Read, Weep, or Reap.

In this particular hand, a student of mine had ACES.  As anyone would want to do when dealt this - the strongest of all possible starting hands in Texas Holdem - my student raised the pot.  A previous limper and one other caller came along for the ride.

The flop was quite ragged, and JACK-High.  In fact, you could not have asked for a more ragged dry flop like J93 rainbow.

Like a true fish, an opponent probe bets into the raiser - less than a quarter of the pot.  My student raises over the donkbet - just barely over the minimum raise.

A mistake, of course:  not the kind of mistake that costs you immediately, but the kind that creates opportunities for more mistakes.  Why?  Because it was not a definitive action.  It creates confusion.  We'll get into that later.


Back to the hand, the opponent RE-RAISES ...just over the minimum re-raise.

This is that moment when we wonder if we are still ahead, or if the opponent is a total tool.

Either way, we can be sure that both parties are sufficiently confused by now.  My student decides to flat call.

The turn brings another JACK, and our tenacious-but-indecisive opponent bets again.  A third of the pot.

Decision time, once again, for my student.  He throws in another min-raise.  The hand is a technical nightmare in progress, considering this is the microstakes.

welcome to the world of the min-bet-min-raise-min-reraise

My student tries to capture his feel of that moment:

"...what i was thinking was that when the villain reraise me on the flop he had a set of Jacks, then the other jack appeared so I thinked ok he does not have it. Then he raise again and I did not know where I was standing."

To which one veteran player bluntly responds:

"...villain reraise you on the flop and you are thinking he has set of jacks and YOU CALL?? horrible."


I won't have to finish this hand to tell you the moral of this story:

IF I HAVE A READ, I WILL GO WITH IT.

I always advocate the importance of information towards making a decision, but as I am playing a game where I do not have the luxury to wait for complete information, I will almost always find myself in a spot where I simply have to decide.

Make the best of what information I have, use my experience to best interpret it, decide what it means, and decide what I am going to do about it.

Just DECIDE.

So now the corollary to the moral of this story - which is the point our veteran observer makes:

I WILL ALIGN MY ACTIONS WITH MY DECISIONS.

I cannot decide that I am beat and continue with near-hopeless odds.  I cannot decide that I am allergic to shrimps and then go ahead and eat a barrel of it.  I cannot decide that my dream is to become a lawyer and then not take the bar exam.

So I threw in my small blind's worth on the matter:

"...if you really think he had a set, then go with your read and fold. i don't care if your read is wrong, you have to go with it IF that is truly your read. by calling you are ignoring your own read. if you keep doing that, your reads will not improve - how are you ever going to play every hand the best way you can if you can't trust yourself? calling should mean "my read is i am ahead" and not "i hope i am wrong"


If we have a read, we just go with it.  WE CANNOT BE AFRAID TO GET IT WRONG!  We will be wrong - often.  Many many many times our reads will be wrong, and we are going to pay for it.  But that is the price we must be willing to pay in order to gain the experience and do better the next time.

I would rather lose a stack going with a wrong read than lose it ignoring a correct one.


If you are - like me - into finding parallels between poker-behaviors and life-behaviors, we are looking at a very basic human flaw:  a chronic inexplicable inability to do the right thing.

What is at the root of this?  Why do we lie, cheat, or steal even when we know we are gonna get caught?  Why do we say mean things that we will regret saying later when the dust clears?  Why do we insist on only leaving ourselves a thirty-minute drive-time-window when we know from every previous experience we had that the drive takes an hour?

1. We don't think long-term.  We see the short-term reward and hope we won't have to pay for it later.

2. We let our emotions run our lives.  We know we are not in good shape, but we feel that blind aggression and bringing anything in our path down will make us feel better when we ourselves go down later.  We let emotions ruin our lives, instead of enhance it.

3. We do not trust our own experiences.  We do not trust ourselves enough.  We say "I hope I am wrong" and then close our eyes and jump into the fire.


Yes, I am aware that there are many ways to play this hand, and none of them have to be black-and-white-wrong-or-right, but I Iike to see microstakes poker is an exercise in clarity and decision-making.  The sneakiness, trap-setting, and other deviousness that make people fall in love with the game can be practiced later.

Practice being truthful first.  Let them pay us off every time they refuse to believe.  They will, because we are wired to a default setting that seeks proof before belief.  They will pay for the proof that we have the nuts - many times - before we gain their trust.  Only then - when we finally gain their trust - can we go ahead and throw in a curve ball or two.


On the flop, in this example, I must practice living decisively by deciding if my ACES are ahead.  Then I must take the action that best aligns with my decision.  

I am ahead, I want to get value, so I RAISE with the intention of getting the entire stack in. 
When I have a hand I can bet for value, I want to be betting that hand as soon as possible.  I Check the SPR.  I want to commit my opponent to the mistake he is about to make. 

