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Recently I was in the early stages of a small stakes online tournament. The blinds were 50/100, I had 11,640 and in the following hand I had the villain slightly covered.
Villain, the most aggressive player at the table, opened to 300 from middle position. Sitting two seats to his left, I decided to three-bet him to 777 with {A-Hearts}{K-Diamonds}. Action folded back around to him and he called.
The flop came {A-Clubs}{10-Spades}{7-Clubs}. With 1,704 in the middle, he checked and I continuation bet half-pot to 852. He then check-raised to 3,408.
A relatively tight player could take this line with a bluff range of all the combo draws including {9-Clubs}{8-Clubs}+, {10-Clubs}{8-Clubs}+, and all the club Broadway hands as well as a value range of {A-}{7-}-suited, {A-}{10-}-suited, {10-}{10-}, and {7-}{7-}. Against this range, I had about 32 percent equity and only needed 30 percent to continue.
I believed that this player was even wider and more aggressive than average. I figured he could have a few more flush draws as well as the three non-club open-ended straight draws with {9-}{8-}-suited. But for the sake of analysis, let’s stick with the tighter range I gave initially.
I decided to call, putting a total of 8,520 in the middle with effective stacks of 6,185 behind. Here is where things got interesting.
The turn was the {4-Spades}, a seeming brick. Had villain shoved, I would have needed about 30 percent equity to call. Against the tighter range, I’d have about 39 percent equity and would have made the call. Interestingly, though, villain decided to bet half-pot instead of making the standard play of shoving his remaining stack for a little more than 70 percent of the pot.
This departure from what I expected him to do with his range forced me to consider which hands he would choose not to shove. I figured that most aggressive players in small stakes tournaments would just shove here with their draws. If I was correct and villain fit this Bayesian model, then his decision not to shove removed the draws from his range — leaving only a value range that had me in bad shape.
Against two pair or better, I only had about 3.5 percent equity. Even if he’d also play all his {A-}{K-} hands this way, I’d only have about 21 percent equity. He bet half-pot which meant I needed to be good 25 percent of the time for the call to break even. According to my math, this made the turn a fold in my opinion.
I discussed this hand with several of my friends who are better players. They generally said you can’t put in such a large percentage of your stack with a hand this strong and then fold. Additionally, they said that you can’t remove the draws from villain’s range on the turn simply because he did not shove.
This is where I disagreed. This was a small stakes tournament. How often have you seen an aggressive player in these games not shove this turn with flush draws? I posed this question to my friends and very few of them could recall ever seeing a half-pot bet here with a flush draw. In fact, many of them admitted that they themselves would shove their draws here.
I am convinced that most players in small stakes games aren’t balanced and make the mistake of splitting their ranges in spots like this one which allows us to play perfectly against them if we are aware of it. From my calculations, the math seems to back me up.
That said, the math is only as good as the assumptions and inputs. In this case, I believe that the math shows I should have made an exploitative fold on the turn given that villain decided to bet half-pot when he could have comfortably shoved.
Unfortunately, I had not studied this spot beforehand and missed the opportunity to get away from his {A-Spades}{7-Spades}. Hopefully by using math to study these “standard cooler” spots, I can play better against unbalanced small stakes players in the future.
This week’s hand involves a not uncommon situation no-limit hold’em — you flop a hand of medium-value such as second pair versus a straightforward opponent who is playing passively by checking and calling. The questions in a hand like this involve deciding whether or not to bet and if betting to decide on the best bet sizes to get these players to call with lesser hands.
This hand comes from the same $1,000 buy-in tournament we were discussing last week, also happening relatively early in the event when the stacks were still deep and the blinds just 100/200 with a 25 ante.
My straightforward-playing opponent opened with a raise to 500 from middle position, and I elected to call from the cutoff with {Q-Hearts}{J-Hearts}. We both began the hand with about 20,000. The flop came {K-Hearts}{Q-Spades}{7-Clubs} and my opponent checked.
As I discuss in the video below, since my opponent is straightforward I can think about what sorts of hands he would be checking in this instance as I decide whether to bet my hand for thin value or to check behind.
When facing someone who plays honestly, it is safe to assume the player tends to have whatever it is he or she is representing. If players like this bet, they tend to have a strong hand, and if they check, they have either a marginal or weak hand.
Take a look at how I decided to proceed in this spot, and hear what else I have to say about playing my middle pair against this kind of opponent:
As I am suggesting above, when a straightforward opponent checks, your decent marginal made hands (like middle-pair hands) can be bet for value. But think also about what bet sizes are going to work best in order to get calls from the hands you want to be calling you.
Jonathan Little is a professional poker player and author with over $6,300,000 in live tournament earnings. He writes a weekly educational blog and hosts a podcast at JonathanLittlePoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @JonathanLittle.
Suppose that you know the optimal poker strategy for every situation. C’mon, admit it — you pretty much think that you do, right?
Now suppose that you have just either won or lost a huge pot. It doesn’t matter how it happened — bad luck, good luck, bad judgment, good judgment — it just happened. How will you play now? Will your decisions be different than they would have been prior to the big win or loss?
