal, you must always be trying to put your opponent on a range, always using new information to narrow your read. Even when your decision seems trivial, you need to think about your opponent’s hand.
In fact, we did get a chance to see how someone would play if he could see his opponent’s cards. In 2008, a thread on the Two Plus Two forums revealed statistical evidence of “superuser” accounts on Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker, players who actually could see their opponents’ cards. The very long post at the start of the thread discusses some of the statistical anomalies in the play of these accounts.
For one thing, they were extremely loose pre-flop. They could afford to be, since they knew that they would outplay their opponents after the flop. The more accurately that you can read an opponent’s hand, the more you should be willing to get involved in pots with him with hands that you might fold against other players.
More interestingly, the superusers’ post-flop play was extremely aggressive. When they had the best hand, they bet it, even if that hand wasn’t very strong. When they were behind, they either folded or, if their opponent’s hand was not very strong, they tried to bluff. They called only on the rare occasions when they were drawing, setting up a later bluff, or slowplaying. On the river, they never called unless a bet was all-in. They could raise the best hand for value, no matter how seemingly weak it was, since they knew it was good. And of course they’d never call with a losing hand, so the only options were bluff-raise or fold.
Many players call as a compromise, or out of lack of confidence in their read. Sometimes they call with strong hands that they ought to raise, because they’re afraid of running into the occasional monster. Sometimes they call when they ought to fold, because they can’t bring themselves to lay down a pretty hand. That’s not how superusers play, and it’s not how you ought to play if you want to emulate the ideal of the Fundamental Theorem of Poker.
Don’t forget the second the half of the theorem, either: you also want to play so that your opponent never knows what you have. You should also try to play in ways that reveal minimal information about your own hand. Whether you bet, check, raise, or call, you should have an idea of all of the hands with which you would make that same play. There should be some combination of strong and weak hands in that range so that your opponent can never say with certainty that you are or aren’t strong.
Conclusion
These are ideals. You aren’t going to achieve them. In some cases, there may even be reasons not to adhere to these ideals. For example, since you can’t actually see your opponent’s cards, there are many times when it is correct simply to call the river.
The point is that you need to know what the ideal looks like if you want to get better. You’ll have concrete things to focus on rather than a nebulous “Play better! Stop tilting!” mantra and a goal of winning more money. Rather than chasing a goal, you’ll be catching it, one step at a time.