Intimidating Bets

#1 7th November 2005, 4:09 PM

Here's a great article I found that I thought might interest you. Enjoy!

Intimidating Bets, and the All-In EqualizerThe young studs of poker no longer play very much stud. The five-card and seven-card versions of that game are played with predetermined bet sizes; along with five-card draw, they were the most popular forms of poker until 20 or 30 years ago. Today the flop games have taken over: pot-limit Omaha; limit, pot-limit and no-limit hold'em; and, most of all, no-limit hold'em tournaments.

Who's winning the long green these days? In tournaments, at least, about 100 men and half a dozen women have been dramatically more successful than the average player. Most of these players are younger than 35, much like the people who dominate physical sports. John Phan, Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu, Michael Gracz, Erick Lindgren and others play many more hands than most folks, and they play them more fearlessly.

They rely on the fact that their opponent - you - is seldom dealt strong pocket cards; even if you have a big pair, it will seldom be improved by the flop, community cards shared by all the players. The young guns watch you, not the cards, as the flop hits the board; if they sense disappointment, or anything short of the serene confidence of "flopping the nuts" - gaining the winning hand from the community cards - they make an intimidating bet, even when holding a weak hand themselves.

"This is harder to do than it sounds," according to Puggy Pearson, the 1973 world champion. He was referring to the almost maniacal aggression of Stu Ungar (1953-1998), who won the World Series main event a record three times, as well as a higher percentage of major tournaments than anyone in history. "It's wired into your heart or it isn't."

Whatever organs courage and card sense may spring from, there's no doubt that testosterone is a vital no-limit ingredient. The new breed of Ungaresque pros trade on their opponents' fear of losing, muscularly leveraging the shuffle's inherent uncertainty with a relentless assault of raises. As David Mamet has noted: "The raiser puts his opponent on the defensive, seizing the initiative. Initiative is only important if one wants to win."

That said, the strongest players' edge isn't so overwhelming that average Joes and typical Tiffanys don't routinely catch a lucky run of cards and play them with panache and intelligence, winning (or coming close) in a big-money tournament. Joe Hachem and Tiffany Williamson are only two examples of relatively inexperienced players who broke through in the 2005 World Series of Poker main event.

But as the columnist Mike Sexton has noted in Card Player magazine, mere luck is no longer the greatest equalizer in no-limit hold'em; the all-in bet is.

More and more amateurs now understand that moving all-in - betting all your chips on one hand - is the most effective way of combating more skillful professionals. Like Pearson, Sexton cites Ungar, arguably the most talented player who ever lived. Watching him blitz through a table, Sexton observed: "Every hand seemed like a rerun of the previous hand. Stuey would make a raise before the flop (and win many hands right there), someone would call, and then they would fold when he continued to fire at the pot."

During a break, Sexton congratulated Ungar on how well he was playing, then added: "I can't believe those guys allow you to pick up pot after pot. I'm surprised that they call your raises and try to play with you. Why don't they just come over the top and move all in on you?" Ungar looked him right in the eye and said, "Sexton, if you ever tell anyone that, I'll kill you."

This murderous threat, however facetiously made, speaks to how devastating a countermove Ungar considered the all-in tactic to be. As long as his opponent wasn't short-stacked, or Ungar wasn't getting the proper pot odds, Ungar could call an all-in raise only when holding a very strong hand. The majority of the time, he did not.

All-in bets continue to short-circuit even the toughest pros' ability to outplay you later in the hand - after the board has paired, for example, or made a straight or flush possible. Even so, most players are still afraid to reraise all-in without the nuts or close to it, and these hands just don't materialize very often. But as David Sklansky, Dan Harrington and others have shown, the top-heavy payout structures of tournaments make an all-in reraise the correct move in a wide variety of ticklish situations - provided you have the stomach for it.

Sexton believes this tactic would make "a total novice" no worse than a 2-1 underdog in a heads-up match against the greatest no-limit hold 'em player in the world. The novice would simply have to move all in on every hand. Sexton predicted that the great player would "fold 8 to 10 times in a row and then make a stand with something like A-10 or a pair of 8's, hands that won't be a big favorite over any other. If the novice wins the hand, it's over. If not, he continues to move all in, building his stack back up."

Yet Sexton isn't the only veteran who thinks an overreliance on all-in bets makes for ugly poker, and he predicts it will foster a renaissance of pot-limit hold'em and Omaha, which both require much more ingenuity after the flop. In the meantime, however, he has written a valuable primer, "Shuffle Up and Deal" (Collins), to introduce novices to the basics of no-limit hold'em.
By JAMES McMANUS

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