Some interesting WSOP antics

With the 2009 WSOP upon us, taking a look at some of the weird and most outrageous hands that have ever been played in that event is more timely than ever. The Big Dance, the $10,000 Main Event is fast becoming the proving grounds of everyone who is anyone, not only in live poker but in online poker too these days.
With thousands upon thousands of participants and with a massive prize-pool fuelled by the $10,000 buy-ins, not to mention the pressure which the continuously escalating blinds exert, the Main Event has been the scene of some of the most spectacular bad beats, perfect hands, extreme behavior and desperation. One needn’t go further than the 2006 Main Event victory of amateur Jamie Gold, who got the better of the pros at a final table where each and every one of the hands he played seemed personally guided by goddess Fortuna herself.
Let’s leave Gold’s 2006 antics for a different post though and let’s take a look at one of the fastest Main Event finishes ever:

Oliver Hudson, Kate Hudson’s brother and Goldie Hawn’s son, himself an actor, goes up against Sammy Farha in this hand, and gets stuck on the bottom end of a perfect hand. The interesting thing about the hand though is not merely the twisted nature of fate though, it’s also the fact that this hand was the very first one both players involved played in the Big Dance.
As the announcer notes it, Oliver Hudson burns through his $10,000 buy-in in a little over a minute. Of course, considering Farha’s track record on such hands, he should’ve thought twice about going all-in against him, on anything but the nuts.

There’s really not much one could do in Oliver’s situation here. He made the preflop raise to protect his pocket pair, and that was definitely the right sort of move under the circumstances. Unfortunately for him though, it is not in Sam Farha’s nature to fold A,10 under pressure, even if it’s the very first hand of the WSOP Main Event. The flop sealed Hudson’s fate here, as he caught another 10 on it for the full house with the two aces on the board. From there on, it was a matter of implied odds, which, unfortunately for Hudson, turned into reverse implied odds for him. It is very rare indeed when you get into a reverse implied odds situation when your pocket pair is hit for a set on the flop. The odds of Farha getting the better of him were indeed minimal and the all-in move that he made cannot really be considered a mistake – even though according to Sklansky’s basic poker theorem it was one.

The bottom line is, this hand was the definition of a perfect hand, and Sammy Farha – as usual – got the better of it.
The question here is: would Farha have been able to get away from the hand, had he had the 10,10 instead of the A,10? If he had position on his opponent I suspect he might’ve been able to. If he were out of position, he probably wouldn’t have gone all in either. There’s something about going all-in in a poker tournament so early on: it carries worse odds than a plain cash game all-in any day, and for that reason, good players avoid going all-in sometimes even if they suspect the odds may be in their favor. In a tournament, losing an all-in is far worse than losing one in a cash game. You don’t just lose your stack there, you lose any and all further opportunities to recover it. Tournament all-ins usually happen when the pressure of the mounting blinds forces a player to undertake such extreme measures. Even if the odds are overwhelmingly in your favor, going all-in is a risky move.
Of course, all this is just theory. Farha may have been just as eager to shove all-in on his full house as Hudson was, especially as the possibility of his opponent holding a set of aces was very real indeed.

The differences between live and online play

If you want to hear a pro’s take on this matter, take a look at the following video featuring Daniel Negreanu:

See what differences between live and online play he finds most significant. You’ll notice straight away that the matter of reading one’s opponents through live tells is what he’s most concerned about. Naturally, a pro who’s used to playing the player and who has built a career on reading people based on their gestures, will find it extremely difficult to get by without this extremely important piece of his poker weapons arsenal.
He says these days people muck poker tells, but he also iterates that they still have a place in live poker and that they will probably always have one.
The fact is, the most important poker tell is in a player’s betting pattern. That is one tell nobody can disguise because he just has to take certain actions in order to push his odds, and his opponents will be able to interpret those action in one way or another.
Professional live poker players however, have learned to correlate betting patterns with actual tells and a certain “feel” they get in a situation. Take away the ‘tells’ part and they’ll feel blindfolded even though they’ll still have the betting pattern to rely on.

