Passive/Aggressive Hand Mix

Wow. This was great.

Not to be a nitpicker but the big problem with these hands arises when they are up against dominating hands (i.e. AK), not when they are played for a raise (although raises and dominating hands are often highly correlated). Its small/suited cards, which rely on implied odds, that do poorly with a raise. With the best big cards (which KJ and AT will often be) a raise doesn't really harm your hand. So the point is against limpers, be wary at a passive table (especially a super passive table) where it is likely an opponent may have limped in with a hand that dominates your KJ or AT. But in an aggressive game, be much more inclined to come in against limpers (consider raising), as those aggressive players who chose to limp would have raised with a hand that dominates KJ or AT.

Bursting The Bubble

I found this great post by fnord in the forums:

I think there are two huge mistakes people make in general after the money in tournies. The first is feeling too much stack pressure, which is what happend to you. There is sense of urgency when you get a short stack, but you must refrain from yielding to it. Here you say you hope he is on a complete steal. You would have to have incredible luck to be more than a 60/40 favorite here even if he is on a naked steal. In fact one of your better case scenarios is that you are a slight dog to an underpair. You CAN come back from short stacks, but you need to pick your spots well and get lucky. You are much better off waiting until you can be first in with the raise. You will have 3BB after the blinds pass you, be patient.

The other huge mistake people make after the bubble bursts is gambling FAR FAR too much. I am amazed at how fast poeple start dropping post bubble. There is a huge collective sigh of relief and most with a short to medium stack seem to think "I need to gamble and get lucky to have a shot at the big money." Again, this impatience costs them a lot. This is the time you should be thinking "People are acting crazy, I can find some nice spots where I have a big edge and pick up some much needed chips." The bonus is that while you are waiting for your good spots, you are moving up in money faster than you are being blinded off.

Certainly, you need to find a spot soon, but if you pick up the blinds with a push, you are right back to where you were before this hand. If you double after paying the blinds, you are considerably ahead of where you started this hand.

If you are dead set on making your stand here, a stop and go is better than a push IMO, but again, folding here is far better.

Also note, I know it is not easy to be patient when you have 3BB left. I have come back from very short stacks in several tournaments, and I would still feel tremendous pressure to push here, even though I know it is not the right play. It's like a survival instinct, your back is against the wall, and you just want to fight and gain closure. You just have to resist it and find a spot where you have greater folding equity and/or greater hand equity.

Waiting Until The Turn

Waiting until the turn to raise is a concept that still gives me problems. Ed Miller posted a great explanation of this.

Check out this post.

MTT Results

I spend a lot of time playing multi-table tournaments this weekend, with mixed results.

My first foray into multi-table tournaments was a good one. I played the Million Dollar Guaranteed qualifier. Basically it is a super satellite where the top n players get free entry into a bigger tournament. So in a field of 440 people with a $10 + $1 entry fee, the top eight people would be guaranteed seats into the Party Poker Million Dollar Guaranteed tournament. I made it to the final table, and when everyone was guaranteed seats, they just starting messing around and going all-in since it didn't matter anymore. It was a strange contrast to the intense poker playing just seconds before the bubble burst. Still shaken to be there, I played my normal game as they knocked each other out, and I came in second. But I guess it's simply fair to say 'I made the final table' as none of the play was sensible after that.

So now I have a seat in the tournament taking place in late October valued at $650 or so. I could cash that out or just play. I'd rather play. I think I have a reasonable chance of hitting the money and winning the $650, plus the chance to win much much more if I make it even a few places up in the money. So I've been practising my multi-table tournament play as much as possible so that maybe I can get a piece of the million dollars.

In the meantime, I played a $32 Sit-n-Go qualifier for the Party Poker Million IV tournament semi-finals. Basically there's a Party Poker Million tournament every year on a cruise, and the entry fee is around $10,000 with $6,000,000 of prizes for next year. It's broadcast yearly on the World Poker Tour, and so not only do you have the chance to win big, but get on TV too! I won the qualifier which gives me the entry into the semi-finals. The semi-finals will award seats to people to go on the cruise and play in the Part Poker Million IV. So that would be cool, to be on TV. :)

Comparing Chess to Poker

A chess player of FIDE master strength was asking about the conversion from Chess to Poker. Here was my response:

If you are FIDE master strength, you have no problems looking at things analytically and are probably already ready to tackle complicated situations where there are many pieces of strategic possibilities.

