It’s the idea behind “big hands, big pots” which may not be obvious to everyone. If I have AK and the flop is A-9-5 and there’s one other guy in the pot with me, why does his hand suddenly get much better if we go all-in? His cards can’t change, so how can the size of the pot change how likely I am to win? This is not a terribly difficult concept, but it’s important enough to warrant a separate explanation.

To understand where this is coming from, let’s’ put you in the shoes of your opponent. Preflop, you called a raise in late position versus a decent opponent, with 100BB effective stacks. Your range, let’s say, consists of small and medium pocket pairs and suited connectors. Now the flop is A-9-4. If before this hand is over you’ve gotten all your money into the middle, what part of your range would you say is left?

Because your opponent is decent, you’d be hard pressed to call him down for your entire stack with T9s. Barring some weird meta game levelling going on between you and this opponoent, the part of your range that is left when all the money goes in is comprised of sets and bluffs, basically. If you have anything else, you’ll probably not let all the money get in.

See how it works? When the pots get big, your opponent is much more likely to have a big hand because otherwise they wouldn’t let the pots get big. If you win a pot with AK, it’s likely to be a small to medium pot, because that’s how much you can expect an opponent with a weaker hand to lose with a hand worse than TPTK.

* my strategy views aren’t “bad.” I’m not Ed Miller, but I do occasionally think something through and can make pretty coherent arguments for them. Or so I’d like to think.
* I like to keep book on poker theory “discoveries” I make, as it helps me with my learning process, and
* perhaps people like occasionally getting tips and pointers from someone who plays at their own level.

So after playing exclusively no-limit for about five weeks (whoop-de-doo, Mr. Paulsson) I’ve had three stages that I have gone/am going through. They are:

1) Get experience. This means play lots of hands. I started out 6-7 tabling to just try to amass a lot of hands. I also played a style that was more showdown bound than would perhaps be optimal, because I wanted to know what people “meant” when they did certain things. This stage was actually wildly profitable for me, despite going against popular wisdom that you shouldn’t be a calling station. What I found was that people were bluffing. A lot.

2) Identify my primary weaknesses. This went on in parallel with getting experience, and really, what I discovered was that I can get myself in some really difficult situations now and then. My primary strength is hand reading and feel for the game (in limit, you go to showdown roughtly 40% of the time that you see a flop, so with about a hundred thousand showdowns lodged in the back of my head, I have a decent feeling for how often different combos appear), and my big weakness is finding myself playing a big pot out of position.

3) Practise, which is what I’m doing now. This is not at all the same as just getting experience. I’ve now moved down to only four tables (and will likely keep it that way for at least the rest of this month) because I want to give every decision a little more time. Playing my opponents more, opening up more in position, and sizing my bets better.

Now, really, if I were to pick one skill that could single-handedly transform someone into a winner at small stakes NL, it would be bet-sizing. Sizing your bets (and raises) in such a way that you will stack your opponents when you have a big hand, keeping the pot small when you’re vulnerable, and making your future decisions easy (as opposed to hard) is such a key feature of NL that it makes starting hand selection seem completely unimportant.

So what’s to it?

Really, it starts preflop. Deciding what kind of pot you’d like to play with the hand you’re holding is the first step. Pocket pairs can often play big pots, because they can flop sets. Suited connectors also. Big aces (e.g. AK) will often find itself being on the wrong end of the stick when all the money goes in postflop, so they should avoid being in situations where all the money goes in. I’m not going to give you a chart to follow that states how much you should raise with hand X, but let me give an example of why it’s important, starting with how the preflop raise size sets up the whole hand:

$100 stacks, $1 blinds. You’re on the button with QQ. A player in middle position opens to $3, and it’s folded to you. Let’s see what happens with three different scenarios: One small, one medium and one big. For simplicity, we’ll test what happens when one bet goes in on each street, and this is to show just how powerful and important the preflop bet sizing is.

Scenario 1: You just call. Blinds fold. There’s $7 in the pot. With three bets going in, each being roughly 3/4ths of the pot, we’ll find that…

flop: $7 + $5 + $5
turn: $17 + 13 + 13 = $43
river: $43 + 33 + 33 -> final pot = $109.