An interesting thing that Negreanu discusses in the above article is about whether a good live player is a good enough online player too and vice versa. According to him, a good online poker player will be a good live player too, because in order to beat the increasingly competitive online tables, one needs to be adept at poker theory and needs to be a master of the mathematical aspect of the game. The ‘feel’ and ‘tells’ part is less important than being able to play a mathematically sound game in Negreanu’s opinion, as that part of poker proficiency can apparently be added on later. On the other hand – Negreanu opines – a good live player will not necessarily be an equally good online player too. There are good live players out there who rely on gut feelings and all sorts of little tricks to obtain information, who build their game around these strategy-elements. These guys are not so solid when it comes to the mathematical aspect, yet they compensate in other ways only available at the live table.
What does all this mean to you? That being good online is more of a function of learned skill than talent and that being good at a live table has more to do with talent than skill? You be the judge of it. One thing is certain though: there are other issues which drive a huge wedge between live and online poker, issues much easier to point out.
Take the problem of the poker rake for instance. Online poker rooms charge you rake and so do live tables. The difference is that while online rake is a function of the number of hands you play and it tends to be relatively small, live rake is usually taken on an hourly basis (we’re talking about cash games here) and it tends to be much bigger than the online rake.
Add to that the fact that there are a variety of ways to further diminish your online poker rake (like rakeback and poker propping), while there’s nothing you can do in this respect at a live table.
The number of hands played per hour is also an important difference. There’s no comparison between the number of hands you can squeeze into an hour online (especially if you play at several tables) and what you can achieve at a live table. This way, your hourly rate – one of the most important performance indicators – will also be heavily modified. You’ll be able to exploit smaller edges on a more systematic basis online and more often too, which means these edges will become much more lucrative than in live poker. With that in mind, if you’re a live player, it’s quite obvious that you’ll have to significantly adapt your strategy to online play in order to keep things optimal.

One of your archest enemies: the reverse implied odds

The reverse implied odds are one of the reasonably good player’s biggest enemies. In order to understand why the reverse implied odds are so dangerous, first you need to understand the concept of implied odds.
Implied odds justify calls which appear to be negative EV ones in the short run. Let’s see an example in this sense: you pick up a pair of small cards and you decide to see the flop on it, even though the hand itself doesn’t carry any EV+ under the given circumstances. If you do not make a set on the flop, your hand will be left hopelessly behind and you know that in the majority of the cases you will not make your set, yet you still make the call. Why is this a good move then? Shouldn’t you only call on EV+ situations?
The implied odds justify this negative EV call and here’s why: in a few cases, you make your set on the flop. In those few cases – due to the disguised nature of your hand – you will take down some huge pots. The money that you pocket on those few occasions will more than make up for the money lost on the many times that you miss your set.
Other great implied odds hands are suited connectors and suited one gappers.

The reverse implied odds work exactly vice-versa. I bet you’ve heard of hands that are capable of winning you many small pots but they will lose you huge ones every now and then. These hands are reverse implied odds hands and they are extremely dangerous. Such a hand is the A,Q. If you were wondering why many of the poker professionals place the A,Q suited lower in their top 10 starting hands list than it is mathematically justifiable: it’s because of the reverse implied odds that it carries.

Good hands which are dominated on the flop are classic examples for reverse implied odds. Because the A,Q is a hand which tends to make good hands which end up being dominated, we’ll use that in our example.
You have A,Qo in your pocket and you take it to the flop. The flop lands 4,A,7 and you know your hand stands a pretty good chance to be the best at the table. You’re faced with a bet on the flop and you know that you have to call it. If the hand was to end right there, your call would be an easy one to make. Unfortunately, here’s what happens.
You call your opponent’s half-pot-size bet on the flop and you see a 5 fall on the turn. Your opponent bets again. At this time, your logic works like this: ‘my hand was the best on the flop, and the 5 isn’t likely to have changed anything’, so you call. The river comes another brick (like a 3) and your opponent bets again. Again – you see no reason to back off, so you call him yet again. He turns over A,K and you’re done for.
The perversity of issue lies in the fact that being in position, your opponent has the option to control the pot by stopping any sort of betting on later streets if he feels he’s beat. What this means is that if you do happen to have the best hand indeed, you’ll win small pots on it. Whenever you’re dominated, you’ll lose huge pots.

