Chapter 2
Applying Essential Strategies
IN THIS CHAPTER
Knowing what Poker is and isn’t
Understanding the basics of the game
Looking at winning strategies
Handling when the bottom falls out
Basic strategic knowledge is critical for any Poker player. If you have no basis for making decisions about whether to call, fold, raise, or reraise, you may just as well play the lottery. Sure, you’ll win occasionally because everyone gets lucky now and then. Without strategy and knowledge, you’ll exercise no control over your destiny as a card player.
If you picked 100 Poker players at random and asked them about the objective of Poker, most would say something about winning the pot, but they couldn’t be further from the truth.
The goal of Poker — in addition to the enjoyment of playing the game — is winning money, not pots. If your goal were to win the most pots, that would be easy to do. Just play every hand and call every bet and raise until the bitter end. You’d win a lot of pots. In fact, you’d win every pot you possibly could. But you’d lose money. Plenty of it, and rapidly.
So the objective of Poker is to win money. And that means tempering enthusiasm with realism by being selective about the hands you play. There’s no need to play every hand. The very best players play relatively few hands, but when they do enter a pot, they are usually aggressive and out to maximize the amount they win when the odds favor them.
This is the essence of Poker: Anyone can win in the short run, but in the long haul — when the cards even out — the better players win more money with their good hands, and lose less with weak hands.
Because of the short-term luck involved, Poker is a game where even atrociously poor players can — and do — have winning nights. This isn’t true in most other competitive endeavors. Most of us wouldn’t have a prayer going one-on-one with an NBA basketball player, or attempting to hit a 95 mph big-league fastball. What’s more, we realize it. Yet most of us think we are good Poker players.
If you took a poll at any Poker table, the majority of players would rate themselves significantly above average. But that’s not the case. It can’t be. In the long run, good players beat bad players — though the bad players will win just often enough to keep them coming back for more.
It’s this subtle blend of skill and luck that balances the game. That balance also rewards good players who are realistic about how they assess their ability and that of their opponents. This chapter can help you develop those skills.
Knowing That Everyone Was a Beginner Once
In the beginning, everyone was a bad player — you, me, the guy winning all the money at your table tonight, as well as every player who has ever won the World Series of Poker. Once upon a time, Peyton Manning couldn’t throw a football, Alex Rodriguez couldn’t hit, and Michael Jordan was once cut from his high school basketball team. They were beginners too, and guess what: They were bad. Raw talent? Sure, they were blessed with an abundance of raw talent, but they all had to work long and hard to refine it.
So don’t bemoan your current skill level as a Poker player. You can improve, and you will if you’re willing to pay the price. Every good Poker player has been where you are now, and they’ve improved. To be sure, some progressed by leaps and bounds, while others have taken baby steps, one after the other, until they reached their goal.
Build a foundation first …
You can reach your Poker-playing goals. You probably have some innate potential as a Poker player, and if playing winning Poker is important, you need to build a foundation that will help you reach your potential as quickly as possible. Everyone who has progressed from neophyte to journeyman to expert to superstar shares one trait in common: They built a solid foundation, and that foundation allowed them to spread their wings and fly. And fly they can.
But in Poker, as in life itself, you can’t fly until you’ve built a rock-solid foundation and mastered the fundamentals. If you’re still grappling with fundamentals, you’re not yet ready to fly. But once those fundamentals are imprinted on your Poker consciousness and you can execute them instinctively, then, and only then, can you think about digressing from these basics and improving. Book 2, Chapter 1 has more about building the groundwork when playing Poker.
… Then you can improvise
When you listen to great jazz musicians, you’re hearing improvisation at its best. That improvisation, however, is based on a solid grounding of music theory. Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Sonny Rollins, Gerry Mulligan, Charles Mingus, Thelonius Monk: These jazz giants are masters of improvisation, but their innovation and creativity stood on a platform of musical theory, knowledge of time signatures, an understanding of harmony, skill in ensemble playing, and an ability to use rhythm to underpin melodic themes and harmony. Without possessing these basic skills, innovation would not have been possible.
The price wasn’t cheap, either. It took lots of playing, lots of years, and more clubs, sessions, and after-hours joints than those musicians would want to count. But the product was sweet, free-flowing music: riffs that seem to possess a life of their own, springing unbounded from horns, keyboards, and strings, and filling the night with magic.
Poker is the same way. No matter which game you play, you have to know the basic rules before you can take risks (aka improvise). Your risks will be small at first, but as you succeed and build confidence, you’ll find yourself taking bigger risks — and you’ll see them pay off.
