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06.15.06
Sixty Minutes
posted by Absinthe | 2:30 PM
One hour. Maybe forty or fifty hands, a few more if your table is tight, which it isn’t. The hour you want to survive while getting your hands on as much dead money as possible. Simultaneously the most and least important hour of the tournament.
It’s the least important because surviving it means nothing. Unless it’s a turbo, you could sit out the first hour and still have chips at the beginning of the second. It’s the most important because not surviving it means less than nothing. Taking a chance and doubling (or even tripling) your stack early on gives you an incrementally better chance of winning the tournament - one that’s probably within the standard deviation. Taking a chance and getting knocked out when you were favored 58-42 gets you a chance of winning of, uh, zero. On to the next tournament.
In every tournament I’ve played that I’ve won (one WWdN excepted), I was by no means running over the table. I creep along with at best a par stack, bobbing and weaving and just waiting for a good chance to double with a huge edge. If that edge doesn’t come I take a smaller one. If the smaller one doesn’t come I’ll take anything in the neighborhood of even money, including the wrong end of a 60-40, when I need to double in order to keep from Broomcorning out. But usually at that point you’re short enough that your opponents will give you the right end just to have a shot at getting rid of you.
My whole tourney strategy is designed around staying alive until the final table. Just get me there. Put me there with three par stacks, three short stacks, and two stacks that have me covered 9:1 and I’ll be happy. I can work with that. If you don’t make the final table you have no chance to win.
But the final table doesn’t come in the first sixty minutes. You have to survive the first sixty minutes, and in a $100-or-less buyin online MTT usually two-fifths of the field (at least) doesn’t. You want to get value for your good hands, and fold the ones that suck. You want to build a big stack, but (in my view) you want to do it as safely as possible. Near the beginning of the tourney your fold equity is at or near zero; your opponents will happily call off 20% of their chips with QJ vs. your AK preflop, and they might well be right to - that kind of preflop edge is almost meaningless early on in a tourney, both in short and deep stack tourneys.
There are, to my mind, five ways to build a decent stack early, meaning to double once and then get some good hands paid with value bets. They are:
1. Flop a set on a ragged board against someone who can’t lay down an overpair. Which, in the first hour of a shortstack MTT, is everyone, including me and you. You raise with AA and the flop comes 942 with two hearts, you bet and get raised and the pot’s laying you a decent price? You call, because the odds that he’s going nuts with JJ or T9s or even 35 are greater than the odds he’s spiked. Flop a set versus an overpair (or TPTK) and you are going to get paid, full stop. You will probably double. Your opponent will resolve to do better next time and then forget this by level 1 of the next tourney he plays. And so will you. The only defense from an implied-odds perspective is to always bet more than 1/8 of the starting stack with a premium pair, to make it a technically incorrect call for anyone hoping to flop a set. (With AA or KK early on, it is probably not a bad play to open-raise or reraise all-in; you’ll get called and double often enough to make up for the times you get no action. I think. Somebody run the math on that?)
2. Get AA/KK vs. QQ/JJ on a safe flop, and don’t lose to a two-outer. This is slightly less likely to double you but, again, you will indubitably get paid something.
3. Flop a monster with a suited connector or chase a (relatively) cheap draw against an opponent who doesn’t believe in outdraws. Especially effective when your opponent has a nut redraw that misses. Less effective when your opponent has a nut redraw that hits. Also good: top two vs. TPTK.
4. Have someone outkicked. This is dark territory - if you’re playing your stack for your kicker in the first hour you are probably not playing optimally - but if the flop isn’t likely to have made your opponent two pair and your notes say that TPOKK is gold for them, it’s probably an edge worth pushing. With AK I’d rather hit a K73 flop than an A73 flop for this, since Ax is much more likely than Kx, but if my opponent usually plays AJ or AQ against a raise I can push harder there.
5. Play passively, limp a lot, and hit a lot of flops. This works for a lot of people - continuation bets are de rigeur in the first hour, since they’re a relatively cheap way to pick up a pot, so a lot of people will call a raise with QT or QJ, hit a Q or J, and let you bet their hand for them. They’ll pick off bluffs more often than they’re outkicked, and can sometimes eke out a small value bet on the river against someone who picked up second pair after the flop. This doesn’t work for me because I have an almost religious belief in the Gap Concept and thus am a lot more likely to hit weak hands like TPNK in a multiway pot where I got to see a cheap flop but needed at least two pair or a quality draw to continue. Also, flops are my Kryptonite. It’s true that AK will make TPTK on the flop roughly one time in three; I guarantee you that this will be the time when somebody besides me is holding it.
