The “meta-game” is the game-within-the-game. Hands are never played in isolation—there is often a great deal of history between players. That history can weigh heavily in the decision-making process. What I know or think about an opponent affects my decision making, and what they think of my game and mental state does as well. The meta-game is one of the aspects of the game that I find the most interesting and rewarding—the battlefield and its warriors are constantly evolving.
Almost every great player online will examine your stats with their HUD and come up with a game plan to exploit your weaknesses. Say you’re a TAG (22/18/5)—you’re playing 22% of your hands pre-flop, raising with 18%, and three-betting with 5%. Knowledgeable opponents have dealt with this type of opponent thousands of times before and already have a well-thought-out strategy.
Now consider what would happen to their strategy if you were to randomly decide to play half of your hands as a LAG (28/24/8) and half of your hands as a super-nit (16/12/2). After a few thousand hands, your stats would converge on 22/18/5—a TAG. Half the time, you would be playing a very aggressive LAG-style game, and the other half of the time you would be playing like a complete and utter nit.
When a player sees your HUD stats, they’re going to be playing sub-optimally against your specific strategy just about every time: A typical 28/24/5 counterstrategy will be playing way too loose against the super-nit and way too tight against the LAG.
I use a similar strategy in live cash games, called “advertising.” After splashing around for a few orbits, I just hunker down and wait for the nuts. Inevitably, by “changing gears,” I get paid off with my big hands because of the monkey moves I made on those first few hands. If you’re going to try to mix your strategies, understand that it is important to do it randomly, and not by position. The advanced HUD users will be able to pick up a positional polarization without much effort.
You can effectively mix more than just two strategies:
25% playing 32/28/9
25% playing 30/26/7
25% playing 26/22/3
25% playing 24/20/1
= 28/24/5 profile
Remember that your opponent will be treating you as the average of those profiles, and they have no idea that you are switching your style of play from hand to hand. If you’re in agro-mode at 32/28/9 and get three-bet, remember they aren’t three-betting a 32/28/9, they are three-betting a 28/24/5.
Randomly polarizing your play on a hand-by-hand basis is the goal—a necessary technique to counter the geniuses who can look at your HUD and execute a near-perfect, exploitative strategy without breaking a sweat.
There are still plenty of players in the game who strictly play at what I call Level O: They only give consideration to their hand. They never consider the hand or hand-range of their opponents. If they have AK on an A-J-9-8-4 board, they never fold, no matter what hand you’re trying to represent. Remember, they aren’t trying to figure out your hand, they are only paying attention to their own hand. Do not try to bluff these fish—they are simply unbluffable.
With a little more experience, players can move up to Level 1: They know what hand they currently hold, and they think a little about what hands or hand-range their opponent can hold. Against these players, you might be able to pull off some bluffs. They will try to narrow down your starting hands based on the action in the hand and figure out what you have.
More advanced players are at Level 2: They know what they have, they think about what you have, and they try to figure out what you think they have. These players are capable of some very advanced reasoning, and they are tough to beat.
The most skillful players can operate at Level 3: They know what they have, they think about what their opponents have, they figure out what their opponents think about their hand, and then, in a twist of mind-numbing proportion, they think about what you think about what they think about your range.
One big mistake that some players make (myself included) is thinking on too deep a level for the competition. As quickly as possible, I assign levels to each opponent at the table mentally. When I’m in a hand, I remind myself of the level I associate with that player and make my decisions based on that level. In general, I focus my thoughts and decision making one level higher than my opponent.
Say you raise from the button six times in a row and get a fold from a very nitty big blind each time. On the seventh time, you raise with AJo. The big blind three-bets. You start thinking, Well, I’ve raised him seven times in a row, so he’s going to start playing back with a really wide range. The AJo is actually near the top of my range, so I can four-bet here. You four-bet, he shoves and shows you KK. Duh. You leveled yourself into making a bad play. The reason you were raising so liberally on the button is that your opponent plays too tight. When he finally decided to play back and three-bet, he had a hand. He wasn’t thinking at all about the fact that you had raised his blind mercilessly, he was only thinking about the fact that he had KK. End of story, end of stack.
The secret to being a winning player isn’t being a math genius, having a million hands of experience, or playing a perfect TAG (24/20/5) style pre-flop. Those attributes help, of course, but there is one criteria that will be the biggest determining factor in your win-rate, and it has very little to do with the actual strategies you employ. The biggest, most important factor in your win rate is the game you choose. A great player who only gets involved in fishless, tough games with regulars will have a really hard time winning more than a mediocre, less talented player who always plays in fishy games.