Some hands are even trickier, making the spotting of the reverse implied odds even more difficult. If you hit a good hand on the flop which stands a slight chance of improving further, your predicament is bigger still. Your opponent holds a hand which already has you beat or has a truckload of outs for improving past your hand. Because of the hand that you have and because of the fact that it can actually improve further, your opponent will probably squeeze the maximum out of his implied odds at your expense.
What’s the best way to spot reverse implied odds hands? Just picture yourself in the shoes of your opponent and imagine him trying to make the best of his implied odds when going up against you.

The semi-bluff

In one of my past blog post I’ve discussed various forms of bluffing. If I recall correctly, I did include a line or two about the semi-bluff but the accent was on pure bluffs like probe bets and floating in that piece.
Pure bluffs only offer the bluffer one way to take down the pot, and that is through making the opponent fold. A semi-bluff is theoretically easier to pull off because it offers two ways towards pot-ownership: one through making the opponent fold, and the other through making the hand and winning the pot fair and square on the showdown.

There’s no better way to illustrate the nature and the mechanism of a semi-bluff than through a couple of classic examples. One of the situations which practically beg for a semi-bluff is the 4-card flush draw on the flop. Indeed, most of the semi-bluffs you’ll come up against when playing against mediocre players will be on such flush draws. The player making the bluff has a relatively high number of outs in this situation, which makes it a low-risk maneuver. He fires out a bet in the hope of making you fold your rags right there. In case you call, he’ll still stand a pretty good chance to make his flush, and if that happens, you basically went out of your way to feed a pot which he will certainly end up winning.
The beauty of the semi-bluff is that the guy making the move will be happy if you fold, and possibly even happier if you make the call and he makes his hand.

Another semi-bluff classic is the open ended straight draw on the flop. While this one has marginally fewer outs than a flush draw, it is still a very semi-bluffable hand. The fact though that most people make a habit of semi bluffing each and every such hand means that good players will usually be on to their antics, and that pretty much kills the value in these moves.
In order for your semi-bluff to be really profitable, you need to choose hands which are less likely to be read by your opponents. An example of such a hand is the gutshot straight draw on the flop. The value of semi-bluffing such hands consists in your opponent’s willingness to pay you out when you do make your hand, as opposed to more obvious situations when he just bails.

Here are a couple of pointers to help you make the most of your semi-bluffs. The first one is a no brainer really: try to time your semi-bluffs for when you are in position. Being in position carries a whole set of advantages, only one of which is being able to collect info on your opponent before you make your move. In the case of the semi-bluff, being in late position means another thing too: if your opponent checks to you on the flop, you bet into him and he makes the call, on the turn he’ll be tempted to just check again instead of taking the reins into his own hands. What that means to you is that you get the river card for free as you’ll have the possibility to check too. Given that the river card is the last one dealt, you’ll know exactly where you stand at that stage and you get all that for the price of a single semi-bluff.

If you are out of position on the other hand, your situation becomes much more complicated because you’ll just have to fire your bet and then pray that your opponents fold. If you get called, or even raised, you’ll be in a tight spot, forced to make an extremely tough decision: to fire your second semi-bluff on the turn possibly mounting your losses or to give it up and acknowledge that your first one has been a mistake.

Another thing that you should know when you’re preparing a semi-bluff: often your opponent is not intimidated by the semi-bluff you make, but rather by the size of the stack that you have and which he’ll potentially have to deal with on later streets if he does make the call.

How pros read their opponents

According to David Sklansky, whenever you manage to play a hand exactly the same way you would if you could see your opponent’s hole-cards, you generate value and you play correctly. Every time you play a hand differently, you give up value and you commit a mistake. In poker, money is made off the mistakes of your opponents who in turn make their money off the mistakes you make. Staying clear of mistakes should thus be your number one priority. Of course, unless you’re faced with a dufus, you won’t be able to play the same way you would if you could see his hole cards. Most of the time, you won’t have reads useful enough to determine your opponents hand. How do professional players manage to play according to Sklanky’s theorem then? Because that’s exactly what they seem to achieve sometimes…

Take a look at this video:

and see for yourself how Daniel Negreanu makes a perfect read on his opponent and thus puts him into a position in which – according to the commentator – he’d rather be anywhere else than at that very table.
The answer is relatively simple: pros always put their opponents on hand –ranges, and apparently sometimes just for the heck of it, they narrow their range down to a single hand and call it out into the face of their opponents to confuse them.

