Reverend Dave

It has been a few weeks since the last update.  Me and Lightbulb have been busy training and learning.  Remember I promised a story of how my own training sessions were going?

This one is a story about a leak.  And a plumber-reverend.

In my apartment, I had an old gooseneck faucet in my sink that refuses to completely shut anymore.  Getting it fixed would have involved the simple task of buying a new gooseneck, and the not-so-simple task of ripping out the old one to put in the new one without flooding my apartment in the process.

Not really knowing how to do the second part of that task, I let it slide for a while.

 Now I am not the kind of person who can sleep at night knowing i am losing a drop of water every five seconds - water that I will be paying for but never actually use.  So I placed a small pail under the leaky gooseneck to collect the water, which I then used for whatever reason when it filled up.

Stopgap solution.  I had a leak, but nothing was going to waste.  Except the time I took to attend to it every time the pail filled up.  Sometimes I had water that I had no use for yet, so I would pour it into a bigger bucket that I could bathe with later.  Okay, so let's call it a break-even proposition at best.

I knew I had a leak, and I KIND OF dealt with it.  But something else kept me up at night.  It was a sound that was magnified with every new drop - the more water in the pail, the louder the reverberation of the additional plops.

Also, it was getting steadily worse - it came to a point where water was dripping every second.  The pail was filling up five times faster.  I was getting up to have to attend to it more and more.  It was time to get this thing fixed once and for all.  I bought the gooseneck.

Then I stared stupidly at it.  And I stared stupidly at my empty hands.  No tools, no knowledge.  I was not about to do this with my bare hands.  And I was not about to do this on my own.

I called for help.  Not the neighbor, but a plumber.  Professional help.


This is a poker blog, by the way.  So while that story was entirely true, it is also a fitting metaphor for my poker game - leaking since 2010.

And the worst part of it?  While I knew exactly where my apartment leak was, I did not know where my poker leak was.  It kept me up at night - I could hear the BB's dripping as I lay in bed.  I did not know where it was dripping from.  There was no place to put a proverbial pail under it.

It took Poker Drill Sergeant Dave Tam to shove it under my nose - where the leak was all this time:  "Oh my God, are you fucking kidding me?  You have no 4bet range!"

It was a leak I had pointed out to many students before.  I even wrote a bit about it with regards to my own self-studies.  But I strangely blindsided myself and ignored it.

I had no 4bet range.

I looked at my data and old screenshots of my stats.  Years of flatting 3bets with Aces, Kings, Ace-King.  Years of folding to 3bet resteals.  It's not that I never 4bet - because I did about 5% of the time.  But if I had a PFR of 18, that accounted for a 4bet range of (18% x 5%) not even 1%!

I reviewed hands where I actually 4bet - yes, there were a few Aces and Kings and AK's in there, but hardly enough!.  What made it worse was that I was more often 4betting as a re-resteal with hands like A5s and other garbage!  I wasn't even polarized - my 1% 4bet range was GARBAGE.


It was not uncommon to hear Poker Coach Dave come down on us for weak play, and follow it up with a great (and super simple) suggestion.  He would close the pitch with "My word is Gospel.  GOSPEL."

His Gospel for me on that session was a two-part setup.  First, he asked me to run a filter on my hands - taking all my instances of AA/KK and AK and comparing overall profitability when I flat preflop 3bets with those, versus when I just 4bet them.

I had a smug notion in my head that the results would be too close to call.  I had it in my head that SURELY it could not be that big of a difference!  There were too many articles and books where authors advocated "keeping the garbage part of his range in the hand by flatting" - and the value I was missing by 4betting was supposed to be more than made up for when I flatted a 3bet and collected his FCbet.

"I'll show him," I thought as I ran the filter.  I would show Dave why I was not a Catholic.  That his Gospel could not apply to a decorated veteran like me!

Boom.  My brain exploded.

Even thru skype chat, I could hear the smirk on Coach Dave's face:  "I bet as you were running that filter, you were excited to show me I was wrong, eh?"

I typed a meek "hehe" as a reply.

Gospel.

"Who told you that flatting 3bets with your best hands was a great idea?"

I could not name names.

"Whoever he is, delete him off all your friend lists!"

A bit excessive, but point taken.  And taken hard.

Those numbers were shocking enough, but if I was to take into context that I was hardly even 4betting to begin with, could I even imagine how much VALUE and DEAD MONEY I had been missing out on?  The illusion that flatting 3bets to "keep their garbage in" was going to make up for that missing value was completely and utterly shattered.  Not only was it not making up for it, I was losing money from fit-folding (or spewing) Ace-King!

The second part of Coach Dave's Gospel was a simple 4bet-sizing fix, and with that I was off to the races with one less leaky faucet.

One of the truly telling marks of a great man, in my humble opinion, is when he says something and you think two things - in this exact order:

"Pssh, well that's obvious."
"Damn, why didn't I think of that?"

and then weeks later, you find yourself thinking:

"Seriously, how did I not think of that...?!?"


Thanks, Reverend Dave!