Staying off Tilt in Poker with Zen

Ok, I have to admit, I stole this idea from Zen and the Art of Poker, which is supposed to be a very good book on well – Zen and Poker. For those of you who don’t know, Zen is basically the idea that you can attain peace through understanding and self-control. Now, based on what I just said, if it sounds like I didn’t actually read this book – you would be right, I haven’t. That said, I feel that I have a very good idea what the book is all about, because I personally found the ‘Zen’ poker principle before hearing about this book. Zen in Poker So what in the world does poker have to do with zen anyways? Besides weird esoteric images of far-east meditation or religion pop-up, you’ll probably be (annoyingly) reminded of all the ‘Zen in X’ books that you keep hearing about:

Zen in Cooking! Zen in Gardening! Zen in Accounting! Zen in Underwater Basket Weaving .. and well you get the idea, yeah?
So Zen, poker and tilt, how does it all fit?

It all fits because unless you are extremely well balanced (mentally) or are an emotional zombie, you will go on tilt at some time playing poker. For beginning players especially, when you are learning correct poker only to have people beat you with incorrect poker, tilt can be a major factor in your game.

Zen comes in, because learning to deal with tilt, or rather, the cause of tilt is an exercise in self-control coupled with mental understanding of the situation. You can either learn to control your tilt or learn to stop tilt at the root – which is where Zen comes into play.

Tilt: Is it in you?

One misconception people have is that tilt is turning into the Hulk and smashing things to itty bitty pieces when you get angry:

“HULK RIVERED? HULK AAAAANGRY!! HULK SMAAAAASH!!!” (as the tilt-o-wheel goes off)

But the thing about tilt is that even if you don’t show anything on the outside, you can still be suffering on tilt from the inside. What this means is that even if you’re not acting like the hulk, if you feel like you want to be smashing things, you still have major tilt issues – but just don’t show it.

The problem with tilt of course is that it distracts you from optimal play – which most of players are NOT doing even when they aren’t on tilt. Even when players are fully aware of what they are doing, they’ll call down a hand when they know they are beat – but they just can’t bear to laydown their hand.

What tilt does is amplify your hasty decision making and put you in a “I want to get him back”, “Fuck it, I don’t care” or “I’m going to push my way around” attitude. So, even if you’re not smashing things on the table, you’re pushing yourself to make wrong plays in crucial situations. You don’t have to be a pot splashing maniac to be on tilt – because if you make any play that costs you a bet that you could have saved, that’s good enough to be on tilt.
Identify the cause of tilt?

Here is where Zen comes in. When I ask you to identify the cause of tilt, what is your response?

* 1. Losing a lot of money on a big hand
* 2. Being rivered by a fish
* 3. Losing a hand where I was the winner
* 4. Playing correctly and still losing

All of these are reasons for going on tilt, but only #4 really addresses the issue of the cause of tilt. The reason you go on tilt is because even though you played to the best of your abilities and played what you thought was correct poker, someone else managed to beat you. Of course, that’s quite unfair when you think about it, right? Which in turn, makes you angry. “He was a 7:1 underdog and he should have known by the way you were betting, but called anyways!” you tell yourself. But if you re-think through your point, you’ll realize that: Yes, your opponent had no idea he was the underdog, otherwise he wouldn’t have made the call!
Zen Lesson #1: Understand your opponent instead of blaming him

Let’s say ou were a History major and asked your friend what year Columbus founded America, you wouldn’t smack him in the head if he replied “Uh… 1812″ would you? No you wouldn’t! Why? Because he’s not a history major and doesn’t have the foggiest on the correct answer. This very simple concept in empathy (looking at things through the eyes of someone else) should help you understand why you shouldn’t get angry at your opponent.
Golf and Tilt

To hit the point home again, imagine if YOU are doing something that you enjoy only as a hobby – let’s say golf. You’re swinging away on the greens and make a lucky hole in one. You’re really happy, but a pro-golfer comes by and tells you that your swing was awful, your clubs are second rate and that you don’t deserve to be playing golf. You’d get pissed in a hurry and tell them to go shove it – and for good reason, you’re just here to have fun! You don’t give a rats ass about good form, because dropping $20 for a weekend of golf is your idea of a good time.

So, before berating other players at a table, stop and remember that almost everyone at the table is just looking to have fun. You’re one of the few serious ones or aspiring pros. So, act like a professional and realize that it’s completely pointless to blame people for mistakes they A) don’t realize and B) don’t care about. They are here to have fun and it’s not your right to spoil it.
Zen Lesson #2: There is no revenge in poker, just karma

Most of the advice you will get about tilt is to remember that it’s a long term game. If you read inbetween the lines, what the advice is really saying is either: that bastard will bust out eventually or you will win eventually. What’s wrong about both of these modes of thinking is that it still implies feeling sorry over the fact that you had a bad beat.

The problem however, is that line of thinking (however logical) is flawed in terms of controlling tilt. As long as you keep thinking that you should be sorry for yourself after every bad beat – you’ll still be tilting. You don’t want to be feeling sorry for yourself period if you want to get off tilt.

To illustrate, if you just had your car stolen and the policeman told you “Oh don’t worry, he’ll eventually be caught down the road.” That doesn’t make you feel better, does it? No it doesn’t, because you still want to catch that punk and give him some five-fingered medicine. But the fact is, you can’t.

You just simply have to man up to the fact that your car is gone and no line of wishy-washy “oh but he’ll pay in the future!” thinking is going to make you feel better, even if it is true. You need to face it now and get over it. Man up. You lost. Suck it up and move on.
Zen Lesson #3: Give up control

Before you watch Rounders for the umpteeth time and convince yourself that poker is a skill only game, remember that it wouldn’t be gambling if there wasn’t luck involved. World Series of Poker champions have been made by the river, so don’t think that you’re special when it comes to getting a bad beat. You lost $20, $50, $100 big ones? Boo hoo. Try losing $400,000 and a bracelet. It’s still a game that is dicated by luck – and don’t you forget it.

Try to think of poker in this way: Luck is a mountain, poker is a big boulder and you are skill, running along the boulder trying to move it to avoid smashing into trees as it rolls down the mountain. No matter how hard you try, you can only adjust the boulder so much to avoid hitting trees. Sometimes the trees are just ahead and there’s nothing you can do, while other times you can barely avoid a hit if you try with all your might.

If you finally mastered this boulder game, you would eventually realize that there is only so much you can do, while the rest is up to fate. It’s futile to try and control that which you can’t. All you can do is position yourself in the best spot possible and hope for the best. Accept it. Really.

Just. Let. Go.
Zen Lesson #4: Using Zen to find your source of anger
Brain and Zen

This is the most important lesson. When you try to get over tilt, you are basically forcing your left brain (logic) to tell your right brain (emotion) why it shouldn’t be pissed off. But no matter how much you mentally fight yourself, you’re trying to surpress emotions instead of addressing them. What you really need to be doing is stopping your emotions at the source.