My last two columns were derived from my recent read of Gary Smith‘s book, What the Luck? Though the book is primarily about the mathematical phenomenon of “regression to the mean,” in one chapter he takes a side trip to summarize an interesting piece of research he did on poker players.
I looked up the original 2009 publication written by Smith and a couple of others. It appeared a technical journal called Management Science, under the title, “Poker Player Behavior After Big Wins and Big Losses.”
Smith and his co-authors first review several theories of human psychology and decision-making that suggest that an average poker player will become less cautious after a big win (i.e., take gambles that he previously would have judged unacceptable), and more cautious after a big loss. But other theories predict the exact opposite. The authors decided to try to answer the question with actual data.
This being prior to Black Friday, they used the program PokerTracker to gather hand histories from Full Tilt Poker $25/$50 no-limit hold’em cash tables, guessing that those stakes would be high enough to ensure that the players were generally highly experienced. They collected data on 226,351 hands of 6-max. tables, and 339,510 hands of heads-up play.
They deemed $1,000 — 20 big blinds — to represent a big win or loss. After each such event, they looked at the behavior of the player who won or lost that much over his next 12 hands, using two of the most common statistics featured in player-tracking software: “VPIP” (voluntarily put money into the pot) as a measure of looseness, and “AF” (aggression factor) as a measure of aggressiveness.
The results were unmistakable. Players tended to become both looser and more aggressive after a big loss than after a big win.
THE RESULTS WERE UNMISTAKABLE. PLAYERS TENDED TO BECOME BOTH LOOSER AND MORE AGGRESSIVE AFTER A BIG LOSS THAN AFTER A BIG WIN.
To be exact, at heads-up tables, 154 players became looser and 181 became more aggressive after a big loss, but after a big win, only 74 became looser and 47 became more aggressive.
Similarly, at full six-handed games, 135 players became looser and 117 more aggressive after a big loss, while after a big win, only 68 became looser and 85 more aggressive.
They ran similar analyses for wins and losses of the same magnitude that occurred over a stretch of 12 hands, rather than in a single pot. As you might expect, the results were in the same direction, but less pronounced.
They also tested whether this observed change in players’ strategy depended on the size of the win or loss by rerunning the original analysis with thresholds of a $250 and $500 instead of $1,000.
“In every case, a majority of the players play looser after a large loss than after a large win,” they found. “However, the fraction playing more loosely consistently increases as the size of the large loss increases.” And, again, they saw an attenuated version of the same effect when the win or loss occurred over a span of 12 hands than when it came in a single hand.
So what does all of this tell us about the mentality of typical experienced poker players? Smith and his co-authors review how their data support or undermine the various psychological theories discussed in the early part of the paper. They conclude, “Overall, the theory that is most supported by our data is the break-even argument that a poker player who has lost a big pot may feel that the cheapest way to break even is to hit a long-shot flop with a weak hand — for example, staying in with a pair of deuces in the hope of flopping another deuce.”
In the last section of the paper, the authors review the empirical evidence that the same phenomenon — increased risk-taking to compensate for a large loss — is seen in both professional and amateur stock and bond traders.
A crucial question, of course, is whether the observed change in poker strategy is profitable or unprofitable.
As Smith explains it in his book, “If experienced players are using profitable strategies to begin with, changing strategies is a mistake. That’s exactly what we found. Those players who played looser after a big loss, did worse than they normally did.”
The problem, as he points out, is that even “these experienced players did not recognize that their performance would regress to the mean after a big loss.” Thus did they change their approach, and as a result adopt what were in fact less profitable strategies.
All of which helps underscore a great lesson to take away from understanding the nature of swings (good and bad) and the significance of regression to the mean.
“For poker players and investors who have sound strategies,” writes Smith, “regression to the mean counsels that patience is better than a Hail Mary.”
What to Do — and Not to Do — About Unusually Good or Bad Poker Results
Robert Woolley lives in Asheville, NC. He spent several years in Las Vegas and chronicled his life in poker on the “Poker Grump” blog. Source: pokernews.com/strategy/………
The check-raise is an important move in no-limit hold’em. The fact that check-raising is an especially aggressive play certainly makes it attractive to some players.
That said, the strategy involved when employing the check-raise successfully can be complicated, with new players in particular not always appreciating all of the factors that need to be in place in order to make the move work.
We caught up with Team PokerStars Pro Felipe Ramos at the PokerStars Championship Bahamas series this week to talk about check-raising, and he picked a hand from the European Poker Tour Prague Main Event from last month to use as an illustration to help him discuss the move.
Ramos had a nice run in the EPT Prague Main Event, making it all of the way to 15th place out of a field of 1,192. The hand Ramos chose to discuss came after the cash bubble burst when he was playing at the feature table.
The hand begins with Ramos the table’s big stack with around 700,000 (about 90 big blinds). Salvatore Bonavena — who won the EPT Prague Main Event back in Season 5 (2008) — is his opponent in the hand, having just arrived at the feature table with a stack of about 350,000 (a bit over 40 big blinds).
