You have a winning image; deal with it:
A few weeks ago, a guy my age sat down at the table two seats to my left. I said “hi,” and then went back to watching the game. I didn't play any hands for the next 10 or so. I was just sitting there sipping coffee, watching. After an orbit or an orbit and a half of folding, the guy turns to me and says, “so, how long have you been playing for a living?” I said, “uh, live, only a few months. But I haven't played a hand since you sat—how could you have known?” He said, “it's obvious—you are just sitting there, but you look like you are in charge.”
A few weeks before that, a drunk guy sat down at my table two seats to my right. I played a couple of pots in that time, nothing significant. Around the end of his third orbit at the table, the drunk and the guy to my right got into a conversation about keeping track of other players' actions after the drunk called a player's winning hand. The guy to my immediate right says something like, “well, this is $1/$2, you don't have to worry about people being able to do that.” The drunk guy says, “wrong. That guy on your left can tell you every action every player at the table has made in the last orbit.” He looks at me and says “right?” I denied it, but the drunk just laughed and said, “yeah, ok, I shouldn't have blown your cover. Sorry.”
Not bragging, there is a lesson here it took me these two dramatic episodes to learn: Almost everybody at your table has you pegged as a winning player. They see you riffling chips. They see you expertly cut out that $50 bet. They see your card cap and how you have a routine for looking at your cards in turn, capping them if you're going to play, and then making your bet. They can even tell just by looking at you whether you seem comfortable at the table. I get asked out of the blue 3 times a week, minimum, whether I am a local (this is the clever way that vacationers try to trap you into admitting you're a pro
), or outright whether I'm a pro player. (Do what you want, I won't lie about it).
Your job is to adjust correctly to it. As I said, I won't lie about what I do for a living, so it is fairly common for me to be playing a session where my end of the table knows that I coach and play for a living. It increases my fold equity dramatically, and against most players, it narrows their ranges against me to make a bet. Every now and then, someone will want to make a play on me because they want to outplay the pro—I even had one guy whip out the Rounder's quote: “Ha! Look at that. I got ****. I bluffed the big ringer.”
Assume people will play differently against you than they will against the other people at the table, because most of them really do notice that you know what you're doing. The reason for this is simple:
Most of the “fish” are smarter than you.
So after I answered the guy who asked me how long I had been playing professionally, he and I got into a nice conversation, and he turned out to be a great guy. He is a mover and shaker in Democratic politics in his state, went to Harvard undergrad and Harvard law, and his
hobby is researching and writing a history of FDR's presidency.
He was a terrible poker player. But that doesn't mean that he wasn't the smartest guy in the room, or that he turned off his brain to play poker. He was still dazzlingly smart, and proved it with his powers of observation. His poker leak was simply that he didn't know what to apply all of that brain power to thinking about. If he did know what to think about, he'd quickly learn to crush any game he chose to play.
Recently, the consumer electronics show was in Vegas. The average quality of the games went up significantly—not because all the electronics geeks were terrific poker players, just that they were way above average in intelligence, and, everything else being equal, a smart novice will make fewer and smaller mistakes than a less smart novice.
While the show was in town, I kept telling the dealer to enforce the English only rule when those guys got to talking about cloud networks and code and all sorts of stuff that sounded like ancient Sumerian to me.
Most tourists who come to Vegas to play poker are smart, above average income, white collar guys who, allowing for their youth, are experts in their field. Their field happens not to be poker. In fact, we are fortunate that:
Recreational players play poker for different reasons than we do.
If you haven't read “The Psychology of Poker,” by Alan Schoonamaker a half dozen times, then you have a major leak in your game. This book is the first and last word on the psychology behind different playing styles. Understanding its content is a major step toward improving the way you play against recreational poker players.
The fact of the matter is that most people who play recreationally these days have a clue. It's very rare today in Vegas to find someone at the table who has never played before, or who is drunkenly spewing off chips in stack size increments. The most commonly consumed beverage at my tables recently is Red Bull, with green tea or water being a close second. The mistakes people make are more marginal than they were a year ago when I was here auditioning for life as a live grinder, and the mistakes they were making a year ago were more marginal than they were in the 4 years before that, when I was coming to town annually for poker vacations.
That's not to say the games are hard. They are not. In fact, they are still pretty easy. What I think of as ABC poker still gets the money. But the average player is much better and makes smaller mistakes on average. Against these better players, you have to look to their psychology and understand why they are playing in order to understand the type of mistakes they are prone to make in order to maximize your earn against them.
In future posts in this thread, I'll be addressing a variety of situations where I think ABC poker is insufficient to maximize your earn in today's Vegas strip games. I'll be discussing
ABCD poker—nothing terribly complex, but adding an additional element to your ABC game.