6. Play people off their hands. I’m ranking this number 6 simply because it doesn’t work. When you make an EP raise and the SB calls, you make a continuation bet on the QTT flop and get called, you fire again on the 9 turn and get called, the river blanks and you check behind and your opponent shows 55 and beats your AK to take the pot, well, so much for outplaying. Usually when you “outplay” an opponent in the early going it’s because you had the best hand all along - checkraising a middle pair on a safe flop and getting him to lay down his AK, or pushing him off a draw when you’ve made it clear it’s not going to come cheaply.
7. Race for all your chips. Repeat until you accumulate 8 or 9 buyins worth of chips or go broke. Extra credit if you win at least one hand as a 4.5-to-1 dog along the way.
And now, the $100+9 question: look over these choices again and tell me how many of them look like pure dumb luck.
1. Luck. You need to hit long odds to flop a set, and it needs to be against something strong enough to pay you off.
2. Ditto. You will probably average three pocket pairs in the first hour of the tournament, one a premium pair (i.e. TT or better). It needs to be better than the other guy’s, the flop has to be safe enough to allow you to continue leading, and it needs to hold up.
3. Flopping flushes and straights = pure dumb luck. Getting them paid is usually easy if your opponent actually has something. Getting paid when you hit a flush draw is harder but you can usually get something.
4. This one might be more skill than luck once you get the ball rolling - you need good notes and a good read to safely extract value from this situation. But again, you’ve got to hit your pair with a better kicker than your opponents’, which will happen only about one time in eight - close to the same odds as flopping a set.
5. Strangely, this one (outflopping your opponent) might be the most skillful at all. Which would you rather take early on, a 60-40 edge for all your chips or a 40-60 for 5-8% of them? I’ll take column B, thanks, though I’m still probably exceedingly cautious because I don’t want to end up on the wrong end of number 4, as above.
6. Much more skillful, much less profitable. You have the best hand and you’re extracting a little value from it by letting your opponent lead the flop when you’re pretty sure he doesn’t have a piece. But also a very marginal territory - the key with marginal hands is that if you’re ahead, you’re not ahead by that much, and if you’re behind you are absolutely crushed. You don’t want to be the player putting in money drawing to two outs. I have check-folded 88 on a 9-high flop to an aggressive LP raiser, and I’ll do it again.
7. Pure dumb donkfish luck.
So what’s the point? To build a big stack early on you need to get lucky. To get lucky you need to put some or all of your chips at risk. While every chip you gain is one that can be doubled later, every chip lose is one you can’t.
In Michael Lewis’ baseball book Moneyball (which may be the second or third best poker book I’ve ever read, in all seriousness), he divulges the secret to an extraordinary yet unflashy way to score runs and thereby win baseball games: don’t make outs. If a hitter doesn’t make an out, he’ll by definition get on base. If the guy behind him doesn’t make an out, he’ll advance. Advancing runners will eventually score. Power hitters who hack at the ball will make home runs every once in a while, but they’ll also strike out. Striking out gets you absolutely nothing. Patient guys who wait for a pitch they like stand a better-average-chance of getting on base, of not making an out. Guys who don’t make outs eventually score, and while they may not do it in spectacular fashion, there’s no such thing as an ugly run.
If I get knocked out in the first sixty minutes, it’s because I made a huge mistake. A whopper. I put all my money in drawing to two outs, I didn’t give someone credit for flopping a monster.
There’s an obvious counterargument to what I’m saying here, and that’s this: eventually you will lose with a huge edge. You need enough chips to survive when that happens, because unless you are exceedingly lucky (and there’s that word again) you won’t always get your opponent to stack off when they’re drawing dead. What kind of edges you can afford to push - what pitches you choose to swing at - will vary from player to player. You might say that by choosing not to swing for the fences every at-bat I’m playing not to lose, and in the first hour you’d be right; when I go for broke I want to to be because I can’t win if I don’t. Anything less and I’m just gambling. My goal is this: put myself in a position to get lucky when it actually means something. If you disagree, well, maybe I’ll see you at the top of the second hour. And then again, maybe I won’t.
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Topics: Poker |
June 15, 2006 at 5:27 PM
I don’t disagree with anything you said, but I worry that your strategy often results in a short stack near the bubble. In other words, it’s really hard to get lucky enough to 1) flop a monster, 2) get action and 3) not get sucked out on. That’s why I’m more inclined to take a chance with hands that have a small edge. But then again, I’m not very good at tourneys.
June 15, 2006 at 9:28 PM
My strategy does often result in a short stack near the bubble. But it’s pretty easy to end up with one just like it by pushing small edges, and more likely I’ll end up with no stack at all. And at least then you’re not on tilt from having a big stack and blowing it.
I’m sure that most serious tournament pros will think this is all bunk and that pushing small edges early is the path to glory. They might be right - all I really know is what works for me. I will happily take a relatively small edge postflop when I know I have a lot of outs and might well be ahead (top pair, straight and flush draws), but the problem with those small preflop edges early on is that they’re quite a crapshoot - the guy you’re willing to race with is allowed to have aces or kings a certain percentage of the time.
