Eyes Wide Shut

I recently won a tournament with my eyes closed.  And I mean that almost literally.

I've done a lot of stunts in small buyin B&M tournaments - some of them in the name of experimentation and education, some of them in the name of prop bets, and all of them in the name of fun.

I once played a tournament without looking at my hole cards before the turn.  This was the B&M version of the old Masking-Tape-on-the-Monitor bit.  I would go through the motions and pretend to check my hole cards, but I would never lift them up high enough for me to actually see them.  This way, the table did not know I was being adventurous.  Instead of value, all my preflop and flop decisions were based on whether I thought the villain could continue.  If I was first in and in LP, it was standard PFR+FCbet.  All my FCbets were texture-based, so I wasn't firing a foolhardy 100%.  When donked to I would raise or call also based on texture.  Once we got to the turn, I would check to see wtf I had.

It was fun, but it did not get past level 3.

My latest stunt, however, won me the tournament.

I was playing a normal enough game of No Limit Texas Holdem all the way till the Final Table.  Then I met him.

I had not shared a table all day with him, so when the final two tables collapsed, he was an unknown.  His face was not familiar, so he had the "recreational player" icon immediately on my imaginary HUD hovering above his head.  He was in a crapload of pots - only missing hands when he had to go pee or grab another beer - so I had him at VPIP 70.  PFR 35.

It did not take me much longer to notice something, so I nicknamed him in my head - let's call him "Verbal."

Verbal struck me as a guy I might want to do business with, because he always meant what he said.  When he threw chips in the pot - be it a bet or a raise or a call - he would announce what he was doing.

"Bet three hundred."  And in would go three hundred in chips.

"Raise."  And in went more chips.

"Double."  And in went the extra stack.

"Call."  And then the splash of the chips into the pot.

Verbal was taking down many pots - many of them uncontested, and some of them with good showdowns.  I was about to be fascinated at his luck, until one river where another player called his final bet only to see Verbal muck without showing down.

The key note in that hand?  Verbal led out the river by tossing in chips...without saying a word!

I couldn't believe it.  It couldn't be that easy, could it?

But it was.  I observed even more closely and confirmed the behavior.  It did not take two orbits to convince myself - I mean, Verbal was playing so many hands the data converged fast.

Speaks?  Strong.  No Speak?  Weak.

I began riding Verbal - trying to get into pots with him as long as I was In Position.  He was a rabid Cbettor, so the plan was to see flops with him and see - NO, LISTEN - to what happens.

Announced his FCbet?  I mostly folded, sometimes floated to listen to his turn bet.  Wordlessly put chips in?  I raised my air and called my value hands.  It did not always play out perfectly - some hands that he quietly bet or checked became disasters when he decided to shove over my position-raises and float bets.  I guess those were the drawing hands...?  Still, I knew I had a huge advantage and a reliable-enough hand-value-barometer.

I was careful not to overuse my advantage, lest I tip him off.  I toned it down and used Verbal merely as an extension of my blind-steals:  to maintain just enough of a stack to stay relevant.  My new primary goal at this Final Table was to make sure Verbal stayed with me to the end.

It got to four-handed action and Verbal was in trouble, so I bluff-shoved into his short-stack after he announced a preflop raise.  Fortunately, his AKo held up against my 53s.  Whew!  Now Verbal is back with a stack that can hurt the other two.  And my image went from "solid" to "wtfishedoing."

I was worried about the decent TAG on my left, but Verbal took care of him.

Three handed.  The Fishy Regular on my right wanted to chop, but Verbal had the slight chip lead and wanted to play it out for fun.  Chop Boy - who was second in chips - started shoving every hand.  I began to worry.  If Verbal gets into this bingo game with Chop Boy, I may end up heads-up with the wrong guy!

Chop Boy stopped the madness for one hand suddenly, and I saw a flop with my pair of tens.  The flop came AJT.  I checked, Chop Boy bet, and I check-raised a quarter of his stack.  Chop Boy mucked his AK face up.  I was suddenly impressed but confused.  How does a guy go from "I don't give a flying you-know-what" to "I want to play good poker and have godly reads"...?