Your emotional center acts up as a response to a need. If someone punches you in the face for example, your reaction goes along the line of:

1. Physical: Flinch, close your eyes
2. Subconscious: Recognize a threat
3. Mental: Analyze how to respond to threat
4. Emotional: Become angry or fearful
5. Biological: Adrenaline rush, get ready to fight or run

The way this applies to tilting is poker, is by understanding the order in which tilt takes place. By taking time to examine your own thoughts (thinking about how you think), you can use Zen principles to break down exactly what you are going through during tilt:

1. Mental: Observe opponent rivering you
2. Mental: Realize you had a better hand than your opponent before the river
3. Mental: Realize you played correctly, while your opponent played incorrectly
4. Subconscious: You are accustomed to being rewarded when you do things correctly
5. Subconscious: You were not rewarded
6. Subconscious: This is not normal
7. Subconscious: This is not ‘fair’
8. Subconscious: Unfairness is resolved through conflict
9. Emotional: You need to prepare for conflict
10. Emotional: You need to become aggressive
11. Biological: Increase heart rate, release adrenaline, tense up the body
12. Mental: TILT
13. Mental: Recognize that you are getting angry
14. Mental: Realize that you need to stop getting angry
15. Mental: Fight against emotion and subconscious for control

We can see by this deconstruction that tilt comes up because of how an your subconscious reacts to an ‘unfair’ situation. This reaction is literally ingrained in most of us, as our biology, society and economy is based on reward conditioning. Everytime you are rewarded, our brain maps out a path on how to receive that reward, so it’s really inescapable. So, when you don’t get rewarded when you expect to, the brian sees this as an uncertain situation or situation that appears to violate the mental rules you have in place. Thus, the brain sees this uncertainty as confusion, which leads to a reaction of anger or fear.

To make yet another analogy, if your work suddenly decided to dock your pay for no reason, you would be up in arms because it’s obviously uncalled for (unfair). Unless you are a weak or timid person, your body will react in the appropriate way to deal with the situation. Just like most guys need a beer or two before hitting on a hottie at the bar, you need to get a bit riled up before you go mouthing off at your boss.

So, they key point here is that by analyzing your own mental train of thought and subconscious train of thought, you will realize that your body is reacting in a way that it is designed to. What you need to do, is intercept your thought processes at #4 and realize that you will not be rewarded in the same way in poker as other activities in your life. By reworking your thought processes at steps #4 and #6, you will stop the progression toward tilt and keep the game solely mental, instead of emotional.

To deal with #4 – you need to toss out the window your expectations of being rewarded in poker. You need to realize that there is no guarantee of being rewarded when you do things correctly in poker. Lose that mental hump you have where you are actually expecting something for doing things the right way. It doesn’t happen in poker. So dig deep… and go back to that inner child in you where you were rewarded a cookie by your teacher for reciting the entire alphabet in front of the class. Now replace that cookie with a solid smack to the head. That’s poker. Get it?
Zen Lesson #5: Learn from your defeats

On another note, many players will find themselves blaming their opponent for their own bad plays and go on tilt as a result. I see this often on the forums, with people blasting other players for outdrawing them when their opponent had the pot odds to do so. So some things you should ask yourself about each ‘bad beat’ you have should be:

* Did I completely count how many outs my opponent had?
* Did I make it incorrect pot odds for him to call?
* Did I try to bluff out a calling station?
* Was this really a bad beat?

In any game, you will find that the best players get angry just like everyone else from time to time. The thing that is different from the elite players however, is that they will always analyze their own play over and over, asking themselves “What did I do wrong?” or “How do I prevent that from happening again?”. It’s a different mentality than the average player, because the top players always put the blame to themselves first, rather than their opponent. The reason they do this is because you can’t improve on yourself if you’re not willing to admit fault first.

In many cases, you will find that you did play correctly of course. But in those times where you played incorrectly, if you cannot figure out that the problem lies with you, then you will never be able to mature as a poker player (or in any other of life’s endeavors) for that matter. Self-reflection is one of the key principles to Zen.
Conclusion and Summary

So to summarize:

1. Do not blame your opponents for things they do not know – that is wrong
2. Accept your bad beats straight up and don’t mull over them
3. Give up control and let fate run it’s course
4. There are no cookies in poker
5. Learn from your mistakes to make yourself a better player

Lastly, if you liked this article, then you should read more about Zen or meditation sometime. You can solve a lot of your own problems just by using this same process of internal dialogue; which comes naturally through meditation. Accessing your subconscious allows you to see what is really brewing under the surface of your brain. You’d be surprised at what you’ll find there.

