Learn to size your bets correctly in poker
The reason I decided to write this little piece about correct bet sizing is a simple one. Making incorrectly sized bets is quite probably one of the most frequent mistakes poker players make, and yes, it is more frequent than the playing of too many starting hands, and the chasing of draws way too far. The way to tell the difference between a good player and someone who is a decent TAG but not quite there yet is through the size of their bets. Beware of the player who always seems to make the right size bet in every hand in which he’s involved.
Now that you know what a plague incorrect bet sizing is: don’t fall into the same trap yourself. Here are a few tips to help you avoid losing money on incorrect bet-sizing, as well as ending up looking like a donk.
The most important thing when you’re about to make a bet is to know thy goal. That’s correct. You need to know exactly what you’re looking to achieve with that bet. Are you making a value bet or are you trying to make your opponent(s) fold. Sometimes a bet can be a probing move too, one meant to make your opponent reveal his true colors through his reaction. Weird as it may sound, most players think little in terms of goals when it comes to betting. Online poker interfaces make all those half-pot and ¾-pot buttons handily available, so all players have to do is to mash some buttons, which is exactly what most of them do indeed do.
Once you set your goals and establish the bet sizes you deem correct in certain situations, it is time to spare a thought or two on mixing up your game. Don’t focus so much on your bet sizing that you forget to mix things up a little. That’ll only make you easy to read and in the end: quite predictable.
Suppose your goal is to make your opponent fold. While you aim to be as intimidating as possible through your bet, you need to keep other things in sight too, like potential damage control. Your opponent may have a hand, in which case you will not be able to intimidate him regardless of the size of your bet. Therefore, the rule of thumb here is to bet as little as possible to get the job done. How much is just enough to result in a fold from your opponent? That’s your task to determine. Mind you, I’m not urging you to min bet every single time you intend to make someone fold. That would be the surest way of turning you into a fish. What I am saying though is that no matter how enticing that “bet pot” button looks, you may want to tone it down a little and hit the ½ pot button instead. More often than not, opponents who can be persuaded to fold will do so when faced with a smaller than full pot size bet just as well as they do when faced with a full pot-size one. By showing a little bit of restraint, you’ll save money when you do get called.
The other scenario is when you make a value bet: you aim to persuade your opponent call. This one’s a little more sensitive matter. Your goal here is to make the largest possible bet that your opponent will call. How exactly does this translate strategy-wise? In the long-run, you’ll be better off making bigger bets that get called less often than you are making smaller bets with a higher probability of yielding a call.
Your reading skills will be extremely important in this case. Some players find the pot odds offered by smaller bets impossible to resist. Others will always regard a large bet as a sign that the bettor has the nuts. Again, you are directly responsible for determining how your opponents will react to differently sized bets that you fire their way, and for making the right move based on your reads.
The weird thing about proper bet-sizing is that pretty much everyone knows the theory around it – which is far from rocket science anyway – yet people fail to put that knowledge to use time and time again. Knowing something is one thing, putting that knowledge to use is different. Think about it like this: all it takes to take your game to the next level is to spare a couple of extra thoughts on each bet that you make. That’s really not a whole lot of effort and it does indeed pay great dividends.
Phil Hellmuth on his hands and knees
Now here’s something I never thought I’d see. After having been out of the top tournament spotlight for a while, and only really making news through his various entrance gimmicks (dressed at Caesar at the WSOP Europe – give me a break…), and after throwing tantrums and bashing players left and right in various televised events, Phil Hellmuth has finally crumbled under the weight of his own expectations.
Day 3 of the WPT’s bay 101 Shooting Star event saw Hellmuth put in a more than solid performance. He came into the day 1st in chips, and he only got overtaken in the final stretch, but he’d still secured a more than comfortable cushion going into the final table action. As fellow Shooting Stars were relieved of their $5k bounties all around him, Phil stood like a rock, upon which no tide could inflict any kind of damage. He came into Day 4 second in chips, and viewed as probably the most likely to end up with the title.
Phil did well too. He had solid reads on his opponents, and got his money into the middle in the best possible spot. There was just one thing wrong though: Lady Luck decided to have some fun with him, to teach him a lesson on why poker was a mere game, subject to her caprices at every turn.