Keeping Track of Basic Poker Concepts
Your first efforts should center on grasping basic Poker concepts. Even when you understand them, this know-how must be continuously applied. The knowledge and abilities that compose basic Poker skills are not a pill to be swallowed once. They need to be continuously refined.
Andres Segovia, the greatest classical guitarist of his generation, did not spend the majority of his practice time learning new pieces or practicing his concert repertoire. He spent four to six hours per day playing scales and études. Segovia spent 75 percent of his practice time on basics, and did this every day. You’ll have to take our word for it, but this analogy holds true for Poker, too.
The following sections give you some important information to help you with the basics. Book 2, Chapter 1 also provides some additional Poker basics.
Understanding blinds and antes
Every Poker game begins as a chase for the antes or blinds. An ante is a small portion of a bet contributed by each player to seed the pot at the beginning of each hand. A blind is a forced bet by one or more players before any cards are dealt. In Stud games, players usually ante; in Texas Hold’em and Omaha Hold’em, blind bets are used.
Regardless of whether a blind or an ante is employed, every game needs seed money to start the action. Without it, players could wait all day for unbeatable hands before entering the pot.
Playing for an empty pot would make for a slow and boring game. Blinds and antes serve the same purpose: to tempt and tantalize players, enticing them into the pot and creating action because there’s a monetary target to shoot at.
Knowing your opponents
Suppose you’re playing Texas Hold’em and have been dealt A♥K♥, and your opponents are Rick and Barbara, two players who are known for calling much too frequently.
“Fantastic,” you say to yourself when you look at the flop and see J♥5♥9♣. “I have position, two overcards, and a nut-flush draw.” You remember something about semi-bluffing and implied odds, and when your opponents check on the flop, you bet. They call. The turn brings 4♠, and it’s checked to you. You bet, thinking they might fold and you can win it right here.
Maybe you even have the best hand and would win in a showdown right now. Perhaps a heart — or even an ace or king — will come on the river (at the last common card). But you are up against players who sleep very well each and every night of the week, secure in the knowledge that no one, but no one, ever steals a pot from them.
The river is no help; it’s 4♣. Rick and Barbara check again. You still might have the best hand if you show it down. But you bet and you’re called, and you lose to Rick, who holds a 6-5 of mixed suits.
“What went wrong?” you ask yourself. “I had the perfect opportunity to semi-bluff.” Perfect, that is, only from the perspective of the cards on the table and those in your hand. But it was far from perfect if you stopped to consider your opponents. Your mistake involved considering only the cards while choosing a strategy. Semi-bluffing doesn’t work with players who always call. You have to show them the best hand to take the money. Although there was nothing you could have done to win that pot, you certainly could have saved a bet on the river.
Nothing was wrong with the strategy itself. It might have worked if the cards were the same but your opponents were different. Knowing your opponents is as important to winning at Poker as understanding strategic concepts.
Strategy is situationally dependent. Skilled players realize they need to be aware of the big picture while simultaneously paying attention to small details. Understanding strategic concepts is only part of the battle. How, and under what circumstances to apply them, are equally important. If you can do this, you’ll find that you have become a better player and a more creative one, too.
Preparing to win
Success demands preparation. Knowledge, plus preparation and experience (and whatever innate talent one may have), equals know-how. That’s what it takes to be a winning Poker player.
The primary step in making behavioral changes and eliminating bad habits is to be responsible for you. Adopt the irrevocable assumption that you are personally responsible for what happens to you at the Poker table. If you put the blame on forces outside of yourself, you haven’t committed yourself to making changes; you’re denying the problem.
Keeping Some Poker Perspective
The information explosion is everywhere, and Poker is no different. More has been written about Poker in the past 20 years than had previously been written in the entire history of the game.
After you’ve made a commitment to reach for the stars, you have to decide where to begin. If you aspire to Poker excellence, the first — and probably the most important step — is to develop a perspective that enables you to put each piece of information into a hierarchical structure. After all, some things are more important than others, and you may as well concentrate your efforts where they’ll do the most good. These sections can help you know what’s important and what’s not.
Knowing why some tactics are important in Poker and others aren’t
Imagine that we could teach you a terrific tactical ploy that would require some real study and practice to perfect — but once learned, could be used to earn an extra bet from an opponent. What if we also guaranteed this ploy to be absolutely foolproof: It would work perfectly every time you used it. Have we piqued your interest?