Don’t let that apparent simplicity fool you though, putting someone on a range of cards is much more complicated than it looks. Also, don’t attempt to follow Daniel’s example in the above movie and put your opponent on an exact hand: most of the time it doesn’t work for Negreanu either, so it’ll definitely be the wrong kind of approach on your part. Try to assign a range of cards for your opponent and then narrow it down progressively. At the beginning of the hand, before the very first action is consumed, you can’t put him on any sort of a range. As soon as he makes his first move though, you’ll be able to assign an extremely wide range. As the hand progresses and you gain more and more information from your opponent through his gestures and most importantly through his betting pattern, you’ll eventually narrow that range down enough for it to become usable information in your decision making process.
Never doubt this: your opponent’s betting pattern is by far the most important read you’ll ever get. He may be a good actor and he may be the owner of the world’s best poker face, but his betting will always give away information just waiting to be decoded by his opponents. Needless to say, the betting pattern is the only tell which is available online as well as live.

In order to be able to determine an opponent’s likely range of hands, you need to have an understanding of his game. I’m not talking about picking up on the table image he desperately tries to project, but rather about picking up his real game pattern. Is he a rock, a loose limper or your average TAG player? Once you understand this, only then do his betting patterns start to make sense.

Again: the video above is actually an example of the wrong type of approach in putting your opponent on a hand. Daniel made his read right after his opponent’s preflop re-raise and that’s not something you should attempt. Negreanu’s most certainly read that young player pretty well beforehand and he called out his read to confuse the guy. Quite obviously, his strategy worked as his opponent was completely thrown off-track and scrapped any sort of strategy to try to milk those aces and thus Negreanu took his pair of Qs all the way to the showdown cost-free.

Also, Negreanu’s decision to put money into the pot knowing his opponent’s hole cards, might’ve made McClean contemplate the possibility of a Q,Q in Daniel’s pocket.
Anyway, it’s a brilliant poker read, not something that you should try at home though.

Bankroll management

Believe it or not, there is one factor that has little to do with actual poker strategy, which can ground even the most skilled poker professionals like Negreanu and Ivey: bankroll management. It doesn’t matter how good a poker player you are and how thorough your knowledge of game theory is. If your bankroll management is nonexistent or faulty, you’re never going to be a long term winner, simply because you won’t even be around for the long term.

Most people move up the stakes/limits as soon as they can afford to pay out a single buy-in. That’s just like playing pro football in your underwear and hoping for a long career. Your bankroll needs to be long enough to handle fluctuations.
Let’s take a look at NL cash games for instance. NL poker and especially NL cash poker, is about the implied odds and about playing the player. Techniques like set-mining and other such implied odds moves (which yield the majority of winnings for a successful player) involve going all-in quite often. It only makes sense that in order to make the most of your opportunities you get as much money into the pot as possible. This is also the reason why you should keep your stack close to the maximum allowed at all times.

It sometimes happens though, that your otherwise excellent implied odds hand takes a huge whooping. If you came into the game on that single buy-in, you just felted yourself for good.
If you can reload though and continue to push such hands, you will eventually make a profit.
This is why some experts say that a huge part of being successful at NL cash games is mere survival.

You have to have at least 10 buy-ins in your bankroll to give yourself a real shot at winning, but to be safe, you’d to better to have 30 buy-ins. Remember, there’s no fail-proof bankroll management strategy, but the general guideline is: the bigger your bankroll is in comparison to a buy-in, the better off you are.
The fact alone that a meager bankroll makes you extremely vulnerable to the swings which are so characteristic of Texas Holdem is not all there is to it. The knowledge that there’s a continuous pressure on you, will make you play scared and as you probably know, scared money never wins.
In cash game Holdem, taking full advantage of every bit of EV+ is extremely important. All these tiny edges will add up at the end of the day to deliver your winnings. You cannot afford to skip marginal EV+ situations in order to wait around for more obvious EV+ ones. The majority of the time, you’ll only get relatively marginal EV+. If you decide to give those hands up, you’ll deal you overall effort a huge blow, you’ll give up loads of value, and on top of it all: your play will become predictable.
The best way to illustrate this predicament is through a tournament example: you know that when your stack is huge compared to the size of the blinds, you have all your strategic moves at your disposal. As your stack shrinks when compared with the blinds, you witness yourself robbed of one weapon after the other.

