Ship It, Fish!

Some suggested that it isn't a good idea to play in mixed games, arguing that Mixed games are to give each player a chance to play a game (s)he is good at. I want to play a game I am good and and not games other people are good at. Thereby increasing my EV. I think this argument is ultimately flawed, and I think most of the players in the Big Game would disagree. I am not completely sure what their arguments against it would be, but I have a few arguments against it that are likely more like to be applicable to the small-time, recreational-but-profitable player.

Fundamentally, I believe this argument that you get maximum EV only by playing your best game relies on two flawed assumptions: (a) the relative popularity and competition of specific forms of poker don't change over time, and (b) that poker games are so different that EV from one doesn't transfer to the other. Were (a) and (b) both true, one would usually be correct to select only games in which one is an expert. You'd usually reach maximum EV in such a case.

In thinking about (a), I immediately remembered a two or three page section of Jesse May's book, Shut Up and Deal. I read this pre-boom book many years ago, and it frankly is a lackluster tale of high stakes limit HE. But this one section really stood out, and it has probably influenced my desire to be good at all forms of poker as much as my history of beginning my poker career in mixed games did. (I am retelling it from memory as I don't have the book handy; forgive errors, but the gist is right.)

In a brief first person description, May describes the difference between him and the local casino's high stakes limit HE “specialist”. May points out that this fellow sits in his $50/$100 limit HE game and holds court. This fellow points out the nuances of every play, and has opponents who are just a notch or two below him on the skill pecking order. That specialist wins, most of the time, but fights to eek it out while he continues to watch his competition catch up.

The hero of the story, on the other hand, isn't afraid to go sit in the $20/$40 stud game. Sure, HE is his best game, and he's only a mediocre stud player. But, the difference between his mediocre skills and the abysmal skills of the opponents in that game makes sure he can win more than the other fellow ever could against that tough lineup in the $50/$100 HE game. Sure, they are both winning players, but who is winning more? Our hero, despite the lower stakes. Who is the better poker player? It's not even close — our hero.

Poker is not just about micro-edges. It's not just about whether or not you can bet the right amount on the river to get a value bet paid off by middle pair. Sure, you have to know how to do that to win in poker. But, that's just a small part of the picture. The macro-edges are where it matters, and the biggest macro-edge is game selection. Indeed, I'd argue that the key macro-edge is long term game selection ability.

What game the fish want to play changes over time. Do you want to be the best HE player against eight people who are only make one mistake every hour, or do you want to be an above average Stud/8 player against eight opponents who each make two mistakes every other hand? What's your best EV? The point is that if you plan to maximize your EV for your poker lifespan, you have to be able to play every single game well. You don't know — none of us do — what form of poker will sweep the world next. We've seen, maybe not in our lifetimes, but certainly in Doyle Brunson's and T.J. Cloutier's, NL HE go from being the most popular game in the world, to only played in tournaments, to the most popular game. That 30 year cycle can happen again, easily.

Think of the history of poker. At the moment, NL HE is by far the most popular game. Just four years ago, limit HE tables filled every poker room and NL HE was basically dead, except in tournaments on occasion. Go back a decade, and, especially on the east coast, Stud and Stud/8 were the games most commonly spread. Stretch back two or three decades, it was again NL HE. Two or three decades before that, it was mixed five card stud and seven card stud. Once you stretch back back to 1880, you find prominently five card draw with only a little bit of Stud. Pick any 60 year span, and you're going to find at least four different games that you'll need to be prepared to play.

Indeed, even since I started playing for serious stakes back in 2002, the poker world has changed in this regard. The books that I had to buy back then were Lee Jones followed by HEFAP. Limit HE was where the money was then. I've watched the world shift around me. Should I have never ventured and plopped down some cash — with negative EV, mind you — in that early River Street NL HE nuttiness to earn my chops in that game? If I hadn't, I surely would be walking around like the rest of the limit HE specialists desperate for a good game, fighting tight edges, and generally not finding the games as lucrative as they once were. Instead, I can make steady money with less variance because I play the much weaker competition floating around the NL HE games.

Meanwhile, the last few weeks I've been hitting that sweet O/8 game on Monday nights here in NYC — better EV than any NL HE game I could find in the same geographical area. In other words, the poker world shifts, and the money dumps happen in different places. You get the best EV when you are poised to catch it no matter where it falls.

This leads to the next point, and the refutation of (b) above. Poker skill is transferable. Read Theory of Poker. There are general principles that can be extrapolated from one game to the next. At times, you even don't see how a concept works in one game until you switch to another and see it applied there. What you learn in one game expands your mind and teaches you how to think differently about another game.