In the next hand, Chop Boy decided he did not care again.  Open-shove.

Hmm, open-shoves mostly, then plays a flop with AK...?  I wondered if I was in tourney poker heaven.  I reflected upon my morning and tried to recall the countless good deeds I must have done.  Saved eight cats from trees, four babies from burning houses, led twenty-one senior citizens across the street...

Yes.  Indeed.  I was a superuser, and I deserved to be here, three-handed with these two!

On the third straight hand that Chop Boy open-shoved, I looked down at KTs.  I decided it was good enough, had him covered, called, and put him out of his misery.

I was now heads-up with Verbal.  Down to just the Boss-Fight.  I could now play the mini-game I have been waiting to play since the Final Table started.  I tilted my hat down so low that I could no longer see my opponent without leaning my all the way back till the back of my head touched the floor behind me.  I put my hands in a position so I could cup my hole cards for my pretend-look routine.  When I was done pretend-looking, I would lean forward and rest my head in my arms so that I would not see the board.

I only looked at my chips, keeping track of what he must have behind.

I min-raised every button and Cbet almost every flop.  When he announced his call I would give up.  When he called quietly I barrelled off.

Verbal completed his button SB a lot, but when he raised it I called to listen to his FCbet.  I don't recall check-raising so much in such a short span.  It was going well.

He took to 3betting me a few times, so I kept listening.  He acted wordlessly on most flops, so I grinded him down further.

I checked my chip stacks:  he was now in shove-mode - with 6bb's or less.  We got it in and I doubled him up with whatever random trash hand I tried to finish him with.  I had not considered that part of this mini-game.  I did not know if I could finish him when it came down to preflop shovesville.

It went back and forth that way two more times.  I would grind him down without showdowns, then he would shove and I either doubled him up or gave up consecutive pots to chip him up again.  Third time was the charm.  He was short again and shoved preflop.  I called and actually had a hand.  My ATo outran his KQ and it was finally over.

I played poker with my eyes closed - well, not literally - and won.

The moral of this story is that we must strive to stay mindful.  Instead of adding to the din of voices that shout to the world "hey, look at me, listen to me!" we can be more productive by being part of that special population that focuses on staying aware.  Let's keep our traps shut, and stop broadcasting all the things we are doing.  Instead, let's keep all our receptors open and notice the heaven that we are already in.

This, to me, after all, is not a poker story, but a life lesson.

Another Game made me remember how to play This Game.

Often when we are stuck on an elusive thought, we are tempted to bruteforce our way through to come up with it.  It could be something as simple as the name of "that actor" in "that movie"...or something as frustratingly complex as "what the hell is wrong with my game?!?"

In the pre-google era (for those of you who are too young to recall such an era, respect your elders and just nod!) such thoughts led to sleepless nights.  I would look in the mirror to check the tip of my tongue.

"Who was that guy?  Argh!  His name started with the letter A...or wait, did it?  I KNOW it had an A in it.  But, well, what few names don't have an A..."

"Tom?  it rhymed with Tom.  Is he a Tom?  No.  It had an A... Tam...?"


And then one morning, while making orange juice and watching some guy on a Home-Shopping Channel try to sell me a gadget that will give me six-pack abs...

"Matt Damon!"


For poker leaks, there is pokertracker.  But even with such a powerful tool, I've had long long hours of staring at the screen and the stats and the replayed hands and thinking "What can be better?!?"

"How can I be better?"

I felt like Kevin Garnett:  still servicable and much-respected, but not quite the franchise player or the fantasy stud.  I had felt for sometime that my Holdem Game had peaked.  I sat in online games feeling like a dinosaur, and that anyone else on the table who wasn't an obvious fish was actually an Isildurrr just waiting to grind me down despite my best efforts.  It wasn't that I was losing or being outplayed every time - it was a more subtle feeling:  That I was due to make an adjustment, but could not figure out what it was supposed to be.