Scenario 2: You minraise to $6. There will be $13 in the pot before the flop.

flop: $13 + 9 + 9
turn: $31 + 21 + 21 = $73
river: $73 + 54 + 54 -> final pot = $183. Here, you’re virtually stacking each other with just regular bets.

Scenario 3: You raise the pot to $10. The pot is $21 before the flop.

flop: $21 + 15 + 15
turn: $51 + 39 + 39 = $129
river: $129 + all-in + all-in = $201.

The relatively innocent decision between raising preflop and calling - which on the surface seemed to be a $7 difference - caused a total cumulative difference of $50. Of course, you have the option of raising big preflop and then checking one of the streets after the flop. This is the most efficient way of keeping the pot smaller, but it carries with it an inherent problem: What street will you check, and will your opponent cooperate? If you bet the turn with the intention of checking behind any river card, what will you do if your opponent check-raises all-in? Etc.

The cumulative effect makes some fairly counter-intuitive plays good. For instance, it’s perfectly okay to make a “pot sweetening” raise with some speculative hands if you think it greatly increases your chance of stacking someone postflop, despite the fact that you will often fold when you miss. Making a small raise with small pocket pairs on the button after several limpers, for instance, is a play like that. Because of the same cumulative effect as above, four people putting in $3 instead of four people putting in $1 can mean a great deal of difference in the size of the final pot. And being in position, you have a great chance of making sure that bets go in on every street when you flop something big.

Try to make the cumulative effect your friend rather than foe. You don’t have to make a huge overbet to get all your money in with a monster, unless you attempt to slowplay and your opponents won’t cooperate. If you just bet three streets, starting with a pot sized bet on the flop, you typically shouldn’t have to make any huge bets anywhere along the line in order to get every dollar into the middle. Your opponent might call every bet, being offered 2.5:1, but still find himself without a stack at the end of the hand. By the time they realize that they’re probably beat, it’s “too late,” so to speak. They’re committed to calling that last bet because the pot odds are too good for them to fold now.

If you’re looking to build a commitment-sized pot - a pot where the effective stack size means that both you and your opponent get such attractive pot odds that folding is out of the quesiton - take a look at what your opponent’s stack sizes are, determine how the cumulative effect can work in your favour, and size the preflop raise accordingly. For practise, look at some common stack sizes in the games that you play. For instance, if you play $25NL, find out how big of a preflop investment means you will get it all-in with three bets, if your effective stack is…

1) $25.
2) $15.
3) $40

… etc. Furthermore, also calculate how much you need to get in preflop in order for only TWO bets to get all the money in postflop, for the same stack sizes. Calculate it, and memorize it. Then start playing with different raises accordingly, and I think you will find that your postflop decisions will become much easier.

Next post will discuss sizing your bets and raises in a way that makes folding to a re-raise much easier.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kgo0VXGixk

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/poker/2008-04-30-WSOP_N.htm 

tl;dr: The WSOP Main Event will play down to the last 9 players, at which point the remaining play will be delayed until November 9th.

Basic argument FOR the change: It will make for better television, with plenty of time to interview the contestants, follow them through their three-month preparation, etc. Because it’s better television, it might make more people start to play poker and cause another mini-poker-boom.

Basic argument AGAINST the change: It’s unorthodox. It lets people hire coaches and practise their game, making the final table a lot tougher than it “should” have been. The risk of collusion increases greatly. Also, waiting sucks.

I think “people will have a chance to get better at poker” is a non-argument. Sure, it makes the final table more difficult for the serious players, and gives the one-in-a-million amateurs a better shot at playing more than just their luck for the big money. There ought to be no lack of coaches ready to charge big bucks for the service of explaining the M-concept to a PokerStars $1 qualifier. And, of course, given how much money is at stake, the amateurs should be really keen on the idea of preparing as best they can, coaching included.

So why is it a non-argument? Because it doesn’t make the main event worse. We will see better play and probably more interesting situations (by “we” I mean people who watch it, of course, and that probably excludes myself), and complaining about the opposition getting tougher sounds a lot like whining.