In Fixed Limit cash games, the variance is much smaller and it tends to creep into the game on a hand-to-hand basis. You cannot really go all-in in a FL game if you’re playing on a reasonable stack and therefore you cannot take a huge hit to your bankroll on any single hand. This doesn’t mean that there’s less money in FL than in NL. It just means that the variance will be somewhat tempered.
Therefore, if you have a bankroll which contains 200-300 big bets, you should be OK.
When it comes to tournaments, determining your minimum bankroll for a given buy-in level is done in a similar manner. For STTs (in which individuals stand a better chance of finishing in the money) you’ll need about 50 buy-ins. For MTTs, your bankroll should be much bigger, because winless spells will last much longer there.

The size of your bet

I think it’s not that difficult to imagine that some players make more money on the very same hands than others, even as they’re going up against the same odds. Some people know how to “milk” their hands to the maximum, whilst others struggle along and are forever out of sync when it comes to milking their monsters.
The same goes for small and marginal hands: some people are better at keeping their losses at a minimum on such hands than others. The skill that defines how good you are at maximizing your winnings on good hands and minimizing them on bad ones in NL Holdem is called “pot control”. The importance of pot control can never be underestimated, after all, the very essence of the game of poker can be summed up in winning big on big hands and losing small on small hands.
How is pot control achieved? Through choosing the correct bet sizes and through position, of course.

Take a look at the following video:

Beyond the obviously hilarious lecture that Negreanu gives his NL opponents, there’s some pretty serious education in the background. Negreanu cannot believe that his opponent shoves 5,000 chips into the pot to raise his 300, because he knows there cannot possibly be a legitimate reason for someone to act like that. If the guy has a good hand, he’ll want to build a pot on it, or he’ll want to protect it. Neither pot building nor protecting your hand is achieved through a 5,000 chip raise into a few hundred chips pot.

If he has rags, the guy will want to keep the pot small, so again: the 5,000 chip raise is not what he needs to do in this case. Bluffing is never done like that. A bluff is much more intricate and requires loads more information in a hand, so if the guy is in fact bluffing, then he is a clueless donkey, risking his tournament life for 300 of Negreanu’s chips.
The highlight of the clip is when the guy tells Negreanu that’s what poker is supposed to be about, effectively lecturing someone who knows infinitely more about the game than himself.

Let’s get back to pot control though. As I said above, pot control is about sizing your bets correctly and position. Sizing a bet is meant to achieve one of two things: get more money into the pot (to build a pot) done when a player has a monster hand, or keep the size of the pot small when someone has a small hand.
When you’re sizing your bet for pot-building purposes, you need take several factors into consideration. Finding the correct bet size is a knife-edge balancing act because you need to find a compromise between getting as much money into the pot as possible, and keeping your opponent’s pot odds alive so that he deems it profitable to call you. This is why only the best of the best players know how to size their bets correctly. It takes 4th level poker thought to get the maximum out of your hands this way.

Pot control is always easier from late position of course. If you’re trying to build a pot and you get a bettor in front of you, you can always raise him thus escalating the size of the pot, and implicitly that of future bets. If you’re out of position and you fire out a bet, your opponent will get information from you and may only decide to call to keep on the safe side.
Likewise, if you’re trying to keep the pot small, you have the option to just check if you see that no one in front of you has bet. If you’re in an early position, you can still check, but sending out such an obvious sign of weakness may spur your opponent to bet even if he had no intention to do so initially.
The bottom line: correctly sizing bets is the difference between reasonable players and good players. Don’t go for the simplistic approach of shoving all in on every good hand you get and limping on every marginal one. You’ll lose money and end up looking like the guy in the video above.