(I would recommend that anyone who has AK take it to war with me. I’ll have KK; you’ll win.)
June 16, 2006 at 5:41 AM
Great post.
Thanks for writing this up, since the first hour is one of the hardest to figure out how to play.
June 16, 2006 at 8:40 AM
Very nicely put. I can’t disagree with any of it. that’s what happens to me when people cite Moneyball. I simply go all Zombie and follow.
I played mostly “your way” last night. got short early (shocker!) when I figured the tiny stack who just went to war with KJ was doomed against my AQ. He had aces, natch. But I climbed back in, got the AA v. TT to double and took 4K to the second hour. Where I played as well as I have in a while. Didn’t result in a lot of chips (my KK and QQ got no action), but I stole some orphans and generally made the right decisions. I made a great read in the last level before the second break (with about 5K) and pushed my 33 against two players on a J74 flop and got called by…KQo. I turned a set, but it gave him more outs to the flush.
Yeah, you know what happened next.
Anyway, my point: You gave me lots to think about with this and the previous discussion and I think it’s done me a world of good. Maybe one of my problems recently hasn’t been thinking about the game–my game–enough.
June 16, 2006 at 11:39 AM
Good stuff. Well said about making the final table. I feel the same way- get me there with an average stack and I feel I have a good chance. About the only thing you don’t cover is surviving the second and third hour when you are card dead. That would be a hell of a strategy post.
June 16, 2006 at 2:32 PM
Great post.
June 16, 2006 at 4:09 PM
There’s always another tournament, and +EV is +EV. Let me get all of my chips in as a 58-42 favorite every day please (and 10 times on Sundays). The only time I’d willingly refuse such a situation is when ICM dictates otherwise, and ICM’s relevance is near zero in the first hour of a large online tournament.
June 17, 2006 at 1:02 AM
The problem with the “+EV is +EV” argument is that usually proponents of it appeal to hope while diminishing quite reasonable fears. It’s all well and good to presume that you’re a 3:2 favorite, but another thing entirely to be one - even with the best notes and tracking of regular players your likely edge when (to reference a recent discussion) taking TT to war early on is less than it would be if you just put TT up against AK over and over again - sometimes you’ll be up against suited overcards, sometimes an underpair (huge edge), sometimes (slightly more often, as not everyone’s that dumb)an overpair (not so huge an edge). (With apologies to Nerd, whose recent dissection of the UTG TT hand puts me to shame.) And this also presumes you can get all the money in before the flop; pushing tiny preflop edges with 5-20% of your stack will only work for you if you play well after the flop and get lucky. How big does a preflop edge have to be, and how much of your stack do you have to be able to bet on it, before you can minimize the importance of the community cards?
If I have AKs and my opponent raises all-in and inadvertently flips up QJo, I’m stupid not to call; on the other hand if my opponent is dumb enough to expose his cards, could be I can count on a better edge if I wait for it.
I would be very interested to see a probabilistic edge distribution across x hands - something that takes into account a set of players’ predelictions for action, gives them all random hands and sees how likely certain common edges are to develop over a given period of time between opponents willing to take their respective hands to war.
And, again, I could be just plain wrong. Waiting for an edge better than 8% does have its price, and until someone starts sending me a list of the hands I’ll be getting in the next hour that price is going to be unknown. Imperfect information is a bitch.
June 18, 2006 at 7:37 AM
That’s an entirely valid point but also entirely separate from the one you were making, so I’ll rephrase: given that in my best judgement I am +EV against my opponent’s range, I will always take the gamble. Of course my read may be off, but bad reads go both ways, and I am more frequently surprised by the weakness of an opponent’s holding than by the strength.
What I am trying to say, in essence, is that the early levels of a big online tournament are not structurally different from a cash game. Agree/disagree?
June 25, 2006 at 6:42 PM
I will happily push a defined edge, even if it’s small. Top pair and a flush draw, I’ll take the chance you’ve got me outkicked. Overcards plus flush draw against a likely pair (AsKs on a 57J board with two spades), straight flush draws (even the wrong end!), etc. I think where most people go wrong is in overestimating their preflop edge, and the “there’s always another tourney” can hurt your game as well as help it - I don’t think that the ability to buy into another tourney sometime in the near future has anywhere near the value of a rebuy in a cash game. You lose a lot of intangibles like accumulated information, which greatly impacts your ability to estimate your edge. Also, I want to win the tourney I’m actually playing, not one in the future.
I also think the old saw that you “gotta give action to get action” is no longer remotely true, especially in the early going.
July 16, 2006 at 6:17 PM
I love this post. I have it bookmarked. And I totally agree that it leaves you short-stacked at the final table. BUT, no other strategy really has a chance in this day in age (online at least).
Now I need to figure out how to TAG the players who wont laydown hands!