I am behind, I do not have the outs and odds to improve to a winning hand, so I FOLD.

And if I am wrong, I can live with myself.  A better version of myself that hopefully learned from the mistake.

Whim, Not Luck.

If I had to rate the top five questions I am asked the first time a player finds out I coach poker, this one would make a strong bid for number one all-time:

"Coach, how much of a factor would you say luck plays in poker?"

What they want me to say is that it is a factor, and that their continued losses are excusable.

"Would you say it's 70-30?  Like 30% luck?  I read somewhere that maybe it's 80-20..."

Or maybe you read somewhere that it's 50-50.  Or 90-10.  That depends on the mood of the writer at the time, and how he busted out of his last tourney.

Last time I was in this kind of conversation and encountered the 70-30 follow-up question, I shot back:  "Hey, did you know that 87% of all statistics are made up?"

I should know.  My College Thesis was full of made-up stats and findings.  Did they really think I went out and interviewed three thousand people in one month's time?

The point I am making is that anyone who has the gall to assign a skill-to-luck percentage split is, well, spitballing.  Was there a study?  How was this measured?  If my skill puts me in a situation where I shove all-in on the flop against naked Top Pair and I have fifteen clean outs to a straight or flush, how much luck will I need to win?  If he folds, was I lucky?  If he calls and I blank out was I unlucky?

When you make the long-term optimal play, the answer is you need zero help from luck.  If it is definitively +EV, luck cannot fuck up your fate in the long run.

If you play life like a lottery, you are going to have to get lucky.

This is because Luck favors no one.

One of the first things I make sure students understand is that no amount of training or studying will ever ever ever EVER make you luckier than you already are.  It may seem that more experienced players are luckier and always seem to survive crazy situations, but that's because they don't cross busy freeways with blindfolds on.

Luck favors no one.  Every dog has his day.  What you do on your day, well that's up to you.

Hey, how about this study where some serious math and simulation was done to report that Texas Holdem was 88% skill-based?  What about that 12% luck?

They are the geniuses, so I'll take their word for it, within the context of skilled control: if they say that 12% of the time I have absolutely no control over the outcome, then it isn't even worth worrying about, because that 12% of instances is going to go either way anyway.  We split that.  That's a wash.  Just because I don't have control of that 12% does not mean you do.  It's the skill to control of the 88% of instances that will wtfpwn you.

To say that Luck affects the game is a truism.  It's like saying the earth's rotation affects night and day.  It just is, so what?

So my textbook answer to the luck query will usually sound something like this:

"While it is true that luck has an affect on the outcomes of poker games, the true nature of the game is to make the best decisions with the hand you are dealt, the information that you can get, and the actions that are available to you."


"Oh yeah?  Well yesterday I 3bet a guy and he called me with pocket twos, flopped a set, and felted me!  How do you explain that?"

Mike Caro pointed that out as something that seems like Luck, but is actually a function of Decision.  I love what he calls it:  WHIM.

WHIM means he makes that call sometimes, and sometimes not.  That is his decision.  That was a hand he was dealt, and that was an action available to him.  Whether or not he was gong to flop a set was insignificant.  What is significant is why he makes this call.

Does he isolate your 3bet range to AK?  Is he stuck and trying to gamble his way back to even?  Does he have reason to believe he is lucky today?  Does he think he can outplay you?

Luck is unpredictable, so we never bother with it.  Whatever flops, is going to flop.

WHIM, however, is something you might see coming.  If you pay attention, you can catch wind of whimsical plays.  As I mentioned already, you can look out for a few signs that a player is going to leave solid ground for a flight of fancy:

If he often talks to you or speculates on what you are playing, he is planning something whimsical.  If he shows disdain or lack of respect for your image, or thinks he has your "solid" range figured out, he is going to get funky.

If he is stuck and his buyin is way smaller than the amount he is stuck, he is going to be very whimsical. If he is constantly shuffling his dwindling stack of chips, those chips are gong to go in on a whim.

If the game has run wild with multiway pots and fishes scooping with awful hands, he is going to let his whims take over.  It isn't because he has studied the algorithms of how the cards have been falling ("ang sipag ng Jack ngayon ah!") but because of basic human flaws:  Envy...Greed.


Our challenge is to figure out when the nit is finally going to crack and 4bet shove preflop into our AQs with A6o.  On a whim.

Focus on your opponents.  Even the best ones are going to crack sometime.  If you can predict whim - If you can catch that spazz - that's Skill.

And after we make this call, the nit would inevitably say something like:

"You're lucky that I didn't have a hand that time."

To which we reply, "I agree Sir.  I was blessed with 74.699% Luck that time."