A Few Things to Think About – by Hogan24

by Hogan24 on 2/9/2005 22:55

How’s it going everyone?  Quick update since my last blog:  I’ve been trying to get in as many tourneys as possible lately but this full time job stuff is starting to wear me down…it has however been up and down to say the least.  I know that I’ve been being impatient because I haven’t been playing as much and as soon as I stop pressing I know things will turn back around.  I’ve been trying to build up some TEC’s to get in the Aruba tournaments cheaply and playing a lot of limit on the side to try and keep a couple of bucks in my account.  Anyway, last week I played in the $100 buy-in, $17k guaranteed and the $200 buy-in, $65k guaranteed tourneys on Ultimate Bet.  I managed not making the break either time after both times being seated at crazy-aggressive tables and getting caught up in all the stupidity.  That’s just not my style; I got away from my game and was out quickly because of it. In the $200 tourney I finally caught a halfway decent hand and considering the action at the table, I wanted to see the flop when I was dealt pocket tens. The flop was 8 high and after the raiser bet I went over the top.  Then another guy behind me went all in and caught his flush draw which just made me sick.  I didn’t think I would run into something like that so early in a larger buy-in tourney, but I suppose if a donkey wins a satellite or makes a good salary, that it doesn’t mean he has a winning strategy. Taking that beat got me started on thinking about some of the dumb moves that I see people make over and over and over in the early rounds of tournaments.  Once I started brainstorming, I came up with about 10 to 12 common mistakes…then decided to drop a few and combine a few and narrowed them down to these three.  Now this may not be everyone’s personal top three because people make all kinds of crazy moves all throughout tournaments, but just possibly what I see most often that get people in lots of trouble and cost them mounds of chips. #3:  Calling raises and/or raising from the blinds I will use the blind structure on Ultimate Bet for my example because it is the site I am most familiar with.  In the first hour of a tournament you have 4 levels of blinds: 5/10, 10/20, 20/40, and 30/60.  If you play 60 hands in an hour then that’s 15 hands at each level, and with 10 people at a table, your big blind will come around 1.5 times at each level per hour. Now if you didn’t follow all of that, then just know this; if you were to call every minimum raise during that first hour, it would cost you 205 extra chips on top of blind.  Out of your 1500 starting chips, that’s 13% of your stack gone because you played every raise from the blinds – and that’s just a minimum raise.  A 3X raise would cost you 280 extra chips, 19% of your original stack, and a standard 4X raise would cost you an extra 390 in chips, 26% of your entire starting stack…and that’s not even mentioning how far behind you possibly are calling a raise just because you already have money in from the blind.  Another thing that I see often is when people raise a very small amount from either of the blinds.  I completely understand the concept of building a pot with an average hand per chance it should hit, but I also understand that that is for the most part, a limit poker strategy.  I don’t believe that a lot of people are raising to try to build a pot either.  A lot of the prize pool builders (PPB’s) are raising because they have something like A9 suited…and since the PPB’s don’t fold aces and don’t fold suited cards, by-god they’ve got the best of both worlds!  Therefore, they figure they might as well raise it up–but only from 20 to 40.  They wouldn’t want to push anyone out considering the monster they’re holding! I know that some people also raise from there with small and medium pocket pairs.  However, in that situation, you either want to raise enough to get some/all of your opponents to fold, or check your big blind.  If you raise just a small amount so that everyone that had originally limped in still calls your raise, then you are making a double mistake.  First, your raise is obviously telling everyone at the table that you have some kind of above average hand.  And second, if you are raising from the blinds, after the flop hits you are stuck in the worst position at the table, having to act first with a mediocre hand that you’ve tried to take the lead with by making a less than intimidating pre-flop raise.  (Hmm, that’s almost a full page of material on just the blinds…and I didn’t even mention defending the blinds or playing against the blinds.) Hmmm, anyway…. #2:  Bluffing/Draws I am putting these two together because they are very similar in concept for the idea I will simply explain.  Whether you are bluffing just trying to pick up a pot or calling off chips trying to hit a straight or a flush draw, you are essentially doing the same thing; putting chips into a pot without a real hand. I had been playing poker for a while online before I started to get into the tournaments, and when I did first try my hand at tourneys, I was clueless.  I didn’t give a second thought to my opponents or position.  In one of the earliest tournaments that I remember doing well in, with about 75 or so people left I was in first place with 80k in chips and the guy in second only had about 30k or so.  To make a short story even shorter, it paid 40 spots and I didn’t even make the money.   There towards the end, I assume I just stopped hitting the draws I had hit earlier when the blinds were smaller.  When they got bigger and I was missing my draws, I was out before I even knew what had happened. I can’t really give many examples on bluffing or how to play a draw, because they all depend on where you are at in the tournament, your opponents, your stack, along with other factors. All I can suggest is this: if you are losing a lot of chips in these kinds of situations, try to play an entire tournament without bluffing or chasing.  I know that a lot of people say that winning in NL is all about bluffing, but I am just throwing this out there as a suggestion.  Make sure that you are getting value out of your big hands and aren’t wasting chips on your bad ones and I would bet that you’ll finish higher on average than when you were a bluffing and chasing machine. And #1 by far and away: Emotional Attachment This is the one that makes experienced players just point and laugh; and what gets your name added to countless buddy lists if you’re a cash game player.  What I mean by emotional attachment is not being able to fold what might have been a good starting hand when you are obviously beaten, smoked, torched, and just outright flattened.  It sounds so simple but if you have been playing for any length of time you have probably seen it hundreds of times…someone tries to be sneaky and limps in with kings and can’t fold when an ace hits the board.  This is the same guy that can’t fold AA with 9876 on the board.  Oh yea…and it is 100% ok to fold AK and AQ after a 9 high flop and someone bets huge in front of you or raises huge behind you.  I see more people lose countless amounts of chips in these situations, and it just absolutely makes my head spin.  If you’ve got AK after a bad flop, all you’re holding is ace high. AK is not AA! Emotional attachment goes right along with chasing your draws, and playing connecting cards and suited cards….oh my god suited cards.  I don’t know if anything gets people in more trouble than playing suited cards.  The odds of hitting a flush or four to the flush preflop with any two suited cards is around 12%.  12%!!!  And if you flop 4 to a flush, your odds of actually hitting the flush from there are only 1 out of every 3 times.  Therefore, if you flop 4 to a flush, you go from 12 to 33 percent…good luck banking on that strategy for big wins.  But yet some people still are just convinced that suited cards make their hand stronger.  For all those people that limp in under the gun with K4 and Q5 suited, when you flop a K or Q, the fact that your cards are suited does NOT make your hand stronger.  I’m done talking about this because if you’re a suited card player and those couple of sentences aren’t enough to at least make you think a little bit, then I want you at my table as quickly as possible.  (Side note:  Playing a ring game in St. Louis a few months ago I told the guy next to me–just in random conversation–that I would have hit a flush with the J4 I mucked preflop.  I swear he looked me straight in the eyes in total disbelief and said, “You don’t play your suited hands?”) I could have talked a little bit more about some of these ideas but for god sakes that’s enough freakin’ typing for now.  Maybe you can take a few of the ideas I threw out there and make a few adjustments to your own game and hopefully see improvements.  Maybe not.  I just wanted to give everyone a few numbers to look at and a few new things to think about if you are new to the game.  As always if you see me at the tables feel free to stop in and say hi.  Good luck to all of you and see ya around.