He picked up pocket queens in the small blind and decided to trap someone with them. He limped along as Andy Seth decided to make a move from the BB. Seth had Ac,Jc and he fired out a 80,000 bet to mount a defense. Hellmuth would have none of that though. He raised to 280,000 and eventually got Seth all-in. The flop fell Kd,6s,5s and Phil was well on his way to reap the rewards of his sneaky preflop tactics. The 10h fell on the turn, giving Seth a straight draw, but Hellmuth was still well ahead. Then disaster struck. An A hit the board on the river, giving Seth a superior pair and sending Hellmuth to the payout booth, before everyone else from the final table. Phil just stood there dazed and battered, like someone living out a bad dream, but here’s a video worth more than a thousand words:
After he shook all the other player’s hands, Hellmuth walked to the sidelines and collapsed in a heap holding his head. He curled up in the fetal position and stayed there for several minutes, leaving the audience to ponder whether the presence of a paramedic crew was called for or not. Eventually he pulled himself together and came back to settle the issue of the bounty and even to sign a T-shirt for a fan. The way he handled the bad beat though, raised quite a few waves in the poker world.
Tony G, fresh Party Poker professional and owner of PokerNews.com (among several other online poker related operations) has written an open letter to Hellmuth in the wake of the incident in which he expressed his concern regarding Hellmuth’s mental health. Half jokingly, the Aussie pro made a few good points in the letter (which has been uploaded to his personal blog) and he even had a few words of encouragement for Phil asserting that the WPT final table was obviously a sign of an imminent comeback on the part of the Poker Brat.
What do I think about it all? Some people hate Hellmuth on account of the way he addresses other players, and on account of being conceited. Others pity him because he’s never managed to add a WPT title to his more than impressive trophy case, and attribute his meltdown to having come so tantalizingly close to breaking the WPT curse.
I just think he’s a guy who takes the game way too seriously. Sure, the best of the best play this game for millions of dollars, and they make more money in a single week (often in a single day) than I’ll ever make in my life, but there’s one thing these nosebleed stakes protagonists all have in common: they have a blatant disregard for the value of money, viewing it simply as chips to play poker with. They can weather huge swings without cracking, and I suppose if one can’t handle that, he shouldn’t be playing at that level. They see poker for what it is: a game, granted one that turns around millions of dollars, but still just a game. Maybe Sam Chauhan, his mindset coach, can hammer a bit of sense into him and get him back on the right track.
Who is Isildur1?
Nobody knows who Isildur1 is. What everyone knows though, is that this guy is the poker gods’ gift to the game. Before he came along and took the nosebleed stakes tables by assault, what railbirds did for fun was to hang around the durrrr challenge tables, looking for Dwan and Antonius to put in a few hands, though the suffering that the series has become lately, took the fun right out of that one and railbirds slowly began to look for their online kicks elsewhere.
September 16th, 2009: enter Isildur1. A faceless player from Sweden, with a Lord of the Rings inspired nickname, Isildur1 meant serious business straight out of the gates. In the beginning, he didn’t look like much of a menace for Full Tilt Poker’s regulars. He spent about two weeks on the $25/$50 tables, where he was considered a fish ripe for the taking. A fish he wasn’t though. Even back then he must’ve been doing something right as he proved more than ready for his first real test: a match against Haseeb Qureshi, known online as INTERNETPOKERS. The two of them traded punches for a while on the $25/$50 tables, then moved to the $100/$200 ones (as one of them was probably eager to do some catching up). Eventually, the end of that session saw Isildur1 finish with a half a million dollars profit. That was his first truly significant move up the ranks and limits, and his first massive addition to a stack which would prove quite impossible to wreck later on.
Seeing one of their own fall victim to a newcomer, Full Tilt’s regulars jumped all over Isildur1, looking to exact some revenge. Isildur1 couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity though, to turn the drop he’d wringed out of the Qureshi session into a trickle and then into a full fledged flow.
UhotaBanana was among the first to tackle the unknown player. That match-up turned into a slaughter too, at the end of which Isildur1 walked away with $300k of his opponent’s money. That gave him enough of a boost to break into the $200/$400 and S300/$600 NL Holdem and PL Omaha tables, where the big boys played.
He did drop a little money to Hastings and Townsend on those limits, but he took Cole South for more than $700k which meant another huge boost for the Swede. That was the moment that Isildur1 finally established himself as a respect worthy presence at the highest stakes. Tom Dwan, everyone’s favorite Wonderkid and high stakes maniac came forth to teach the Swede a lesson. And what a lesson it turned out to be. The two of them put in almost as many hands in a few days’ time as Dwan and Antonius had at their durrrr challenge tables in over half a year. At the end of it all, despite a few downswings, it was Isildur1 who was around 3 million above the red line. This move opened up a world of possibilities for the Swede.
