Poker – a game of luck or one of skill?
With one court decision after another ruling that poker is in fact a game of skill, let’s take a closer look at this more than controversial question.
We’re going to have to start out from the premise that poker is indeed a game of skill. There are now scientific studies available to prove this and I’ll go into details on them later on. Just how big a role does the luck element have in it though? While I agree that it is a predominantly skill based game, I’d also like to know how one can quantify the element of luck.
Take a look at the following YouTube video in order to see the luck element in action:
It is about Jamie Gold (who else) squaring off against Patrik Antonius in a hand in which the latter has a straight against the former’s set of Ks.
The hand begins with Gold basically telling the others at the table what his pocket hand is. He tries to be subtle about it, but his quiet eagerness betrays him. There are numerous opinions and theories out there about just how skilled a poker player Jamie Gold is, but I suppose we’ll have to agree that in this instance he walks straight into the trap that Patrik Antonius sets him. The Finn picks up all the preflop information he needs about Gold’s hand and decides to see a flop probably hoping that it will bring along an A that will get the better of Gold’s pocket Ks. The flop brings a gutshot straight draw though, so he’s still in search of a hand when Gold commits his second mistake: he gives Antonius a shot at completing his hand on the turn by betting a small-enough amount into him. The Finn pounces on the opportunity, and sure enough, the turn brings a K which doesn’t just give Antonius the nut straight, it also gives Gold a set of Ks, a hand which he would probably never be able to get away from.
Predictably, Gold runs into the trap without a second thought, goes all-in and gets called by Antonius. What comes after this is the interesting part: the two players agree to run the river card 3 times, and even though Antonius has a made hand going up against Gold’s 12 outs, two times out of three he loses the pot.
Now then, Gold makes several mistakes in this hand and Antonius makes none. Of course, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that Gold is a lucky fellow. Not after his 2006 WSOP Main Event run it shouldn’t, but this example makes one wonder about just how much of a factor luck is in this game.
Whether or not poker is a skill dominated game is no longer a question. For years, those advocating that poker was in fact a form of gambling, kept going back to the claim that there wasn’t any clear, science-rooted evidence to support that the skill factor was the dominant one in the game. Nowadays, there are several such studies. Two German scientists from the University of Hamburg ran an experiment based on actual hand histories lifted from an online poker room, which analyzed win-loss fluctuations and players’ win-loss averages to determine how big a role skill had in the outcome. They concluded that those with a skill-wise edge over their competitors did much better than less skilled players, to an extent which is clearly outside of the variation induced by chance.
In a study aimed to offer a simpler and more convincing view on the skill factor, a couple of American researchers have determined beyond any sort of doubt that poker was indeed predominantly based on skill. They looked at a staggering number of 130 million hands played at PokerStars, and concluded that 76% of the hands played never saw a showdown. In a hand which doesn’t even allow the cards to have any sort of say whatsoever, the luck factor is obviously non-existent.
With all this in mind, I suppose we can conclude that poker is a game of skill, except when one adds Jamie Gold to the mix…
Learning to fold
People usually love the feeling of calling their opponent’s huge raise on the river and finding out they just busted a bluff. It is indeed one of the highs live and online poker offer, but too many people become addicted to this high way too fast. You see, you may bust a bluff every now and then, but turning this into a habit may be extremely counterproductive for your bankroll. Yeah some people do bluff quite often and some of them do make wrong moves like taking their bluff too far, but statistically speaking, that won’t happen all that often. If you make a habit of trying to keep your opponents honest at all cost and if you keep talking yourself into calling in situations which – by all appearances – are not bluffs, you are going to be the one making the mistakes and your opponents the ones exploiting them.
You know what can be an even bigger rush than busting a bluff? Making that huge laydown on the second best hand, especially when your hand is strong enough to be taken to the river under different circumstances. Now, this is where true poker skill and experience comes into play. You may have seen several ‘name’ professionals fold sets or even straights when sensing trouble. They’re capable of doing that because they don’t just play their hands like amateurs do: they play their opponents. In order to be capable of doing that, you need to advance to the third level of poker thought, which is usually out of the reach of most online players and live amateurs.
Take this youtube video as an example:
It’s about Daniel Negreanu locking horns with a couple of amateurs and with John Juanda. Obviously, it all comes down to a confrontation between Juanda and Negreanu, on something that’s pretty close to a perfect hand situation. Both professionals flop a set of Jacks, only Juanda has a K kicker and Negreanu a 3. Juanda shoves all-in and I suppose any other player at that table with the exception of Negreanu (and Ivey) would’ve made the call.
What does Negreanu do though? First of all: he doesn’t get caught up in the possibility of a huge hand developing and he takes a step back taking a look at the big picture. He puts the pieces of the puzzle together and makes a decision in the blink of an eye. Don’t let all the stalling he does afterwards fool you. He is aware from the second Juanda commits his stack that he has the 4th J coupled with a better kicker than his. He laments about how Juanda may also hold something like a Qs,10s – which is quite amazingly nearly the hand that Cheryl Hines folded before to get out of Juanda’s way, but he knows that Juanda has the J. He considers the situation: it is a pro he’s up against and not one of the amateurs who are much more likely to make mistakes.