Make Sure Time is on Your Side – by EpicATC

by epicatc on 6/25/2006 01:03

When we’re playing cards, live or online, it’s our job as poker players to manage the information we give out. We want to maximize the information we take in, and minimize what we give off. We try not to fall into predictable patterns with our betting, or let our words or demeanor give away hints at our hand. But one of the vital pieces of information in an online poker game is often forgotten. I’m talking about timing.Now, when I say timing, I don’t mean knowing the right times to shift your game up a gear, or knowing at which stage of the tournament to take a flip or not. Those are certainly important, of course, but I’m talking about timing in the literal sense. There aren’t many tells available online. We can’t see our opponents nervous habits, their ticks and twitches, their concealed frowns and grins. We base our decisions on repeated actions like betting patterns relating to situations, like how somone usually plays a certain street or certain type of hand. However, there’s another free piece of information concealed in those actions – the speed at which an opponent bets. While good players usually remember to vary their betting patterns, they rarely pay attention to the speed with which they act. This can give you a useful advantage. For example,I find that many looser players will usually insta-bet on a continuation bet or outright bluff if they’re up against a tight player. If they had a hand, they’d probably take a second or two to think about it. On the other hand, a good player with a made hand will often get excited and come out firing off instant bets each street. As always, you have to use the showdowns you’ve seen to figure out which betting speed corresponds to which type of hand. But once you do, it’s a valuable bit of information that’s available to you every hand and which most opponents never think to change. Here’s another, more commonly-known way to utilize bet speed. Let’s say you’re in the SB, with a weak/tight player in the BB. You limp, and he instachecks – literally, you can tell he marked the check/fold box before you even acted. If the flop comes high, bet out. You’ll usually take the pot away. He could have waited a few seconds to see what you did, but he gave away the strength of his hand early out of laziness and essentially told you that pot was yours. Is this 100% accurate? Of course not. But it’s another useful bit of information in your arsenal, and as a tell, it’s accurate more often than not. How about a situation where mismanaging your bet speed can lose you a hand? Here’s one from a few days ago. I was playing a SNG, and I limped with 99 on the button (for reasons specific to that game), the SB folded, and the BB checked. He was pretty loose, but once you reraised him, he was prone to laying down hands that he bet big with. The flop came Q34 and he led out for the size of the pot, which was decent sized since the blinds were big. I looked through the hand histories, and upon spotting his pattern of betting hard with marginal hands and then folding to raises, and considering that getting him to laydown his hand would pretty much lock up second place for me, I moved in over the top. He though for a long time and called with Q5. Now, had I quickly pushed in there, he probably would have folded that hand – we’ll never know. But since I took 30 seconds to look through hand histories, it gave off the impression that I didn’t have the Q and didn’t know what to do. Mismanaging my bet speed busted me from that game. If I’d had KK there, though, that extra 30 seconds would’ve earned me a double-up. Here’s another way to use bet speed to your advantage: make sure to ham it up on your huge hands. IF you have a big made hand, don’t be lazy: act. Pretend. If you have a hand that’s a relative lock, like a flopped boat or flush, realize that getting all excited and acting too quickly can easily scare an opponent off. Literally, the speed at which you bet your big hands could easily mean the difference between a bubble and a win. You need to get value for your huge made hands at any cost. So let 15 or 20 seconds run, make it look like you’re thinking, especially if it’s after they bet at you. How do you defend against giving off information with your bet speed? Well, one good excercise is to practice waiting a set amount of time before you act on any hand. Say, 10 or 15 seconds. Set up your phone stopwatch to time out a certain number of seconds, and get used to always waiting that long to act. It certainly can’t hurt, in the long run, to cut out one source of information that you’re giving your opponent. This is a technique that Andy Beal used against the pros in his heads-up matches. In online poker, which is devoid of the physical tells available in live poker, every bit of information is magnified in value. When I first started, I was super-conscientious about my bet speed. After a few thousand games, I started to slack, as I didn’t think anyone would notice. When I whipped myself back into shape, and reminded myself that it was stupid not to do EVERYTHING in my power to win, I actually realized how much value I was losing when I got lazy with my bet speed. Don’t leave chips on the table. Make sure time is on your side.