Ever drive to your friend's house for the second time after having driven there only once previously?  "I know we're supposed to make a right here somewhere, but I'm not sure which street!"

As I looked for ways to be sharper, I also honestly felt that perhaps my learning curve was at its apex.  had I Peter principled myself?  I decided that the best strategic move was to put myself in a situation where there was still a lot of curve for me to learn on.  In such a situation, I was counting on my reliable lightning-fast-learning-ability to put a profitable distance between myself and a (hopefully) still clueless recreational general population.

I made a transition to Pot-Limit Omaha.

To describe my experience so far simply, I felt like it was Holdem in 2008 all over again.  While a lot of players knew what they were doing, there was a greater number of players who just wanted to make hands.

I mean, with four hole cards, surely they could make some kind of strong hand...SURELY!  (Meanwhile I've had shots at a five-card Omaha game and failed to so much as hit a pair or a draw a few times - even when we ran it to the river.)

As I transitioned, I sought the wisdom of APA PLO Coach Gumaaa.  He has since said many things, but one of the first things he wanted me to remember was to play in position and respect the board.

It sounded like a truism - something someone says and you just laugh and think "duh!"

I personally recall thinking "of course, you don't need to tell me!"... and then weeks later kicking myself for check-calling a river bet on a flushing board with my nut straight.  I wake up every single day thinking I would be smarter than that - that position and board texture was supposed to be part of my subconscious competence by now.

Hero call. Nice try.

Not in this new game.  it turns out that Coach Gumaaa DID need to tell me.  With all my excitement to play the new game - I managed to forget things.  Not regularly, but enough to disappoint myself.  Words Coach Gumaaa had just thrown out like it was token advice suddenly found themselves on a post-it on my monitor.

"Play much much tighter EP, always always always respect the board."

It was so simple it clicked the tip of my tongue.  And suddenly I knew what to do with my Holdem Game.

Years of having a significant skill advantage had led me to ignore position more and more.  Years of betting with playmakers in shorter-handed games led me to call lighter.  Those became habits, because they worked often enough.

I knew the dynamics of the entire community had already shifted slightly.  It had taken a wild turn when HSP first came out on Television, then shifted from "wild" to just "wide" when people figured out how "wild" lost money.  The specific dynamics of the games I was in had also shifted slightly.  I had hero-called profitably so much that less players were bluffing me.  My hero calls had gone from massively profitable to just marginally +EV.

I thought I had Holdem all figured out, but I had to play PLO for an overdue adaptation - the adjustment that I was looking for but failed to make - to suddenly stare me in the face.

I am happy to report that my Holdem Game is back in the groove.  Which in turn has helped my fledgling venture into Cycling (a fancy pro-sounding term for riding a bike), as I learned that my bike chain falls off when I shift to a gear that is too low for the situation.

Now if only I can learn with absolute perpetual finality how to respect other peoples' worldviews.  I may have to transition into Mixed Martial Arts to conjure up some realizations.

It is not my duty to call!

9-handed Tournament Table.  Blinds are 1000-2000 with antes of 300.  5700 in the pot before a hand is dealt.  A shortstack shoves first-in from UTG.  The all-in bet is 7000.  It is folded to me in the Big Blind.  I still have 100k behind.  Should I even look at my hand, or is this a duty call?

Math.  I have to wager 5000 to win 12700.  That gives me 2.54:1 odds.  Ranges?  With the blinds coming to get him, he has any two cards.  I have any two cards.  That's 1:1 odds.  Pot gives me 2.54 so I no-look duty call.

Let's add some detail.  We are on the money bubble.  I am the chip leader with over 470k in chips.  This encounter won't even hurt my stack.  Duty call?

Strategy.  Nobody wants to bust out on the bubble, so everyone is playing extremely tight.  The entire field is rooting for me to bust this guy out.  I remember Mike Caro:  "Figure out what they want you to do, and disappoint them."

I fold, the shortstack chips up slightly.  The bubble does not burst and ultratight play continues.  I steal six sets of blinds and antes over the next two rounds, easily making more than the 12700 I passed on.  My stack crosses the 500k mark.