A simple example: How many HE-only players really understand the concept of a true freeroll and how dangerous it can be? This is a simple concept for the PLO, O/8 and Stud/8 player, but many HE players can't get it. But, I have, a few times folded a second-nut straight precisely because I knew that my opponent most likely held the same straight, but could very well have a freeroll against me. Sure enough, when I've seen the hands shown down due to other player's all-ins, I've seen people holding the same straight plus a gutshot or the same straight with a flush draw. This situation happens extremely rarely in HE, but if you have some PLO, O/8 or Stud/8 experience, you can learn how to detect it and avoid it.

A more complex example: I spent years playing limit HE, and got very used to the difficulty of the turn and the rising pot odds. Many people take flops and turns in limit HE, and they often hit strange two pair holdings and even sets. You often have to be prepared to fold top pair or an overpair when you've taken a turn in a big multiway pot and someone (min)-raises you and just can't be bluffing. Experienced limit HE players will recognize this situation immediately, but it's not a common one in NL/PL forms of poker.

However, I sat in NL HE games that play much like limit. Not at first, of course, because you're making a pot-sized bet. But, against extremely loose players, it doesn't matter that you are making pot-sized bets, or even larger. You get call, call, call all the way down the line. Now, when someone min-raises, you are getting these amazing pot odds, and the player who grew up on NL HE only is going to sit and think: How in the world does someone fold being offered 5-to-1?. But, the truth is, you're drawing dead or near dead (3 outs or less). So, you let it go. It is only because of my limit HE experience that I can recognize these situations and let go of hands in these spots.

Poker is about adapting to changing conditions, not only on the micro-level that we all think about daily, but also on the macro-level over a period of years. If you don't expand your poker mind, and become a bit of a Renaissance player, that EV in your “best game” can easily disappear.

The best players in the world are mixed games players. I meet a lot of poker players who are much worse than me and a lot who are much better than me. Generally, the ones who are much better play more than just one game, even if it's just two. Almost every very strong player out there has spent some time playing lots of different games. Even the amazing limit HE specialists I know like roryk who have resisted going to NL HE are usually branching out into other forms of limit poker at the very least.

I have many times offered up my home game as a learning game. I want to keep that feel to it. Everyone there is in constant search of good EV, they wouldn't be good poker players otherwise. Yes, it's probably not the best game to maximize your EV over the six hour period in question. However, I assure you that playing mixed games at reasonable but not high stakes against reasonably good players will be a windfall for your long term EV. And, that's what poker is about, isn't it, focusing on long term EV rather than short term results?

In his highly acclaimed comedy performance, Dress to Kill, Eddie Izzard points out that the Church of England has no fundamentalists, because they simply aren't that far into the religious aspects of life. He argues that the most radical of questions a C of E fundamentalist would ever come up with would be Tea and Cake, or Death, and Izzard comically points out how easy of a question Cake, or Death? would be to answer, should one of these C of E fundamentalists ever approach you.

I got a question today from a poker fundamentalist on an old blog entry. My first thought was of Izzard's comedic Cake or Death sketch. Someone sitting in a hotel, asked me, Do you suck [at poker], or lie [about your winnings]?.

So, should I take suck or lie? Izzard's point, of course, about these fundamentalists is that single-minded thinking, where the options are narrowed to two ludicrous paths, are exactly where single-minded religious focus falls into the absurd. I think this fellow has done the same.

Of course, there are many players out there, even playing at my stakes, making a hell of a lot more than I am (at least in the short term). Poker games are really juicy right now, and lots of new players have done well early, through a combination of luck and some basic skill. I believe that over time, the luck is going to even out for those players who are beating these games for more than the statically expected.

Regardless, I take every poker criticism, however ludicrous it seems on the surface, very seriously. I therefore don't want to dismiss the possibility that I suck or lie; someone has made the case, so I will attempt to figure out if he's right. Checking whether I am lying is pretty easy; I simply am not. I don't plan to prove that to Mr. Hotel with scanned images of my bank records. My readers will just have to assume that for sake of argument that I am not lying and my results are as I say they are. Why would I draw the IRS' attention by ranting about how I pay my taxes on poker winnings if I wasn't paying them in full?

So, let's dig deeper into those results to see if I suck. I generally can eek out about .7 big bets per hour (or per 100 hands) in limit (I'm frankly not that great of a limit player), and I can pull down 5-7 big binds per hour (or per 100 hands) in NL games. In the really soft games, I find that I can reach that 7 big blind level pretty frequently, and when the games are a bit tougher, I struggle to stay at the 5 level.

I have looked at years of results — online databases of hands and session records from live play — and I don't think I'm that far from the theoretical expected maximums. I do figure I could get myself to a 1.5 big bet winner in the limit games with serious work, but until NL and PL structures actually start to completely fizzle out, I'm going to hold off into putting serious work into my limit game. I probably do suck more than I should at limit, but that's been a known problem in my game for quite some time and don't think I'm likely to improve it. I had two choices: work on my limit game, or focus on NL/PL, and I've chosen the latter. I argue this isn't “sucking”, it's picking a specific area of focus and holding off improving another area that isn't all that popular at the moment, anyway. In other words, I've made a game selection decision that I'd be better off improving my NL and PL game for the moment.

