Why Sharp People Sometimes Fail At Poker

This is pretty cool.

Someone just pointed me to a monster thread on 2+2 where poker pro “Giev Money??” details his path to winning a million dollars playing no-limit hold’em. Someone asked him if he watches any videos or reads any ebooks, and this was his answer:

Nah haven’t watched any videos in a long time. Two eBooks that helped me most when I went pro were Let there be range (probably overpriced nowdays) and Small stakes holdem by Ed Miller (only $30). It was almost 3 years ago when I read those but there is probably still valuable info even though games have developed.

You can check out the entire thread here.

I don’t write books with the intention of helping people to make a million dollars playing poker. Honestly, for most people, it’s not a realistic goal. But it’s cool to hear someone who has made it to the top credit one of my books when asked how it all got started. (And, not to toot my horn too much, but I’ve had a number of other million dollar winners tell me that one of my books got their careers rolling.)

Making a million isn’t a realistic goal for most people… but I think making ten thousand dollars at this game IS realistic for most people if they are willing to put in the work and willing to keep at it over the long haul. That’s my goal when I write. I want my readers who do the homework and put in the serious effort to make ten thousand playing this crazy game that we all just can’t get out of our heads. Sounds good, right?

So congrats, Giev Money??, on your tremendous accomplishment. I figure this is as good a time as any to offer those of you aspiring to win more money playing no-limit hold’em a discount. So for the next week (expiring February 18, 2012), you can take $10 off either Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em or my new book How To Read Hands At No-Limit Hold’em. Just use the discount code GIEV10 when you check out.

Buy Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em

Or

Buy How To Read Hands At No-Limit Hold’em

Don’t forget the code GIEV10. I wonder which of you who buy today will be the next to win ten grand…

The first month of 2012 is in the books, and I wanted to share a few of my poker-related thoughts for the upcoming year.

The birth of online poker 2.0

I think 2012 is going to be an excellent year for poker. With the recent DOJ statement that online casinos aren’t prohibited by the 1961 Wire Act and Nevada leading the way with legal online poker coming (hopefully very) soon I expect full-blown legal online poker in the United States by the end of the year. Now I don’t expect every state to get involved, and it’ll probably be a few years until the Feds, the states, and any other interested parties all take sides and online poker 2.0 becomes truly mature in this country.

But as a player, writer, and coach, I don’t need mature poker. I’m sure I will like online poker 2.0 in its nascent form. I’m thinking the very first day the pay games run, the action will be better than anything you’ve seen on the major sites for the past few years. And as the sites come online and compete for casual players through major ad budgets, I think we’ll get an influx of soft money like we haven’t seen since 2005. There’s an opportunity coming, and I plan to take full advantage since opportunities never last long enough. In the coming months I’m planning writings and maybe a few videos aimed at helping you get ready so you can take the fullest advantage of online poker 2.0 when it arrives.

Aussie Millions Envy

This month also marks the conclusion of the Aussie Millions Poker Championship at the Crown Casino in Melbourne, Australia. I have to admit, this is one tournament I’ve always wanted to play. I’m not much for playing tournaments. My primary purpose for playing poker is to generate steady income, and in my opinion cash games are just plain better for that than tournaments are. Tournaments also require a major time investment, and one reason I always liked poker is the flexibility the game offers. I don’t like being told I have to play at this table, in this seat, from noon until 2am, whether I like it or not.

But I also get the upsides of tournaments. They’re fun, without a doubt. And the promise of a huge payday is nice. One year I’m going to make an exception and play the Aussie Millions. I’ve always wanted to visit Australia, and heading down under in January definitely seems like a good plan (even if I’m sitting in a casino half the time). A www.onlinecasino.com.au and a guide to Melbourne. If you’ve been to the Aussie Millions and have any feedback for me, let me know.

Calling 3-Bets Out Of Position

Oh boy. Someone pointed me to a thread in the microstakes forum at 2+2. In the thread, the poster has KQs in the small blind in a 25NL 6-max game. It’s folded to him preflop, and he 3x raises. The big blind 3x 3-bets. Blind versus blind. The poster 4-bets small and gets called. The flop is J-T-7 two-tone (no backdoor draw for our hero), and the poster check-shoves the flop and gets snap-called by KJ.

The poster’s comments about the opponent was that this guy 3-bets light a lot and he’s a suspicious player.

The poster’s commentary is that flat-calling the 3-bet is “****ing awful”, and he cites my book Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em as his source for why this is such a terrible play.