The MTT Prize: A Mathematical Approach – by lilprog79

by lilprog79 on 5/10/2007 08:32

I have read several threads lately about people who want to hit the big prize in a MTT. I too find myself to be one of those players who has found success at the lower limits and dreams of hitting the big prize. Many of us good players will take the occasional shot during an up streak when we have played well, or perhaps when we can win a satellite. But with these big prizes come big stakes, big players, and big variance…  So just what are our chances against the big dogs? One of the problems in calculating variance and chance is a fallacy that exists in our way of thinking. If I play nine 9-person sit and goes, the common thought is that if every player was even, I would win 1 time out of those 9. In reality, though, there is actually only a 66% chance that I will win at least once in those 9 times, with all players being even. See we like to think that with a 1 in 9 chance, 9 tries will give us a probability of 9/9, but we actually have to multiply the chance of not winning (8/9) to the 9th power. This gives you .34 or a 34% chance of not winning. While this isn’t profound to some, when you compound it out to multiple entries into MTTs, the numbers can be surprising. Let’s lay out the average “good” player’s scenario. For the sake of this discussion, I am going to say that a big cash would be considered $10,000 or more. Here is the plan: I’m going to take the above statistical model and apply it to 10, 100, and 500 entries into 3 of the bigger tournaments on PokerStars. The 3 I have chosen for comparison are the Sunday Million, the Nightly One Hundred Grand, and the nightly $10 rebuy (55k guaranteed). First we need to set some numbers for these tournaments. I will aim a little high to make sure the odds err on the low side. For the Sunday Million (which varies greatly in terms of participation), I am going to go with an average field of 7000 players. This means a prize pool of 1.4 mill and 8 spots that cash for 10k or more. For the Nightly One Hundred Grand, I am using an average field of 900 players and roughly 3 spots that cash for 10k or more. For the $10 rebuy, I wanted to use the numbers at the end of the first hour, which is generally about 1400 players, and an average amount spent of $51. Now that we have these stats, I plug them into our formula, and we get some interesting results. Lets start by taking a look at the Nightly One Hundred Grand. This one plays five days a week (with a bigger one on Wednesday; we will leave that out for the sake of this model). I have personally played in 6-8 of these that I can remember, and I cashed once, which was worth twice my buy in, so I have lost money on them personally. The average player like me plays these on occasion. Let’s say you could work it out to play 10 times a year. The odds of hitting a big prize (10k or more), are roughly 3.28% or about 33-1. At first that doesn’t sound terrible for the chance of hitting the big one. But applying this same model, you could play this way for 5 years and would still only have a chance of 15% to ever win a $10k+ prize. To make matters worse, there is a 24% chance that you wont finish ITM a single time in 10 tries. Not only that—the $1650 in tournament fees would buy you 7 $215 SNG entries (with some change). The odds of not cashing in at least one of those 7 SNGS is 200-1 (this assumes all players are equal, but you get the idea). 200-1 might sound really high because you an think of times you have lost 7 straight sit and goes, but keep in mind if you played 1500 SNGS a year, this downswing would hit you several times a year. As you can see, taking 10 shots at the One Hundred Grand is not ideal for variance. Let’s step it up though. A lot of good players will use a system where they take a portion of their winnings each day and put it towards satellites for bigger tournaments. So let’s say you were a winning player who could afford to play several satellites a week, and on average you won your way into the hundred grand about twice a week, giving you about 100 entries per year. In this case, you would be taking a more serious shot. How do the numbers play out? The odds of winning our “Big Prize” increase dramatically to 28%. Is the glass half full or half empty? 28% is a lot better than than 3%, but at the same time, there’s a 70% chance that you could play for an entire year and not hit the big prize. The chance of winning the whole thing is about 10.5%. Now if you can’t cash in 100 tries, you shouldn’t be playing poker, so I won’t waste time calculating that. Again, though, you are spending $16,200 for a 28% chance to win the big prize, which is the equivalent of 76 ($215) Sit and Go’s…. If you played this way for 5 years (500 entries), your odds start to look good, with a 81.16% chance of hitting your big prize (still a 1 in 5 chance you wouldn’t hit it in 5 YEARS!!!) and a 42.64% chance of winning a tournament in that 5 years. Could you imagine playing this tournament twice a week for 5 years and not winning once??? It sounds absurd, but the odds are actually against you. Again, this is based on all players being equal; we will discuss the reality that they are not in a bit. Let’s compare these numbers to the other 2 tournaments in our model. The Sunday Million is the behemoth of Poker tournaments. Why drive hours to get to a casino for a $250,000 tournament when I can play in my underwear for 1 mill online? How do the numbers compare, though? You may be surprised to find out that your chance of winning 10k or more is actually substantially less than in the hundred grand tourneys. For 10 cracks a year, you have about a 1.14% chance of making 10,000$ or more, which is 1/3 of the shot you had in the hundred grand. The odds of winning in 10 tries come out to .14% or 714-1. So you’re spending $2,150 for a 714-1 shot at 200 grand, or about an 88-1 chance of hitting the big prize. If you were to play almost every weekend for 2 years (100 tries), the numbers are still substantially less than in the $100k. You would spend $21,500 and have a 10.81% chance of winning 10k or more once, along with a 1.42% chance of winning $200k. That means if a group of 67 people played every Sunday for 2 years, odds are that one of them would win once. In evaluating your goals, you have to ask yourself if the shot at 200,000 is worth the decreased chance of our original goal of scoring 10k or more? The Sunday Million costs an extra $53 each time, and our shot is cut in three. The 3rd tournament we have is the $10 Rebuy tournament. Again, some of these numbers are arbitrary, but we went with an average field of 1,400 people at the end of the first hour, with an average investment of $51(5 buy ins). We also calculated a starting field of about 1,600, meaning 225 will place. Because only one place pays 10 grand or more, this actually gives you the worst chance of hitting a score that big. In 10 tries, there is a .71% chance of winning and grabbing a 10k or more prize. Over 100 tries, this increases to 6.9%, and in 500 tries it’s about 30%. We can’t just look at the percentages alone, though. We also have to factor in the cost of the entries. For example, you can play 3 rebuys for the cost of one nightly one hundred grand. We would need to try 3 times as many rebuy tournaments as we do hundred grand entries in order to compare the numbers. With 10 entries, the hundred grand gave you a 3.28% chance of winning 10k or more. When we do 30 entries in the rebuy, your chances are 2.12%. Based on this, we can say that you actually have a better shot for the exact same money in the hundred grand tournament. Not only that, but if you win the 100 grand, you’re going to be taking home close to 28k, while the rebuy averages a payout of 12-14k. We already know that the numbers for the Sunday million pale in comparison to the hundred grand tournament, so if our goal is truly to cash for 10k or more, the hundred grand, statistically speaking, would be our best chance and the greatest return on our investment. As you read this, you need to determine what your ultimate objectives are. Obviously we all want to win money, but I think a lot of people are also looking for respect and the opportunity to be considered an elite player. If this is the case, I still think that cashing a few final tables in the hundred grand is going to be more obtainable and make a bigger splash in the community than getting one lucky hit in the Sunday Million. If you’re looking to win 220 grand and somehow magically retire off of it (seems kind of skimpy to me), then by all means go for the gusto. Now, moving on. All this was based on the premise that all players had an equal chance of winning the tournament. In reality, we know this to not be the case. Aside from variance that can swing in your favor or in your opponent’s favor, there simply are players that are better than others, both in general and in relation to the size of the field and/or blind structure. This is good news and bad news depending on who you are. For those of you who are better than the average player in the field, this works to your favor, while for the rest of you, it means the percentages are even worse. While a better player will up the percentages, it is not a drastic amount. At best, I would expect that a quality player could raise their percentages a point or two. While this isn’t a drastic statistical change, it can create a dramatic ROI change. How can you maximize your percentage? There are a couple ways, the first of which  is to decrease the cost of your entry with satellites. If you do so, keeping statistics of these satellites is absolutely vital. A good goal to reach for is to win entries for 70% of their value or less. There is a reason for this, and it’s simple. Generally speaking, if you can win entries consistently at 70% of their value, then when you finish in the money, you will win at least 2 more entries to that tournament (via satellite). The reason that is important is that the second way you boost your percentage is by boosting your number of entries. Part of the reason the pros win so many tournaments is that they play so many tournaments. I’m not saying that if you or I played the exact same amount that we would win the same amount, but if you think you’er going to win as many tournaments as JohnnyBax while playing in 1/3 as many as him, you’re crazy. Part of taking a shot to the bigger tourneys and prizes is finding a consistent way to generate winnings. I have my own formula of SNGs, Low level MTTs, and cash games where I can consistently win within my bank roll. With this, I can allot a certain amount to satellites and work accordingly. If this is your goal, you need to find the same. It may mean you have to grind 160 SNGs during the week to win enough money to risk some money on some satellites, so that you can get into the bigger tournaments. This also means that any time you finish in the money and win those 2 buy-ins, you should put them right back into satellites to give yourself additional opportunities. If you can sustain income and satellites, then you have a shot, rather than just a shot in the dark. Finally, you have to get to a point of comfort where there is no fear of losing and no fear of missing the bubble. Bubble play is one of the most crucial parts of any tournament, and when we play not to lose, we usually end up doing the very thing we tried to avoid. The more you can increase the number of tournaments you play, the less you will be concerned with that specific tournament. If you only play one big MTT a month, chances are you will get real nervous when you start to get close to the money because this is your one shot for the month. If you’re playing them every week or a couple times a week, you can play more fearlessly when the crucial points come, thus making the right moves instead of the scared ones….. I realize that all these numbers can be discouraging and perhaps might discourage you from taking those big chances, and in the end, that might be the best thing for you and your bankroll. If all this hasn’t scared you away, the bottom line is that out of the tournaments we’ve discussed, the Nightly One Hundred Grand is the best bang for your buck. To all of you trying to make that first big score, good luck at the tables.

ICM Calculations Part 3 – by Fox

by Fox on 5/23/2006 11:59

In part 3 I’m going to give some of the reasons that ICM’s won’t always give you a perfect answer. There are a lot of factors that an ICM can’t understand, and they can have a big effect on your strategy in a tournament situation. 1. Your skill level compared to that of your opponents. If you are a much better playerthan your opponents then a number fo thigns change. Having a big stack is slightly less valuable, having a small stack gives you much more equity than the ICM might tell you, and gambling becomes a very bad thing in most situations. Mike Matusow commenting on Phil Ivey’s play toward the end of the WSoP is a great example. He said Phil was playing too many big pots and that he didn’t need to take so many risks against these bad players. Mike was right, and Phil agreed that he should have played smaller pots and let his skill work gradually against the weak players rather than gambling so much even when he had a slight edge in the gamble. As the strogner player you want to cut down variance and take the gamble out of things. See more hands go farther into the hand, and try to avoid getting all your chips in as a small favorite when you may have a chance to get them in as a big favorite later. On the other hand if you are facing competition that is very strong and you think you are actually at a disadvantage then you want to gamble more, increase your variance, and make it hard for the more skilled players to make their skill work for them. 2. How well you play various sized stacks. I personally play a short stack very well, while my big stack game might need a little work. This means that a big stack is even less valuable to me, and staying alive to fight with my short stack is more important. 3. How wild your opponents are. If your opponents are gambling like crazy and likely to move you up a couple of money spots very soon without any risk from you then it’s a better idea to play a little more conservatively. 4. Your “M”. If your stack is fairly deep compared to the blinds, then gambling it up is not often a good choice. If your M is low then go ahead and get your chips in there, you can’t do much with them until you double or triple up anyway. There are an infinite number of considerations, but most of them have to do with how much you want to gamble right now. A good understanding of tournament play will help you use all the factors available and allow you to make wise decisions on how much gambling you want to do right now. Pay close attention to the tournament lobby and what the payouts are. Just made it into the money in a huge tourney and you have a short stack? It’s gambling time, pick some hands and go with them. I’ll see you at the final table, Fox 11 left in the same tourney and you are a medium stack? Get your foot off the gas my friend, you can’t win the tourney yet, and the money is going to get good very soon. Use those considerations when thinking about ICM calculations