Another idea I had to investigate the possible source of the comment was, instead of looking at my average results based on that session data, that I would take the numbers backwards instead. In other words, let's investigate if making around $10,000 a year fits with a reasonable amount of EV, given how often I play. Ok, so for sake of simplicity, let's figure I made exactly $10,000 and I played only $1/$2 NL and made that average of six big blinds per hour. That means that I would have played 833.33 hours in a year, or about 16 hours each week. On average, this is exactly how much I am playing. Some weeks I don't have time to play at all on the weekdays. Those days, I play about 8 hours a day each of Saturday and Sunday. On weeks when I've put in a few hours during the weekday evenings, I usually put in less on the weekends. Anyway, I have to note that I was truly amazed that the numbers, which I hadn't looked at in this “top down” way ever before, actually matched perfectly to the EV numbers I calculated using other data sets. It's not mere mathematical symmetry, because my banking records which I use to generate my tax data and that $10k number are completely separate records from the session data I used to generate the average win rate numbers.

Of course, if we do the numbers from a limit perspective (I did play some limit in 2004 and 2005), it comes out to about 18 hours a week of half $5/$10, half $10/$20 (i.e., the theoretical limit of $7.50/$15). Again, the numbers match my actual playing frequency.

Anyway, this troller has given me two options (suck or lie?), neither of which makes much sense given the data. Sure, I'm not the best player I could be. I suppose there must be players out there who have reached a pinnacle of 3 big bets per hour in limit and 12 big blinds per hour in NL. However, I may be well on my way, because my results show a steady climb (when I first started NL, I was lucky to stay even over time and I was certainly net loser in the early River Street days). Of course, my game needs work (everyone's really does), but wouldn't the first step in such work involve being honest about one's results? And if you are honest about your results, how can you suck? To really suck at poker, you have to be someone who is unwilling to be honest with yourself about your game.

I think that newcomers to poker are far too optimistic about what is possible with regard to wins. I know a lot of young kids who have had amazing runs, and they have moved up in stakes quickly. I heard about one young boy who has put together a $30,000 bankroll in the matter of just about a year (having started at $1/$2 NL), and he frequently sits in $100/$200 NL games with his whole bankroll on the table. Sure, he's winning now and may win for a while, but the odds say that a crash and burn is coming unless he gets realistic.

Meanwhile, I have friends asking me why I'm still usually playing $1/$2 NL after all these years and only occasionally taking shots at bigger games. It's true that I keep very conservative bankroll requirements (having gone broke twice, once for having inadequate bankroll and once for raiding it for other expenses). I simply don't believe I have a reasonable bankroll for bigger games. Meanwhile, I've chosen this year to take some profit from poker, so my bankroll, for most of this year, has been at static size; my winnings each month leave it steadily for other expenses.

I'm a winning player who constantly tries to get better, and that's enough for me for the moment. Maybe I'm not improving as fast as others, nor making as much as people who are playing above their bankroll, but that's ok with me. I'm pretty sure I'd have to quit my hectic job if I wanted to focus even more on poker. So, my message to my hotel-posting friend is: money isn't as important as you think it is; making the correct decisions and playing well and within your bankroll is. The money will come as a side effect over time. For my part, I'm happy to wait, as long as I play my best game every time and learn something every time I play. Occasionally, I feel a twinge of worry that the games will dry up before I have a chance to cash in at higher limits, but I really believe I'd have to go to full-time professional now to do that, and I don't want to quit my job and take that life-risk at the moment. If I miss the best part of the boom, I'll miss it. I'm thinking long term here.

I'll end with this link to an excellent Barry Tanenbaum article that I (ironically) just read before going to bed last night. His point is that there is much luck in poker that is hidden, and you could be experiencing a lot of that kind of luck and not even realize it. I think so many players, probably Mr. Hotel included, have generally good basic poker skills but also have, on top of that, gotten really lucky in this way over the last year or two. It's not that they can't overcome it and get better; it's just that their hidden luck might lead them believe that amazing results are normal. In fact, I know from experience that those amazing results are simply a cushion that will later help you survive the times when your hidden luck suddenly transforms into someone else's overt luck — every time they are in a pot with you. Don't be a fundamentalist about it; Don't assume that your better-EV-than-thou faith in The Great Sklansky and your excellent recent results actually measure how good you are. We all suck a little bit and we all are God's proverbial gift to poker a little bit. Sure, read Sklansky religiously and be proud of your results, but remember that poker isn't as simple as Cake, or Death.

Back in March, I mentioned that I was hoping to write up various cognitive biases and how they relate to poker. I'd first like to cover the trait ascription bias, because I think it drives at the heart of one of the first things poker books teach us.