Let me start out by saying that if there ever were a place where it is a-ok to flat-call a 3-bet from OOP, this is it. (In fact in modern no-limit games there are plenty of places where flat-calling 3-bets both in and out of position is fine.) I would tend to call in this situation more than anything else.

It is true that in SSNLHE we warn against flat-calling 3-bets from out of position. The biggest problem with doing this is that, too often, when players do it, they make two major postflop errors. First, they mentally give their opponents credit for holding a legitimate 3-betting range rather than the wide range that light 3-betters have. Thus, they tend not to give their own hands enough credit, and they underplay. Second, they tend to play a fit-or-fold strategy postflop. If they fit, they want to shovel all the money into the pot. If they don’t “fit” according to their definition, they’re looking for the first opportunity to fold. The problem with this is that most people’s definition of “fitting” a flop is too narrow, and they end up putting big bucks in preflop and then giving up too often. Basically, they’re calling the 3-bet, but then just folding WAY too often on the flop or turn. Furthermore, they’re calling the 3-bets with too many small card hands that will be begging to fold once the flop comes.

Here’s the thing. In a blind versus blind battle against a notoriously light 3-bettor, KQs is a legitimate monster hand. There’s no question it’s worth playing against a light 3-betting range from the blinds. Now when I’m deciding whether to flat-call or to 4-bet preflop, I’m going to think about how my opponent is likely to make mistakes responding to my action. I tend to find that most players at the 25NL level will make more and more significant mistakes playing the 3-bet pot (even when they have position) than they will in responding to the 4-bet with a hand like this one, so I’m more inclined to just call the 3-bet.

If there’s a hand that makes something on more flops than KQs, I’m not sure what it is. Something is as little as overcards and a backdoor flush draw. When your opponent is aggressive and has wide ranges, flopping something with KQs gives you license to continue in the hand. Again, how you continue depends on the sort of mistakes your opponent is likely to make. If your opponent is going to make too many folding mistakes after the flop in the 3-bet pot, then I would consider lines that involved semi-bluffing the flop or turn. (E.g., donk betting the flop, check-shoving, betting the turn if the flop gets checked through, etc.)

If my opponent is suspicious, however, and unlikely to fold incorrectly, then I’m often going to try to extend hands through to the river. Getting to the river will allow my hand value advantage to play out because it maximizes the chance of seeing a showdown. Getting to the river also helps me because my opponents tend not to read hands well once the board gets crowded. I’m going to make a lot of money against a suspicious opponent when I catch a king or queen and get paid two postflop streets of value… sometimes even getting stacks in by the river. I’ll also be able to find spots where my opponent’s turn play turns his hand face-up and I can bluff profitably. (Even suspicious players don’t look you up when they have air.)

Basically, against a light 3-bettor who is also suspicious and doesn’t like to fold early in the hand, I’m going to rely on the preflop hand strength of KQs to justify early bets preflop and on the flop. Then on the turn and river I’m going to rely on my (hopefully) superior hand-reading to find value and bluffs where appropriate. This is, of course, aided by the fact that my starting hand is quite good.

Bottom line, when people 3-bet you really light in position, you have to have an out of position calling range. Suited big card hands are probably the perfect hands for this range, since they hit so many flops and they flop top pair often allowing your opponents to value-own themselves. Even on a rag flop with a backdoor flush draw you might take the 3-to-1 odds and float out of position looking for something positive to develop on the turn or river. (Either good cards or your opponent taking a line that betrays weakness.)

When your opponents are aggressive and bloat pots with light 3-bets and auto-flop c-bets, you have to get sticky with them. You can’t just fold all day long. You have to gamble. As long as your hand compares well to your opponent’s actual range (rather than the range you’re scared of), you’ll be fine. Yes, there’s variance. And yes, you’ll have runs where your opponents outflop you a bunch of times and you lose X buyins real fast. That’s modern no-limit.

But as long as you’re willing to hang in there and not just call preflop and check-fold flop, calling 3-bets out of position can be just fine.

Just a quick note to let you know that I’m now accepting orders for the paperback version of How To Read Hands At No-Limit Hold’em.

It’s $49.99 plus shipping (and sales tax for Nevada residents).

Order here (purchase links at bottom of page).

Assuming there isn’t a disruption in the supply chain, the first books should ship end of next week/beginning of the week after that. Books ship via USPS Priority Mail, and Priority Mail International for purchases outside the US. I will personally sign every book in the early orders, and if the first shipment sells out I will fulfill orders on a first come/first served basis.

