Book Discussion: Theory of Poker, chapters 8-10

The value of deception - compare to the fundamental theorem

Win the big pots right away - how does this affect your strategy?

Free cards - risk vs. reward

We're getting to some juicy stuff now!

Why is the value of deception (in regards to the fundamental theorem) highly reduced when it comes to bad players?

Discuss!

NOTE: Please do not quote the book. This thread is to help broaden the understanding of the book, not rip off the copyright of it. Feel free to discuss, but try doing so without infringing on David Sklansky's and 2+2 Publishing's intellectual property rights. Thank you.

Obviously if you decieve someone, you force them to think you have something you don't...and it makes them play differnetly than how they would if they saw your hand...in otherwords, you gain...

Here's something slightly ot though, maybe should be in the last discussion...but Given that you know you're opponent has a made hand...say a set of aces, and you've got a gutshot straight..you'd fold that if you had seen the hands (if you weren't getting 11-1 odds or so...and of course there are no implied odds since if you make your straight you opp folds, since he can see the hands too)...however, lets say you correctly read him on a set of aces, and are drawing to a gutshot....would you make that play say with 10-1 odds and implied odds etc if you had seen the hands? I say no, because the pot odds tell you not to... so if you make a call outside of the pot odds, you're opponent will gain, even if you catch and break him... am I right?

Let's say that the pot odds you're being offered are close, but on the short end (like you said, 10-1). If you KNOW your opponent's hand (set of aces), I think it's definitely a winning move to call a bet. With a monster like that, he will surely lose at least another big bet, if not two, if you hit your straight.

Look at the "worst case" scenario, where only one of your hole cards help the straight, like this:

He has AA
You have K4
On the board, you have AJT 9

The pot is offering you 10-1 - you should call. If you hit your straight (a queen), it will not be "hidden." In fact, it's pretty obvious that you could have a straight. But look at it from his point of view: If the queen falls on the river, he may check, you bet - and he will be getting 12-1 on a call. He absolutely has to call here, in the rare case that you're bluffing or betting a weaker hand. So even when the straight is extremely obvious, he will still pay you off enough (an 11:th bet) to make the call on the turn worth it.

Now let's say that you have 98 instead, and the board is AT6 2. Here you easily have the implied odds to call. If a 7 comes, you will win at least one more bet, more than likely two, and quite frankly - that river could get capped, winning you 14 bets, for the price of 1.

However, it's not often you can know that you have such a strong hand against you. Your implied odds go up tremendously in the times you know that you do, though.

yes yes I know all that. MY point is when you can see all the hands face up, there are no implied odds...because if you hit your straight the guy folds - So the correct play if you saw both hands face up would be to fold your gut-shot when you're not getting correct odds to call....am I right?


I know you don't see the hands face up, but i'm just trying to create a paradox here to get people thinking.

Oh, you mean if my opponent saw my cards as well? Right, then you're perfectly correct.

Win the big pots right away - how does this affect your strategy?

Well it seems to me that it will create a little more variance in my game than I am use to. I understand that you want to try and win the big pots right away, by raising and reraising. I find that I have trouble raising with the second best hand to drive out other players. If I reraise with QQ on a board that has a K, I may drive out others but we could still have to possibly call a re-reraise from the original bettor or is this a fold at this point?
Now that we have isolated that player if the river comes and does not help us and he bets, do we fold assume this is a sizable pot 8-10BB? There seems to be no reason to reraise at this point, he's not going to fold and possibly re raise here. Getting such great odds on our bet we feel compeled to call, but at this point we know we "don't" have the best hand, we were betting the second best hand.
We have now cost ourselves 2-3 extra bets where as if we just called the original raiser we would have 1 bet commited to the pot saving us 2BB. That is a lot of bets in the long run.
Also won't observant players get on this and soon not fold to our reraises even possibly re-reraisng our bet on the turn ect..

Well, specifically with QQ against someone who has paired a K on the board - this is not a good example of when you want to raise to drive others out (because you are not helped by them folding - in fact, since your only chance of winning is to spike a Q, you want them to stay in - a set of queens is a monster).

But consider this scenario:

You have AK on a board of J-8-6, and you're second to act in a pot of five people.

First player bets - you may want to raise. Clearly, your ace-high are not likely to be the best hand, but here are some hands you'd like to fold:

A6/A8 (AJ is not going to fold)
K6/K8 (KJ is not going to fold)

... and really any other hand who may hold a trey or an eight, who - if you spike an overcard on the turn, may still outdraw you on the river.

This is how you increase your own chances of winning by raising - making hands fold that would otherwise use your outs to make even stronger hands. It has the added benefit of possibly making your hand the strongest on the table right now; the first player in the above example could have been bluffing (not likely, but hey), and all of a sudden, you made the best hand (perhaps the A3) fold!

But the pot has to be pretty big for this to be worth it, and certain conditions need to apply. It usually involves freeing up backdoor flushdraws and similar things as well (in the above example, if the flop was two hearts, your K was of hearts, and you made the ace of hearts fold, running hearts will now give you the best hand - not him).

