This is going to be helluva tl;dr -- Continue at your own peril.
I started playing Poker heavily in April of '08. My first brain dump was my 45 man turbo guide. There's some chaff in there, but I think it's a decent beginner's primer for the most part. I decided that I wanted to write something for my (belated) 1 year's anniversary of obsession. There's a whole lot of information out there, and this time I'm going to try not to rehash ABC Poker strategy that has been covered 1,000 times. I am going to try to contribute my own observations.
Before I continue I'd like to remind the reader that I am not a Poker Messiah. I'm not a nosebleed player who has it all figured out. I'm just a guy who does a lot of reading, a lot of playing, and I feel I'm smart enough to at least have a couple of good thoughts mixed in with my opinionated tripe. Note that there are several hand examples where I compute pot sizes etc. in my head. If I mess up the pot sizes or stack sizes in my betting examples, I'm sorry.
Shifting Gears
Everybody says that adjusting is the most important skill in Poker. Well, at least they should. Usually when people talk about adjusting, or shifting gears, they mean in the context of a particular session. As the table dynamics change, you must adjust to these dynamics.
In addition to the changing dynamics of a particular table, you need to be capable of shifting gears when you move from table to table, from a full table to a short table, from a cash game to a tourney, or from an online game to a live game.
Sure we all know this. LOL Duh Obvious. Whatever.
But people don't properly internalize what this means. Identical hands must be played completely differently in different table contexts.
Example:
UTG raises 4xbb and you are on the button with JJ. What is the play?
If you are in a 45 man tournament sitting on 15bb this is a shove.
If you are at a full ring 25nl table and you have 3,000 hands on UTG and know he's never raising anything but AA/KK/AK in this spot, you might be flatting to setmine JJ. (To you donkament guys this may sound like madness, but trust me, 25nl full ring is so nitty that JJ is practically 55)
If you are at a 6max table vs. a lagtard this is a 3bet for value.
When I switched from 45/180 man tourneys to 25 uNL FR the first wake-up call I had was that 4betting QQ was generally not a good idea against the tight regs. Most of those guys are 3betting exactly KK/AA. That's it. The best you can hope for is AK. The more money you get in the pot pre, the more likely it is that you're behind. I still get into arguments in the forums about this one, but I don't care. When I have QQ, I'm not getting it all-in pre against a full-ring reg. I'm not too worried about them exploiting this tendency since their 3bet % is like 1. Whether you agree with this or not isn't the point. The point is that you must be very aware of the metagame you are walking into. You must pay attention and be capable of adjusting your game to deal with the new dynamics. (FWIW digging through PokerTracker shows me pretty definitively that stacking off with QQ pre is a losing proposition at 25 uNL FR)
Let's say you walk into the Poker room at Harrah's New Orleans and find a nice 1/2 table. You find yourself UTG with AsKs. If you raise to $6 you are literally taking a piss on your money. You are going to end up in a 6 way pot, and you're essentially going for a straight or flush draw. $15 raises are pretty much the "standard" raise for those tables, and anything less is getting a table full of callers. If you pick up AA UTG you might as well raise $20 or $25, because that's your best bet of getting heads-up. If they catch any piece of the flop you're getting their stack. Easy game. When I pick up AK on the button the pot is typically already $45 by the time it gets to me. When I 3bet I'm pretty much set to stack off if I hit the flop. Whatever you may think about the sensibility of these preflop bet sizes doesn't matter. You either adjust to the preflop sizing or you play every pot 5 or 6 handed.
Back to 25 uNL. Let's say a nit reg limps in EP, it folds around to you, you raise AK on the button and only the nit calls. Flop comes K64 rainbow. Nit checks and you bet 2/3 pot. Nit calls. Turn comes a 9. Nit checks, you bet 2/3 pot and the nit raises. You need to fold. The nit has a set exactly 100% of the time. I promise you EVERY time. A tourney donk could easily take this exact line with KJo. Against a tourney donk with sloppy stats this is an easy turn reshove. Against a 25 uNL nit this is a trivial fold. A trivial fold or a trivial shove depending on the game/player we are playing. Even with identical stack sizes! This is changing gears.