I don’t play a lot of pots out of position. When I do play out of position, the most common scenario is that I’ve open-raised preflop and someone has called behind me.

In this scenario, many students of the game automatically fire a continuation bet on the flop. This is too aggressive. You should be checking many flops when you’re out of position whether you were the preflop raiser or not.

Why is that? Well, the short answer is that once a competent player calls your preflop raise in position, you’re no longer necessarily the favorite in the hand. A competent player is going to call your preflop raises with a range of hands roughly equal in strength to the ones you would open-raise with.

Say you’re four off the button and you make it $20 to go in a $2-$5 game. What hands are you doing this with? If you’re playing an aggressive but not particularly loose game, you’ll be opening with hands like 4-4, Q-T suited, A-6 suited, and A-J offsuit. A competent player generally won’t be calling your raise with hands too much weaker than these. Sure, you’ll have A-A and K-K in your range while your opponent might reraise rather than call with these premium hands. But generally your raising range doesn’t have a huge card strength advantage over the caller’s range.

And you’re out of position. Out of position, with no card strength advantage, against a competent opponent. It’s not a particularly profitable situation. In deference to this reality, you should be checking many flops.

But just because you’re checking doesn’t mean you’re just giving up. You can check-call with good hands. And you can check-raise. In this article I’ll talk about check-raise bluffing.

Since most players don’t check enough in this scenario, they also don’t check-raise bluff enough. This is a powerful play when used with an appropriate frequency.

Think back to a time when you knew very little about how to play poker well. Some of you may not have to stretch the imagination very far. You went to the casino. You chased big hands, you checked back value hands, you had no idea what your opponents had.

What have you learned since then? Likely you’ve learned all the important fundamentals. You’ve learned not to limp in out of position with weak hands. You’ve (more or less) learned not to pay off big bets from nut-peddling and passive players. You’ve learned to play position aggressively. You’ve learned to c-bet flops and also to barrel the turn when it’s clear your opponent doesn’t often have much. You bet your good hands for value, and maybe here and there you find a good thin value bet.

You’re a nit or maybe a TAG, and you make money easily off of players who can’t read hands and who therefore overvalue their medium-strength hands in big pots. As long as you can play in relatively soft games, you will make money playing poker for the rest of your life.

But I’m sorry to say, you’re not very good yet. Being very good means firing up an online casino and sitting in a game with nothing but players just like you and being able to generate a consistent profit. An advanced stats package is R for download and Casino.org. Obviously we’re not talking about a massive winrate. Massive winrates require legitimate spots in the game. But a consistent winrate.

You might be thinking, “Why on earth would I even want to try to play in a game with nothing but solid players to squeak out a winrate?” If you were thinking this, stop yourself! That’s not the point. The point of getting very good is that instead of winning X in a game, you’re now winning X + Y, where Y is the profit you squeeze out of the regulars in the game. That Y over time allows you to build your bankroll faster and move up.

So how do you do this? It’s a relatively simple, yet painstaking process. It’s simple because you can find a single edge over your clones in as little as fifteen minutes. But it’s painstaking because you have to find these edges over and over and over again–and retain them all–to really get the best of your TAGish bretheren.

Basically, it’s a lot of work. But if you play a lot of poker, and your goal is to win more or move up, the work is very worth it. So what do you do?

First, pick a relatively common situation. It’s a $0.50-$1 6-max game at an online casino. A 21/17 regular opens for $3 from under the gun. You’re on the button, and you call. Let’s not worry about what hand you’re calling with just yet. The blinds fold.

The flop comes A 6 2 . Your opponent bets. Is this bet unexpected?

It’s not. This is a dry, ace-high flop, and many regulars think they should bet flops like this one with 100 percent of their range. After all, they raised a tight range UTG, and they can “represent the ace.”

What’s the reality, though? Say the UTG player raises 13 percent of his starting hands from UTG. His range is something like this:

AA-22
AKs-ATs, KQs-KTs, QJs-98s, QTs
AKo-AJo, KQo

This is 13 percent of hands. How often do you think this hand range makes top pair or better on this flop?

According to Flopzilla, which is an invaluable, yet inexpensive, program if you want to get very good at poker, this UTG range makes top pair or better just 31.6 percent of the time. This means that 68.4 percent of the time, your opponent will flop a hand he’s likely to fold to pressure.

