Bigger Deal

Not long ago, when I was in my poker salad days, someone regurgitated a sound-bite that I have since heard a fair few times: ‘Fixed Limit is a science, No Limit is an art’, or words to that effect. Now I don’t want to shroud myself in controversy, or come across as a bit of a pedant, but I would argue this point to be wrong. No Limit poker may be beautiful to watch when played expertly, but to deny its status as science is illogical; practically no decision made in a hand of NLHE should be anything but mathematically sound, and if it is not, it is most probably a negative expected value (unprofitable) move.

I, as much as anybody, enjoy watching a crazy Phil Ivey bluff, and trying to emulate it later with my friends or at the card room, but I do try to remind myself that however enjoyable it may be to flip over my 2-5o after thrice betting the loose- aggressive on the monotone 9-T-Q board, that move is certainly not going to show me a good return on my somewhat risky investment. It would perhaps be wiser, instead, simply to do as the maths (which of course takes into account your read on your opponent’s range of hands) dictates.

To illustrate my point, let me give you an example of a hand I recently played at $400NL against a very tight-aggressive opponent (15 vpip/13 pfr/4 af). The key to this hand is that I was in position and almost 215BB deep with him. I knew him to be a thinking player, playing a large number of tables, and therefore would have an extremely tight 3 betting range out of position against a player who was playing a semi-loose- aggressive game (24/21/5*) and could put a lot of pressure on him so deep-stacked. With all this in mind, from the CO I made it $12 with 7-8h and from the SB, our villain made it $50. Believing my opponent to have a range of no more than 4% of his hands, (AK, AQs, AA-JJ + very occasionally random small pairs and hands with good implied odds such as low suited connectors etc.) I made the call believing my implied odds to dictate that I should with a hand that flops so well. The flop came 3h-6s-8s giving me top pair and a backdoor heart draw, and Villain bet out $80 into $104. Considering how the board had been favourable to me after my speculative pre-flop call, I decided to peel. The next card was the Ad, ruling out my hitting a back door flush, and meaning that I must have been behind to anything my opponent could conceivably be holding save random pre-flop re-steals. He checked, a tactic that seemed to be a pot control line that gave me an opportunity to take the betting lead - to which I duly obliged, putting $140 into the $264 pot, leaving myself with slightly over the total pot + the villain’s $140 call behind. In this position, if I had been check-raised, I would of course have let go of my hand; but I was flat-called, signalling that my opponent had either KK-QQ (less likely JJ), or AK-AQ, and was attempting to slow down the escalation of the pot. This was further confirmed when he took a long time to check the river, a slightly irrelevant 6h, pairing the board. Into the $544, I shoved my remaining $582 and braced myself for an agonizing 30 seconds. The total pot stood at $1132 minus the $3 rake, meaning that I would have to win the hand around 52% of the time to show a profit (582 out of 1129 times). The villain’s hand range hardly mattered any more, unless he had slow-played a set or hit some twisted boat, which I figured to be extremely unlikely. His decision was whether or not I was bluffing, as the only hands I was representing were in reality a flopped set, or, possibly the AK of spades. Knowing that a bluff made up far less of my range than 33, 66, 88 or AKs, he made the correct fold after allowing me to sweat until he timed out. When I eventually pestered him enough, he told me (truthfully I believe) that he had folded AK thinking that, unless I was bluffing, the best he could hope for was a split.

Looking at this hand from his side, he played it completely correctly on the river. I do think that he should have bet the turn, even though he would in all probability have pushed out any hand he beat, and been called or raised by any hand that beat him, simply because the isolated turn bet would have shown a profit as I would be forced to fold the hand I called with on the flop a very high percentage of the time. On the river, however, he determined, correctly, that most of the time in that situation I would have him beat, and, in the knowledge that I could be bluffing (but not as often as I would have had to be for him to be able to correctly call), he made the fold. Getting less than two to one on his call, laying his hand down was the most profitable move in the long term for him.

This point demonstrates what I mean when I refer to NLHE as science. There is right and wrong even if there are multiple right answers and multiple wrong answers; what gives it its scientific status is its testability through mathematics, and through maths you are constantly searching for optimal strategy. What I want to get across here is that what players are trying to do in poker is not simply win hands, but make winning moves in the long term, and this is perhaps the single most important idea for a poker player to grasp before he can start making money. It may seem an obvious point, but if you are losing a lot more pot-sized bluffs than you are winning, you will be losing money. This is not to say that you should have a calculator next to you when you play poker, or formulate equations whenever you decide to enter a pot, but rather that you should be very much aware of roughly how often you expect to be showing a profit through any move you make, be it bluffing or value betting. Every decision you make has either a positive or negative Expected Value, and this is the very definition of your long-term win rate.

* Voluntary put in pot, pre-flop raise and AF is agression factor (ratio of bet/raise : call post flop), so his AF of 4 means you can tell he’s pretty agro, which you expect from a decent nit!