Dwan did try to get his money back, and he even challenged Isildur1 to a live encounter in London, however the illusive Swede didn’t take him up on that offer and he took a further $100k and some from Dwan in a re-match.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing for him though. The past weeks have been pretty rough for him, as he dropped around $3 million to Antonius, Phil Ivey, Ilari Sahamies and Brian Townsend. He managed to bounce back though, and in the process, he blew away several online poker records. He beat the biggest ever online poker pot record twice within a week’s time. The second time he dropped a $1.3 million pot to Patrick Antonius.
Watch the video here, complete with commentary and odds calculus
Whether or not Isiladur1 played that one right is debatable, but he sure did play another similarly sized pot well a couple of days later against Phil Ivey. That time, it was a $1.1 million whooper that he won from Ivey, the second biggest online poker pot ever played.
That made Isildur1 the only player who’s ever won and lost an online pot larger than $1 million.
He, Antonius and Ivey combined for 7 of the 10 largest pots in the history of online poker, all within the same week. Never has anything as big is Isildur1 hit the online poker world (in a good way of course) and I reckon it’s only fitting that he should be an anonymous online player: an exponent of the masses. Whoever he is, he sure revels in his anonymity. While others would’ve long stepped forward to claim the benefits of their fame, Isildur1 is happy to hide behind the stage and to do his work from obscurity. Some speculate that he is in fact Victor Blom, a young Swedish player who had had an Isiladur1-like incursion into the high stakes online territory months ago and who pretty much vanished with the loot following a successful run.
Another Swedish mystery man, “martonas” is also a suspect in the case, but some say Swedish soccer player Henrik Larsson may be the one behind the Isildur1 account. Still others have come up with the hypothesis that Isildur1 is in fact a conglomerate of Swedish players aiming to storm the online poker world and t make money off those who really have loads. A theory linking Isildur1 to Todd Brunson has also surfaced.
Whatever the case, one thing is certain: that fact that Isildur1 remains unknown only adds to the intrigue, and therefore I would personally prefer never to find out his true identity.
Jeff Schulman offering us a behind the scenes peak into the WSOP Main Event
Following his successful rise into the ranks of the 2009 November Nine, Jeff Schulman – obviously a very down to earth guy (or at least trying hard to look like one) – gives us a piece of his mind about how the WSOP truly works – from the commoner’s perspective.
Take a look at the following video and take a minute to think about it:
Even though I have been playing poker online for quite a few years now, I haven’t yet managed to land a WSOP seat, and I’m just not prepared to cough up the direct buy-in either for some reason… I don’t know. It may the working class mentality of sticking to small-ball that I just can’t shake… or the possession of an all too vivid imagination that depicts the moment I lose my buy-in and head to the rail in such lifelike colors…the bottom line is I have never actually taken part in a WSOP event. As your regular (and hopefully better than average) online player, I’ve always nurtured this vision about what the WSOP could be like. Well thanks loads Jeff Schulman, you’ve just ruined it all for me. Common sense backs this guy up all the way though. Everywhere you turn, people get treated differently: some always seem to land on their feet, others can never crawl out of the gutter. Why would it be any different at the WSOP Main Event? I mean equal opportunity is capital baloney and everyone knows that. What Jeff does in this interview is that he delivers a slap across the faces of all those who thought the WSOP was supposed to be this out of this world frenzy of glitz and glamour where even the average Joe could be king for a day.
First off: celebrities and poker celebrities were allowed in while the regular guys got turned away. I have to admit I did not foresee this limited space problem happening. I mean these guys were trying hard to attract as many participants as possible. Pollack himself said that in an interview before the series got rolling. They would’ve loved to break the 2006 record, so how come players weren’t allowed in on the final day? How come the final day 1 exodus took organizers by surprise this way? It was something predictable, that’s the state of affairs at every prestigious live event. What makes that issue even worse is the fact that common folks were apparently treated like scum yet again. Now why doesn’t that surprise me? I know my $10k and your $10k is not worth as much as poker celebrity’s, and I know it’s supposedly good for the game to have accomplished professionals playing. After all, who cares to see you or me on television? But to see such open discrimination must’ve been pretty damn humiliating for those everyday folks who pep-talked themselves into heading down to Vegas for the Big Dance and found that their hard-earned money was no good there. Aren’t we the masses supposed to develop a taste for the game? Isn’t that what the whole Main Event is about? How is the Big Dance supposed to help popularize the game, if it treats regular folks this way?
