Are You Paying Off Too Much?

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Whenever I have a bad session, I spend the next hour or two doing a post-mortem in my head. What went wrong? Could I have done something different to play better and (presumably) lose less money? I go through all the significant hands and analyze my play. Should I have raised there instead of called? Did I lose more on that hand than I had to?

I think it’s natural to go through this process, and I bet most players do something similar. It’s tempting to focus most on the biggest pots. After all, if that one huge pot had gone a different way, the result at the end of the session would have been much more palatable. Focusing on the big pots isn’t always best, though, because often it’s all the little things we do wrong here and there that set us up for failure.

But it’s certainly smart to review all the big pots for any obvious mistakes. One mistake I see players make frequently in big pots is that they pay off too much. It’s a tricky problem to solve because just because you lose a pot doesn’t necessarily mean that you should have folded. To distinguish bad calls from good calls that didn’t work out, you have to think about the particulars of the hand.

Most bad calls fall into two rough categories. First, people call to try to catch a bluff when a bluff is very unlikely. Second, people call with a hand that looks good, but that is almost always worse than the hands their opponents might be betting. (These categories are not rigid, and they can overlap a lot.) Here’s an example of a call in the first category.

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