If you don’t know who the fish is at the table, you’re probably it. This poker axiom is as valid as ever. Even a mediocre or bad player can beat the daylights out of a spewtard playing a 60/5/20 profile. And believe me, even with all the information available, all the training sites, all the poker on television, these whales still exist and still dump millions of dollars a year.
If you’re lucky enough to find a whale and the game is particularly juicy, this is one spot where it might (with all due respect to Chris “Jesus” Ferguson) be okay to buy in at a stake a little higher than standard bankroll management rules would suggest. If the fish goes broke, what might have been a gold mine could turn into a land mine if you don’t quickly exit the game and search for a freshly stocked pond. I see so many people get the fishy money only to turn around and donate it all back to the rest of the sharks once the fish leaves. My friend Erik Seidel said it best: “We’re all just holding Phil Ivey’s money. The goal as a poker player is to hang on to Phil’s money as long as possible.”
When you identify a fish or whale online, use the site’s note-taking facility and color-code them. I mark fish as green, good TAGs as red, and whales as blue so I can quickly scan the lobby and immediately get in the right game.
Another way to find a fish is to look in the lobby and find the games with the long wait lists—you can be absolutely sure that there is a fish at the table. Add yourself to the list and hope that the fish gets lucky and busts a few of the regulars.
When there is a serious skill differential between you and the rest of the players at the table, there are some adjustments you can make to a standard strategy that will give you a better win rate and lower variance.
There will be plenty of times when you will find yourself seriously outclassed at the table. Perhaps you entered a heads-up tournament and got unlucky enough to draw the toughest opponent in the field. Perhaps you’re in a tournament playing shorthanded with more skilled players. Or, perhaps your game selection is sub-par and you’re playing in a cash game with guys who are going to eat you alive.
Playing “Big Pot Poker” is one way to drastically reduce the edge that a better player has on you. Essentially, you create conditions at the table where your more skillful opponent won’t have all his weapons available, and he is reduced to gambling a bit more or playing a much more straightforward style against you.
If you have effective stack sizes greater than about 30 big blinds, one key adjustment that you can make in this situation is to increase the size of your pre-flop raises from the standard 3 times the big blind to around one eighth of the effective stack sizes. For instance, if you both have 40 big blinds, you would raise one eighth of 40, or 5 times the big blind. When you do this, you effectively eliminate your opponent’s ability to three-bet without moving all-in—any three-bet they make will get them completely pot-committed.
For example, if the effective stack sizes are 40 big blinds, I make it 5, my opponent makes it 14.
I move all-in for 40.
They have to call 26 blinds to win a pot of 80, so their break-even percentage is 26/80, or 32.5%—they are getting a little less than two to one on their money, and they are virtually forced to get it in.
Pre-Flop Raise Amount |
|
30 |
3.75 |
40 |
5 |
50 |
6.25 |
60 |
7.5 |
Since they can’t fold to a four-bet, they are forced to either call your pre-flop raise or just move all-in. Either way, you’ve increased the variance (which is something you definitely want to do against a better player) and eliminated one of their most effective weapons. If you have a stack size of less than 30 big blinds, you could simply play a pre-flop shove-or-fold strategy. That is, you are either folding, or you’re going all-in. Playing this method will give you something around a 35–40% chance to win against a single opponent.
If you’re one of the better players in the game, try to play smaller pots in marginal situations. Flipping QQ versus AK for your buy-in against weak opponents isn’t really necessary. You’ll be able to find much better spots to get the money in than a coin flip. As the best player at the table, you want to play small ball—just grind them down, wait for the inevitable big mistake, and don’t give them an opportunity to collect easy chips.
If you check your bankroll, you’ll know when it is time to move up to higher-stakes games. At the higher stakes you can expect tougher competition, more aggression, and higher variance. Your first session at the higher stake is the most important. Do your best to employ superlative game selection in this first session.
After you identify a juicy table, don’t just jump right in and post a blind. Lock up your seat, but sit out a few orbits and observe. Make some notes on some of the guys in the game. Form a game plan: Where are the weak players? Where are the players opening too many hands? Which of the players is three-betting the most? Who can you trap? Who bluffs?
