Common uNL Leaks: Part 1
05-20-2009
, 10:47 PM
I'm starting to write up my thoughts on themes I've noticed so far from the 30-minute videos I've review for uNL readers. I've done four so far (they take a while to do) and want to discuss some broader ideas which, if adhered to, will do magic for your winrate. Also, this is kind of a draft, so I hope some of the discussion that comes out of this will help make a more clear and perhaps concise (and certainly grammatically correct) future article.
Some of these things will seem elementary and obvious, so if you've heard all this before, pat yourself on the back and go back to crushing the games. Hopefully most of you can take SOMETHING away from each article.
Log on to Full Tilt at prime time and go check out the Heads-Up tables at 5/10. You will see a few games playing and a LOT of people sitting around and waiting for action. Why don’t they just play each other if they want to play? When two players don’t play each other, it’s because one of them doesn’t feel like they have an edge. Yet, when you go down to the 50NL tables, it’s extremely easy to get action. 95% of those players think they are God’s gift to poker. If 10NL had HU tables it would be even better!
So what about 6-max? One of my good friends is a regular at the 10/20 – 25/50 games on Full Tilt and in the top 20 for total earnings in NLHE for 2009. A few times a month I’ll sweat him for a few hours and the first question when watching the 10/20 or 25/50 tables is “Who is the mark?” This becomes obvious after a few orbits, but he knows right off the bat.
He’ll tell me – “this guy is good and he has position on me which sucks. This other guy is a nit and plays straight forward so I 3-bet him a lot in position. The other guy is a solid regular and a friend of mine so we try to stay out of each other’s way.” As the game progresses, there are clear reasons for why we are even in the game. As soon as those reasons are no longer there, the game breaks pretty quickly.
Now, let’s talk about why this is relevant at the micros. Very few players at the micros have this shark mentality. I was watching a 25NL regular playing in a video and the following hand comes up. It’s folded around to us and we raise K4s blind on blind. We get 3-bet by the villain and fold. He shows us 78o and takes the pot:
My first reaction was “this is not a good guy to have on our left.” I don’t want someone who is playing 31/27/2 to have position on me 5/6 times per orbit.
Now – before choosing to leave or stay is not going to be just based on one player. Let’s look around the rest of the table and see if there are now overwhelming reasons to stay. It looks like we have two nits, one unknown, and one tight/aggressive player playing 23/9/5.
While this type of player might be calling/limping instead of raising more than he should, it doesn’t mean that we have a clear strategy for exploiting this player right now. Nor is it likely that he will be a huge donator. As soon as we’ve done a quick scan like this, we need to leave. There are simply much better games out there (we’ll talk a little later about what we DO want at our table although you probably have a clue already).
So why do most people not leave when they sit at a table like this? One of them might be inertia – if we are sitting, we will often remain sitting until the table breaks down. The other might be ego. If we get 3-bet by an aggressive player, a lot of poker players will take it personally and want to outplay them.
No one likes being bluffed or 3-bet light. So then we start 4-betting lighter, calling 3-bets OOP with marginal hands, and other plays that are simply unnecessary to be a big winner at the micros. Why get into leveling wars with a player when you can simply find some loose/passives calling stations and continue taking them to value town?
When this happens to you, you need to ask yourself the fundamental question: Why am I playing poker right now?
Is it to make money or try to outplay a monkey? If your goal is to maximize your winrate then you need to leave. If your goal is to practice playing a monkey out of position, then you need to stay. Yes – there are times when Durrrr plays Ivey, but probably not when Guy Laliberte is playing the high stakes. There are a lot of Guy-type players at the micros and there is an art in extracting max value from them.
Your ego wants to play vs. tough players. Your bankroll wants you to play vs. bad ones. But there isn’t as much satisfaction in beating the bad ones as in beating the good ones. You expect to take money from bad players – that you are entitled to their money, but you feel like you’ve earned the money from the tough ones. You feel like you outplay and outwit the tough player, but the bad player will simply hand over their money if you sit at the table long enough.
There was a great article about competitive gamers whose sole focus was on winning [1]. The point of it was that there are winners and there are scrubs and that 99% players that play a video game are scrubs. The article describes “the scrub”:
“He talks a great deal about “skill” and how he has skill whereas other players—very much including the ones who beat him flat out—do not have skill. The confusion here is what “skill” actually is. In Street Fighter, scrubs often cling to combos as a measure of skill. A combo is sequence of moves that are unblockable if the first move hits. Combos can be very elaborate and very difficult to pull off. But single moves can also take “skill,” according to the scrub. The “dragon punch” or “uppercut” in Street Fighter is performed by holding the joystick toward the opponent, then down, then diagonally down and toward as the player presses a punch button. This movement must be completed within a fraction of a second, and though there is leeway, it must be executed fairly accurately. Ask any scrub and they will tell you that a dragon punch is a “skill move.” Just last week I played a scrub who was actually quite good. That is, he knew the rules of the game well, he knew the character matchups well, and he knew what to do in most situations. But his web of mental rules kept him from truly playing to win. He cried cheap as I beat him with “no skill moves” while he performed many difficult dragon punches. He cried cheap when I threw him 5 times in a row asking, “is that all you know how to do? throw?” I gave him the best advice he could ever hear. I told him, “Play to win, not to do ‘difficult moves.’” This was a big moment in that scrub’s life. He could either write his losses off and continue living in his mental prison, or analyze why he lost, shed his rules, and reach the next level of play.”
