First off let me aplogize that I didn’t get something up on Monday. The HD on my Mac decided to take a dumper and I had to learn real quickly how you put new hardware into a Mac. Much of this is written from memory of what I wrote before my HD went busto.
I’m going to return to a topic that I’ve discussed in the past and was discussed in Elements of Poker and has been covered by Ed Miller in Small Stakes Hold’em as well as many of his other writings. The topic is marginal decisions. By that I mean those decisions where the difference in EV between choice A and choice B is relatively small.
I think Miller uses the example of someone who always folds royal flushes on the river to one bet. While it’s a massively -EV move on that hand it’s a relatively minor leak in the player’s game since the chances of him having a royal flush are so long. A player might see a royal flush roughly once in 650,000 hands. Assuming the player plays 10,000 hands a month he’ll get a chance to make that mistake again in another 5 1/2 years.
So why are the pages of 2+2 filled with guys debating miniscule differences in EV? The short answer is that because the more frequently you are presented with the choice the more important it is to make the best decision. So if you fold pocket aces every time you get them it’s a -EV move but less so than playing any two cards from any position since you only get pocket aces once approx every 220hands while you get two cards every single hand.
But the goal of this post wasn’t to beat to death this topic. I believe people like Miller have written enough on the topic that I’m not going to add any value with any new thoughts. What I did want to do is discuss how this is impacting poker across the board.
As most online players are aware, most sites are becoming tougher. A lot tougher at some. And while I’ve heard people discuss the general concept about players getting better I’m not sure I’ve seen anybody specifically talk about how.
I’m going to make an argument that most of your EV in a hand is pre-flop. Your decision to call, raise or fold pre-flop is, in my opinion, the most important decision you make the entire hand. And since you have to make that decision on every single hand the impact of your decisions can be substantial on your overall results. Until you hit the middle-limits and higher you really don’t see too many truly creative post-flop players so that puts even more emphasis on the pre-flop portion of your game.
So it’s not that the players are becoming significantly better players in terms of their wisdom of the game but it’s almost impossible to play hold ‘em today without having never heard of a starting hands chart. Even the fish are using them. Some are even using poker calculator software that recommends whether or not to call, raise or fold. What is happening is that the pre-flop edge between the good and the bad players is narrowing. As that gap narrows so does the profit margin for the better players.
The lesson I think we can all take away from this is to look at games you’re likely to find yourself in often and plug those leaks first. If you already play tight pre-flop then what other tough decisions do you face frequently? Do you freeze up when the flop fails to help your AK? You’re only going to hit the flop 1/3 of the time so I’m willing to bet that you see that situation pretty often. Looking at these high frequency situations and spending days or weeks researching them and developing a strategy will serve you much better than worrying about whether or not you should raise on the turn or try to induce a river bluff.
Poker Blog Post of the Week
Short-Stacked Shamus gets a nod this week for reporting on a story that hasn’t seemed to have picked up much traction. The story is that Mike “The Mouth” Matusow reportedly slipped up on his Mouthpiece video blog on CardPlayer and said that he had played other player’s accounts.
“Tournament poker involves tremendous focus, I mean tremendous focus . . . . If I was to play tournaments online, I would have to play just the one tournament, and have everything turned off around me, and then put my heart into it. And I haven’t been able to do it yet except for once, and I did it once for a friend of mine who was six hours deep into a tournament — I’m not gonna name what site — and I took over for him because he’s not really a good closer, and we finished third. ‘Cos I put my heart into it, and I knew we had chips to move with and I could evaluate players and we should have won it if we would have won a coin flip. So, that’s what it comes down to is the focus.”
Wow! That really is a huge statement to make in light of all the recent cheating scandals.
Poker Pic of the Week
I really like this montage from Flickr user MariSheibley.
Top Poker Stories
Sorel Mizzi heads over to BetFair
From the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” department: Anti-casino strategist Dennis Bailey has joined up to fight against Massachusetts’ plans to add three casinos. How is that good news? Well teh bill authorizing more casinos also had an anti-online gaming clause in it to protect the new casinos.
The planned Manchester Super-Casino was shot down
Phil Hellmuth was booted from the post Dorchester Hotel after refusing to remove his baseball cap in the restaurant
Andy Black found another reason to burst into tears at PartyPoker Premiere League
Tip of the Week
Check out the poker rap from TheDudeMan. Your life will magically improve.
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Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.
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