From middle position Bonavena opened from 18,000 (a bit over 2x) and Ramos called from the big blind.
The flop came , and after checking Ramos watched as Bonavena continued for 28,000.
As Ramos explains, the situation, stack sizes, and board texture all suggest this to be a good spot for him to check-raise — regardless of Ramos’s hand, in fact.
However, as he points out, you don’t simply want to check-raise just because you think an opponent might be bluffing. There are multiple reasons for check-raising, and you want to think about and decide if any of them apply before you do.
Ramos lists four reasons for check-raising:
as a bluff
for value
as a semi-bluff
for “meta-game” reasons
Listen to Ramos explain these points and see as well how he played the particular hand with Ramos:
Dear reader: I wrote this article 16 years ago, back when the term “brick and mortar poker” had just been invented because before then, there was no other kind. When I read it again just now, I was all set to revise it, with updates and newfound perspectives. And then I didn’t change anything. –Tommy
A good game requires a team effort among dealers and players. I’ve sat in all eleven seats and watched tensions simmer that could have been easily avoided or quickly calmed. Here are some simple precautions and courtesies that reduce confusion, spats, and delays.
Entering a Game
Players: When you join a game, tell the dealer your intentions: “I’ll come in behind the button,” or “I’ll come in on the big blind,” or “Deal me in.” You can do this before being asked, before sitting down, and before buying chips.
Dealers: When new players join your game, do not ask them if they want to wait. Ask them if they want to play.
Split Pots and Side Pots
Players: Strange, we play poker for thousands of hours and freak out when there is a brief delay. Relax. Do not light bombs; defuse them. Only help the dealer when something is wrong and no one else is saying what is right.
If you must advise during a discrepant or confusing situation, do not snap at the dealer. Stay calm and coach. A good time to speak up is when bedlam breaks out and you know the dealer is doing it right. Say so, for the team.
Dealers: When everyone screams at you and your face flushes and players have the gall to stick their mitts into your pot and the next dealer reaches around you to help and dribbles coffee in your hair…
When this happens and you are not confused, do not fight panic with panic. Stop, sit up straight, and maybe offer some soothing words of confidence. They’ll get the message. When the table quiets, resume your task.
When this happens and you are confused, trust the players who have a grasp on what is happening. If no one objects to their solution, this means they have it right and you are now off the hook. Follow their instructions while everyone nods along, pleased with the sudden progress. If commotion persists, meaning the players are in disagreement, call the floor, now.
Calling the Floor
Dealers: Do not engage, at all, with an embittered customer. Do not make rulings, even when you are certain of what is right. Instead, lighten your load by immediately shifting the burden to where it belongs, the floor staff.
You’ll have a smoother game, a smoother life, and you’ll ideally make more money by having the floorperson take the heat.
Before calling the floor, announce your intention to the table. If the dispute is minor, ask “Would you like me to call the floor?” This is not only courteous, it is often enough to end the quarrel. When you know the floor is needed, do not get flustered and shout for one. Instead, say, “I am going to call the floor.” Then shout.
Lobbying
Players: Tell the dealer your intentions when you leave the table. We often say, “deal me in” for our own sake, but we rarely say, “deal me out” for the sake of others. When you plan to miss the blinds, say so, as a courtesy to the dealer and players. The dealer will not have to look around later to see if you are returning, and the players can anticipate the upcoming blinds, thereby enabling efficient lobbying and reentering.
Buttons
Dealers: Hold buttons and missed blind buttons do serve as effective reminders of who to deal to but that is not their only purpose. Those buttons are for the players and floor staff as well. Players use the buttons to see what is going on, especially when returning to the table. The floor staff uses the buttons to do their seating job efficiently.
Use your buttons. The split second is well spent.
Players: When you have a hold button or a missed-blind button, make sure it is easy to see and then leave it alone. If you want to save the dealer a long reach by tossing in your button when entering or reentering a game on the next hand, fine, but wait until after the previous hand is completed before doing so, especially when you are coming in behind the dealer button.
Players and Dealers: Do not move the dealer button before the end of the previous hand. Leave it be! Premature button passing causes mix-ups when it gets moved twice. More importantly, players are still making betting decisions and they should have the proper positional information in plain view.
Other Tips for Players:
Put your bets and folded cards where the dealer can reach them.
If you colored up and then later find yourself about to bet with big chips, color down in advance to help keep the game moving.
**When you bust out and leave the table for good, say, “Seat open.” **
Post your blinds before the dealing, not during it.
In high-low games, stack your bets.
When something seems obvious to you but the dealer missed it, just say what needs to be done instead of intentionally making the dealer squirm by remaining silent.
Try to imagine a game in which every player and every dealer was a considerate team player with the common goal of having a well-run game. See? It’s not that hard. Dealers, remember that your players are customers. Players, remember that dealers are people, too. Okay everybody, sing along now with Mary Poppins: Just a spoonful of kindness helps the button go round.
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, and after checking Ramos watched as Bonavena continued for 28,000.