You're already at a head start because most of your opponents aren't thinking players. They throw their money in and hope they make a pair by the river. The fact that you are making this post puts you way ahead of most low-limit players out there.

So you are used to reading through tomes of chess books. The ability to study material and apply it to your game will be very important. Reviewing your hand histories are as important as reviewing chess games. The only way to improve is to seek out and find your mistakes in past hands you have played.

In my opinion, the major poker books are all available from Two Plus Two Publishing. Definitely learn the material from the following two books inside and out:

- The Theory of Poker by Sklansky
- Small Stakes Hold'em by Miller

Also very important, although it covers more mid/high limit games:

- Hold'em Poker For Advanced Players by Sklansky and Malmuth

Poker is very similar and very different from chess in several ways.

In chess, we often think of things in terms of imbalances that add together to form the strategy and decision of the moves we want to make. Similarly, poker has many complex pieces of information that singularly do not tell you what move you should make, but in their entirety can lead you to a correct decision.

Learning poker pre-flop strategy is much like learning chess openings. You could go the route of memorizing pre-flop hand tables, with all the creativity of memorizing say the French Defense without understanding the purposes of each move.
And pre-flop strategy will only get you so far. Some people learn how to play pre-flop and play terribly when the next three cards come down. It's almost like if you're white with 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 f6, falling out of book lines, would you be able to see 3. Nxe5 fxe5 4. Qh6+?

Now there is a lot of complexity in chess by how many possible moves you can make at any given turn, and computers face combinatorial explosion when they try to evaluate every possible path. Meanwhile Limit Hold'em has at most four choices at any given situation, check, bet, raise or fold. But the complexity comes from the fact that you do not know what your opponent holds.

The key to poker is that it is a game of incomplete information. In chess, there are no secrets, everything in the game is available for everyone to see, and to some degree a best move can be decided for a given position. In poker, since you do not know what your opponent holds, you must, based on the betting patterns of your opponent, be able to put your opponent on a reasonable range of hands and decide on the best course of action from that. This is further complicated by the fact that your choices to check, bet, raise or fold will affect your oppoents guess of your hand and also your table image, or how they will adjust their play based on what they think of you.

The biggest change from chess is that chess is results based, and limit poker is not. If you play the best chess game possible, you will win, plain and simple. If you play perfect poker without a single mistake, you will face losing streaks and have losing sessions. It is hard to determine how well you are applying the material based on the money you are making or losing. You could play terrible poker and win, you could play amazing poker and still lose. The problem is that in poker you are making a decision that will maximize your winnings IN THE LONG TERM.

In a roulette game, if people only bet on red or black, the house has a slight edge. And although for a short period of time the house may be down by a lot of money, in the long run, they are confident they will profit. When playing poker it is the same principle. You make decisions that maximize your profit in the long term, by always keeping the odds in your favor. In the long term you will be rewarded handsomely.

Anyway, I've rambled on and on, but I'd strongly recommend reading Theory of Poker and Small Stakes Hold'em as probably a good place to start. And start with the microlimits (25c/50c) so that you can learn how to play without going broke.

Chances of winning unimproved with 99

So I am talking to someone on the forums who likes to tell me I am smoking crack and that raising 99 from EP is never correct. So of course, I throw the math back in his face.

and since your chances of winning with 99 unimproved are miniscule, why not raise hands like 88 or 77 too, by that logic?

Okay. Let's do some math. Let's look at 99. There are 28 unseen cards between 2 to 8. The probability of flopping an overpair is 28/50 * 27/49 * 26/48 = 0.167. So there is a 16.7% chance of flopping an overpair, and a roughly 11% chance of flopping a set.

Now let's look at 88. There are 24 unseen cards from 2-7. So our chances of making an over pair is 24/50 * 23/49 * 22/48 = 0.103 or 10.3%, with the same 11% chance of hitting a set. So the winning chances between 99 and 88 drop dramatically. 77 drops to a 5.8% chance of making an overpair, and so 77 has extremely low chances of winning unimproved, where 88 has decent but still low chances. 99 seems to be a cutoff, and against certain players and situations becomes profitable, even raising.