Collusion, however, is a problem. And waiting, objectively and majorly, sucks.

That it’s unorthodox is also a non-issue.

Whether it’ll be good or bad is hard to gauge. From where I’m sitting, anything that increases the chance of a lot of new players sitting at the tables is a great thing, so while I’m still torn, reasoning seems to tilt me towards approving of the idea.

Gut vs. reason. I hate it when that happens. Fortunately, I can’t do anything about it whatsoever, so all I really need to do to find piece of mind is just put my feet up and wait to see how it plays out.

I took off, hurriedly, from the office at shortly past 11am on Friday. The plan was to pick up Lori, go for a quick lunch, and then drive to Stockholm/Arlanda airport, a 2.5 hour drive. The flight to London City Airport was to leave at 4:20, so we had time - but not loads of it. The drive went fine though,without much traffic surprisingly enough, but I guess we beat the Friday rush hour by just a tiny margin.

We made the BRILLIANT move of checking in online before we left and only taking carry-on luggage, so once we were at the terminal, there was no waiting in line whatsoever - which rocks. I hate airport lines. I hate the people in airport lines. They hate me back, I presume, and quite frankly, we’re all just best off if I don’t stand in them. Having lost my precious Star Alliance Gold membership, the one that lets me check in at the Business Class counter, online check-in and carry-on luggage is the next best thing. If not better.

After an uneventful flight, albeit it an hour delayed, we got on the short train to Tower Hill, which was just a short walk from the hotel where we stayed. While in transit between the airport and the hotel, we learned that Debi - Dakota-xx in the forums - had given me the wrong phone number to her cell phone, but the owner of the wrong number kindly texted me back, “U TEXTED WRONG NUMBER.” Met up with Debi and Joe (Debi’s husband, the one who held the camera in the above picture) in their hotel room, waited a short while for Tracy and Tenbob to show up, and then went to the hotel restaurant for a late dinner.

Now, my headache started when on the flight. It had been a long week, and I guess I was tired and had been slightly stressed during the day. I had to leave work in the middle of something (hurriedly trying to finish it before I left, but failed and had to very quickly improvise and leave instructions for some coworkers on how they could continue on what I didn’t have time to finish) and then worrying ever so slightly about the drive to the airport. Also, were out late on Thursday night and didn’t pack until we got home, so nagging feeling that I had forgotten something - which I had; camera, noise cancelling headphones and painkillers.

All-in-all, a fairly stressful day and it ended with me going 11 hours without eating or drinking, by the time we sat down for dinner. I guess it all caught up with me and I was simply exhausted and very nauseous as a result when food was finally served. I had one tiny bite of a pretty expensive chicken before making my excuses and going upstairs to crash in the bed. I made sure, while explaining that I had to call it a night, to point out that I wasn’t normally this quiet. Lori thought it was funny that I was fretting about the idea that people might mistake me for shy.

The next morning, Lori gets up at 7:30 and heads down for breakfast alone, while I sleep for another hour. Once I get down, there’s still no sight of the other four but I presumed they had hit the pubs after I went to bed (an assumption that, needless to say, was correct) and that they might not be all too energetic in the morning. We meet up, all of us now, Chris (Dorkus Malorkus), Irexes with wife (Anne) and the six of us already there, outside of the hotel at about 11:30am and the weather was BEAUTIFUL! Perfect day, about 20 degrees centigrade, barely a cloud on the sky, and we head off to a nearby pub for lunch.

Lunch is over with pretty quickly, and as quickly, I discover that in terms of meeting relative strangers that I’ve so far only known through text-only communication online, I had hit the jackpot. These were all nice people, funny and relaxed to be around with. Having met online acquaintances in real-life before, I know that this is not something you can really expect, much less a group as fun to be around as this one.