All introductory poker books tell us to profile players at our table. Generally, there are four categories: tight-weak, tight-aggressive, loose-passive, and loose-aggressive. We are often encouraged to make these assessments quickly.

However, the trait ascription bias indicates that people are more complicated than that. For new players, these four categories are a way to begin to learn how to classify the play of others. But, if you are finding, as you advance, that you still have only six words you use to describe someone's play, you have fallen into the trait ascription bias.

The answer, of course, is right there in the “other half” of the bias' definition. If you monitor your own play carefully, you'll see that you have probably fallen into every single one of those categories from time to time. Of course, your natural tendency is in one specific place. (Schoonmaker's Psychology of Poker helps you fill out nice charts to understand yours and others natural tendencies.) But, you have the ability to move around in tendencies based on your mood, the game conditions, or even how much sleep you've had.

Other people are like this, too. Greg (of River Street) once told me that he doesn't like to take notes on players online, but rather focus on “session reads” to see where the players are at the given moment. There is some serious value in this, because it helps Greg avoid the trait ascription bias by not stereotyping players.

I have done reasonably well avoiding it, but in a different way. My online notes usually say things like this: I've seen this player do X in situation Y. In other words, I keep track of what I've seen, but don't ascribe to it any particular classification. You begin to understand tendencies when you observe similar behavior over long periods of time, but at each given moment, you have to assume that it is not necessarily a predictor of future behavior until it is observable as a pattern.

Another piece of this trait attribution puzzle is that people learn. I mentioned a while back that I recently played W.D. heads up. I played my usual hyper-aggressive heads-up style against him which failed to work. He's learned a lot of poker since the last time we sat down. I fell into the trait ascription bias by assuming that his skill had stayed static, when of course it hadn't. It had been months since we played heads-up, and I had actually been a witness to his improvement, as we talk about poker almost daily! Trait attribution bias can be quite strong if it can cause someone to hold the bias in a situation that they have personally witnessed change.

It was suggested to me not long ago (offline) that the primary reason I post hand details of bad plays where I point out donkey plays is that somehow I can't handled the losses and/or variance. The implication seems to be that someone who says boy, what a donkey play I made must be deeply upset over that loss because the money means too much to them.

Of course, the money means less to rich people, particularly those who play at only lower stakes that are basically financially meaningless and cost less than a nice dinner out. I try to carefully balance the value of money. In poker, you can never focus in the value of the money during the game — down that path leads to tight-weak play. But, you also can't think of it as valueless entertainment dollars either, because in those cases, you can easily excuse your inability to play correctly with the fact that the money “just doesn't matter”.

You also have to be ready, willing, and able to admit that you're a bad player, even if being such only lasted one session or one hand. You've got to be ready to call yourself a “donkey” once in a while. As Thomas Keller wrote the first time the term “donkey” appeared in Card Player magazine:

Donkey is generally perceived as a friendly word, and few people I have run across have taken great offense at being called a donkey — whether it be for making a bad play or accidentally posting right in front of the big blind. Even I have been called a donkey at times for things I have done at the poker table, and I usually have gotten a good chuckle out of it. Lots of professionals will even refer to themselves as donkeys when they make a mistake, saying such things as, “I played that hand like a donkey”, or sometimes they just let out a good heehaw (the sound a donkey makes).

Playfully calling yourself out for a stupid action doesn't necessarily have anything to do with fear of variance or otherwise being unable to handle the losses. I agree that one should avoid playing for stakes where the losses would be too much to handle. However, there is no reason that being honest with oneself about one's game relates to playing above one's head.

I play for stakes where I can take a loss that is meaningful. While I believe somewhat in the relative nature of wealth — I know that the man with a million dollars has trouble proper valuing $100 — I try to keep in mind that even $20 is enough for anyone to be well fed for a day, and therefore it has absolute value that no one's relative wealth can ever obscure. But, since I'm playing for meaningful stakes, it also means I can win amounts each year that are meaningful as well. It's amazing to me to have a hobby that, unlike so many others that just cost (sometimes waste) money, can turn a profit. By keeping a bankroll appropriate to the stakes that I play, if I'm a winning player over the long term, I can survive whatever variance comes my way.

But, I'm careful to keep this concept — bankroll variance and serious losses — separate from my analysis of the game and mistakes in it. Sometimes people will describe a hand where they faced a draw out, and then believe that such a loss is equivalent to one where a terrible play was made that cost them just as much. Money lost as a “donkey” and money lost when playing correctly are deeply different things.

It was tough for me early in my poker career to start picking apart this distinction. One of the reasons it took me so long to figure out that I was abusing semi-bluffing was that I won so often doing it. It's hard to realize how much of a donkey you were when you walk out a winner because you got called every time you were semi-bluffing and happened to get lucky a few times in a row. This principle has an impact the other way, too. If you lose, you have to figure out whether it was your fault or merely bad luck.