But suppose that we also told you that this tactic works only in very special circumstances that occur about once a year. Do you still want to invest the time required to learn it? Probably not. Although your ability to execute this particularly slick maneuver might brand you as a tough player in the eyes of your opponents, the fact that you might use it only once a year renders it meaningless. In the course of a year’s worth of playing, one extra bet doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. It doesn’t even amount to a can of beans.
Making frequent decisions
Tactical opportunities that occur all the time are important. Even when the amount of money attributed to a wrong decision is small, it will eventually add up to a tidy sum if that error is made frequently. Always defending your small blind in Hold’em, for example, is a good example. You have to decide whether to defend your small blind every round — and that’s frequent. If you always defend it, you are investing part of a bet on those occasions when it is wrong to do so. At the end of a year, those mistakes add up.
Suppose that you’re playing $10–$20 Texas Hold’em, with $5 and $10 blinds, and you decide to always defend your small blind, even when you’re dealt hands like 7♥2♣. Just to keep this simple, we’ll assume that your small blind is never raised. Based on the random distributions of cards, you’re probably dealt a throwaway hand about one-third of the time. At the rate of 30 hands per hour, you’ll be dealt the small blind three times every 60 minutes. If you always call, you’ll wind up calling once each hour when you really shouldn’t have. That’s only $5 each hour, but after 1,000 hours of Poker, you’ve essentially given away $5,000. It adds up fast, doesn’t it?
Avoiding costly decisions
Playing correctly requires a great deal of judgment — the kind that comes from experience, not books. No matter how skilled a player you eventually become, you’ll never reach the point where you always make these decisions correctly. Don’t worry; that’s not important. Just err on the side of protecting yourself from catastrophic mistakes, and you’ll be on the right track.
Decisions that cost a significant amount of money when they occur, even if they don’t happen too often, are also important. If you can’t decide whether to call or fold once all the cards are out and your opponent bets into a fairly large pot, that’s an important decision. If you make a mistake by calling when you should have folded and your opponent wins the pot — that’s an error, but not a critical one. It cost only one bet. But if you fold the winning hand, that’s a critical error because the cost of that error was the entire pot.
Now we’re certainly not advising you to call each and every time someone bets on the last card and you’re unsure about whether you have the best hand, but deciding to call instead of fold doesn’t have to be correct too often to render it the mistake of choice. If the cost of a mistaken fold is ten times the price of a mistaken call, you only have to be correct slightly more than 10 percent of the time to make calling worthwhile.
Making more decisions and taking subsequent actions
Choices can also be important because of their position on the decision tree. Those that are first in a long sequence of subsequent choices are always important because subsequent choices are usually predicated on your initial selection. Make an incorrect move up front and you run the risk of rendering each subsequent decision incorrect, regardless of whatever else you might do. That’s why the choice of which hands you start with in Poker is generally a much more critical decision than how you play on future betting rounds. If you adopt an “ … any cards can win” philosophy, you have set yourself up for a disaster that even the best players could not overcome on later rounds.
Poker’s single most important decision
Choosing the right game is the most important decision you’ll encounter as a Poker player. Choose the wrong game and little else matters. Choose the right game and you might even make money even on nights when you’re experiencing a below-average run of cards.
Starting with standards
After you choose the best game and select the best available seat at that table, what’s important to winning play? Early decisions predicate subsequent choices, so deciding which hands to start with (your starting standards) is critically important.
It’s human nature to seek the best bang for the buck, and Poker players are no different. There are hands where the return on your investment is positive, and others that will prove costly in the long run. In the heat of battle, you don’t have the time to thoroughly assess your hand. You should have made these decisions long before you hit the table. That’s why standards are critical. If you incorporate solid starting standards into your game, you are light-years ahead of any opponent who hasn’t done this — never mind how long he’s been playing or how much experience he may have in other phases of the game.
Starting standards also provide a basis for deviation, but only under the right conditions. Those conditions are impossible to recognize — and capitalize on — unless you’ve developed standards and integrated them so completely into your game that they are second nature to you. Only when that’s accomplished can you hope to find those very few exceptions that allow you to profitably deviate from them.
Having hand selectivity
Hand selection is one of the most important keys to winning. Most people play too many hands. I’m not referring only to beginners. Some players have been at it for years, and the single most important flaw in their game is that they still play too many hands.