Everybody loves High Stakes Poker on TV. People see Dwan and Negreanu calling 3bets with absolute poop and think they can emulate this in a 25nl game with 100bb and 3 short stacks at the table. What people fail to notice is that on HSP they're playing with antes, so the preflop pot is already worth fighting over, and these guys are playing with like 500bb. Making a preflop "mistake" by calling a 3bet with 75s isn't such a big deal when you could potentially win 500bb because somebody is afraid of being bluffed off of AA on TV. With huge stacks preflop hand values normalize due to implied odds. The game changes and you must adjust.
This is why preflop hand charts and one-size-fits-all solutions do not work in Poker. The right thing to do shifts dramatically based on what game you are playing. No hand exists in a vacuum. Every detail in the hand matters. Whether it is a tourney or cash, online or live, whether somebody's girlfriend is watching, stack sizes etc. etc. All of these things affect the dynamic of the table, and properly adjusting to all of these things is part of "shifting gears." It is part of playing Poker.
Massive Multi-Tabling
This is intrinsically related to shifting gears.
I played one table almost exclusively for the first 9 months or so of my play. I wrote every action of every hand I played into a spreadsheet. After a while I got pretty confident, and I started playing 3 or 4 tables at a time. When I switched to cash I played 4 tables for quite a while, and eventually graduated up to 8. I played about 80,000 hands of 25 uNL for about 3 ptBB/100. Not crushing it, but pretty decent for my first foray into cash.
A couple of months ago I cashed out some money, bought a 3rd monitor, and started grinding 12 tables of uNL. I proceeded to enter a 30,000 hand 40 BI downswing. To be fair, I'd say that at least 50% of this downswing is pure variance (just counting my all-in hands I'm $400 below expectation), but there is a lot more to this puzzle than the variance. I hit absolute monkey tilt. I stopped folding to those turn raises. I stopped folding QQ pre when I knew I should (ran QQ into AA twice in one session, ignoring my 4bet rule), I stopped folding my low PP on the flop when I missed and the villain cbet.
But there was something else that was happening that I didn't really notice. I was playing like a robot. It was very hard to admit to myself, because I was still cbetting, I was still semi-bluffing, and I was still making some "moves," but I really wasn't playing very strong Poker. I wasn't much harder to read than the set-mining nit in the above example. I wasn't getting any action from villains with any history at all with me. I raise AA EP and it folds around. None of these guys are going to play with me unless they have a premium hand or a PP to setmine. When I was in the cutoff with a 75s type hand, I clicked the fold button before I even saw what happened. I wasn't taking shots at blinds. I wasn't 3betting the regs light. I wasn't playing Poker. I'm sure that some people can play 12 tables effectively, but I had to come to the conclusion that I am not at a level with my Poker skill that I can do this.
So, the bottom line I have to say about massive multi-tabling is this: If you aren't beating the level you're playing over 20,000 hands, you should be playing fewer tables.
Alcohol
This one is very near and dear to my heart. When I first started playing I was committed to always playing sober. After a while I loosened up on this restriction. After a couple of drinking and playing sessions, I noticed that I was still able to play. And it is true: alcohol doesn't really directly hinder my ability to play Poker. It doesn't make my brain incapable of reading a hand or knowing when to raise. It doesn't make me too stupid to play Poker.
What it does do is make me emotionally incapable of playing Poker effectively. The beats that I am able to shrug off when I am sober haunt me when I am drunk. My ability to swallow my emotions is hindered. That stupid 56/38 donk at the table with the 300bb stack becomes my mortal enemy. When I pick up KK I am not even happy to see it. I am already defeated. I just know I am going to get sucked out on.
