Relative vs Absolute Hand Strength

August 13, 2011 2 comments

Lately my posts have been giant walls of text and I have drifted away from a big part of my intent with starting a blog in the first place, which was to post interesting hands. So this week a few suitable hands came up and I thought I would spend this post mainly talking about one of them after a brief overall update.

I changed backers once again, it seems to be a monthly occurrence lately. I don't want to go too deeply into it for the sake of their privacy but I am now being staked by a family member. It's a better arrangement for me because I now keep 70% of profits rather than 50% and also I can basically choose what I want to play and manage my own bankroll. The first week under this arrangement has started off well with a 6th in the Stars Sunday nightly $162 (again, highest buy in I had played this year) for around $2600 and a few other smallish scores which ended the week in decent profit.

On a whim I listed a small four event WCOOP package on twoplustwo, I had hoped it would sell a bit faster and at this rate I will be lucky to sell enough to be able to play any of the events, although there is still three weeks to go before the first event so it might work out okay.

I have been watching a few training videos this week, most notably a series on Deuces Cracked by Vanessa Selbst where she final tables the Sunday Million. It's a three part series and I watched the first two parts during the week - I have had a head-cold all week so I took a day off in the middle where I just relaxed and did a little study. They were fantastic videos and I am really keen to see more MTT stuff by her (there's a long series called Tournamentality which I plan to watch after this series). She's a great example of thinking outside the box and being creative. There's just something extra about watching a predominantly cash game player, especially a higher stakes one, play MTTs, they have a great approach and they aren't afraid to do unconventional things for fear of looking stupid. If they believe something is +EV then they just go for it.

So anyway, onto the hand I mentioned. This was from the $3 rebuy early in the week. It gets a couple of thousand entrants and has $10k guaranteed, with around $2k for first. We were at the final two tables with 12 players left and I was feeling pretty good, there was deep stacks so plenty of room to play and it was my only table left so I could really focus. Most of the other players had fairly unimpressive results but seemed to be playing well. The villain in this hand had standard preflop stats, not particularly aggressive when it came to 3-betting but he was playing 22% of hands overall so he could be defending reasonably wide here.

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em, 3.3 Tournament, 8000/16000 Blinds 1600 Ante (6 handed)

CO (t402829)
Hero (Button) (t541372)
SB (t483490)
BB (t954063)
UTG (t381160)
MP (t731789)

Preflop: Hero is Button with
3 folds, Hero bets t33469, 1 fold, BB calls t17469

Flop: (t84538) (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets t42269, BB calls t42269

Turn: (t169076) (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets t84538, BB raises to t169076, Hero calls t84538

River: (t507228) (2 players)
BB bets t294958 putting Hero all in

After flopping gin I'm basically trying to work out the best way to get stacks in, so obviously betting flop is a must, as we would be c-betting this flop with all our air. I'm hoping villain gets bluffy or tries to protect a weaker hand by raising. On the turn there is definitely a strong argument for checking back. I posted this hand on Two Plus Two where it generated a great deal of discussion, and I made the argument there that I think checking back the turn is good because we are either way ahead or way behind, and it's really hard for villain to call three streets with all that many hands we beat. We probably shouldn't be greedy and should just go for two streets of value, and the turn is a logical place to check back because it keeps his range for putting money in on the river as wide as possible. At the time I decided to bet the turn because I didn't really think that hard about it, I just thought about the absolute strength of my hand and that it was possible villain could spaz out on the turn.

But the problem is that people don't really float the flop with the intention of bluff-raising the turn out of position, especially not with 12 people left in a two thousand person field. If he was going to bluff he would have done it on the flop. It's also unlikely he is playing a weaker hand for value, there just aren't many worse kings in his range and even if he had one he would often just keep calling and hope we keep bluffing, as it's hard for us to continue with many worse hands. Nevertheless, it seems like we should call the turn because it's a min raise, so even if we're usually behind we're getting a good price to draw to the nuts and there is still a small chance he's raising something worse to see where he's at and will check the river.

In retrospect and in the cold light of day I really think the river is an easy fold, but our judgement often gets clouded by confusing absolute hand strength with relative hand strength. In a vacuum we have a strong hand, we have trips on the button in a situation where we are expected to have a wide range and to be playing aggressively. But villain's line shows such strength that it's almost impossible for us to be ahead, as I said he would virtually never take this line as a bluff and we don't beat any hands in his value range, whereas it's conceivable he has lots of hands in his defending range that beat us, such as KT+, 33, 77, k3s and K7s. But, with my thinking process being limited to "I haz trips, I call!" I did call the river and he tabled 77. This is a spot which I think requires some deeper on the spot analysis and some discipline, so hopefully I have learnt a lot from this hand and won't make such a crucial mistake in future. More updates next week.