Let's change it up again.  This time it is not the bubble, but I am still chip leader with 155k in chips.  12700 is a good amount to add to my stack!  But wait, the shortie shoving is not UTG, he is MP...Still getting 2.54:1 on my money.  No-look call?

"Just throw in a 5k chip!" the entire table goads...

Ranges.  Shortie must think he has no almost no fold equity.  Shortie could have waited three more deals to catch a hand.  He chose this hand.  Broadways, 55+, Suited Aces.  His equity versus ATC is about 64%.

"Come on, it's just 5k more, you will still have 150k!"
 
He is a 1.77:1 favorite.  But the pot is still laying me better odds.  Sigh...

Table says "duty call!"  Math says "agree!"  Strategy says "look!"

"Don't look, mahihinaan ka lang ng loob! (You will only lose courage!)"

I look at the hand, it is garbage! His equity versus 73o is about 72%.  He is now a 2.57:1 favorite.  No odds.  Fold.

What a difference information makes!  Just by spending a miniscule amount of energy to peek at my cards, I turned a duty call into a good fold.

While all this may seem academic to the experienced player, it is always (pleasantly) surprising how many players are out there still bind themselves to "duty calls."  These seem to be the top considerations:

His stack won't dent mine.  So guy with 600k duty calls a shove from guy with 50k.  He adds 48k to win 55700.  Shortie holds, and now has a 100+k stack.  A few hands later, 100k gets dealt AA and 550k doubles him up with KK.  Duty caller chips down to 440+k and Shortie is up to 200+k

He's denting you now.

There is already so much money in the middle.  These heroes say "pot odds" - or even "Well, I'm priced in" - as they call off the last chips in their stack on the four-straight broadway board with a naked pair of fives.

"Eh pag nag fold ako, ano pa ba gagawin ko sa stack ko ang liit na eh.  (I can't fold and play with so short a stack anyway.)"

That may or may not be true.  What I know to be definitely true is that you can't play with NO stack.

Ya gotta gamble to win a tourney anyway.  Ya can't win without winning a few flips.  Ya gotta come in from behind a few times.

All true Sir, but please pick a better spot than "two guys shoved and I can triple up with 22 if they both have Ace-King!!!"


There are times in our lives when we have to take leaps of faith.  Those times are few and far between though.  The in-between-times are filled with information.  One of the aspects of poker I love the most is the gathering of information.

I don't like to do things just because people say I have to.  I guess that's the kind of stubborn proud independent guy I am.   I prefer to choose my duties, and I urge others to do the same.

Tourneys Taught Me Fear.

You are not a Poker Player until you are asked this a few hundred times:

"Is there really a difference between tourneys and cash games?"

The short answer is "Yes." But since we are not limited to morse code, I usually give a longer but still simple answer.  This is the place where I like to start the discussion, and I suggest you try to start here as well the next time you are asked to discuss tourneys-versus-cash games.

"I would never EVER fold Aces preflop in a cash game."

Indicating that in a tournament, I might.  That should be enough to sit them down.


I remember prepping for the first-ever "biggest tourney" held in the Philippines.  It was the night before, and I was discussing basic strategies with my wife - who was playing my second seat.  (We had decided that she would play it instead of sell it, since the experience would dwarf the value of the money from the seat-sale.  Even though the seat back then cost php22,000 for a 1M Event.)

Suddenly she asked a simple question:  "What if I get Aces on the first hand and someone goes all-in?"

I remember telling her to call, of course, but not without some sighing and head-shaking.

We were playing this tournament to win, for sure, but we were also playing to enjoy the experience.  I did not want my wife - an extremely casual home-game player at best - to go through all the anxiety and heartbreak of a first-hand bustout.  It would break her heart.

Maybe I told her to fold.  Maybe I told her to pretend she arrived late and the Aces got mucked unseen.

Maybe I was giving advice based on Emotional EV.


"What if I am first to act preflop?" she asked as a follow-up.

