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.