It then mentions a note about elite players:
“The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. The game knows no rules of “honor” or of “cheapness.” The game only knows winning and losing.”
This applies to poker on many levels. For one, many players at the micro and low limits are aware of 4-betting light, triple barreling with air, CiB, and other fairly fancy poker plays. What type of plays do people post in their blogs? The huge river CRAI bluff. Or the soul-read calldown with bottom pair. These are your “combos” from the above passage. There is a place for them in poker, but that's not what the focus should be.
On the other hand, knowing the right bet sizes vs. the right players and getting 10-15% more value over a large sample size isn’t considered sexy, yet it’s what elite players do very often. Leaving right after you got 3-bet for the 2nd time this orbit by the same player is definitely not considered "honorable" or "sexy", but is a winning strategy.
For now, focus on finding and recognizing the truly bad players and extracting money from them. There is plenty of work to be done there. Often when you play at the micros, you will know very little about most of the players at your table when you first sit down. The ones you know a lot about are probably at least descent (otherwise they would be broke). So your job is to assess the profitability of tables within a few orbits.
Don't be content with having an edge. You want a massive edge. Two or three whales at your table. Make that a priority in your game.
If you can spot the mark(s), then you need to have a plan for getting their money. If you can’t spot the mark then leave. If you cannot articulate a strategy for extracting money, then you have some thinking to do and that’s poker.
In the next article I want to discuss a variety of tables and what makes them profitable or unprofitable.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/200701010...ToWinPart1.htm
Some of these things will seem elementary and obvious, so if you've heard all this before, pat yourself on the back and go back to crushing the games. Hopefully most of you can take SOMETHING away from each article.
Log on to Full Tilt at prime time and go check out the Heads-Up tables at 5/10. You will see a few games playing and a LOT of people sitting around and waiting for action. Why don’t they just play each other if they want to play? When two players don’t play each other, it’s because one of them doesn’t feel like they have an edge. Yet, when you go down to the 50NL tables, it’s extremely easy to get action. 95% of those players think they are God’s gift to poker. If 10NL had HU tables it would be even better!
So what about 6-max? One of my good friends is a regular at the 10/20 – 25/50 games on Full Tilt and in the top 20 for total earnings in NLHE for 2009. A few times a month I’ll sweat him for a few hours and the first question when watching the 10/20 or 25/50 tables is “Who is the mark?” This becomes obvious after a few orbits, but he knows right off the bat.
He’ll tell me – “this guy is good and he has position on me which sucks. This other guy is a nit and plays straight forward so I 3-bet him a lot in position. The other guy is a solid regular and a friend of mine so we try to stay out of each other’s way.” As the game progresses, there are clear reasons for why we are even in the game. As soon as those reasons are no longer there, the game breaks pretty quickly.
Now, let’s talk about why this is relevant at the micros. Very few players at the micros have this shark mentality. I was watching a 25NL regular playing in a video and the following hand comes up. It’s folded around to us and we raise K4s blind on blind. We get 3-bet by the villain and fold. He shows us 78o and takes the pot:
My first reaction was “this is not a good guy to have on our left.” I don’t want someone who is playing 31/27/2 to have position on me 5/6 times per orbit.
Now – before choosing to leave or stay is not going to be just based on one player. Let’s look around the rest of the table and see if there are now overwhelming reasons to stay. It looks like we have two nits, one unknown, and one tight/aggressive player playing 23/9/5.
While this type of player might be calling/limping instead of raising more than he should, it doesn’t mean that we have a clear strategy for exploiting this player right now. Nor is it likely that he will be a huge donator. As soon as we’ve done a quick scan like this, we need to leave. There are simply much better games out there (we’ll talk a little later about what we DO want at our table although you probably have a clue already).
So why do most people not leave when they sit at a table like this? One of them might be inertia – if we are sitting, we will often remain sitting until the table breaks down. The other might be ego. If we get 3-bet by an aggressive player, a lot of poker players will take it personally and want to outplay them.
No one likes being bluffed or 3-bet light. So then we start 4-betting lighter, calling 3-bets OOP with marginal hands, and other plays that are simply unnecessary to be a big winner at the micros. Why get into leveling wars with a player when you can simply find some loose/passives calling stations and continue taking them to value town?
When this happens to you, you need to ask yourself the fundamental question: Why am I playing poker right now?
Is it to make money or try to outplay a monkey? If your goal is to maximize your winrate then you need to leave. If your goal is to practice playing a monkey out of position, then you need to stay. Yes – there are times when Durrrr plays Ivey, but probably not when Guy Laliberte is playing the high stakes. There are a lot of Guy-type players at the micros and there is an art in extracting max value from them.
