But if the stats over a great sample size indicate that I am playing well, why am I losing? It doesn't add up!"
The simplest explanation - and often the correct one - is this: You win small and lose big.
Imagine a 9-max player whose range is a decent and solid 20-16, he wins when he sees the flop almost 50% of the time, he wins showdowns more than half the time, and his AF is balanced. In a hundred-thousand hands, he has played 20 thousand - and has taken down four thousand small pots - an average profit of 5BB's each time. That's 20,000 BB's in the bank.
Now imagine he loses focus for just 0.5% of that span. During those 100 hands played, he made bad decisions and blew a bit more than half a stack each time - sometimes a whole stack, and in rare cases, a deep stack. Let's just say his "bad-play-losses" average 75BB's each time. That may seem like a lot of stack-offs, and you may say that a solid player won't stack off that much, but we are talking about hands that don't even happen 1% of the time - they don't affect his overall statistics, and this player may not even notice how many times he has made these precious few bad plays (one bad play every one thousand hands) - but they were all in medium-to-big pots. 7,500 BB's disappeared without him really noticing.
In the other 80,000 hands he folded, he was SB and BB about 9,000 times each, so scratch off another 13,500BB's. Deduct the rake, and some other small to medium pots from a few thousand hands that were well-played but had to be given up on (or coolered/setup, etc...)... and now the solid stats guy is a losing player.
The culprit? A very tiny amount of medium to big pots.
We've all had sessions where we grinded two hours with hardly a showdown and doubled our buyin, only to lose the whole stack in one bad 3barrel decision. It's that easy to set yourself back and negate all the good (hard) work put in!
All the small pots won actually just barely pay off the rake, blinds, and other stabs at pots that did not work out. As sexy as a red-line-graph might be, the simple truth is this:
In the micro and low stakes, your source of income is still in the occassional big pots. The blue lines. The showdowns where the villains are making the big mistakes, and not you.
If you look at your source of income as the amount of mistakes you capitalize on - as a poker player should (we don't play for a living to hit flops and make hands) - then a BIG part of your source of income is the SAVINGS from mistakes you avoided!
So I spent time looking for these big pots. The big mistakes. No they aren't made with hands like 93o and K7s. Some of them are made from suited connectors and the overplayed draws that follow. Some of them are made from mental lapses that make me complete my SB and then flop something I get excited about. Most of them are made from premium hands.
Those hands sure do win a lot, but they shouldn't be losing as much either.
Of the premium hands - AA, KK, QQ, JJ, AK - I noticed my Ace-King was my second-largest money-earner, expectedly behind AA. This same hand is also one of my main big-pot losers. It was time to play with some filters.
Back in my Full-Ring Days, shoving AK preflop showed a positive expectation. Those days are gone. It's not just because I am now playing short-handed, but moreso because players are not that stupid anymore. Contrary to what we would love to believe, THEY ARE NOT CALLING AS LIGHT AS WE THINK!
In almost all cases, I am only called by hands that beat me - yes, I get the rare spazz call from AJo and K6s, but most of the time, premium pairs are only too happy to see me shove over their preflop raises! I used to think that the dead money from all the folds I got would make up for the inevitable stack-off... they do not!!!
The important thing to remember is that a nicely sized 3bet of 4bet can get the same amount of folds as a shove. At least when we are caught by a real hand, we are not stacking off...
JJ is an exception because I really play it more like TT - which is to say "very awkwardly"... The only times I get that hand in preflop is against a confirmed and absolute spazz-monkey. As the stats above show, I've picked those spots well.
Even KK is an improvement. I've gotten that in so many times against AA. And although I do not mind the times I got it in versus AQo, it's still hardly a lock when that happens.
So next I had to look at what happens when I got cautious or trappy:
Not a good idea to get cute with AKo and KK though. With AKo, there isn't much of a monster draw to come up with, and by flatting, I have no initiative or ability to represent a huge hand postflop. I would have to end up folding a lot.
With KK, I also lose the ability to have initiative in a bigger pot - so I am winning a small pot, or losing a big one. Add this complication: If I flatted PF and see an Ace on the board, I freeze. I become bluffable - because, hey, surely he has the Ace because he was the preflop raiser and I'm a pussy, right?
So I had to ask the question: Am I better off when I see flops, or when I get aggro from the get-go? How do these premium hands make the most money?
Shocking. For a hand that is my number two money-earner - behind AA - AK makes all that money without a flop!
Conventional wisdom taught me that AK was strong because once it hits, it hits better than all the others. It is a hand that hits and dominates whatever the other guys hits. I thought that was how it was supposed to make money.
I thought "preflop fold equity" was a nice little plus. As it turns out, it seems to be all that matters.
I will now explain this phenomenon with a term I borrow (steal) from Dusty Schmidt's ramblings.
"CARD REMOVAL" is AK's main source of income!
What do we mean by "card removal"...? (In sexier terms, you can also say "combinatronics") Simply put, when you have an Ace or King in your hand, it is just so much less likely that they have one too. AND if they don't have an Ace or King in their hand, they are not feeling so hot when you put in that re-raise preflop.
Now imagine you have QQ and raise preflop. Once someone re-raises, you can look at your two Queens and it will be VERY EASY to imagine the 3bettor has Kings or Aces. 12 times he can have those hands, sixteen times he can have AK. Even if you assume he has AK, you are still flipping. So 12 times you are crushed, and of the sixteen you are ahead of, you only win 8. It's not very exciting.
What if I raised with pocket Tens? because of (reverse) card removal, i have to count Jacks and Queens in his range. That's 24 hands that crush me, and sixteen hands that I flip with. It just gets bleaker.
Even with KK, there is always a nagging fear of the villain holding an Ace. After all, he liked his hand enough to raise AND call my reraise... shouldn't that usually mean when that Ace hits the flop I'm in trouble? Not really, but it sure feels that way almost every time.
With AK, I hold in my hands - in plain verifiable sight - two cards that the villain is much less likely to have. There is no need to shove this, because when I 3bet with this hand, the villain - who likely does not have AA or KK - is already getting the point.
There is a lot more to be discovered, I am sure, once I play with the filters a bit more and have a closer look at each hand, but the basic eureka-moments are here as posted.
(Granted, some of the math above is generic, but all the stats are from Sample size are from my last six months of data)
If I stay aware of my true sources of income - as fact and not as I'd like to think of it - then I can better proceed to capitalize on those sources instead of trying to squeeze profits from shakier sources.
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