Pride and Poker

Emotions have no place at the poker table, and apparently feelings like pride or ego even less so. Sometimes however, not even the best of professionals can efficiently lock these factors out of their play.
The hand I’m about to discuss is one for the ages: it has Sammy Farha going up against Barry Greenstein, in the very last hand of the day on High Stakes Poker. It has a perfect hand situation, which eventually blows up in the face of the player who initially held the advantage. It has fair play, it has emotion and above all, it has pride involved, pride which costs one of the protagonists a huge sum of money.

You can take a look at the hand yourself here:

Just as the day draws to an end at the High Stakes Poker table, and just as players are getting up one by one to probably head to their quarters, the unlikely happens as Barry Greenstein picks up a pair of Aces. That fact alone however is far from being enough for starting the chain reaction which will eventually blow this hand up. The missing ingredient gets added to the mix when Sammy Farha picks up a pair of Ks. That hand turns the otherwise mundane mix into a volatile concoction, set to wreak havoc and to eat up one of the stacks involved.
Now then, don’t you for second think that Farha didn’t have Greenstein on a fairly accurate range of hands, but despite the fact that he says he is the only gambler at the table, he most probably considers his is the best hand at that moment. He probably puts Greenstein on an A,K, and that’s probably the reason why he asks about who’s done the shuffling.

Farha may want to come through as a gambler and a reckless player, but if you’ve seen him play, you’ll probably agree that a player of his caliber doesn’t shove all his money in when he knows he’s a huge underdog and especially not when he knows his opponent has him covered. So in this respect, that’s great theatre on the Farha’s part but nothing more.
He goes all-in and probably realizes that Greenstein does in fact have the rockets and not the A,K when he sees the speed with which the latter makes the call.

By then, Farha knows he’s in trouble and the reflexes of the successful businessman that he is take over. He immediately tries to improve his odds by asking Greenstein whether or not he wants to run the board twice. Perfectly aware of the advantage he holds, Greenstein refuses, and the flop is dealt. Farha doesn’t quit acting for a second. He announces that he is in fact the favorite, but the surprised look on his face when he sees the flop betrays him. He is still smooth-enough though to propose running the board twice, again. Greenstein refuses him once again, out of pride, as he can’t possible accept the deal after he so bluntly refused it the first time.

The flop and the turn fall a couple of bricks and Barry’s chips head on over to Farha’s side of the table as the rich get yet again richer.
Did Greenstein commit a mistake by refusing Farha’s proposal the second time? It depends on how you look at it. He knows the show is televised, and he knows thousands, possibly millions of players will see it. For a professional of his caliber image means something we – the ordinary people – cannot possibly comprehend. His image does translate into cash for him among other things, and he probably knows things in that respect that we don’t. From that perspective, his decision is a correct one.

If we look at it from the point of view of the player out to nab every tiny edge, he’s committed a mistake.
Something tells me though that the pressure and exasperation conveyed by the hand failed to get to Greenstein. He made the right call after all…

The various thought levels behind poker play

Poker in general and Texas Holdem in particular are extremely easy to learn. Pick any guy who hasn’t even seen a playing card in his life, and you’ll have him playing poker in a matter of a few minutes. The rules themselves are extremely simple, the game as a whole is everything but.
I read it somewhere that poker takes only a few minutes to learn and a lifetime to master. For those without the right attitude towards improving, a lifetime may not even be enough.
Some people play for tens of years and they’re still amateurs with little hope of ever ascending to a level where they can actually make money playing.
In order to give yourself a shot at improvement, you need to adopt the attitude of an efficiency expert towards the game. You need to assess every tiny detail, every subtle aspect of the game as a whole and of play strategy, and then inform yourself about how you can improve in all those areas.
There are off-table edges in poker (like table selection, rakeback, game selection, etc) which have little to do with actual play strategy yet they’re extremely important parts of the big picture. It’s surprising that a huge number of players who consider themselves above average and even good players do not know about these edges. If you are among these people, you probably do not have the right attitude to ever leave the fist level of thought behind and ascend to the next.