Don’t get out of line in the first few orbits. You aren’t going to be comfortable, and you are likely to make some less than stellar plays because you’re not used to seeing that much money in the pot. Just play a solid, TAG game. Build a tight image. Get a feel for the game flow. Going off on a weird triple-barrel bluff line to start your session will probably end very poorly.
If things do not go well at the start of the session, consider leaving the game and taking a short break or finding a different table. Many of the regulars in the games will know that you are “taking a shot”—if they don’t recognize your screen name, they’ll peg you for an easy mark. If you show weakness early, you can expect the pressure and tough decisions to multiply in future hands. You’re much better off just saving it for another session.
Success at poker comes from three things: skill, luck, and bankroll management. You can’t control luck, so we can take that off the table. As for skill, hopefully this book has been helping you in that arena so far. Now let’s talk about the third factor—bankroll management. Do this well and it’s possible to grow a bankroll from nothing to $100,000. Do this wrong and you’re on a guaranteed path to bankruptcy.
Bankroll management is how you budget your poker funds among your opportunities to play. It is choosing to play the right games at the right level so that when you lose, you’ll always have another opportunity to play. It is an essential skill whether you play at $0.05/$0.10 or $5,000/$10,000. Believe it or not, successful bankroll management still evades many of the top players in the poker world today.
One of the foremost experts on bankroll management is a good friend of mine, Chris Ferguson. The 2000 WSOP Main Event champion has accumulated over $8 million in live lifetime earnings, including 64 WSOP cashes (which puts him third all-time) and five WSOP bracelets. He is one of the most legendary players in the game, not to mention one of the icons on the virtual felt after he recently turned a bankroll of $0 into six figures.
Playing on IRC (Inter Relay Chat) back in 1989, Ferguson was often faced with decisions in huge pots that could eventually move him up on the leader board. IRC wasn’t real-money gaming; the leader board was purely points based, which suited Chris well as poker has never been about money for him. Chris thrives on the challenge of becoming the game’s best player.
Many believe that at its highest levels, poker is meant to be played for large sums of cash. “I love that people play poker for money, but even if they didn’t, I’d still be out there studying hard and trying to improve, much like a chess player,” said Ferguson. “Playing for money has never been my thing. I wanted a challenge; something I could concentrate on that would motivate me to play my best.”
So, if the money is insignificant, how do you keep things interesting? Simple: Bring on the “Zero to Hero Challenge” and try to build a bankroll online from $0 to $10,000.
Ferguson’s “lightbulb moment” regarding bankroll management came during a televised panel discussion with many of the game’s best players. The other players advocated taking bankroll risks as an inherent part of the game. They believed that every once in a while you should play in that big game and try for a big score—even though it is above your head and your bankroll. After all, they claimed, the only way you could get better was by playing against better players.
Ferguson could not be more astonished by their conclusions. “They said that it’ll get your adrenaline going and keep things really exciting. I was floored that the pros said that. It was the worst advice I’d ever heard. What’s even worse is that I know that all these pros believed what they were saying to be true.”
If poker is indeed a game where the higher you play the more successful a player you are considered, Chris felt that a player should have to earn their way into those higher games, not just grab a spot and hope that luck was on his side that day. He believes that limiting your risk increases your overall enjoyment of the game. Ferguson’s advice for players aspiring to higher stakes games: “Don’t just buy your way in and overextend your bankroll. Earn your way in and prove you can handle it.”
The consummate poker academic, Ferguson set out to prove how critical understanding and implementing bankroll management was to poker success. “I wanted to give people a set of rules to follow that guaranteed you wouldn’t lose money. And the only way to guarantee that you won’t lose money is to start with nothing. That way, you’ve got nothing to lose. I wanted to build from nothing to $10,000 very methodically to show that you could repeat this again and again. Above all, I wanted to show that it was skill, not luck, that got me there.”
To prove his point, Ferguson implemented and followed four basic rules:
1) Never buy in for more than 5% of your bankroll in cash games or sit-and-gos.
2) If you have 10% of your bankroll at risk on any one table you must quit that table.
3) In a multi-table tournament, you can never buy in for more than 2% of your bankroll.
4) You can only enter a re-buy tournament if the buy-in is less than two-thirds of a percent of your bankroll.
There was one very small exception he allowed to these rules and that was his approach when he was just getting started. There were no games smaller than $0.05/$0.10, so once he had built up a bankroll, Ferguson would buy into those games for $2.50. Also, at any time during the challenge, if he could afford it, he could also buy into a $1 multi-table tournament and a $2.50 sit-and-go.