One of the key truths of poker is that every player makes mistakes. It's already pretty hard for all but the best players in the world not to do so. Games like poker, where you need lots of conflicting technical information at your fingertips while simultaneously making educated guesses about your opponents' private information, can easily cause you to make awful plays. We all make plenty of them when we play poker. As Phil Ivey said on a recent Learn Poker From the Pros broadcasts: I make mistakes every time I sit down to play poker. If Ivey's sometimes a donk, how can anyone say it's wrong to admit to yourself that you might have been a donk, too?

My game got substantially better when I took “default ownership” for hands. By this, I mean I started assuming that I'd done something wrong, and forced myself to prove that what I'd done was correct. Occasionally, the proof becomes a justification for bad play. However, most of the time, if you force yourself to disprove the hypothesis that you're an (albeit temporary) donkey, you have a much better chance of being honest about your game and improving.

[ This is the second part in a continuing series about starting playing poker from the ground up.]

There are two sets of choices to make when picking which poker game to learn first. The first choice is whether or not you'll start with limit poker or “big bet” poker. The second choice is which specific game to learn first.

Before I give further advice on this choice, I should note that those of you that might be invited to a game at the home of a friend might be facing an existing structure. Due to televised popularity, many home games are the two games I will recommend in this article — either purely limit texas hold'em (usually spoken as “limit hold'em” and abbreviated in writing as “limit HE”) or no-limit HE (abbreviated in writing as “NL HE”). However, there are still many home games in the USA that are “dealer's choice” of some sort.

Personally, I started with dealer's choice poker myself, and I found it a useful introduction to poker. However, I was playing for extremely low stakes. I would certainly warn against starting too soon with mixed games (more or less, another name for dealer's choice) for stakes that are enough to hurt.

A few years ago, I used to tell people outright to start with limit HE. I felt then that a number of factors demanded that one start there. First of all, it's the easiest way to limit one's losses. Mistakes aren't that expensive. Low-limit HE (up until about $5/$10) is also a straight-forward game that you can beat with some basic discipline, knowledge of the odds, and patience.

It's honestly tough to recommend that one only play limit HE at first given the current state of poker, unless you happen to live near a public poker room (in CA, CT, or NJ) that has constant juicy limit HE games. NL HE has taken over the poker world by storm. On the Internet, many sites have much juicier NL HE action than limit HE. Indeed, on many sites, limit HE games are so filled with multi-tabling sharks that it's very tough for an newbie to avoid losing.

However, the problem in starting with NL HE is two-fold. First, mistakes are extremely costly, and the bankroll requirements for a new player can be large. You can mitigate this some by playing extremely tight, which tends to work ok at big casinos and online — where player turnover at the tables usually keeps you from being pegged as “tight-weak” and getting run over. However, in the home game world, it's tough to play extremely tight and get enough action on your good hands, unless you opponents are truly horrible players. OTOH, you should probably take the losses and still start a bit “tight weak“, as the variance (the amount your bankroll fluctuates up and down from session to session) will be substantially less than any other approach. This worked pretty well for me when I started NL HE; I got run over some, but didn't lose too much.

The second problem with NL HE as a game for newbies is that still, even to this day in the middle of the NL HE boom, there are very few books at the lowest introductory level designed for NL HE cash games. Sure, there are at least a dozen starter books for new players who want to try tournament NL HE. Some of those books “pretend” to be about cash games but are really written by tournament experts who aren't the sharp cash game players they once were. There are precious few books designed for new NL HE cash game players. There are a few gems out there, but I know from my own learning that they were far over my head until I had at least a few thousands hands of NL HE experience behind me.

I have been unsuccessful in my arguments to keep people away from NL HE as a starter game. The interest and draw seems too great. So, I inevitably live with the fact that new players will be drawn in and they'll have to fly blind for a while.

In next week's post, I'll be nonetheless suggesting starting books for both limit HE and NL HE.

I have been asked a number of times by friends and acquaintances about poker. It is USAmericans' favorite game, and was so even before the boom. Post-boom, it's ok now for even the intellectual elite, who would otherwise frown on “gambling”, to like and enjoy poker.

I am somewhat used to the “Oh, so you're a doctor, I wanted to ask you...” syndrome of being a good poker player. As someone who also knows about computers, I have often been the person whom friends and acquaintances come to and ask their computer questions. Since I have barely ever used Microsoft products, I'm usually no help there — to their surprise. However, in poker, I'm well versed and knowledgeable in the ways that they need me to be, since I started from the very bottom games that interest new players.

When I started teaching my friend Dan how to play, roryk told me:

It seems fun and innocent and cool to be teaching someone, until one of the people you get into playing cards completely destroys their life with it. 90% of the people are suckers in the games, and more likely than not if you get someone playing, they are going to be a sucker. [...] So just save yourself some hassle and tell them not to get involved and that it is a brutal, frustrating game.

