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06.05.06
No Good Deed
posted by Absinthe | 5:52 PM
In tournament poker, it’s easy to suffer through a seemingly endless string of bad beats, bubble finishes and unlikely bustouts. There are a number of strategy books out there that’ll give you a decent primer on most of the situations you’ll face, but few if any have much of an eye toward the long run or offer much macro-level advice apart from the uniform recommendation to try to get your money in with the best of it and take your lumps like a reasonably well-adjusted human being. None of them really address the question of what size and flavor of lumps you’re going to take.
If you play a relatively consistent game - solid, selectively aggressive poker where you try to get your money in with the best hand, only making moves or flat-calling bets when you figure to have a decent range of outs and you think your opponent might actually lay down a hand - you’ll find that certain things are going to happen to you over and over, and they’re going to seem to happen to you a lot more than anyone else. A lot more. This isn’t quite true, but you’re going to take more than your fair share of questionable beats because you’re not going to make the same kinds of mistakes - you’re most likely to be making your theoretical errors preflop, at the most fluid times, when you’re at most a 60-40 favorite against a player with position, and the mistake you’ll be making is folding too often - and that’s about the least costly mistake you can make.
It’s other people’s mistakes that are going to kill you, and they’re going to make the same mistakes over and over again. Long-run-wise it’s well to your advantage to go up against opponents who will instacall when they’re a 70-30 dog, but waiting for the long run can take a very long time indeed. In the meantime some seemingly senseless things are going to happen to you, over and over again, and there’s nothing you can do about it but be prepared. So here, then, is an (uninclusive) list of the pitfalls a tourney player’s going to face. Forewarned is forearmed. Sometimes you’re only forearmed with a pop gun, but at least they’ll have to take it from your cold, dead hand.
1. You will lose a lot of races against very questionable hands.
You’ll be raising all-in with hands in the 88-JJ range or AK range; they’ll be calling all-in with hands like 33 and KQ. Sometimes their call will be technically correct (especially when adjusted for the value of the blinds) against your particular hand, but these are the hands at the bottom end of your range. Calling off all your chips with a likely dominated hand is something that you’re likely to do only when you’re short-stacked enough to be hoping for live cards; meanwhile, your opponents are merrily taking ATo and 55 to war by the middle of level 2. The unfortunate corollary to this is…
2. You will often be at a chip disadvantage in the early and middle stages.
As in the Thunderdome, so it goes in poker: When two donkeys go to war, one of them has to win. That donkey now has twice as many chips as he started with. Since the donkey won’t lay down a hand, you need one to take to war with them, and long, dry stretches are the rule rather than the exception - you’re looking for a huge edge to push and it can take a while to find them. Meanwhile, the donkey can make some improbable catches or ridiculous calls (river pot-size bet with an underpair against four or five overcards on a flushing, straightening board) that swell his stack even more. It’s certainly nice to have a big stack early on, but I don’t think it’s worth gambling your tournament to get it until late in the tournament, where you can force your opponents to more significant real-money decisions. And a “big stack” of 2 or 3 buyins’ worth of chips isn’t all that likely to become a monster stack anyway, because unless you’re on the rush of your life you’re going to have to gamble huge chunks of it on the same thin edges that built the stack in the first place.
3. You will lose to drawing hands more often than you win with them.
With strong hands, you’re going to be making bets that mathematically discourage flush-fishers and gutshot-drawers from calling. They’re going to call anyway. Sometimes they’ll hit. Meanwhile, your opponents will be monkey-pushing the ‘bet pot’ button with nothing, but since you don’t have anything but a draw and the stacks aren’t deep enough to give you spectacular implied odds you’re going to fold. The drawing hands you do hit are likely to be the ones in multiway pots against min-betters, the ones that come in when you have other outs anyway (pair and a flush draw, gutshot with overcards) or the ones that come in when you were ahead all along (overpair that makes a straight or a flush).
4. You will lose to TPNK.
Often. You will lose against it until you realize that no amount of betting will ever get your opponents to lay down top pair, especially if it’s aces. It’s a hand you can’t play them off, you have to draw out on ‘em or be ahead in the first place. Then you’ll lose against it a little bit more with TPTK because you’ll get three-outered. If anyone knows of a way to stop this from happening, please let me know. Fuckin’ dyin’ over here.
5. You will lose with dominating hands what seems like a ridiculous percentage of the time (but actually isn’t).
You’re reluctant to call off your chips with AK, but will against a loose player or if there’s money in the pot already. Your opponents suffer no such compunctions about any big ace, any big king, and sometimes that powerhouse QJo. It’s the kind of edge you’re looking for, but it’s just an edge; you can end up on the wrong side of it fairly easily. The thing about this is, you’re only occasionally going to end up on the other side of it. When you open with ATs in MP and someone pushes behind you, and the pot’s only laying you 1.4-to-1, you, a reasonably well-adjusted and inarguably sane person, are going to fold, letting your initial raise go and vowing to have a better hand the next time you come in. Your opponent, meanwhile, only understands domination in a much seedier context and is thus fairly excited by the prospect. A significant percentage of the time he’s going to spike on you and send you to the rail. For maximum tiltage, it’s best when this happens two hands in a row, once with AKs vs. AJo, and then the very next hand you push your short stack in with ATo and get called by A6o. The best possible boards for these hands, respectively, are K48JJ and T3425, ideally when you have a four-flush by the turn both times.
Fuck you, I do not owe you a dollar. This is all purely hypothetical.