And this defeated attitude leads to me making tilty decisions, failing to make the folds when I know I should, and stubbornly shoving my overpair when I know it's no good. Sometimes you just have to keep making those gross folds. Sometimes you have to make 5 in a row in a session. It is emotionally difficult to do, but sometimes it is the right thing to do. When I am drunk my annoyance slowly rises as I make those folds. I get exasperated that I am 3bet preflop on 5 different tables. I get angry that I keep having to fold TPTK to a checkraise on the turn. I get sick of it until I just can't take it any more and then I start spewing. I am not spewing in a lagtard way. I am spewing by ignoring villain raises. I have trouble letting go of overpairs and TPTK. I refuse to fold my set on the river when villain shoves on a 4straight board.
The nature of alcohol is that it is very difficult to know when it is affecting your judgment. It is insidious and can affect very subtle aspects of your decisions. It took a lot of analysis of hands before I could see how alcohol was affecting my play. I kept seeing hands that looked like coolers. TPTK beaten by sets, overpairs, etc. It wasn't like I was just playing trash. But the alcohol was making my "gearshift" malfunction. I was ignoring the realities of 25 uNL FR. I was ignoring the realities of playing against the nit regs.
More than one Poker pro has warned against alcohol in their book. I wish I would have listened to them rather than come to the same conclusion independently.
Tilt
Other than Mike Matusow, I think I may be one of the tiltiest players on the planet. How many other players can say they have broken both hands from playing Poker? How many people know how hard you have to hit an LCD monitor before it breaks? (Pretty goddamn hard)
As I said before, my recent downswing was largely due to variance. But I'd say that I have easily spewed off 16 buyins over the last 30,000 hands due to tilt. 16 buyins is a lot. A 24 BI downswing due to variance is a lot more acceptable than a 40 buyin downswing caused by variance and augmented by tilt.
So what to do? Well, step one was to stop drinking during sessions. Step two was to only play when I felt emotionally ready to play. I don't know about you guys, but as much as I love Poker I often feel a sense of dread before I sit down. I dread sitting down and having a losing session. I dread the feeling of failure that will come from a losing session. So I resolved myself to never play if I felt that way. If I felt that sense of dread, I didn't play. I did not play Poker until my mind was clear and I actually looked forward to applying newly acquired strategies.
The second step was to implement a stop loss. During my horrible downswing I would just keep plugging away as buyins flew out the window. I would get AA, KK, and QQ cracked pre all in one session and would just keep playing. I would lose 3 buyins due to AIPF 80/20 suckouts and just keep playing. That's when the tilt would set in. I'd lose another two buyins by refusing to let go of TPTK or an overpair. Before I knew it I was down 5 buyins in 1,000 hands.
Now if I lose more than two buyins in one session I will stop and take a breather. Whether I realize it or not I am most likely not playing my A game and need to chill out.
One final note on this subject: When I sit down to play a session now, I genuinely don't get upset at an 80/20 all-in suckout. I make a conscious effort to move forward, looking at that as just a reality of the game. The second one of those suckouts gets me angry I stop playing.
Last night a guy to my left 3bet me every time I raised. It started to annoy me. I kept notes, and he 3bet me five raises in a row. I decided I would start to 4bet him light. Then it occurred to me: "Wait a second! I am playing microstakes 6max. Why in the hell should I be 4betting light when there's so much easy money lying around?" I closed that table and opened up a different one full of fish that wouldn't 3bet me light. I think this was the proper decision. Sure, my ego wanted to play back at this guy. Part of me said, "You need to learn how to deal with this at some point." Sure I do. But right now I am working on building my roll back up from my downswing, and getting into a pissing match with somebody is a tilty decision. When the pond is full of fish that will bite on a hooked worm, there's no need for me to go diving in with a knife and using my dick as bait for a shark.
Variance
I ran pretty good for the first year I played Poker. I hit a couple of rough patches, but for the most part I didn't really experience negative variance. I secretly thought most people explained away their bad play with variance. I would read these posts about people having a 1,000 tournament downswing, or a 30,000 hand downswing and secretly believe it was impossible. I suppose there are some things you can't learn until they happen to you.