I gave that advice serious consideration, but in the end, rejected it (Sorry roryk). I have never had anyone come to me to ask about poker whom I judged to be susceptible to losing themselves in addiction. I have a good sense for this, but even if I do screw up and get someone involved who can't handle it, I am certainly not going to blame myself. Should everyone who ever served an alcoholic their first drink blame themselves? Of course not, it isn't their fault; it's a mix of bad genetics, bad environment, and a lack of self-control on the part of the alcoholic.

I model poker as an example of the typical USAmerican male hobby. Upper-middle class men spend a lot of money on their hobbies. Think of golf, for example. I know men who must dump a grand or two each and every year into their golf habits. They'll never make a dime of that back, of course. It's our culture; the “pursuit of happiness” appears right there in a one of our founding documents. Golf makes some men happy, so they dump all their so-called “disposable income” into it.

roryk is right, of course, many experts estimate that 90% of regular poker players are long-term losers. I've never seen hard data, nor a even rigorously computed estimation of that number, but it's still probably correct. But being one of the 90% is far from having a problem. If the player doesn't have a gambling problem, there isn't any inherent additional harm in giving poker a go and dropping a few grand a year in poker instead of golf. Indeed, poker losses can surely be mitigated by careful study to no more than any other hobby someone might undertake. And, the new player might even end up a winner for the year. I think it's a fun hobby and a great way to study the psychology of others, regardless of financial outcome.

The first thing I always tell people who have interest in poker, is that they will be losers forever unless they plan a rigorous, diligent, involved and constant learning process that will take up a large portion of their free time. As a new player, you must realize that to become a strong player, it takes study and lots and lots of active practice (not the passive practice of playing without an eye to game improvement). It takes discipline, concentration and nerves of steel. But, it's also rewarding, just as it is always rewarding to engage in competitive hard work with direct financial reward.

Having heard the caveats, you may still want to give poker a go. You have some “disposable income” and want to take your shot. Then, I suggest you set a budget for the hobby and be disciplined about it. It can be disheartening to realized you don't have the time to put in to learn how to beat the games, but any hobby one might engage in can turn out that way, despite substantial financial investments. It's important that you make an up-front budgeting decision on how much you're willing to spend on the hobby and stick to it. I am sure that every day, a USAmerican man realizes he's never going to be that good of a golfer but that he'll keep playing anyway because he enjoys it, but he surely does so on a budget.

Anyway, the upshot is that I have no qualms about helping people learn poker, with the caveats set forth. So, then the next question always comes: How do I get started and what type of game should I play? What should I read? Where should I go to start playing?.

I've answered these questions many times over during the past few years. I've decided, after tmckearney asked a few questions and I started putting down the usual answers, that I'll instead do a series in this journal, geared to help complete poker newbies get started. Each Sunday night, until I run out of things to say, I'll make a post helping new players navigate their way through the world of poker.

Every time I talk about NL cash games, I find myself, at one point or another, insisting how bad it is to play short-stacked in a cash game. In a tourney, of course, you'd prefer not to play short-stacked, but shouldn't quit just because you are. However, I firmly believe that you are usually better off quitting a cash game than playing in it with a short-stack. ( In the following rather long article, I hope that I have made that case. )

In the last segment of this series, I discussed the classic advice on playing AK in NL HE. Classic, Brunson-style AK play can work in some games -- usually tight or tight-weak games, or games where people have very typical, unimaginative preflop (and, to some extent, flop) play.

I play in a few online games that fit this bill, but in most of the live cash games, the game conditions don't match those that make the "classic" plays optimal. I play against very loose players, and you probably do, too. I wouldn't call their preflop play "imaginative"; however, most of them are capable of waking up with any two cards on the flop, often regardless of how much went into the pot preflop. This is particularly true if the there was multiway action for a small or medium-sized raise preflop.

I believe that AK plays best heads up with position against a single, tight opponent whom you have forced to commit about 5% of his stack preflop. When you make one pair, you want to bet your hand for value and get called when your opponent has a weaker kicker. You also want him to able to fold a hand to bluff on the flop should you both miss. For the latter, it's much better if he doesn't have too much of his stack committed preflop, and it helps too if he's tight enough to fold (for example) middle pair on the flop when heads-up.

I propose that situation as the best conditions for AK; not surprisingly, I consider the opposite situation as the worst for AK. AK is a very tough hand when you are out of position in a large, raised multiway pot, perhaps against a broad mixture of short and big stacks. It is also a terrible hand when heads up against an opponent who has committed a large portion of his stack (I'll talk more about this specific situation in the third installment). Too often, in the current NL HE cash game climate, one or all of these bad factors come to work against you.