After all, the majority of Poker players are recreational players. They’re not playing Poker to make their living; they play to enjoy themselves — and much as they’d have you believe their goal in playing is to win money, that’s really secondary to their main objective: having fun. The difference between a player who has come out to have fun and another who is playing to win money is that the recreational player will look for reasons to play marginal hands and to continue playing them even when subsequent betting rounds are fraught with danger. The money player will look for reasons to release hands, avoid unnecessary danger, and dump speculative hands whenever the potential reward is overshadowed by the risks.
Being aggressive, but being selective
Winning Poker requires selectivity and aggression. Every top player knows that concept, and every credible Poker book emphasizes it. If you have any doubts, consider the need to be selective. Picture someone who calls every hand down to the bitter end unless she sees that she’s beaten on board. Her opponents would soon discover that it never pays to bluff her. Of course, every time they had the smallest edge, they’d bet, knowing that she’ll call with the worst of it. These value bets would soon relieve our heroine of her bankroll.
If selectivity is clearly correct, what about aggression? Consider the passive player. He seldom bets unless he has an unbeatable hand — and they don’t come around all that often. More often than not, you’ll find yourself in pots where you believe, but aren’t absolutely certain, that you have the best hand. Even when you are 100 percent certain that yours is the best hand at the moment, you might recognize it as one that can be beaten if there are more cards to come. This occurs more often than you might realize, and you can’t win at Poker by giving your opponent a free card. If they have to draw to beat you, make them pay the price.
Being patient
Patience is certainly related to the “be selective” portion of the “be aggressive, but be selective” mantra. Few players dispute the need to be selective. Nevertheless, most aren’t very selective about the hands they play. After all, Poker is fun, and most aficionados come to play, not fold.
When the cards aren’t coming your way, it’s very easy to talk yourself into taking a flyer on marginal hands. But there’s usually a price to be paid for falling off the good-hands wagon.
Sometimes it all boils down to a simple choice. You can have a lot of fun, gamble it up, and pay the inevitable price for your pleasure, or you can apply the patience required to win consistently.
Focusing on position
In Poker, position means power. It is almost always advantageous to act after you’ve had the benefit of seeing what your opponents do. Their actions provide clues about the real or implied values of their hands. This is true in every Poker game, and is particularly important in fixed-position games, like Hold’em and Omaha. In these games, position is fixed for the entire hand, unlike Stud, where it can vary from one betting round to another.
Coping When All Goes Wrong
Unfortunately, no magic elixir eliminates the fluctuations everyone experiences at Poker. But it’s little consolation when you’ve been buffeted by the ups and downs of fate to realize that you’re not the only poor soul tossing about in the same boat. When all seems lost, you need to remember this: There is opportunity in adversity. In fact, losing provides the best opportunity to examine and refine your own game.
Face it. Most players don’t spend much time in careful self-examination when they’re winning. It’s too much fun to stack the chips and revel in the money that’s rolling in. But when they lose, they pore over each decision they made, wondering how they could have improved it. “What could I have done differently,” they ask over and over. Losing turns them from expansive extroverts into brooding introverts whose thoughts bring them back to the same ground time and time again, in search of reasons and strategies that will prevent losses like these from ever happening again.
Change gears if you’re on a losing streak
While no guarantees about future losses are available, we do recommend one course of action to any player mired in a losing streak: Just change gears. We all change gears during a Poker game, sometimes consciously, as a planned strategy, and sometimes we just wind up playing differently than we did when we first sat down.
When you’re losing, consider gearing down. Way down. This is a time for lots of traction and not much speed; a time for playing only the best starting hands. Not marginal hands, not good — or even very good — starting hands, but only the best hands. That means you’ll be throwing away hand after hand, and it takes discipline to do this, particularly when some of these hands would have won.
When losing, most players want to minimize fluctuations in their bankrolls and grind out some wins. Gearing down accomplishes this because you’re not playing any of the “close call” hands you normally might. By playing hands that have a greater chance of winning, you’re minimizing the fluctuations that occur with speculative hands. Of course, you’re also cutting down your average hourly win rate, but it’s a trade-off because you are less apt to find yourself on a roller coaster ride. You can still win as much; it will just take more hours at the table.
Narrowing the target
Gearing down also prevents your opponents from kicking you when you’re down. When you’re winning, your table image is quite different than when you’re losing. Win, and you can sometimes bluff with impunity. It’s a lot tougher when you’re losing. After all, your opponents have watched you lose hand after hand. They believe you’re going to keep losing. When you bet, they’ll call — or even raise — with hands they might have thrown away if you had been winning steadily.