6. Cowboys will break your heart.
Don’t they always? Almost one time in three, that ace-rag playin’ motherfucker is going to spike on you. Or catch trips with his undercard, or make some stupid longshot draw. You have better odds in a beginner’s game of Russian Roulette (though, admittedly, that buyin is a little higher). When stacks are small, you’ve just got to pray they come through for you; when they’re deep, you’ve got to be willing to break up with them when the ace hits the flop.
7. When you lose a big pot, you’ll have lost with a big hand.
Overpair crushed by a turned two-outer. Set goes down to an OESD or straight draw. Flopped straight no good against overplayed overpair’s runner-runner flush. You’re going to lose big pots with big hands for the simple reason that you’re not going to play a big pot without one. In some of them you’re even going to be the one who got your money in on life support - kings against aces, set under set, flopped straight heads-up against a flopped flush. Every time it happens (and the more you play the more it’ll happen), you’ll wonder why you ever picked up this stupid little game in the first place. But you gotta move on. The correct response to a beat like this - and poker is, above all, a game about doing the right thing - is to say, “THANK YOU SIR MAY I HAVE ANOTHER?”
Because, here’s the thing - you know they’ll oblige.
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Topics: Poker |
June 5, 2006 at 9:00 PM
Excellent post.
June 5, 2006 at 9:55 PM
You should try donkey poker as an experiment. Let us know how it goes.
June 6, 2006 at 5:12 AM
“Fuck you, I do not owe you a dollar. This is all purely hypothetical.”
Best answer EVER.
Great post!
June 6, 2006 at 9:40 AM
Looking through my ledger for the past few months, I can’t tell you how right you are, especially on # 4, 5, and 7.
Brilliant post. Bravo.
June 6, 2006 at 11:17 AM
I agree with Studio.
Pick 10-20 $1 and $2 MTTs at Stars, call any raise, push, or limp with A2-A9o, KJ-K9o, any pocket pair, and any two sOOOted cards and see what the results are.
I’ve played dime MTTs this way and my ITM % hovers around 45%.
June 6, 2006 at 11:20 AM
Is that true Drizz? That stat makes me feel ill…
June 6, 2006 at 12:51 PM
In those dime tourneys, you’ve got about twenty-minutes to play real poker. Then it turns into push, push, push.
Much luck required.
June 6, 2006 at 1:31 PM
I was just looking at links, and I noticed you linked me up, which humbles this humble little poker blogger. I loved your link, too: “That guy who lists me as that guy who won 100K in a tourney.” You have to admit, that will probably get you more readers in the long run, as you’re a poker player, so you’re all about the long run, right?
Keep the great posts coming. One of these days it might help me expand my games beyond the $5 SnGs and .25 or .50 NL poker (who-hoo! Today I made $3!).
Anyway, great blog, and you’re kinda my hero, although not in a gay way.
June 6, 2006 at 1:36 PM
Oh, yeah, and GREAT post. I was nodding my head the whole time. I actually keep track of the suckouts against me, with a suck counting as the times I’m a 65/35 favorite or higher. The point isn’t to relive bad beats, just to measure how many times I was knocked out with the best hand to see how I’m playing at the time.
There have been weeks when I’ve cashed four times and been knocked out eight, and all eight times were because of suckouts.
I like to play the $5 SnGs because I don’t have a huge bankroll (it hovers around $650) and I don’t want to gamble a lot of money. But am I, in fact, gambling more by playing the $5 SnGs, when you’re way more likely to suffer a suckout because of the idiot mistakes? Would I be gambling less by playing the $10 or $20 ones?
Any thoughts on this would be cool.
June 6, 2006 at 4:46 PM
I’m not a SNG specialist by any means. But those idiot mistakes, in the long run, are what give you your edge. Whether they actually increase variance is a question for a statistician with a mainframe. I’d think that ultimately they even out because though you’ll take mad stupid beats every now and then, you’ll have many more opportunities to double up (so long as you’re not trying to bluff at TPNK).
I doubt that the play at the $10 or $20 SNGs is all that quantifiably better than at the $5s. You might have an average of point-23 fewer first-timers at your tables but that won’t add up to much.
A lot of the pros say that you need 100 buyins for whatever level of tournament you’re winning at, so my advice (which is worth absolutely zero) would be to stick with the $5s until you’ve built the roll up to $1k. Though those numbers are geared toward MTTs, I think, and if you’ve got a good ITM ratio in SNGs you might be able to get by with less.
June 6, 2006 at 9:19 PM
My ITM ratio usually hovers around 50 percent (I’m assuming this means how many times you cash, I have a Mac so bear with me).. They’re definitely profitable for me.
Thanks Mr, 100K
June 7, 2006 at 8:42 AM
June 7, 2006 at 2:18 PM
Brilliant and informative post, Ryan. I guess I can stop bugging you to tutor me pre-WSOP now.
June 7, 2006 at 9:07 PM
Excellent post. Was led here by Wil’s post, and couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve been playing for about 9 months consistently now, online and in live “bar” tourneys - but it’s great to see you reinforce and quantify what I have felt “instinctively.” Given that I have only read the first few chapters of Hellmuth, and I have System 1 and 2 to go through, I think I’m doing OK based on your post and Wil’s, given that I am only concerned with whether or not I have played the best scenario in each hand’s situation. That (hopefully) will count for something someday.
Glad I found the ‘blog - I’l be sure to visit regularly (and - who knows - maybe start to post myself - thanks for the inspiration.)
4b54l0m (on PokerStars.com)
June 8, 2006 at 7:04 AM
June 8, 2006 at 11:04 AM
Excellent post, sir!
June 10, 2006 at 5:49 PM
June 13, 2006 at 2:32 PM
Great post. I wish I had read this before I decided to go on my tourney bender