While the three present moderators (Dorkus Malorkus, Rex and Dakota) take my suggestion of randomly banning someone under consideration (I suggested Lo-Dog) just because they could, we headed out of the pub and walked across the street to the Tower of London. The guided tour took about an hour, and we spent about another hour strolling around and checking out the crown jewels and the armory, before we felt the ever-so-familiar sensory overload that inevitably comes when you’re spending time in a museum looking at too many old things at once. I had an acute case of it in the Vatican museums; this was not quite as bad but it was getting there. There are only so many swords, pikes, cannons and full plate armors that I can look at before I get a bit weary.

Once outside, we circled up and stood silent for a few moments, all of us waiting for someone else to suggest what to do next.

Tenbob said the immortal words.

“Go for a pint, then?”

…

We headed for Covent Garden later in the afternoon, with the basic idea of strolling around and eventually find a place to have dinner. The restaurant we settled for (sort of randomly, what else) ended up being quite possibly the restaurant with the weirdest decor I’ve seen. And I’ve travelled to a lot of countries and seen a lot of places. The principle design idea, as far as we could gather, was “opera,” complete with velvet curtains and small balconies, musical instruments books and vases lining the walls and niches, colorful paintings lining the walls, and… Well, there was apparently very explicit paintings in the women’s bathroom. Lori took pictures using my cell phone, but they didn’t turn out that great so the details are kinda lost. I’ll see about posting them later.

After seeing Chris off (he had to make a train back home), we made a stop at a pub near Leicester Square that had the benefit of eight seats available next to each other, but the drawback of very loud music. Now, for a personal reflection.

I’m a decent English speaker. I’ve always been pretty good at languages, but living with an American woman for five years - and we only speak English to each other - has propelled me from “okay” to “could probably pass for an American if not put under very intense scrutiny.” But there’s something to be said about that, and it’s this: I can speak fluently, because I can choose which words I want to use. I don’t have anywhere near the vocabulary of a native speaker, and definitely not instantly accessible to me. If I’m reading a text, there are very few words that I don’t know what they mean, but reading them and hearing them are a different matter, especially when they’re delivered at a fast-paced conversational speed. Still, I have virtually no problems understanding and participating in a conversation - with Americans.

And so I want to apologize to the gang that participated. I spent a decent amount of the night smiling and nodding, not particularly following what was going on. I wasn’t really sure what the proper etiquette would be, but I figured that,

a) I don’t want to have to ask Tenbob to repeat everything he said three times just for my sake, when he’s in the middle of a story and everyone else is following and enjoying it, and

b) I don’t want to sit with a blank stare on my face, because that might lead others to think I was uninterested or in a bad mood.

So I smiled and nodded. Laughed at times where it seemed appropriate. And desperately tried to keep up with the conversation. That must have made me seem weird at several times during the evening, especially when I notice that I’m suddenly addressed and expected to react to something. I smiled and nodded and secretly crossed my fingers for that to be an appropriate response and that I wasn’t just asked how often I had been to England before.

We left the noisy bar after a couple of rounds and headed back to the hotel bar, which would allow people to drop off in case they got tired (at least two of us weren’t feeling great) without having to get on the underground by themselves on a Saturday night. Sitting in the hotel bar until it closed, and a little while still after that, we talked, laughed, and laughed some more.

I won’t give you samples of the conversation (but go ahead and assume we were talking about you), except for two parts:

1. We toasted to not being professional poker players and staying that way, and
2. We decided to make it an annual event.

I don’t know how big my chances of getting there next year will be, given that I’ll hopefully be the proud father of a 6 month old by then, but if there’s a way, I’ll try to find it.

So, to Debi, Joe, Liam, Tracy, Chris, Paul and Anne: Thanks for coming to meet us! I had a blast and can’t wait to do it again. This time, I’ll perhaps try to watch some Irish movies without subtitling to see if that’ll prime me for more than just smiling and nodding.

/FP

But tonight, I played poker. A whooping 600 hands, which might not sound like a lot to some of you, but it’s hard for me to find the time nowadays. Unfortunately for me, this means that since I’m forced to find windows for poker, I might not always be at my best when I actually get to play, but play anyway. Such was tonight. I opened up 8 tables, and almost immediately realized that my brain wasn’t capable of following the action. I decided to close a few, and did so - but grudgingly. I didn’t run into many interesting hands, but this is probably to a large extent because my brain wasn’t thinking clearly and so even if interesting situations presented themselves, I probably ran on autopilot. Whether or not I manage to finish my goal of 10k hands this month is still not certain. I have a little over 7k hands played, so it’s far from impossible, but time… Time isn’t on my side.