Skill vs Variance

August 04, 2011 1 comments

I couldn't decide between the current title of this post or the alternative "Nit vs Spew" for reasons that will become apparent later. The thing with tournaments is that the variance is so huge it's really hard to know if you're playing poorly or just running bad, or playing well or just running hot. I was listening to the Deuce Plays podcast a couple of weeks ago where Bart Hanson was interviewing Tommy Angelo; it's one of the best poker podcasts around and one of the few I make it a point to listen to regularly. I had heard of Tommy Angelo but never heard him speak or read anything by him, all I knew was that he is someone with more of a mental game approach and focuses on helping people play the best they can by avoiding tilt. Anyway, I really enjoyed hearing him speak and it's obvious he has a great understanding of human nature in general and a really great approach to life. At one point they were talking about poker tournaments vs cash games, and the point Tommy made was that he used to play tournaments, but he couldn't handle the fact that you could play great and do everything right for the majority of the tournament, and then just lose one coin flip or 70/30, get coolered or whatever and have that all taken away from you. At least in cash games you actually have something to show for most of the times you do things right. He said he thought that tournaments were 90% luck and 10% skill whereas cash games are the other way around. Whilst I think that's a pretty big exaggeration, there is definitely some truth in the point he's making and I have been thinking about it a lot since hearing that interview. But the thing is, it's a double edged sword in that you can also do a ton of stuff wrong in tournaments and then just win a huge flip or get aces vs some guy's AK a couple of times and next thing you know you have a massive stack. For this reason, it's very hard to know if you're playing well or just getting the right cards at the right times. It's possible to get a coach or somebody to review tournaments with you and point out if you're doing something bad, but the problem is that if you're multi-tabling 50 hours of poker a week, going over hands with someone for 1-2 hours a week really isn't going to begin to cover many of the spots you're finding yourself in, and coupled with this is the fact that even if you're choosing hands that you think might be your weak spots or things you have trouble with, there may well be a lot of other things you do that you're taking for granted and that are actually quite bad, but are never seeing the light of day. You may well just be choosing things to go over that just made you think really hard, but that are fairly close and really quite inconsequential, whereas the hand before you folded BvB in a spot that is clearly leaking money over the long run.

This is where I think having people that you can regularly get opinions from in real time, about stuff that you take for granted (commenting while watching each other play) as well as stuff that gives you trouble, can be of huge benefit, so for that reason I am finding the skype group I mentioned starting in my last post really helpful. It's grown to over fifty people, which has brought some of it's own challenges with people trolling etc, but overall it's pretty self-regulating and people will just get from it what they put in. I guess the drawback is that by a group of people sharing their ideas about something as structured as poker, it can make everyone more or less play and think in the same way, but if that way is successful then that's fine. I suppose it's the same criticism in general that's often leveled at the TwoPlusTwo forums - it creates a bunch of people who all play the same and there is just this kind of top-down group-think, where people aren't really looking at the best way of doing things for themselves, but rather just trying to emulate the latest forum legend. There's a kind of leveling out process where the best players don't really get that much out of it, but inexperienced players can develop a cookie-cutter style that makes money, without ever really having to reinvent the wheel or think too deeply about trying new things. I don't see this as an inherently bad thing. After all, most of the good players are good because they went through this process as a beginner in the first place. If you read many great players' story, they will mention that fateful moment where they found TwoPlusTwo and everything changed. It's when they actually go beyond that cookie-cutter approach and start thinking more for themselves that they actually go a step above the majority, and in turn they pass that down the line, so it becomes part of the canon of communal knowledge. I could give tons of examples of this but I don't really want to take up too much space with it; the one most striking example I can think of is the legendary thread entitled Glorious shove by DJK in 1k on Stars. In the thread, the great DJK shoves 25bb BvB with QJo, something that was really pretty way out three years ago when this thread was posted, but which is incredibly standard today, mainly because of this thread! So this is an example of the trickle-down approach that things like forums and any group discussion medium where varying skill level is concerned embody.