The bottom line about making the laydown: if every bone in your body tells you that you’re beat, chances are you are indeed beat. Your opponents – regardless of their skill level – bluff much less frequently than you think they do. This seems to be a general truth. If you’re playing online, the vast majority of your opponents will be doing exactly what you expect them to do based on the range you put them on. Don’t be shy to use the feature which allows you to take notes on your opponents. If you jot someone down as a tight-aggressive ABC player, chances are you won’t get any sort of surprises coming your way from that guy.
Certainly, there’s glory in taking down a huge pot and busting your opponent’s bluff in the same time, but saving a huge bet by not calling a marginally better hand is – from a financial point of view – just as big an accomplishment.
Keeping your opponents honest through such hero calls carries another risk factor on top of the obvious one: the heart-ache factor which can easily send you on a tilt.
A Bluffing frenzy
The bluff is one of the most popular moves in poker and online poker. Ask any beginner what aspect of the game he likes most and he’ll tell you it’s the fact that you can take money away from an opponent who holds a better hand than yours. Every newbie is in love with the bluff, and they will try to pull the move every time they deem it appropriate. The fact that they bluff much more often than they should and that they do it based on zilch is another matter altogether. Such bluffs are called donk-bluffs and they represent one of the most frequent mistakes beginners make. Good players love the donk bluff, because they make a lot of money on it.
The bottom line about bluffing is, one should never do it blindly. A bluff is a very complex poker strategy move. It needs to be built up, it needs to be correlated with the board texture and the reads one gets on his/her opponent. A successful bluff requires third-level poker thought, because a player has to be able to put him/herself in his/her opponent’s shoes and look at the situation from the perspective of the opponent.
Take a look at the following video:
This one is a classic example of a bluffing frenzy: two players trying to out-bluff each other.
The hand featured in the video is between Michael DeMichele and Eric Crain, with the latter holding a sizeable chip advantage over the other players at the table. The fact that he’s so well stacked and that he has position on DeMichele is probably the reason why Crain makes the call on his 8s,6s in the first place. This hand is a suited one gapper, and as such it offers excellent implied odds, especially when one is deep stacked. The calls are made and the two go heads-up to the flop which lands 2,9,2 rainbow, not giving anything to either of the players involved. DeMichele realizes that his Kh,Qh is no good and checks the flop. Crain makes his read and decides to check as well, just to make sure the pot stays small. The turn brings a 5s and doesn’t change much, other than offering Crain a gutshot straight draw. Out of position, DeMichele is the first to act and he checks again. The commentators capture Crain’s thought process excellently here. They talk about how no one wants the pot and how Crain might as well take a whack at it and steal it since he’s got the firepower to do just about anything he wants to DeMichele here. This is where it gets interesting. DeMichele has been lying low and studying his opponent and the board texture and by the time Crain decides to attempt the steal, he knows what he’s going to do. As anticipated by the commentators (who can see the cards and don’t actually comment live anyway) and by DeMichele (a much more impressive feat on his part), Crain makes the bet. DeMichele knows it’s a feeble attempt to steal the pot, so he decides to turn the situation around on Crain and raises him. This is where the situation precipitates. Surprised by his opponent’s aggression, suspecting a steal attempt himself and also confident that the texture of the board doesn’t look like it’s given DeMichele anything, Crain re-raises. The following move on DeMichele’s part is sheer genius. He goes all-in, thus effectively announcing that he does in fact have a hand on which he’s ready to stake his tournament life. Crain knows the only thing he can possibly beat here is a bluff and possibly not even that as DeMichele is sure to have a high-card, otherwise he might not have seen the flop at all. He makes the fold and DeMichele walks away with an unlikely-sized pot, thanks to the mistake Crain has made by re-raising him.
As you can see from the example, a bluff is by no means a move executed on an impulse. Both players have carefully weighed the situation before committing their chips to a bluff. It may look like chaotic play at first glance but it’s everything but that.
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.
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.
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…
A more than perfect hand
The perfect hand is one of the few situations which present a direct contradiction between the fundamental theorem of winning poker – as formulated by David Sklansky in his ‘The Theory of Poker” – and the actual way the involved parties play their hands.
The fundamental theorem of winning poker says that a poker player commits a mistake (gives up value) whenever he plays a hand otherwise than he would if he could see his opponent’s hole cards. He gains value every time he plays the same way he would if he could see the hole-cards he’s up against.
Now then, take a look at the following hand,
and let me know who made the mistake there. The two players (Boeken and Marek) who went all in on the weaker hands? According to Sklansky’s theorem, they were the one making the mistake. The outcome of the hand suggests the same conclusion: they both took huge hits to their stacks, and I’m pretty sure they would’ve thrown their hands away had they known what Jethro was hiding in his pocket.