“Part of this experiment involved playing against a huge variety of players on the site. And that resonated with me because poker, at its purest, isn’t just about the big games and the high-limit players. Poker is for everyone. So even when I had no money in my bankroll and no free-rolls were available, I spent my time honing my skills and chatting with the players in the play money games. It was a great opportunity to get to know players of all levels, all of whom shared a common love of poker.”
Ferguson started out playing free-rolls on Full Tilt. Given the maximum capacity of these events (when he first started this challenge in April 2006), he had to set his alarm to be ready to register the second registration opened up. Now, think about that. You have a multi-millionaire setting his alarm to play in a free-roll where the most he could win was $5. Chris meant business.
Every time Chris made the money in these events (only the top 18 out of a field of 900 got paid), he felt relief and excitement. At the start of his challenge, he cashed in nine of them for a total payday of $22. At every money bubble, the poker legend recalled sweating out the possibility of bringing home a $2 win.
Those first $2 wins kept him up staring at the online lobby for hours. “I was always looking for the right spots to put my money into play,” said Ferguson. “I didn’t just want to play because I had $2 in my account. I always wanted enough money to rebuy once so I wouldn’t have to miss any hands once I’d started.”
“The first time I cashed in a free-roll, I thought for two days about what game I should play. For two days, I wondered what I should do with that $2. I finally decided to buy into a $.05/$.10 no-limit hold’em cash game. I posted the big blind and three or four hands later I was dealt A-Q and lost to T-T. Back to the drawing board I went.”
Accumulating a couple of dollars proved difficult, but once he developed a small bankroll, Ferguson often looked to the $1 buy-in tournament, which is today aptly named “The Ferguson.” With only a $1 buy-in it was one of his favorite tournaments to play throughout his challenge. Month after month his bankroll grew, and after nine months he had completed Stage 1—turning $0 into $100. The $100 was a significant milestone—at that number Chris felt his bankroll rules could finally be applied and tested in a meaningful way.
With a $100 bankroll, he was on his way, but his biggest challenges were yet to come. Not only would Ferguson be faced with bad beats and tough situations, but how would the millionaire maintain the mental focus necessary to succeed day after day when playing at such insignificant stakes?
“I was always playing at the top of my game,” Ferguson said recalling his play at each level. “I knew my bankroll rules were very powerful. At the time, I just didn’t realize quite how powerful. My bankroll management rules kept me motivated 100% of the time. What I see players do all the time is win, move up in limits, and then go on a losing streak. On the way up they use the right bankroll management techniques, but once they’re on a losing streak, they lose focus and discipline.”
Chris recognized that it was hard for players used to playing at higher levels to play “down” a level (or more). “They think they are better than the game and their overconfidence leads them to play too many hands and play them poorly. If you see people playing below their bankroll, those are usually the guys you want to play against. They may be great players, but when they move down they don’t play as well because they’ve lost motivation.”
Ferguson knew he had to train himself to avoid that type of pitfall, but found it challenging nonetheless. “I found that in my own play, I went through that exact situation,” he said. “I went on a terrible losing streak, and I went down to $.05/$.10 from $.25/$.50. It was hard for me too. That feeling that you want to play higher, that you should play higher. I could see how hard it would be to play well in those lower stake games without a set of rules you were 100% committed to.
“Losing streaks are going to happen to you. It’s part of the game. Staying committed to your bankroll rules is the real challenge. I’m not saying my rules are easy, they’re very hard. But they’re essential if you want to be a successful poker player. With bankroll management, there is always a new goal you’re striving toward. You can’t jump into a bigger game without the necessary bankroll and you have to play well to be able to stay in the bigger games over a long period of time.”
It was that motivation that kept him going throughout his quest from rags to riches. He kept his rules simple and reminded himself that there were no exceptions allowed. The challenge boiled down to adhering to his basic guidelines no matter what and having to earn entry into the bigger games that he desperately wanted to play.
Over the next nine months Ferguson built that $100 into more than $10,000. Having achieved his first goal, he then decided to see just how big he could grow his bankroll. Over the next four years, he built it up even further to $126,000. He is now working toward his next goal—$1 million.
Remember: Chris started with nothing—Zero to Hero. Not a bad ROI, if you ask me. If you really want to succeed as a poker player, you need to adhere to your own set of bankroll management rules.