For example, in the clubs here in NYC, the NL HE games typically have between a $200-$300 buy-in with $1/$2 blinds. However, the typical preflop raise is about $15. Most of the loose players can't be gotten off "crazy two pair hands" (the name I use for strange hands like J6 that cannot possibly make the best hand without flopping two pair) for less that $15 preflop. Typically, a raise of $15 in early or middle position will elicit four or five callers on a typical night. They are usually calling with small or medium pairs and suited connectors and one-gaps, and a few 20-point (i.e., two paint card) hands. (As a side note, on "tight" nights in these games, you can raise a $2 blind to $15 from early or middle position and get "only two" callers! :)

So let's think through one of these scenarios together. Suppose we hold AK in early position and open-raise to $15 -- if it's any less, the whole table is going to call. That's about 5% of our stack already (assuming we have just bought in). Around the table we see a couple of people nursing $60-$80 stacks, a few nice stacks ($500-$800), and some very loose players who have gambled their way up to very large stacks ($1,000 or more). The rest of the stacks are usually about the size of the buy-in. At $15-to-go, we watch calls come from one nice stack, one or two buy-in-sized stacks, and then a short stack comes in hoping to see a flop and get lucky.

We're seeing a flop out of position for 5% of our stack against four or opponents. How should we play the flop? If we flop an A or K, we'll need to play it as the best hand, but we might be way behind someone in this complicated field. If the flop brings a flush draw, we'll be forced to bet something approaching the pot size, which is around $60 or $70. In that case, we'll have committed over 30% our stack to this hand. If our flop bet gets called, it'll be by a stack that has us covered or nearly even, and we'll be looking at some tough reads on the turn. If a short stack makes a play on the flop, we'll be forced to call and hope he's drawing. All this situations can be survived, and are "classically tough" poker situations. Such situations are interesting, and spark illuminating debate on the 2+2 fora. However, these tough NL decision moments are simply not the way to make money in a loose NL HE game. There are much better spots in these games.

Consider just such a better spot: I limped for $2 recently with a $500 stack with A8s in mid/late position in a multiway NL pot, and was treated to two-tone flop of 8-8-4. As I usually do with flopped trips, I bet half the pot (reasons I believe this play to be correct are left for another article), and got check-raised for twice the pot by a $400 stack holding what was obviously a weak 8. I moved in, knowing he'd call me drawing to three outs (he had 86o), and I took his $400 stack. This situation more or less played itself; my only decision point was whether or not he calls if I move in (this player was inexperienced enough that he would never fold flopped open trips for any amount). Compare this situation to our AK situation described above, and consider how they match up in terms of EV, difficultly in play, and certainty of being a favorite if your whole stack goes in the pot.

In loose NL HE games, situations where hands like A8s can win a huge pot as a substantial favorite come up so much more than situations where an AK can win a big pot as a favorite. Loose NL players call off large parts of their stack too often when they are second-best with few outs. We can set up such situations much easier with hands that play well cheaply multiway.

Quite simply, the classic advice on AK is often nowhere near optimal play in loose NL HE games. We can find situations where the classic play need not be modified much, if at all, (such as those tight bonus-chasing online games). But, when we have AK in the typical game these days, we have to know our opponents very well and take great care when pushing a lot of chips forward on a hand that can usually, at best, make one big pair with a good kicker. Playing well enough to allow such a one pair holding survive a multiway pot with highly variant stack sizes isn't where the big EV is in the modern, loose NL HE game.

I don't necessarily want to dissuade you from raising with big unpaired cards, there is good EV anywhere someone is willing to call you with a hand that is an underdog. However, always ask yourself these questions preflop: "Am I raising to build a big pot, or to push this to heads-up/three-handed? And, how likely am I to achieve my goal given all the current game conditions?" If you can't get yourself heads-up against a tight opponent (preferably with position) with your raise, then maybe you should just limp with that AK and see if you can win a small pot if the flop comes favorable. Remember that loose players make those raises cold preflop in hopes of winning a big pot; they are much less likely to "gamble" on the flop when it was only limped around preflop.

In the next installment, we'll consider further how the general thinking evolved that leads most to consider AK in the way that we do. I've already mentioned Brunson, which is a big part of that puzzle, but there are other factors in modern poker that inspire people to misplay AK in the ways these articles discuss.

(While you are waiting for my next and final article on the subject, be sure to also read this recent Card Player article that has some interesting things to say about AK. I don't agree that much Abrams' argument that "people know not to play weak kickers", because I still see plenty of A-rag showdowns, and preflop reraises stupidly with AQ all the time. However, I do agree with some of his points, and it is true that people are unlikely to commit their whole stack with a weak ace until they hit the kicker.)