Fpaul,
Thanks for the responce. I guess my example was not quite right. I see what you mean now with the AK example. The fact still remains that you will be raising and betting on the turn with only A high. The fact that the pot is big would only cause those to act after you with draws or a pair to call your raise due to the size of the pot. We could be creating a situation where we are just the pot sweetener.
You have played limits low enough to know that for another dollar or two, they would be willing to stay to could catch trips,2pair or a gutshot they won't fold to your raise anyway. I'm assuming that this play only works with certain table compision. It's not going to work against calling stations. Which seem to populate the low limit tables. This just seems like a long term -Ev play. The few pots you would win would have to be large to cover the lost bets when you don't make the best hand. or you could spike an ace but it gives someone after you with A8, which we know they won't fold to our raise on the turn. There for we might not make the best hand even if we do hit.
What do you think?

I've actually played hold 'em with all the drawn cards exposed! The local smoking club was having a hold 'em tournament for members, and five of us who arrived early decided to have a dry run with play money involved. Two of us knew poker hands--I think they'd played five-card draw before--but had not even played a single hand of any stud game, including hold 'em. To help them get a little practice, we played a few hands with all hole cards exposed.

Sklansky says in his book--and I can't remember the page reference--that, if everyone's cards were exposed, there would always be one mathematically correct way to play each hand. But, when you have to consider position, pot and implied odds, outs, and other things, the thought process can get so complex that you don't have time to puzzle it all out before the other players start complaining that you're taking too much time. The five of us played only about five hands in 25 minutes and spent the rest of the time discussing each player's decision.

I also think there is limited value in discussing how people would play if all cards were, in fact, exposed. Open hands eliminate not only any edge a player might have, but a significant amount of the thinking that goes into deciding what your opponent has in a real game, where you can't see his cards. IMO learning to deal with incomplete information is a huge skill Sklansky discusses in great detail, and the rest of poker can't really be separated out from it.

The Bleeder

I think that, given Sklansky's theories, a bad player would be defined as one who doesn't give any thought to what cards his opponent might have or is consistently wrong in his assessment thereof. The former kind of bad player cannot be deceived because he hasn't formed an idea of your hand in the first place. The latter kind of bad player is dangerous to deceive because, if he has the wrong idea about your hand, trying to deceive him might give him the *right* idea.

There are other ways to define bad players, of course, but I'm just addressing the Fundamental Theorem of Poker here.

The Bleeder

Xandit,

Yeah, I know what you're saying. A key point, though:

The theory behind this is not necessarily applicable to low stakes games. Most of the theory in this book actually covers the cases where people make "correct" plays, and how to make the "correct" play actually be a mistake (thereby, as per the fundamental theorem, make money). In this case, you make people fold a better hand than yours, which they wouldn't have if they knew what you had. It's a special kind of semi-bluff, you could say, where the object is not to get everyone to fold, but to get at least some hands to fold and thereby increasing your equity in the pot.

At low stakes games, you are bound to find so many players making so many mistakes that you don't need to trick them into making incorrect plays - they will happily make them anyway. This play is made in order to disguise your hand - the value of deception - and this brings us directly to the answer to my OP's question: Why is the value of deception reduced when playing bad players? Because they will make mistakes even if they knew what you had. AlwaysStuck makes a good point on this.

FP, you put it much more succinctly and far better than I did. Sometimes I get convoluted.

Many's the time I have lost my table stake to a total donkey on a streak of good luck, just waiting for his luck to turn, because I know he's going to start losing at some point. My mistake there is that *I'm* relying on luck instead of, as Sklansky advises, being at war with it.

The Bleeder

Free cards - risk vs. reward
It appears to me that if you have the best hand you should bet making your opponet pay the maximum for there hand. If you think your hand has a chance to improve due to the mutiple outs you could also bet.
It seems to me that when you have the best of it, you need to bet. As he stated, it's ok to lose one bet, but to give your opponet a chance to win the whole pot for free is bad.

no, but the chance for your opponent to draw to a straight when you have a made full house is VERY good.

Ah, but if you know he's drawing dead, you can bet enough to give him odds to draw still (essentially forcing him to pay). If he misses, you've still gotten more money in the pot. If he hits - jackpot.

Thats true, but lets say you know if you bet he folds, and if you check he checks. Then if he makes his hand, he will call and possibly raise. thats when you check.

Right, as a slowplay, essentially. We will get to that in chapter 15, but it does tie in to the free card play, in a way (or rather, it's an application of it when you have a very strong hand).

Sorry - Finally got my book last night and caught up to where we all are.

Not so much. Hands you "want to win right now" are ones that you can be outdrawn on. Such as.

You holding JJ with a 10-7-2 flop. You can be outdrawn to any A-K-Q, so you bet trying to take down this pot now. If someone incorrectly calls, you are okay with this because it is a +EV move. You just force them to either fold, or make a incorrect move (which is what you need to do every hand. Maximize winnings and minimize losses) Note that you wouldn't necessarily bet out AA in that situation if it was a rainbow flop, because you aren't scared of many cards on the turn, so you can allow someone to "catch up" without being so worried, unlike the jacks.

Another situation is where you are semi-bluffing with an open ended straight or 4flush. You want to take this pot down now, but if you are called, you aren't a huge underdog for drawing out. Also by semi-bluffing, you can create the illusion of a stronger hand and force a fold of a possible best hand.

The last situation (that i can remember) is when you are in a multi-way pot. You might be a 30% favorite, with one person as a 50% favorite and the last as a 20% favorite. You try to take down the pot now, because if the 20% favorite folds, you might possibly move up 10-15%, making it worthwhile.

Because they wont bother trying to read your hand, so representing a certain hand means nothing to them. And you pointed out the other part.