I did snap off a pretty big bluff with third pair, though, which is always nice. I make a lot of those hero calls, lately, and I rarely seem to get them wrong. Either I’ve been lucky, or I’m pretty good at sniffing out bluffs. Or maybe both.

That said, I want to demonstrate a fairly common mistake at the $25NL tables that I play: The weird over-the-top protection raise on a dry flop.

Effective stacks are usually short, let’s say $12. A few limpers, and I raise on the button to $1.25. One limper calls, the other folds. The pot is $3.

Flop comes 9-4-4. The first limper goes all-in for his remaining $10.75.

Every time I’ve called one of these massive overbets, it’s either been a hand like T9, or it’s been a medium pocket pair. Here’s the mistake: I’m not likely to fold a better hand. I’ll probably fold medium pocket pairs myself, stuff like 55-88, but then the overlay is pretty small for him, and he definitely doesn’t need to risk that much to run a bluff against a hand like that.

Also, if I have AK or any other worse hand than top pair, I’m not continuing anyway. Making this huge overbet only entices calls from hands that beat him (e.g. overpairs) and folds out hands that are weaker than his. It’s a hugely -EV play.

If you’re bluffing, make the smallest possible bet that will get the job done. If you’re protecting, same thing. Pushing all-in when the only hands that will call you have you dominated is a serious mistake.

In other news, Iggy actually wrote something that looks like a freshly hatched über post. Although it felt like a bear coming out of hibernation, stretching and yawning and not being quite its agile and deadly self, it showed potential. I’m proudly thinking that maybe, just maybe, I had some small part in waking the bear.

Oh, and this weekend is the London meet-up with various CardsChat people. I’m very excited, and trip report will certainly follow as soon as we’re back.

Jon has a lot of politicians on as guests, and it seems to me quite a few of them have written books. All of three remaining presidential candidates, for instance, and quite a few of the ones who dropped out - or maybe even all of them? So while I’m sitting there watching one of them promote their books on family values or what their dad used to be up to or whatever else it is they’ve written about, I ask myself “when did you find time to write it?”

I’m not American, so I have no say in how senators spend their time, but it seems to me that if I elect someone, I’d rather they spend their time doing whatever it is politicians should be doing, than writing a book. Or do the proceeds from the books - that I’m pretty convinced was written chiefly on government computers, on government time - go to the state they’re from, or something like that? Or do they take a pay-cut from the senate equal to the income they get from the book?

The first time this came up for discussion was when there was a big fuss about how the new Democratic house/senate leadership demanded that sessions actually started on Mondays and ended up Fridays (instead of starting Tuesday afternoon and ending Thursday morning so that the poor congressmen didn’t have to actually be at work on Monday morning or work at all on Fridays) and they got a lot of crap about how they were trying to destroy the senators’ family lives or whatever. It seems to me that if you’re a family man from Oklahoma who wants to spend time with your kids, don’t take a fucking job in Washington DC.

And don’t you dare complain about that change while simultaneously promoting a book that you wrote during work hours.

Grrr.

/FP

PS. This hypocrisy presented to you in this particular blog was written during work hours. DS.

I used to do that, to some extent. I used to solve the riddle that I knew how to solve, so to speak. I didn’t know what to do if the opponent was just a typical $1/$2 LHE loose/passive player, but if he was a rock, then continuation betting was sure to be right! But when we only answer the questions we already have the answer to, we don’t learn anything new. It’s vitally important for our own self-improvement that we tackle the questions that we find uncomfortable, the ones where we have no idea what we’re doing and we’re really stumbling in the dark. THAT is the interesting territory, andTHAT is where we should strive to be.

If the decision is easy for you to make when the opponent is super tight, try analyzing the hand from the view point of your opponent being super loose. And then try somewhere in the middle. See what you end up with.

Cigars for everyone!