That brings me to another issue brought up Schulman: the dealer cutting undeserved slack to a pretty woman. Well, that’s just plain un-professional, I don’t suppose there was any sort of malice involved, although it can be pretty disappointing, to the point that witnessing it several times could send some people tilting. Then again, who cares about what you do? You should probably be glad you were allowed to rub shoulders with some of poker’s greats and some Hollywood celebrities.
The singing of the national anthem and the podiums… I’ll have to agree with Schulman on that one too. Some of these guys may be known all over the world, and they may be outlandishly good at what they do, but should they be treated like athletes representing their county at the Olympics? Hm…that’s got to be over the top there…although if one is to consider poker a sport indeed, it may have some justification. As far as the bracelet is concerned, no, I don’t think Schulman would give it away or toss it to the bin. It may not be the most stylish and tasteful piece of jewelry, but one has to be practical about it: that thing’s worth much more than gold it’s made of, although every time a new one finds its way to a winner, the others lose value.
How big a chance does Schulman stand for taking down the big one this year? He’s third in chips so I’d say above average. Other than that all I can say is I don’t know, and don’t you believe anyone else who tells you otherwise. People speculate a lot and they spare no ink putting their thoughts to paper, but the bottom line is poker’s way too unpredictable. One thing looks certain though: if Jeff Schulman wins it, he’ll probably go down in poker history as the guy who rode off into the sunset with his prize money and never gave a rat’s behind about what’s good for the game. Don’t go looking for tips to this guy either. He’ll tell you to take it easy. It’s just poker for crying out loud, there’s no rocket science involved.
Poker tells
You’ll often hear that whenever good poker players (those who master the third and fourth levels of poker thought) play each other, they play the player rather than their cards. Past a certain level, poker becomes a game in which psychology takes front seat, ahead of mathematics which is the leading play-guiding factor on lower levels. Poker psychology is based on reads and tells, and on players’ abilities to read the tells their opponents drop while disguising their own hands and if possible, misleading their opponents. As far as tells and reads go, the fundamental concept guiding players’ actions is that keeping their opponents in the mist is not enough: they need to actually mislead them, to cause them to become certain of the wrong thing.
You probably all know Daniel Negreanu and his uncanny ability to read his opponents’ pocket cards. If you take a look at the following video:
You’ll see Negreanu in action against fellow Canadian Brad Booth also known as “Yukon” Brad.
The interesting thing in this hand is how Booth manages to jam Negreanu’s otherwise infallible radar and to cause him to hesitate a bit before making the big laydown. Negreanu does manage to evade the trap, after all, his instincts are among the best if they’re not THE best in poker, but still, Booth’s tactics cause him to hesitate a little before doing the right thing, and making Negreanu actually attempt to talk himself into a call is by no means and everyday achievement.
Many people don’t realize this, but this hand is probably the best illustration of how one should disguise his/her hand and how much potential there is in the mind games behind all the reads and tells.
Brad Booth turns a straight flush, calls Negreanu all the way to the river where he raises him just as the latter rivers a straight. This is when the mind games begin: what Booth is trying to achieve here is to make it look like he’s bluffing to steal Negreanu’s river bet. The circumstances are right, and sets up the trap perfectly: he actually tells Negreanu the hand he’s got, knowing that his opponent will not only not believe him, but might be mislead to think that he is desperate to make it look like he has a true monster in the pocket. What do you know? For a second there it actually seems to work. The play-bluff is so well portrayed by “Yukon” Brad, that Negreanu begins to talk himself into calling him down. He is way too experienced to act on emotion alone though. One can literally feel how his heart tells him to call Booth’s raise, but his mind calls for a time out and begins a cold analysis of the situation. At the end of the analysis, Kid Poker concludes that he could only possibly beat a bluff there, and even though it looks like that’s exactly what Booth has against him, the odds are unfavorable for a call as a flush may well be in the books.
Of course, just to keep his opponents guessing, Booth never shows his hand. Just to add to the confusion, a female voice at the end of the hand claims that she in fact had the nine of diamonds, which sows further confusion at the table. Nobody really knows what to make of it, and Esfandiari’s remarks make it quite clear that he appreciates the way Booth played that hand.
Some people will say that Booth didn’t exactly accomplish anything impressive in this hand. After all, he won with a straight flush, how hard can that be, right? And he did fail to get Negreanu to call him in the end. What these people fail to realize though is that out of God knows how many possible ways, Booth played this hand in the most optimal manner. He singled out a weakness and he exploited it in such a psychologically complex manner (see his “Canadian” comments which were probably intended to re-enforce his play-bluff) that he is worthy of all respect for it. At the end of the day, how many people can boast that they had the great Daniel Negreanu on the ropes like that, even if it was only for a brief moment.