ICM Calculations Part 2 – by Fox

by Fox on 5/19/2006 14:57

In part one I came up with some numbers for a few different outcomes from a specific hand. Now we’ll work with putting those numbers to work in helping us make decisions. As refresher, and to have everything on one page, I was looking at a SNG situation where our hero has K2o in the SB and the button had already folded. The chip stacks were – Button – 5,000 SB (Hero) – 10,000 BB – 5,000 For reference I did in fact leave the default settings in the ICM, with payouts of 50%, 30% and 20%. When our hero folds his SB here we found that we now have an equity of .3764 or about 37% of the prize pool. The question is whether that is the best play. Given the assumptions we made in the first article about the BB we came up with numbers for moving all-in and hoping that he folds. Because we assumed our opponent would fold 70% of the time and our equity if he folds is .3902 we can multiply those numbers and get .3902 * .7 = .27314. We’ll save that number and add it to the numbers we get when he calls. When he calls and we still win we get an equity of .45 and we need to know how often that will happen. With the estimates we came up with we think that will happen .3 (he calls 30% of the time) * .3 (we will win 30% of the time we are called) = .09. Then we find that .09 (how often this outcome will happen) * .45 (our equity when it does happen) = .0405 When he calls and we lose the hand our equity becomes .3083, and we think from our earlier assumptions that this will happen .3 (he calls 30% of the time) * .7 (he wins 70% of the time when he calls) = .21 So we get .21 * .3083 = .064743 Now we can compare the number we got when our hero folds (.3764) to the total of the numbers we got from when our hero raises all-in (.27314 + .0405 + .064743 = .378383). It looks like we have a winner! The equity when we raise all-in turns out to be higher than the equity when we fold the hand. K2o isn’t so bad after all. What we did here was detemrine the frequency of an opponent’s actions according to our best guess, and find the value of each of those actions. Let’s do an even more simplified version of this so it is a little easier to understand. Let’s say that we are in an even chip position with 5k each and we are down to 3 handed in a SNG. The river has just brought a brick, and our flush draw has missed, leaving us with a hand that has no chance of winning. The pot is 3,000 so we each have 3,500 left in our stacks. The pot is heads up, and we are first to act. Is it right to put all of our chips in on a big bluff? Let’s assume that our opponent will call us 40% of the time, and when he calls we will lose every time. We will also assume that if we check we can not win the hand. Checking gives us an equity of .2333 which we find by simply entering in the stack sizes after we give up the hand into the ICM. Raising all-in means we win the pot 60% of the time which gives us 6,500 in chips for an equity of .3649. It also means that we lose the pot 40% of the time for an equity of .2 because we will have gone out in third place and in this case third place receives 20% of the prize pool. When we add up the equity for pushing all-in we get (.3649 * .6) + (.2 * .4) = (.21894) + (.08) = .29894 Aggression has won both battles. If our assumptions about our opponent are correct then we have determined that the all-in bluff is the best choice. ICM calculations for more complex situations like a steal at a final table can get very complex, but they all follow the same simple rules. 1. What are your choices? 2. How often will your opponent have each possible response? 3. What is your equity with each response, multiplied by the frequency of that response? Add them up and you can find what the correct decision would have been. Obviously ICM calculations are too time consuming to be doing in the heat of the moment, but using them later to find the correct play will teach you a lot about the game. ICM programs are not necessary to be a very good tournament player, but for even the best players they will yield some valuable information about the game and tournament situations. There are of course many things to be considered when using an ICM that I haven’t covered here, but I’ll be covering some of those things tomorrow. Things like like the size of the blinds in relation to the stacks, your skill level in relation to your opponents, and their playing styles, all change things quite a bit. Eventually once I have all three or four articles written I’ll try to put them in some coherent order and maybe make one big useful article out of them. I’ll see you at the final table, Fox This article sponsored by PokerFox.net where we turn players into winners and winners into pros.

ICM Calculations Part 1 – by Fox

by Fox on 5/19/2006 15:08

This is a part one of a three part series. For the rest, check out Fox’s Blog. I am surprised at how rarely I see in depth hand discussions here on pocketfives. In the interest of starting a few more of those discussion I’m going to do an introduction to Independent Chip Modeling or ICM programs. Regardless of your skill level if you aren’t working with an ICM on occasion you probably should be. Before I get into the nitty gritty of working with these handy programs a quick caveat may be in order… My last article caught some flack on the boards. Some of it was deserved, but some of it was also in relation to how basic the article was. Let me say first off that if you are a serious expert in using ICM calculations and evaluating chip equity in tournament situations then I would love to have you write an article on it. I don’t use this kind of stuff nearly often enough to be an expert with it, though I know I should. If anyone has tips or hints, or wants to write a more advanced article, I’m sure the P5’s community would learn a great deal from it, myself included. An ICM is basically a tool for finding your equity in different tournament situations. Two excellent (and free) examples are my personal favorite here – ICM (a useful heads up database is also hosted on this site) and a much more widely used version here – another ICM. I honestly don’t know the math involved in writing these programs, though it wouldn’t be that hard to figure out and the writers of the two programs might share that information if you contact them. What I do know is that they work, and they are very valueable tools once you learn how to use them. I’m going to use my favorite ICM calculator in the examples if you want to follow along. The basic premise goes something like this – You have a number of options and you have an estimate of your opponent’s reaction to each one, but you need to find out which is the most profitable. I’m finding that this stuff is easier to show with examples so we’ll start with a very simple one. You are 3 handed in a SNG and on the small blind with K2o. The blinds are 500/1,000, the button has folded, and the stacks look like this this – Button – 5,000 SB (Hero) – 10,000 BB – 5,000 You have been watching your opponents closely like you always do, and because of this you can estimate that if you move all-in the big blind will only call with a hand in the top 30% of his hands. We are working on the assumption that a smooth call or a raise smaller than all your chips in a bad idea. Whether those things are true or not is debateable, but for the sake of simplicity we are assuming them to be true. Option A – Fold and give the BB your small blind. This one is easy, and it would leave the stacks looking like this – Button – 5,000 SB (Hero) – 9,500 BB – 5,500 You can plug those numbers into the ICM and get equity numbers for each player that look like this – Button – .3071 SB (Hero) – .3764 BB – .3165 Those numbers tell you the percentage of the prize pool each player can expect assuming equal skill and random distribution of the cards. Equal skill isn’t usually the case, but we’ll address that a little later. Option B – Raise all-in and hope your opponent folds. If he folds you can easily calculate the equity in the ICM once again and come up with – Button – .3099 SB (Hero) – .3902 BB – .2999 It’s interesting to note here that the button loses equity compared to when you fold even though his stack doesn’t change with either decision. This is because the more chips you have as the big stack the less chance he has to take first place and the jump between first and second is much larger than the jump between second and third. Your opponent may also call you, and if your estimate is correct he will do so 30% of the time. If he calls you have two more calculations to do. First of all how often will he win? We could debate all day about what hte top 30% of hands are here, or what your opponent might think the top 30% of hands are, but for the sake of the example let’s take a reasonable estimate that you will win the hand about 30% of the time against the hands he will call you with. We have two possible results and we can calculate the equity for each of them in the ICM as well. If we are called and win then the chip stacks look like this – Button – 5,000 SB (Hero) – 15,000 BB – 0 and when we put those numbers into the ICM we get – Button – .35 SB (Hero) – .45 BB- 0 The big blind has however taken his 20% of the prize pool and left the game, so he did not recieve 0 equity, which is why we are left with numbers that don’t add up to 100% If we are called and lose the hand the numbers look like this – Button – .3083 SB (Hero) – .3083 BB – .3833 So far all of these numbers just tell us how much equity we will have in various situations.Next we need to learn how to apply them to find out which move was correct given our assumptions about the situation, and how to do that. This article is running awfully long and I’m awfully tired, so let’s take a break here and come back to ICM calculations tomorrow. In the next few days I’ll not only tell you how you can use these numbers to learn how to make better decisions, but we’ll learn about the flaws in ICM modeling and how to adjust the numbers for things like skill levels and unique opponents. I’ll see you at the final table, Fox This article sponsored by PokerFox.net where we turn players into winners and winners into pros.