Last week I had my biggest win of the year, taking down the nightly $109 $40K guaranteed last Sunday for $9K. The thing that made this extra sweet was that it was also the highest buy in I have played this year - the day before the tournament I asked my backer on a whim if I could play the big $109 on Sundays when it's extra juicy, which he agreed to. So I am one for one in $100+ tournaments this year, a strike rate I'm planning on maintaining . If it wasn't for that tournament, however, in the three weeks since my last post, under my new backer, I would be down around $3k. That's over something like 400 tournaments (the middle week I was only playing at night because my wife had a stay in hospital), so in a way I consider this still something of a downswing. One way of looking at it is that I am outlaying something like $1200 a day so over an average of around 12 days play I would have been losing around 25%. But maybe I'm being too hard on myself, I mean success in tournaments revolve around big scores amidst steady downswings. After all, not many fields of endeavour have an expected failure rate of 80-90% (the amount of tournaments that even the greatest players won't even make it to the money in).

The thing is, I went over the tournament yesterday, and I couldn't really find anything I did particularly well. I could just as easily have been looking at this tournament played a year or two years ago, so it really makes me question my overall skill level and my constant striving to improve, when my biggest score in ages just amounted to me coolering people, winning flips and sucking out. Maybe I reached my ceiling two years ago and just need to accept that and play within it. On the flip side I don't think I did too many things wrong, I might have missed a steal or a good spot to 3b or two, but apart from one spewy bluff which wasn't risking many chips anyway, I don't think I made too many obvious mistakes. I just really didn't get into too many tricky spots and didn't get many opportunities to either spew or set up good plays. I think I'm trying too hard to be creative in most of my tournaments, I'm getting in lots of spots where I'm not comfortable, which I guess is a necessary part of improving - over time one becomes comfortable in those spots - but in the current climate of MTTs it's probably just not all that necessary. One can just nit it up and still have a good win rate ... I was going to write that playing like that just isn't going to win majors, but then I thought about it and realised my biggest ever win did come exactly like that, and it was a major, in fact pretty much the toughest major around, the Sunday Second Chance, around two years ago, against a final two tables that included aaaaaaa, jcamby, acehighdro, sketchy, Ben Lamb (!), and Thay3r amongst others. When I look over that tournament I see a similar pattern - nitting, coolering, winning flips, so maybe there's a really sustainable argument for just staying within one's natural comfort zone, doing what you do well within that zone, and surviving long enough to be able to do those things. That goes against what a lot of great players, much smarter people than me, think it takes to be successful at tournaments though. The sentiment in particular that springs to mind is that of Seabeast, arguably the best player in Australia, former top ten in the world, one of the players I admire the most and who has inspired me the most with things he says:

"... I strongly disagree with the prevailing sentiment that just because someone reads the forums and decides they want to be a winning player, they are automatically a winning player.

not being a losing player is not the same as being a winning player.

it's almost as though people think we are all equally good because we read the same threads and register in the same tournaments, and that some of us just have to wait longer for our heaters than others.

eventually we'll all be rich, because lucky us, we all found the same automatic cashcow!

poker is hard to beat. it takes discipline, study, and self control.

very few people ever really take a large amount of money out of the game. this doesn't change whether they are backed or not, or whether they play tourneys, cashgames, or back other players.

you aren't a winning player just because you show up, even if you never make a huge spewy embarassing mistake, or play table games, or tilt off money like other people you know... even if you read 2+2 for two hours a day...

all that is still not enough. it takes more. profit in poker is GROUND OUT, it's not automatically there. it's a privilege. it's earnt, over time, not by *avoiding mistakes*, but by actually becoming a tough player.
...
the difference in skill level between a gboro or a zeejustin or a lilholdem and the average HSMTT poster is way, way bigger than most people think.

ultimately there's the 1-5% of people *getting money*, and then there's the rest."

This is from a thread about backing, and I've left out most of the stuff he said about backing, which is interesting in its own right and which has helped shape my own opinion on backing as expressed in my earlier blog posts. You can see the entire post, and indeed the entire thread here. It's a great read if you have a spare hour or so to read the whole thing.

So anyway, I guess I need to keep experimenting and work out what really is going to best work for me, how much I want to try new things at the expense of immediate (and possibly long-term) gains, and how I can best find out what's working and what isn't. My backer returns from overseas in the next few days so I'm looking forward to weighing up some coaching options with him. I'm also pretty keen to start playing some live stuff, I really miss playing live, although every time I do I come home to my wife saying "never again", but that may well be that I just didn't have the patience and the passion to do well live in the past. I think I do now. Either way, it looks like an exciting time ahead. Hopefully next time I will have some room to talk about non poker things and maybe post some interesting hands, I really need to get in the habit of marking interesting ones so I can easily retrieve them. I will try to update next week.