The first level of poker thought is about your own hand and the board. Beginners, rookies, fish (call them whatever you want) are all on this level and some of them will never leave it behind. On this level of thought, a player is only concerned with his pocket hand and the way it matches up to the board. Any hand that he deems reasonably strong will see him put money into the pot. These players are often extremely frustrating for more skilled opponents as they’re oblivious to and thus immune from intricate strategy moves. When several such players play at a table, a phenomenon known as “schooling” occurs. Schooling consists of several first thought level players calling down a skilled opponent’s good hand with rags. The sheer volume of hands involved this way will seriously cut the good player’s odds.

On the second level of thought, players begin considering their opponents’ possible hands as well, and they become aware of the importance of board texturel. This is when players begin to make laydowns, and learn to give up hands they would’ve easily gone all-in on, had they still been on the first thought level. While it represents a huge step upward from the first level of thought, the second level is extremely tricky: this is where players’ gas-tanks fuelled with interest usually run dry. Many people get stuck on the second level of thought forever, although in order to call themselves true poker players, they need to ascend to the third level.
Even those who manage to hit the third level will often drift right back to the second or have one of their legs forever stuck there.

The third level of thought is the first one which takes the game’s focus off the cards played and puts it on the players behind those cards. The third level of thought is about considering what your opponents think about your hand. In order to ascend to this level, you need to be adept at reading your opponents, the board texture, and you need to know the betting story of a hand like the back of your hand.
The third level is the one which will make you understand where, when and how big a bluff you can make. This is where you’ll first become capable of bluffing really.

The fourth level of thought is about putting the reads you make on the third level to use. A player on the 4th level creates a table image and exploits that image by misrepresenting hands and sowing deceit in a variety of ways. This is also where the loop comes into the picture: hands which are suspiciously obviously represented are probably the exact opposite of what the tells make you think they are.
Many of the pros on TV are on the 4th level although definitely not all of them. This sort of skill level requires not just outstanding abilities but a little bit of talent on the side as well.

Pot odds and your decisions

As I’ve said in my previous blog-post, playing positive EV hands will always yield a small revenue, regardless of whether or not the EV comes through and wins the pot for you in any given hand. Likewise, if you play negative EV you always lose a little money.
As you’ve probably seen in my previous post, I’ve also discussed the factors that influence the EV. These factors are the size of the bet and the odds on the event on which you place your wager.

Translated to poker, the size of the bet in relation to the pot is one of the factors, the odds of your making the hand you’re shooting for is the other.
The biggest question in poker is whether or nor you should call a certain hand, fold it or raise it. If you compare your pot odds to the odds of your hand becoming the winner, you gain a mathematical response to this question.
Theoretically, if your chances to win the pot are bigger than your pot odds, you should make the call or the raise. Mind you however, that your winning chances need to be much bigger than your pot odds to justify a raise, because the raise will alter your pot odds significantly.

Here’s an example. Let’s consider that you have a $50 pot on the table and it takes you $10 to call a bet. You have a 4-card flush on the flop.
First, you need to take a look at your pot odds. It costs you $10 to win $50, so your odds are 50-10, which means they’re 5-1. If your odds of making your flush in the turn are better than 5-1, you should make the call.
In order to determine your odds, you need to take a look at the number of cards remaining in the deck, and the number of cards that will make your flush. These cards are known as your “outs”.

In the above case, out of the 52 cards which make up a deck, 2 are in your pocket and 3 are on the table. You can see these cards, so they’re not unknown anymore. That leaves 47 unknown cards in the deck. There are a total of 13 same-suited cards in every deck, out of which 4 are already involved in the action. That leaves 13-4 = 9 cards that can still help you make your hand. Out of a total of 47 cards 9 can help. That means the odds of your hand coming together on the turn are 38-9 against, (because 38 cards will not help you). That means your odds are 4.22-1 which is slightly better than the 5-1 pot odds, you get: a call is justified here. A $10 raise (which means $20 shoved into the pot) would make your pot odds 5-2, or 2.5-1 and in that case your 4.22-1 odds would be worse.

Mind you however that these numbers are only valid for the turn card. The river card will give you another shot at making your flush, but both the pot odds and the odds on your hand will be different at that stage.

This calculus only gives you a mathematical course of action. Your optimal strategy, based on reads you have on your opponents might be different.

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