Picking up a pair of Ks against pocket rockets does happen rather often. If you take a look at the hand histories of any major live poker tournaments you’re bound to find at least a couple of hands like that in every event. This hand is much more interesting though from the perspective of two players both picking up pocket kings against the third guy’s pocket Aces. How often does that happen?
Despite the fact that the two players on K,K both commit a mistake here, they just cannot fold – as the commentator himself remarks. There’s no way you can throw a K,K away preflop, simply on account of the fact that there’s just one possible pocket hand that can beat you, and apparently – despite the adverse odds – one hand which can tie you. If you make a habit of folding pocket Ks when faced with a preflop raise, you’re probably going to let go of a whole lot of value in the long-run.
This is exactly why hands like this one are called perfect hands. They will make money for the player with the marginally stronger hand taking advantage of the fact that it is contrary to the principles of EV+ exploitation for the victim to fold.
Now then, this hand here is more than a simple perfect hand situation. On a perfect hand, the eventual winner usually only manages to trap a single opponent all-in, which makes this setup a guarantee for a double-up. In this YouTube hand though, the winner triples up pulling of a double perfect hand setup.
What sort of defense is there against such perfect hand situations? I’m afraid none. It’s just one of the peculiarities of poker that sometimes you will get felted while making the best possible decision from your point of view. Not the even the best of poker professionals can do a whole lot about getting stuck on the lower end of a perfect hand.
Daniel Negreanu, one of the best readers in the game, couldn’t do a whole lot about Gus Hansen outdrawing him with four 5s to three 6s. I suppose it’s safe to say someone who lacks Negreanu’s skills doesn’t even stand that much of a chance for spotting the freight train headed for his stack.
The thought process of the victim in perfect hand situations gives him all the reasons he needs to make the call and to possibly risk his tournament life. Out of a relatively wide range of hands he places his opponent on, only a tiny fraction has him beat, which means the positive Expected Value is not just obviously there, it comes with a rather large margin too.
The question that comes to my mind about the perfect hand situation is the following though: how does it affect your balance of Sklansky dollars? Can you consider that you just bagged a nice pot or should you jot down a loss?
I mean going all-in on K,K against a random hand will certainly win you Sklansky dollars all the time, but going all-in on it against A,A won’t…
Keeping your emotions in check
One of the most important attributes of a true poker professional is that he never lets his emotions get the better of him. Letting emotions rule his actions is the most counterproductive thing that can happen to a poker player.
Texas Holdem features an extremely jerky short-term variance. That means that you will sometimes lose on hands in which you have a huge edge. Despite all that, if you continue to make good decisions and play only EV+ situations, you will walk away a winner in the long-run.
Many people have a tough time dealing with the short-term variance. Most of the reasons behind the adverse reaction can be traced back to human nature which was in turn shaped by the way we were brought up. In an increasingly bi-polar world, the concept of right and wrong, good and evil, positive and negative are more and more prevalent.
Even though, theoretically speaking, there is no such thing as good or evil in life (what might be the best thing for one person may be another man’s worst nightmare), we continue to believe that if we are 90% favorites for winning a hand, there has to be something unfair about us losing it. We start to blame different things (most frequently the poker software) for dealing a board which defeats our 90% favorite. We never ponder that being a 90% favorite also means that we are in fact 10% underdogs, nor do we ever consider that despite losing one particular hand with such odds, we did in fact do the right thing strategy-wise.
If you continue to play another 99 hands after the one you lost on a 90-10% match-up, you will lose exactly 9 more times and win 90 times, which means you’ll walk away with a huge stack.
Interestingly enough it’s not just the beginners who have problems keeping their emotions in check. Some of the biggest pros lose control sometimes too, and let a glimpse of human nature shine through the iron masks they don every time they belly up to the green felt.
Take a look at the following video:
if you need proof of that.
Dave “Devilfish” Ulliott takes Phil Hellmuth Jr on in a hand in which his aces eventually fall to Helmuth’s pocket 9s. Out of all poker professionals, Uliott should probably be the one to know the most about right and wrong, yet he blows up in a rather shameful display of suburban aggression, first targeting Hellmuth then the dealer, then the person (organizer?) who threatens to disqualify him for his behavior.
Sure it must have been tough to see your aces succumb to pocket 9s heads-up, especially after waiting around for such a redeeming hand to come by for quite a while. That however doesn’t justify the misdirected anger that the British pro cast out in every direction. That’s one of the problems with turning emotional in poker: regardless of whom you blame for your bad beat, your anger will always be misdirected, and you’ll always end up looking like a bully, a donk or both.
Now then, with all the respect due to Dave Ulliott, who definitely cannot be branded as a donk, he does come through as a bully and as a whiner especially when he attacks the dealer and the tournament director. Not only does language like that have no place at the poker table, such behavior doesn’t do anyone any favors either. At the end of the day, both players made the right move: Ulliott got Hellmuth all in with rockets against 9s, and he got slapped by Lady Luck. I don’t think the dealer had anything to do with it, or anyone else for that matter. Ulliott should have been pleased with himself for making the right call. Whatever happened to the good old Sklansky dollars…what’s that? They don’t really matter in a tournament, huh?