I will generalize some in this post, so I apologize in advance to some of my more anal retentive readers. It’s probably also more true for limit hold ‘em than no-limit.

I’ve said before that poker learning is cyclical; about how you go through various stages of confidence, and how when you pick up something new you almost wonder how you could possibly have been doing alright at all before. I feel like I’m in a constant state of being a beginner. This doesn’t bother me though, I like keeping the perspective of a learner.

However, there’s another idea that I’ve started to toy with: It seems to me like the stages of learning are also often directly related to the streets that we play. Let me give an example:

The absolute beginner learns the rules of hold ‘em: two hole cards, a betting round, the flop, another betting round, the turn, yet another betting round, and then the river and the betting is concluded with the last round. Easy! So the beginner calls before the flop, calls on the flop, calls on the turn and calls the river if he has something and folds if he doesn’t. One of the first major improvements that the beginner will go through (if he goes through improvements at all) is usually to pick up a starting hands chart somewhere.

Step 1: Learn how to play before the flop.

He learns that while any two cards can win, some just don’t win often enough to be worth playing. I first wrote “realizes” rather than “learns,” but I don’t think that’s true; most beginners don’t realize this - they’re forced to accept it. Realization comes much later. So he starts to fold many of the hands he was previously playing.

The next step for many, is to pick up the advice “fit or fold” (or “flop it or fold it” or any other variant on the same theme). Seeing what the flop brings is okay, but if your hand looks poor at that point, get out of there.

Step 2: Learn how to play on the flop.

Q9s, this powerhouse of a hand that the beginner still plays before the flop, doesn’t look all that great anymore when there’s both a king and an ace on the flop. “I fold!” exlaims the beginner triumphantly. Good. But sometimes, it’s just too tempting to take a peek at the next card. Maybe we have two overcards to the board, or maybe the other guy is bluffing. Or maybe we actually flopped something. Call!

But on the turn, things get more expensive (this is the bit that’s more specific to limit than no-limit) and most beginners realize this as well. This plays in, to some extent, to why it’s hard to learn when to fold the flop; it’s so cheap. But now we’re faced with a much bigger bet than before, and the hand that looked like it could win suddenly looks like a loser.

Step 3: Learn how to play the turn.

The turn can often be folded safely. If we have nothing by the turn, it’s rarely safe to pay two more big bets to see a showdown; the other player has to be bluffing with a worse hand than ours pretty often to make that profitable. However, playing “fit or fold” on the flop will usually mean that we have at least something on the turn, but at some point we learn when to fold middle pair, no kicker. Some hands, however, we take to the river.

Now comes the last, and arguably the most difficult step:

Step 4: Learn how to play the river.

“Having nothing” is only the argument for folding the river when we’ve been chasing a draw that didn’t get there, so what about those times when we have a mediocre hand? When do we call, and when do we fold? Are the pocket treys in the hole good? Is he bluffing? Or did I miss the flush, but rivered second pair?

There’s a generally accepted “rule” for this as well in limit hold ‘em circles, although not at all as widely spread as “fit or fold,” but it goes something like “if your hand is good enough to call the turn, it’s good enough to call the river,” with the obvious exception of busted draws. The saying is somewhat misleading, however, because it should generally be seen as a criticism of the turn play, not the river - like “if you were dumb enough to call the turn, you’re going to have to follow through on the river” (because of the pot odds). Don’t read this as me giving you advice, by the way, I’m just repeating something that’s commonly stated. Learning when to make use of it is the hard part.

Through all of these four steps, the general tendency has been to fold more hands, street by street.

What happens next? Well, now it’s time to start over: Visit the preflop charts again, and try to get a deeper understanding of what makes them look the way they do. Usually fold some more hands than before; raise some other hands; call with yet some other hands.

With this new understanding, you should be able to decipher flop textures more intelligently. Should you really play “fit or fold” or is there a smarter way? Is KJs on a 8-5-2 board really something you should fold for one bet in a 6 bet flop, with the 5 being of your suit? Etc. Playing the hole cards differently means playing the flop differently. With new decisions being made on the flop, your turn play will also change, which of course affects how you play the river. And then we start over again.

I re-read the preflop play chapters of Hold ‘em Poker for Advanced Players a little while ago, and noticed something that I had misunderstood before, or rather, that I had dismissed as incorrect before because I had misread it.

In the book, Sklansky and Malmuth suggest sometimes raising a hand like JTs in a multiway pot preflop to build a bigger pot for when we flop a powerful draw (something a hand like JTs is fully capable of doing). My previous misunderstanding was that they meant that we should raise so we could give ourselves odds to continue after the flop. I know I’ve seen others make this mistake in reading it as well, and I’ve dismissed it because that’s just not good. We shouldn’t build a huge pot preflop just to give ourselves odds to continue. That’s a little bit like giving your opponents a couple of dollars just so you can try to win it back from them: Not smart.

However, this is not actually what it says: They advocate (sometimes) raising with a hand like this to give your opponents odds to stay in after the flop. This is completely different! If we build a big pot with a speculative hand preflop, our opponents will often peel a card on the flop because of the odds they’re getting, and when we have a powerful draw this is a huge benefit for us! The size of the pot forces them to stay in, which is excellent for our draw: Strong draws like multiway pots.

This is of course only an example, but my overall point is that I’m currently reworking my preflop play. I don’t think it’s going to change very much in terms of how I actually play the hands I’m dealt, but it is changing the way I think about the hands. When you’re dealing with margins of only a few percent here and there, and small relative long term win rates, finding extra profit even in the marginal situations is important. Preflop isn’t something you can just learn once and then discard.

Take the time to work through all the streets of hold ‘em, and see how learning something about one street affects the next.

Cheers,
FP