Why did I do that? – by Adam

by Adam on 4/14/2005 05:31

In my last article, I wrote about my plan to take a short break from poker.  I’d been taking some hits and losing confidence, and the last thing I need to be doing is playing without confidence.  The bad streak I was on was one of the worst I’d ever experienced, and I felt like I needed to ease myself back in, so I decided to deposit $200 into an account and just play some very small games for a few days to try and get my focus back a little.   This is a plan that can backfire—small games can be some of the most frustrating and unpredictable games out there, which may not be good for a person who has just become less convinced of the stability of poker (and rightfully so).  The advantage is, of course, that by playing the smaller games, I’m not putting myself in a position to get upset if things don’t go well, since I’m not playing for an amount of money I could really get upset about.  I figured it was the best way to go… Anyway, sometimes you find the answers where you least expect them.  I realized by my second or third $5 sit-n-go that I was impatient, irritable, etc.  I wasn’t dealing well with seeing my opponents get away with their mistakes, which is something that usually makes me smile.  I’m typically happy when a bad player gets a lot of chips, because I know that if I wait him out, I’ll end up taking them from him.  But on this day, I was just frustrated to see people going all in with QJ off or calling off their entire stack on a straight draw.  I didn’t feel like I had any chance to win any hands, which is definitely very bad—good thing I was only playing for 5 bucks! I started making some ridiculous plays, and after one of these plays, I finally had somewhat of a moment of clarity.  I raised UTG with AK and was called by the big stack on my left.  The flop came 7 high and I made a reasonable bet, which he called.  I decided he had a medium-high pocket pair (9’s-J’s) and would not bet his hand out of fear that I was stronger.  The turn card came a Q, and I checked.  He checked behind me, and the river came another low card.  Now I figured the Q was an overcard to his pair, and I knew he wasn’t that strong to begin with, so I made a big bet, which he called immediately, showing pocket 10’s. Perfect read, right?  Wrong.  I knew what he had, yes, but I didn’t apply my knowledge of the player to my decision about how to play the hand.  Some players just cannot be bluffed, and to play aggressively against them just does not make sense.  I know he’s going to call me down when I have a hand, so why waste my chips trying to push him out of pots? The answer is really just impatience.  The mistake I made, which is one so many of us often make, was wanting to win that pot right now, rather than waiting for a better opportunity.  We get tired of playing solid poker and want to push our opponents around.  Well, in some games that works, but in a $5 sit-n-go, I might as well just be throwing $5 into a slot machine.  This guy wasn’t going to fold his 10’s if the board came K J J Q Q, and I just needed to recognize this and not throw any more money into the pot until I could be sure I was ahead. This whole scenario may seem trivial to most, since we’re talking about a game that can’t be seriously considered as a viable source of income—I’d be hard pressed to find anyone making a living off $5 sit-n-go’s.  But the truth is, I run into this type of player in bigger games all the time.  They’re all over the place in $20, $30, and $50 sit-n-go’s, and I typically even find at least a few of my opponents to be playing this way in the Sunday $200 tournaments. The truth is, these fabled “calling stations” are everywhere, and if I can’t figure out who they are and be disciplined enough not to bet into them without a hand, then I know who the donkey is—it’s me.  Poker isn’t just about playing the cards.  You also need to be able to determine how your opponents will respond to your bets.  I think my bad run affected my ability to do that properly. So I’m making a note to myself to remember, regardless of what I’m playing, to be patient.  Even in a game with solid opponents who are much more willing to fold decent hands, I still need to wait for the right opportunities to pick up pots.  I took a step back after my failed bluff attempt and promised myself that if I’m going to lose any more money, it’s going to be on bad beats, not bad plays.  I can’t recoup all my losses in one hand, but if I can stay patient and consistently make the right plays, I’ll be back on the winning track before I know it.