I played about 1,000 tournaments without hitting any significant losing streak. I built from about $30 to $1,300 in a year. Looking back I realize that my initial run of 45 mans was damn lucky. I was very lucky to build that $30 up to $100 without going busto.
I switched to full ring cash games, and I built my roll from $1,300 to $2,300 playing about 80,000 hands of 25 uNL. I hit one dip that could be considered a downswing, but it wasn't very severe. At the time I really thought it was horrible. I thought I understood variance during this 10,000 hand period of losses paired with another 10,000 period of roughly breakeven. I thought this was what people meant by variance.
Very very odd things can happen in Poker. Things so odd that you will doubt your own sanity. They will happen over and over in a row. You will become convinced that the site is rigged. My downswing started literally the day after I withdrew $800 from my Pokerstars account. This was really bad timing because it allowed the conspiracy theorist in me to question whether the site was rigged.
One interesting factoid is that most of your profit in NL Hold 'em comes from just two hands: AA and KK. These are your biggest moneymakers, and in a way most of your other hands are just a way to ultimately increase your expectation when you hit these two big hands. Generally, you shouldn't walk away from a session with losses on these two hands. You certainly shouldn't have two sessions in a row where you lose money on these hands. Three in a row is just insane.
During my swong I ran KK into AA twice in one session. In the same session I went all-in preflop with AA and got cracked by KK hitting a set on the flop. Over and over it happened. AA in a 3bet pot, stack off on the low flop and the jackass hit his set with 44. It got to the point that every time I got a big pair I would announce to my wife, "Hey baby, come see how I lose with KK this time!"
Out of morbid curiosity she would watch. She really didn't believe my stories of losing with KK every hand. Crack crack it gets busted again. It became a kind of game. I was on monkey spew tilt and I would call her over every time I was dealt QQ, KK, or AA. Crack crack crack all in a row, over and over and over.
The important thing to realize about variance is that it can get really, really, really bad. You have to appreciate just how bad it can get. It is part of the game. Once it starts to happen -- and it will -- you need to implement stop losses. Not because of "streaks" or other superstitious nonsense, but because it is very difficult to avoid going on tilt when your aces are cracked ten times in a row.
To reiterate: However much you think you understand variance, you don't. There is no limit to just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Moving Down
Moving down was a hard pill for me to swallow. I have been very careful with my bankroll, and have always been over-rolled for whatever stakes I was playing. I had $2,300 in my roll and was only taking infrequent shots at 50nl. Then I took out $200 for a 3rd monitor, then $800 for a weekend at the WSOP N.O. and my roll was down to $1,300. No problem. Then -- BAM -- 30,000 hands of pure torture and I'm down to $389 in my roll.
I took a few weeks off. I analyzed my hands, I read books, I read threads, and I tried to figure out what had happened.
The result of my analysis is what you see above regarding Tilt, Alcohol, Variance and Multi-Tabling.
So now I'm 4-tabling 6max 10nl. I feel like Billy Madison in 3rd grade. But I haven't had a losing session since I have been back. Sure, some of it is because my KK isn't up against AA. Some of it is because my overpair isn't against a set. Some of it is just sloppy bad players. But a lot of it is because I have cut down on the number of tables I am playing. I'm no longer playing as a 9/7 nitbox who doesn't get any action. I am actually playing Poker rather than being a HUD-Bot. I am no longer sitting down to play when I am full of dread and negative emotions. I am no longer steaming when I am 3bet on all 4 tables at once.
So, that's it for my opinions on random subjects. Now I segue into some sentiments that I consider pretty huge leaks:
"I'm calling with K7o in the BB because I can outplay him after the flop!"
If you have ever said something like this you need to take a long hard look at yourself and realize you aren't the crown prince of Poker. Bad players use this as an excuse for pretty much any crappy preflop call and it's total BS. I see guys in tournament threads talking about flatting a MP 3bb raise, and then "outplaying" people postflop (OOP no less!) when they have a 40bb stack. The idea is just laughable. You ain't Tom Dwan and you don't have a 500bb stack. You aren't outplaying anybody with K7o from the BB with a 40bb stack.