I remember the excitement that I felt when I turned to that page in my copy of Sklansky's thin introductory volume on limit HE. The chapter was entitled "Semibluff". "What's that", I thought, "sounds interesting and technical". A semibluff, I learned, was a bet made with what is likely to be the worst hand, but has the potential of becoming the best hand if certain cards fall on later streets of play. I had probably done this before before I became a student of the game, but having a technical term for it intrigued me.

All poker players, when first starting out, are in love with the idea of bluffing. The concept that you can win without actually holding the best hand is what sets poker apart from other games -- so much so that the idea of a "bluff" is a deep analogy used throughout the cultures of the industrialized West.

Hopes are dashed, though, when we learn that at the low limit games we all started with, that bluffing just isn't all that profitable. Those games are what I often call "best hand poker" -- games that go to showdown almost every hand and require that you play the best hand profitably to win. I learned this in my early college home games; there were few people I could bluff. I would wait all night for my one, single opportunity to be heads-up with my good friend and fellow poker philosopher, Mike, or with my tight-aggressive cousin, Dan. There were the only two guys I could bluff off a hand. I used to keep two dollars back apart from stack (most pots in our game were about $2 each), that I could use to make a big pot-sized bet on sixth street and push them off that big pair when I had a four-straight or four-flush showing. Drawing to bluff-outs -- boy, that was fun, even if I didn't know that was the term for it at the time.

When I started playing $2/$4 at Foxwoods, I learned quickly that bluffing was a waste of those good yellow chips. Was I really going to make someone fold for one or two $2 fox-faced chip? Usually, I'd have to make a field of five people fold for that one measly chip. It wasn't going to happen. I eradicated all bluffs from my game.

But, the semibluff! I could bluff, and still make the best hand anyway. Like anyone with a shiny new hammer, I saw every poker situation as a nail. Do I have outs if called? Yes? Well, then I bet. It's a semibluff! I get to bet a lot. Isn't this great! Well, it was great, when I got lucky and my outs came. But they rarely folded to my semibluffs. Chagrin overwhelmed me; my new toy was busted.

Then, I started playing NL HE. Here, I could semibluff big! People don't usually call big pot-sized raises on the flop, especially when that bet is all-in. My semibluffs started working. I won huge pots with suited connectors on two-tone flops. I started playing any connecting cards hoping to flop a straight draw so I could get all my chips in.

The hey-day of my semibluffs was short-lived. I was, in fact, insulted the day that nick_marden said "you are always pulling the same tired semibluffs". But, I took his comment to heart, more than he likely realized at the time. I looked at my play, and discovered that I had huge swings at Greg's game (the only place I was playing NL HE at the time). I was getting called on most of my semi-bluffs, and I was only profitable when I got lucky and hit those outs. I had little or no fold equity.

That's the danger of abusing the semibluff. Too often, especially in loose games, you get called by a better hand and you need to catch to win. When you do catch, your tendency is to think the play was correct when all you did was manufacturer pot odds that weren't there when you started throwing chips in with the worst of it.

Half of the word "semibluff" is "bluff"! When you make the bet, you rarely have the best hand, and you opponent must fold somewhere around half the time (depending on the situation and your number of outs, of course) for the play to be a long-term winner. Eventually, I had to make the word "semibluff" one I never actually thought about. I couldn't consider the root word itself ("bluff"), because I had become willing to think of bets with the worst hand, where my opponents were unlikely to fold, as would-be "semibluffs". Heck, I was even willing to consider bets with two outs or less as "semibluffs", even though I knew almost for sure I'd get at least one caller. That's not semibluffing; that's betting with the worst of it and hoping to get lucky!

So I quit semibluffing, and my game got better. Recently, though, I've ventured into the realm of semibluffing again. This time, though, I actually make sure I have a strong amount of fold equity against the best hand when I make the bet. I've found that, for me, the only way to safely semibluff is to ask myself, before making the bet, "What are the likely hands my opponent holds, and how many of those will he fold if I bet?" I don't make the semibluff unless he folds around 70% or more of his possible holdings.

In the next few posts I make, I'll post at least three specific hand discussions from recent NL HE games where I have attempted to truly semibluff, and talk about why I think the semibluff was a good or bad move.

I paid my backer another $250 or so this week -- his 33% of my approximate $800 in winnings. I've been steadily beating both live games here in NYC and online.

Because I was chasing some bonuses on a few sites, I've been playing on sites that I generally felt in the past were "bad games". Some of the higher bonus sites online tend to attract bonus hunters, who are by their nature, low-risk, tight players. Like most players, my optimal game is a loose-passive one, where my value bets get called and I can play the best hand and win with it. Generally, I still feel that such players are the most profitable opponents for limit games, since the best hand is usually shown down.

However, on many sites, there are many more NL HE games running than limit. As such, I've been playing a bit more online NL HE than I used to, and am discovering that the tight-weak style of the classic "bonus chaser" or "correct player" makes for profitable NL HE games. ( I discuss in this entry a number of reasons why I feel this is so. )