In addition, I'll be answering your questions, so if you have a situation you want me to address, feel free to post a request ITT.
3 Betting live
To get us started, I am going to say a word about 3 betting. I was planning to write an amusing 9999th post; however, in recent days as I was composing, I saw a few really terrible posts that made me reluctant to waste this opportunity to hold forth. One of them was on 3 betting, so I am going to start with that.
As a general rule, we should be reluctant to 3 bet light at live low stakes. The reason is simply that we have less fold equity in general. However, there are opportunities to be 3 betting light that can pad your win rate a little bit.
First, a word of caution. This is a thin value spot. You will play big and medium size pots for an overall addition to your win rate that hardly seems worth all the drama. How much can you make? I dunno. What I do know is that online winning regulars at all stakes are making maybe 1.2 big blinds per light 3 bet. If you extrapolate that out to live low stakes, where win rates are higher, it works out to maybe a reasonable expectation of 3 or 4 big blinds per light 3 bet.
Think about that online win rate of 1.2 big blinds per light 3 bet. That is less than the original raiser's preflop raise. When an online player raises to 3 bb and is 3 bet to 10 bb, the pot is 13 or 15 bb, and the average winning reg is pulling a 1 bb profit that represents maybe 6-8% of the pot size. THIN. When he 3 bets to 10bb and gets called, the pot is 20bb, and his 1 bb profit represents 5% of the pot. VERY THIN, and we haven't even seen a continuation bet yet.
I mention how thin the situation is to point out that you have to be very careful and confident of your read to make a light 3 bet, because even one error in a small sample will wreck your light 3 betting win rate and it will take a long time to recover.
OK, onto the basics of light 3 betting. I'll cover the complexities and nuances in future responses ITT, and I hope I'll get some help from the best of the forum regs.
There are three distinct forms of light 3 betting:
Light value: This is the least clear of the three types. It is when you have the opponent on a fairly wide range, your hand rates to be at the top of his range, and you expect him to call with a range that you are ahead of, but not necessarily crushing. An example would be raising AJ against a Lag's button steal, when you expect him to call with medium and small pockets, broadway and some decent suited connectors. I mention the light value 3 bet first because, unlike the other types of light 3 bets, when we make this 3 bet, we are hoping for a call.
Semi-bluff 3 bets: These are hands that we 3 bet expecting a fold, but it's not the end of the world if we get called, because our hand will flop reasonably well reasonably often. An excellent example of a good semi-bluff 3 bet is if it is folded to the cut off, a decent Tag, who raises, and we 3 bet from the button with A5s or K7s. Here we have blockers to the hands that dominate us, we'll fold some of them out, but if he calls, we're ok because we can flop a pair we can try to get to showdown, or a flush draw that we can continue semi-bluffing (or that may flop as a slight equity favorite).
Bluff 3 bets: These are 3 bets with trash hands we would otherwise quickly fold, such as 95o or J7o. We should only make bluff 3 bets when we are supremely confident that the raiser will fold, or, in extremely rare cases, we expect to call preflop and then fold the flop. You WILL lose money when you see the flop with a bluff 3 bet. This is completely normal. But if you see very many flops with them, you are screwing up badly in estimating the raiser's calling range, and should stop making them. You need something in the neighborhood of a 70% success rate (where the villain folds preflop according to plan) just to break even with these 3 bets. So you better have a damn good read before you make one.
Conveniently for the existence of light 3 bets, all players, no matter what their usual playing style, can be broken down into three groups in how they react to a 3 bet:
Those that usually call,
Those that usually fold, and
Those who sometimes call.
In online terms, I categorize players as usually folding if they fold 70% of the time or more, sometimes calling if they call between 55% and 69% and usually calling if they call around 50% or more of the time.
Each category of player should be light 3 bet differently:
Those that fold most of the time should be 3 bet with your bluffing range. You'll make an automatic profit for every fold above 70%, so there is no reason to worry about having to have a hand that can flop well. Any hand that you would normally fold to that player's raise is a potential 3 bet. This may, but need not, include hands that qualify as semi-bluffing hands.
Those that sometimes call should only be light 3 bet with semi-bluffing hands that can flop well. Their calling tendency means that you won't make a profit just from their folds, and you have to win money on average post flop in order to play your light 3 bets for a profit.
Those that usually call should be 3 bet for light value only. Expert online players will disagree with this statement, and note that they often semi-bluff 3 bet the very top of their folding range against these players. While doing so can be profitable, it is a very advanced play that is well beyond the ABCD scope of this post.
Players move in and out of the calling a 3 bet categories above based on a variety of factors, including relative position and table dynamics. A bad Lag who raised 97s who will call a 3 bet from the blinds in position will fold it if he open raised it from the cut off and gets 3 bet from the button.
OK, that should get us started. Next up: Showing cards for fun and profit.