You see this one more from tournament players. I guess it's because a 100bb+ stack is so rare in that world that some fail to realize 99% of a tournament is spent playing shortstack Poker.
Fun experiment for tourney guys who express the above sentiment:
Go to any of the cash forums and post your K7o in the BB hand where you're going to "outplay" somebody postflop, but change everything to cash game nomenclature. See what the cash game regs have to say about your ability to "outplay" people postflop OOP with 40bb and a crappy hand.
"Fold and wait for a better spot!" (In MTT)
This is another tourney gem. I think saying this should be a bannable offense on the forums. There are no better spots. There are just decisions that are +EV and decisions that are -EV. That's it. The chip value vs. survival argument has been covered to the point of absurdity. There is nothing more to be said on the subject. If you are a survivalist, then I really don't know why you bother posting hands or doing any sort of analysis. Here's the survival strategy in a nutshell: If you aren't an 80/20 favorite you should fold. End of story.
I would say some things in favor of chip utility vs. survival, but it is a completely covered issue. My purpose in writing this is in the hopes that even one person will stop derailing quality threads where people are posting hand ranges and equity by saying "Fold and wait for a better spot. You don't want to risk your tournament life here on a flip."
Just stop saying it. It contributes nothing. At this point it is dogma. If you want to talk about that crap start your own damn forum for survivalists.
"I had to call because of pot odds!"
This one is a self-fulfilling prophecy of spew. UTG minraises and gets three callers. Hero is in the BB and looks down at 9c4h. I have to call! Look at dem odds! Pot is 10bb after the call.
Flop comes As4cTs two spades. Hero checks. UTG minbets. Three calls. Hero calls because he has odds to draw to two pair. Pot is 15bb.
Turn is a Th. UTG bets 2bb. 3 calls. Hero calls because of "pot odds." Pot is 25bb after the action.
River is 2c. UTG bets 5bb. Everybody folds to hero. Hero just HAS to call with his paired 4 because of the sexy 6:1 odds!
Hero didn't lose a huge amount of money in this hand, but it's a leak. Even if hero hits his "draw," his two pair would be so crappy as to be easily beaten. Hero calls each street only to build a pot bigger than his craptastic hand justifies. Not to mention the fact that so many people are sticking around with a twoflush board. Any spade is going to kill our hand. We can't consider 9s or 4s as "outs." Also, if another broadway card hits, some joker with KJ or QJ could make a straight. This situation is just disgusting, and these little bets are just pulling us into a crappy situation.
On the river our paired 4 is has about a -400% of winning showdown. Villain bet into 4 people. There is no way our crappy pair is good. Those 6:1 odds mean squat.
This example may seem contrived, but hands like this happen every day to people who think they're pot odds masters.
"Call and re-evaluate on the turn."
I have to admit, I have been guilty spouting this one myself.
Hero (100bb) raises 4bb from MP with AKo and aggro button (100bb) flats. Pot is 11bb. Flop comes K94 rainbow. Hero bets 8bb and button raises to 24bb. What's hero to do?
Very often you'll see someone say "Call and re-evaluate on the turn."
There's really nothing to re-evaluate. You're either ahead or you aren't. There aren't any draws that would prompt a semibluff. You are OOP. We are either willing to stack off with TPTK or we aren't. It doesn't really matter what comes on the turn; it isn't going to change much. If villain has a set we'll still be behind on any turn.
Since we are OOP, we won't really get the benefit of information on the turn. If we flat the raise on the flop and check the turn, there's about a 150% chance that an aggro villain is going to fire again. What then? Flatting the raise on the flop and check/folding the turn is just spew IMO.
Hero has 88bb after his flop bet. The pot has 43bb in it. We are at the commitment threshold. Calling that flop raise brings the pot to 59bb and our stack to 72bb. Calling to re-evaluate the turn is spew. We either need to commit to a stack-off or not.
This hand example may seem elementary, but you see this one all the time.
Well. That's all I have to say about that.