This time I remember exactly what I answered - although I don't recall why: "Raise 1/3 of your stack"

Yep.  With the blinds at 25-50, my advice was for her to open-raise it to 7,000 and snap-call a shove.  I wanted to make sure her Aces would not go into a five-way battle.

That may seem harshly noobish now, but I tell you that story to tell you something I do believe in that I first recall hearing from Colin Moshman, and then Matthew Hilger:

"The chips that you lose in a tournament are worth much more than the chips that you gain."

That reality makes all the difference for me between cash games and tournaments.  I would fold Aces preflop in a tournament, and there is more than one scenario where I would gladly do so.

The simplest scenario is in an online Double-or-Nothing Sit-and-Go.  I am on the bubble with 4500 in chips, and the five other players each have about 2100.  The blinds are high enough - say 300/600 - that they are basically in shovesville.  Someone shoves, someone calls, the stacks are about even.  I fold my Aces and let them rumble.  Best-case, the larger stack wins.  Worst-case, the shorter stack cripples the larger one and he is left with barely a small blind anyway.  We group-call him next hand.

The same dynamics apply on the bubble of a satellite event.  28 players win a seat, 29 players left.  As before, winning everyone's chips is no longer the objective.

A not-so-common scenario is in the early stages of a Major freeze-out tournament.  To really feel the heat on this one, let's define "Major" as "The WSOP Main Event."  Let's say we all have just around the starting stack and some maniacs raise, 3bet, shove preflop, and cold-call even before it gets to me.  Don't ask me why they do this - maybe they are all drunken oil tycoons.

I look down at Aces.

Time to do some math.

The first maniac opens about 40% of his range.  I have about 85% equity against his range.  The second maniac isolates with any pocket pair.  I have 80% on him.  The third guy enters any pot "that has lots of chips" with any two cards.  85% on him as well.  The cold-caller has suited-connectors and thinks his hand is live because "everyone has Ace-King" - I've got just under 80% on this optimistic sonofabitch.

I am crushing all their ranges.  I am going to quintuple up!

Except going up against all four of them reduces my chances to about 48%.  I am still the most likely to win the hand among the five of us, but more than half the time, my tournament is over.

Question:  Does flipping to chip up to 150,000 in Level 1 justify being out of the tourney 52% of the time?  I am the favorite to win the hand, but a dog to stay in the tournament.  To put this in perspective, let's say the average stack come Final Table would be somewhere in the area of 10 to 15 million.  How much does my 150,000 help me get there?

I am not enough of a math geek to know what ICM algorithms to apply in order to determine the $EV of chipping up to 150k in one hand versus being out of the tourney 52% of the time.  I just intuitively don't feel good about it.  Not after a $10,000 buyin, a transatlantic flight, and a world of anxiety.

Add another caller to that mix - some fool with a range of broadways and pairs - and my Aces are now 37% to win the hand.  63% of the time I am out of the tourney, 37% of the time I will have 180,000 in chips.  Is this worth it?

In a cash game, my risk-reward ratios are so much simpler.  Just the money I have to put in versus the money I stand to win.  Ten thousand bucks to win Fifty thousand?  My my, the pot is laying me 5 to 1.  Meanwhile I am barely a 2 to 1 dog to take it all down.  Easy call.

In a tournament, my ten-thousand dollar buyin is at risk.  And the reward?  Absolutely unknown - somewhere between a sort-of-shoo-in to day 2, and a slightly (who knows how slight?) better chance to finish ITM in a few days.

Would you make the call?

I can hear players all over saying the same thing:  "If you can't make that call, you probably shouldn't be playing the tournament to begin with."

I am not sure I can disagree there.

"So which do you prefer?" is a common follow-up question.

Cash Games.  It should be obvious by now, but I try spell it out anyway:  "I prefer an activity that gives me more than one shot at success.  I prefer an activity where mistakes can be made and not everything is on the line in one go.  I prefer playing one hand at a time if I may.  And most importantly, I prefer not to play scared."

Yes, I confess, tournaments fill me with dread.