Your ego wants to play vs. tough players. Your bankroll wants you to play vs. bad ones. But there isn’t as much satisfaction in beating the bad ones as in beating the good ones. You expect to take money from bad players – that you are entitled to their money, but you feel like you’ve earned the money from the tough ones. You feel like you outplay and outwit the tough player, but the bad player will simply hand over their money if you sit at the table long enough.
There was a great article about competitive gamers whose sole focus was on winning [1]. The point of it was that there are winners and there are scrubs and that 99% players that play a video game are scrubs. The article describes “the scrub”:
“He talks a great deal about “skill” and how he has skill whereas other players—very much including the ones who beat him flat out—do not have skill. The confusion here is what “skill” actually is. In Street Fighter, scrubs often cling to combos as a measure of skill. A combo is sequence of moves that are unblockable if the first move hits. Combos can be very elaborate and very difficult to pull off. But single moves can also take “skill,” according to the scrub. The “dragon punch” or “uppercut” in Street Fighter is performed by holding the joystick toward the opponent, then down, then diagonally down and toward as the player presses a punch button. This movement must be completed within a fraction of a second, and though there is leeway, it must be executed fairly accurately. Ask any scrub and they will tell you that a dragon punch is a “skill move.” Just last week I played a scrub who was actually quite good. That is, he knew the rules of the game well, he knew the character matchups well, and he knew what to do in most situations. But his web of mental rules kept him from truly playing to win. He cried cheap as I beat him with “no skill moves” while he performed many difficult dragon punches. He cried cheap when I threw him 5 times in a row asking, “is that all you know how to do? throw?” I gave him the best advice he could ever hear. I told him, “Play to win, not to do ‘difficult moves.’” This was a big moment in that scrub’s life. He could either write his losses off and continue living in his mental prison, or analyze why he lost, shed his rules, and reach the next level of play.”
It then mentions a note about elite players:
“The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. The game knows no rules of “honor” or of “cheapness.” The game only knows winning and losing.”
This applies to poker on many levels. For one, many players at the micro and low limits are aware of 4-betting light, triple barreling with air, CiB, and other fairly fancy poker plays. What type of plays do people post in their blogs? The huge river CRAI bluff. Or the soul-read calldown with bottom pair. These are your “combos” from the above passage. There is a place for them in poker, but that's not what the focus should be.
On the other hand, knowing the right bet sizes vs. the right players and getting 10-15% more value over a large sample size isn’t considered sexy, yet it’s what elite players do very often. Leaving right after you got 3-bet for the 2nd time this orbit by the same player is definitely not considered "honorable" or "sexy", but is a winning strategy.
For now, focus on finding and recognizing the truly bad players and extracting money from them. There is plenty of work to be done there. Often when you play at the micros, you will know very little about most of the players at your table when you first sit down. The ones you know a lot about are probably at least descent (otherwise they would be broke). So your job is to assess the profitability of tables within a few orbits.
Don't be content with having an edge. You want a massive edge. Two or three whales at your table. Make that a priority in your game.
If you can spot the mark(s), then you need to have a plan for getting their money. If you can’t spot the mark then leave. If you cannot articulate a strategy for extracting money, then you have some thinking to do and that’s poker.
In the next article I want to discuss a variety of tables and what makes them profitable or unprofitable.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/200701010...ToWinPart1.htm
05-20-2009
, 10:55 PM
awesome post. point out a look of good insights into the game in general 
05-20-2009
, 11:00 PM
ZOMG! He got 3B by pr1nnyraid?!?!?!? 
Definitely should 4B light cuz KRANTZ is 3B'ing like any two there. But he is probably on some sort of drugs and will shove even though he has 78o because its KRANTZ and he's sick like that.
Definitely should 4B light cuz KRANTZ is 3B'ing like any two there. But he is probably on some sort of drugs and will shove even though he has 78o because its KRANTZ and he's sick like that.
05-20-2009
, 11:04 PM
05-20-2009
, 11:05 PM
05-20-2009
, 11:07 PM
05-20-2009
, 11:20 PM
05-20-2009
, 11:20 PM
05-21-2009
, 08:06 AM
05-21-2009
, 09:17 AM
05-21-2009
, 11:26 AM
Awesome post! 
... I'm definitely guilty of not leaving the table when I should. It's not an ego thing I just usually don't play long sessions so I just ride it out. Definitely something I need to address.
I'm really looking forward to that one.
I thought that was very cool and relevant as well. I can still hear echos of "God that's so cheap!" from back in the day when I was owning fools at the local pool hall on Tekken 3.
... I'm definitely guilty of not leaving the table when I should. It's not an ego thing I just usually don't play long sessions so I just ride it out. Definitely something I need to address.I thought that was very cool and relevant as well. I can still hear echos of "God that's so cheap!" from back in the day when I was owning fools at the local pool hall on Tekken 3.