So winning unimproved for 99 is not miniscule. It's low compared to TT, JJ and up, but it happens enough times that raising can become profitable.

Trying to hit your set and other thoughts

You want to make an average of 10-11x your preflop investment (1 BB) for the call to be correct (7.5:1 against hitting set, plus some protection for the times you hit and lose). In this case, you had 3 opponents preflop, so you needed to make an average of 7 or 8 BB more postflop. This will almost never happen against three opponents, unless one is a maniac.

That seems to be about correct.

Let's do some math. You hold a wired pair and have two outs to hit your set. With 50 unseen cards our probability of hitting it on the flop is 1-(48/50 * 47/49 * 46/48) = 11.76%. Converting it to odds 100/11.76 - 1 = 7.5. So yeah 7.5 to 1 odds to hit your set. Thus you need to be sure to make at least 7.5 bets to break even. Otherwise you are leaking money.

So how does this affect cold calling? Let's see. UTG raises, 3 cold callers, to you on the button with 22. There are 4 BB in the pot and you have to call 1 BB. You're going to have to hope that you will make 4-7 BB by the river if you hit your set, for the correct implied odds. With a multiway pot, the flop will probably hit several people, and you can expect some bets from UTG, so this is probably profitable. If there is only one cold caller between you and the preflop raiser, there is only 2 BB in the pot and you have to make up 6-9 BB, which is unlikely if it's going to be three way action with a roughly 1/3 chance to hit the flop.

I had a great run last night, where I went up around $400 playing 3/6 on Pacific Poker, and have made a profit of $550 total on Pacific so far. Obviously this isn't a sustainable win-rate, but it's nice to have won around 67 big bets to pad myself for the next downswing. Plus I am slowly working my way to playing 250 raked hands that I put money into and saw a flop. Once I hit 250 they will ship me the WPT Season 1 DVDs.... making money and getting free DVDs. This is the life!

Why we win

This post gives a great explanation for why those people winning 3 BB/100 hands still might me making many mistakes...

The people that we play against are so god awful that it doesn't matter much. Even if we make 3 or 4 bad plays an hour, our opponents are making 30 or 40 bad plays.

You are doing things wrong, but you are just much less wrong that your typical opponent. That is the dirty little secret that us poker players don't want to admit. We don't win because we are so good, we win because we play against those who suck.

Trifecta

This was a great hand I saw on the forums, if only for the entertainment value.

I think the correct play is to bet out on the river, but I think everyone should have a trifecta play at least once in their poker playing careers. :)

First Post!

Well, this is my poker blog. I'm just going to post great strategy that I come across for quick reference for myself later. And also talk about my poker results. That way I won't be spamming my main blog.

Last night I busted out of the Google Poker Classic early getting short stacked on a coinflip (all-in steal attempt with 77 which became a coinflip) and losing with a short stacked allin push on AQo. The side game went a lot better, and I managed to come in first place.

Strategy bits.

Ed Miller's fantastic post don't fricken fold! on monster's-under-the-bed syndrome in small stakes games. Especially good is when he berates people for folding top pair for one bet in huge pots.

There was a post just this morning where someone limped in with A3s on the button after two limpers. The big blind raise behind and everyone called. The flop was AQ2, and the action went BB bet, one limper called, and it was your action. You have top frickin pair in a big (i.e. raised) pot, and it is one bet to you. The BB's bet shows no more strength than what he showed when he raised before the flop. He could easily have KQ or TT or 76s. The limper called... that means he has.. well, two cards. You are getting 11-1 on a call, and did I mention that you have top frickin pair?

Also, Clarkmeister's Flush Theorem, presented here with examples here and here.

The idea is that when you have an okay hand (top pair, two-pair, whatever) and the fourth flush card appears on the river (which you have none of) and you are out of position, bet!

The natural instinct is to check-call here for the cheapest showdown possible, not wanting to waste two bets if you bet and are raised. But the proper strategy is to bet out. You may make a better hand or a small flush fold here! Your opponent may fold a large range of hands here (a set, trips, a straight) which is clearly good, your opponent may even fold a small flush card such as a 2 or 6. If your opponent calls then the result is no different from check-calling. If your opponent raises, this is an easy fold, and you have still only lost one bet.

Very excellent play in this situation.