Stop Whining and Start Winning

The main pitfall of being identified as a Poker Coach has always been the whining.  It is as if there is a neon sign above my head that says "Vent all your frustrations here."

While I do welcome the opportunity to do players the sounding-board service, there are limits to it.  I haven't defined the limits, maybe I should.  One article I read long ago was written by a coach who gave guidelines on how and when to tell bad-beat stories.

I do not recall his guidelines, so I made some of my own:

1. Your bad beat story must actually qualify as a bad beat - you are allowed to get this wrong the first time, and you will receive a primer on the differences between coin-flips, coolers, draw-outs, and bad beats.
2. You have five minutes to tell me your bad beat story.
3. Do not begin to tell your story until all your facts and the sequence of events are straight.
4. You cannot repeat any bad beat story you tell me to anyone else.

Is your bad beat story really worth telling?  Or is your listener going to shrug and say "meh, standard"...?

These guidelines are not just there for the sake of my aching ears, they are there for the sake of the storyteller's health.

The first rule is there because I want students to have the appropriate emotions for the appropriate events.  I do not want them to feel like the entire world is conspiring against them just because they lost a hand that they were actually a slight underdog to win.

"I shoved with AK and he called with pocket threes!  Unbelievable!  I can't catch a break!"

The second rule is there because I don't believe in drawing out drama.  I believe in feeling an emotion, expressing it responsibly, and letting it go.  My personal experience - not only with bad beat storytellers, but also with people who are in a life-funk in general - is that the longer they sit inside that emotion, the harder it is to get out of it.

The more you churn, the more you burn.  Man, do I know some major churners!

Five minutes means less churn time.  Five minutes also means the emotional expressor has a responsibility both to himself and his listener.  We are having this conversation because I want to pull you out of your funk, so don't spend all your energy trying to pull me into it.

The third rule is there to protect the storyteller from flying off.  It keeps us all in touch with reality.  When told properly, the story can be taken in a proper context, and we can feel better about it. 

"I raise from the button and this guy who hates me 3bets a ridiculous amount...!  No wait, I think he raised and I reraised and he 4bet...anyway, we are all-in by the turn, but the flop was..."

Exasperating.

First of all, you don't know that the guy hates you.  Second, if you recall that his 3bet sizing was about quadruple your initial raise, you might see that it was still quite standard.  Third, yes, you opened and he 3bet.  Fourth, you need to clue me in on what hand you had before you tell me about the post-flop action.  Fifth, you need to tell me about the flop and the actions before you tell me about the turn...


In my attempt to get the complete situational picture, I am also attempting to ground the storyteller.

A lot of times, the storyteller feels a lot better once he has taken the time to get his story straight.  Instead of being re-raised by "an asshole who hates his guts," he realizes he was up against a decent player who had a better hand.  That was something he was too busy metagaming to see at that moment.

The fourth rule is another anti-churn measure.  You came to me, you vented, we felt bad together, then we moved on together.  Let's move on.  Retelling the story for any purpose other than as a learning example serves up a double whammy.  One, you travel back in time to the place where you felt bad.  Two, you take someone with you.

The story is in the past, you are in the present, and the future is ahead of you.  The sooner you stop whining, the sooner you can start winning.

I have been taken back to the same bad place so many times by the same person.  Different stories, but all the same.  It has happened often enough that the title of this article was supposed to be "Quit Bitching or Quit Poker."

Perhaps that was too harsh, so I changed the title.  But you know what?  I find it to be true.

In The Poker Mindset, we are taught to "Understand and accept the realities of poker."

Once we accept certain realities, they become truisms.  Truisms are so obvious, they do not need mentioning.  If someone comes up to me and complains about "that goddamned sun setting every goddamned day," I would just assume he hates the rest of his life as well.

Accept the realities of the game  then set them aside.  Luck, variance, card-dead runs, bad reads, slow-rollers.  They do not merit mentioning anymore.  They just are, like trees in a forest. That is the landscape we are on.

The sun rises, the sun sets.  Aren't we already aware that we work around this reality with light bulbs?

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."