Making the Right Read – Part II – by Adam

by Adam on 4/2/2005 05:08

I wrote an article a while back about reading opponents in online games, and I promised to write a follow up with some examples of how to apply the techniques I outlined.  That article got lost in the muck for a while, but I think it’s about time I continue on with this series. This article is going to be a lot like the “poker quizzes” that have been getting popular recently on the message boards, but its focus is somewhat different—in the poker quizzes, we typically focus on how to play cards in a given situation.  In this article, I will focus on how to translate a good read into a winning play, given the situation and the cards. These hands ARE in fact real hands that did come up for me recently, and I do describe them exactly how they occurred.  If you have feedback on any of this, I’d love to hear, so feel free to post about these situations in the Poker Discussion Forum. Situation 1 I’ve got a player I know to be tight but aggressive sitting two to my right, and he’s been raising my blind quite often.  The blinds are 200-400 with a 50 ante, and I’ve got a healthy stack of 15k, which is enough to cover the 11.5k of the aforementioned opponent.  I pick up JJ in the big blind, and sure enough, this same guy raises up to 1200.  I’m not gonna mess around with my jacks, so I bump it up to 3500.  He thinks for a couple seconds and calls my raise. Now I know this guy has been raising my blind quite a bit, but at this point, he HAS to have a good hand, right?  I give him credit for AK at the very least, and the lowest pair I think he could have is nines.  Remember, this is simply my read of the situation.  Now I have to figure out how to apply that read, and that can be the tricky part. The flop comes 943.  This is a great flop for jacks, but I’m a little uneasy.  I want to figure out right away if he’s got a bigger pair, so I bet out 4000, which is about half the pot and also half of my opponent’s remaining stack.  He thinks for about 5 seconds and then pushes all in. So what do I do? I’ve determined that he must have either AK or a pair of nines or better, so there are only two hands I have beat that he could hold, AK and TT.  Since it’s a rainbow flop, I know he’s not on any sort of draw, and I can’t possibly imagine that this solid, tight-aggressive player would be making this move with AK, since he has to give me credit for a very strong hand after my reraise preflop.  While it’s a possibility that he holds tens, I have a hard time believing it, as again, he would have to give me credit for a pair at least that high, and I know he is good enough to have a read on me as well. So I have a decision—do I fold, assuming he has nines, queens, kings, or aces, or do I call, since there’s already over 15k in the pot and it’s only 4k more.  If I call and lose, I’ll be stuck with less than 10x the big blind, but if I fold now, I’ll still have almost 20x the big blind and be able to play some. My decision is to fold, even though I’m getting nearly 4 to 1 on my call, and even though I’d be in great shape in the tournament if I call and win.  I just can’t make myself believe I’m ahead in this hand.  I feel like I’ve done everything I can at this point to feel out my opponent, and every last bit of information I’ve obtained points to me being stuck with 2 outs to win the hand—that’s about a 10% chance of winning.  It just isn’t worth it.  I will cut my losses at this point, even though I’ve lost half my stack in the hand, because there’s gotta be a better time for me to get my chips in than as a 90% underdog. Situation 2 I’m playing a $3/$6 limit game, and I’ve noticed a pattern in the play of the opponent two to my left—he slowplays every time he hits a hand!  I don’t just mean big hands, but even hands like top pair.  He’s only aggressive after the flop when he is uncomfortable about his hand. So I get dealt TJ in the small blind, and this guy raises to $6 from under the gun.  Everyone folds around to the button, who calls.  Assuming 4-way action (there’s only $16 in the pot, but I’m counting $19, assuming a call from the big blind), I go ahead and call, as does the big blind.  The flop comes AJ2.  I check, the big blind checks, and the raiser bets.  The guy on the button folds, I call, and the big blind folds.  I decide the raiser has a pair, probably as big as QQ or KK, since he raised UTG.  I think he might even have TT.  What I don’t think he has is an A, as my read on this player tells me he would check an A, hoping to check-raise. The turn comes the 4, and I decide this pot is mine–if I’m willing to work for it.  I check, he bets, and I immediately raise.  I don’t know if I’ve got the best hand here—I think it’s possible I do, and I’m fairly certain I have outs if it’s not the best, which is something that factors into my decision.  However, the main component of my decision is my feeling that this guy does not hold an ace and will fold to my raise.  He thinks for a while and calls.  I decide I’m giving up if I don’t improve on the river. The river comes the J.  Whew!  I bet out and he thinks for about 15 seconds and calls.  I pick up the pot, of course, and he mucks his hand.  I look at the hand history and see that sure enough, he had KK. So let’s analyze—what did I do right here and what did I do wrong?  My biggest mistake was that I misread my opponent.  I didn’t misread his cards—I read them perfectly.  I misread him psychologically, thinking he would fold a high pair to a check-raise if there was an ace on the board.  This is a common mistake a lot of average players and even some very good players frequently make, thinking that knowing an opponent is weak necessarily implies that they are willing to give up their busted premium starting hand. I’ve seen a lot of players bicker at another player who called them down in a similar situation with an underpair and won, saying they should have been able to fold, etc.  The truth is, I messed up and got lucky.  My read of his hand was dead on, but I didn’t accurately determine how he would respond to my bet. … There’s quite a bit of analysis that goes into applying reads, and I think I’m getting better at it all the time, although like everyone else, I still make mistakes here and there.  The key is to learn from the hands you played wrong and try to improve your game, rather than focusing on wins and losses.  I could have felt good about my play in that hand with TJ, since I ended up winning the pot, but I knew I’d made a mistake.  While I’m glad I got lucky that one time, it doesn’t mean much for me in the long run, and I’d rather take that hand, as well as many others, as an opportunity to learn to read my opponents better.  I hope you can do the same.

Making the Right Read – Part I – by Adam

by Adam on 1/15/2005 13:54

A number of friends have asked me, knowing that I play poker online, how I can possibly read my opponents when I can’t see them in person. This is, of course, one of the key differences between playing online and playing in a brick and mortar setting. While being able to read physical tells is an important part of poker, these tells are certainly not the only type of read you can get on an opponent.As is the case in live games, a player communicates through his actions at the table. Deductive reasoning is the key to deciphering this form of communication. Moreover, if you can get a good idea of what your opponent holds, you will be better suited to fold hands you need to get out of and to get paid off optimally when you’ve got the best of it. First, you need to have a good idea of what sort of hands your opponent might be willing to get involved in and how they are likely to play these hands before the flop. This can be determined in part by observing their play when they first come to the table. If a player seems extremely timid before the flop, it is likely that they are only playing premium starting hands, whereas if they are involved in every pot, they could hold anything. Beware of pitfalls with this technique, however. Many players will “advertise,” or show down a weak hand early in their session at the table, to try and make other players think they are betting with weak hands. Another thing to be aware of, as far as watching for patterns, is that good players have the ability to change gears. A good player might try to obtain an image as a tight player at the table, and then use that image to steal pots later in the game. If a player is all of a sudden opening 50% of the pots, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve just hit a sick run of cards. All in all, I’d say you’re most likely to get a good read on a player by observing their play through several rounds. Once you know what sort of cards your opponent is most likely to be holding before the flop, you must be able to further narrow it down after the flop. You will face tough decisions and will have to be able to answer some questions: Should I call this big bet my opponent just made? Is he going to fold if I take a stab at this pot? Do I have the best of it, and if so, how do I get paid off as much as possible? If you cannot get some idea, through deductive reasoning, of what cards your opponent holds and how he is likely to play them, you will not be able to make the best decisions—you will essentially be playing your own cards against a random hand, and you will never be able to optimize your winnings. Try to detect patterns in the post-flop play of your opponents. If an opponent is betting every time it is checked around to him, let him bet into your strong hand. The more often someone is betting, the less likely it is they have a top quality hand, so it may be easier to call with a weaker hand, such as top pair or even a lower pair. You never want to be a loose-passive player, regardless of who you are up against, but sometimes a call, rather than a raise, is a good way to test the quality of an opponent’s hand on the flop, particularly if raising will commit you to the pot. There are a number of questions you can ask yourself when trying to figure out what your opponent holds. Does he normally bet big with a big hand or does he tend to slow play? What purpose could he have in betting this amount? Does he understand the relative strength of the cards he’s holding? Is he putting me on a hand or is he just playing his own cards? Is he likely to shut down if I call his bet on the flop? One thing to keep in mind here is that none of this is much different from how you read players in a brick and mortar card room. The purpose of the article is more to show how much more there is to reading opponents than just looking at their face, and how you can apply these concepts, despite not being able to see the faces of your opponents. In the next article of this series, I’ll go over some examples of how a good read on an opponent can translate into a winning play in online poker.