If this is beginning to sound like a good spot to throw in a bluff, you’re catching on. Assume UTG is playing a very simple strategy of c-betting 100 percent of his hands (because he’s “supposed to” on a flop like this one) and then shutting down without an ace or better. You can raise his c-bet and show an automatic profit. There’s $7.50 in the pot preflop. He bets $4 on the flop. That puts $11.50 in the pot. You raise him to $10 with any two. You’re risking $10 to win $11.50 that he’ll fold. If he is indeed folding 68.4 percent of the time, this is extremely profitable.

If you find that your regular opponents tend to take this line on flops like this one, you can raise them all day long and auto-profit. You’ve taken a small step toward becoming a very good player. Now find 200 more situations like this one. Find two every day for 100 days in a row. At the end of this exercise, you’ll be an absolute monster in your regular games, and you’ll have a gaudy winrate to match.

“But Ed,” you say, “you make it sound easy, but it’s not easy like that! If I start raising these flops with air, I’ll be exploitable, and my opponents will adjust and punish me. And then I’ll just be spewing chips.”

No, no, no, no, no! This line of thinking has two enormous flaws. First, it’s monsters-under-the-bed. Most players at your level don’t adjust quickly or accurately to opponents who are playing counter-strategies. Many of them are multitabling 12 tables or more, and they literally click buttons every second or two. Do you think one of these players will think twice about the situation when they see they got raised on an ace-high flop holding 8-8 or K-J suited? No, they’ll fold, and they’ll do it day after day unless you absolutely abuse them many times in a very short period.

Second, you are not a robot. Say you get reraised. What is a legitimate reraising range on this flop given the UTG opening range? Sets and maybe A-K, right? Your opponent will have one of these hands under 15 percent of the time. You are going to get reraised very rarely. If you notice a player start to reraise you, he’s likely adjusted, and now you adjust yourself. You start raising A-J and A-T on this flop and stop raising air.

For the most part, though, when you find an exploitative play like this one, it works. It’s a more-often-than-not thing, which adds up to a long-term edge. Nitty and TAG players LOVE to bet/fold. It’s a strategy that works terrifically to maximize value against fish. But it’s an exploitable, unbalanced strategy. Find all the common spots where your opponents are bet/folding, and raise them. (Or float them and then bluff when they give up.)

Yes, it will blow up in your face sometimes. And when you’re running bad you’ll feel like a total idiot spewmonkey. But after 100k or 200k hands, you’ll likely see a much better winrate than you had before. And you’ll know that it was all your hard work that got you there.

Time to move up and start the process anew with a more sophisticated set of regulars.

All right, folks, it’s that time of year. Since today is Black Friday I figured I’d get in on the action and offer discount prices on my two latest books. The sale prices are good from today through Cyber Monday, November 28th.

Get $25 off on Small Stakes No-Limit Hold’em. That makes the PDF, Kindle, or iPad/iPhone versions only $4.99, over 85% off! You can get all 3 versions or the paperback for just $9.99 (plus shipping on the paperback). To redeem this deal, use discount code BLACKSSNLHE and click here.

Get $7.50 off my newest e-book How To Read Hands At No-Limit Hold’em. It’s been getting great reviews so far, and for the next three days it’s going to be an even better deal. Hand reading is the most important poker skill there is, and this book can help you take your game up two or three notches. To redeem this deal, use discount code BLACKHAND and click here.

You can also buy the books as gifts, even the e-books! All you have to do is purchase the e-book and then send me an email at edmiller@notedpokerauthority.com with the recipient’s name, email address, and an optional message.

Don’t miss this deal.

(Moneybookers/Skrill customers: These prices are also good for you through Monday, November 29th. Just send payment to moneybookers@smallstakesnolimitholdem.com and follow up with an email to edmiller@notedpokerauthority.com with your name, email address, and the e-book title you want to order.)

People often ask me questions like, “How much can I win per hour in a $2-$5 game?” There’s no good answer. It obviously depends on how good you are. But just as much it depends on how many fish are in the game and how much money they have.

I can estimate my winrate in a game by counting how much money at the table is controlled by the fish. After a few hands I usually have an idea who the real live ones are in a game. They play nearly every hand. They like to limp in and call raises. And they usually appear as if they came to Vegas for something besides sitting hours on end at the poker table.

I look at these players and then add up all the money controlled by them. My winrate in the game is roughly proportional to this amount of money. A game with four fish having $500 stacks and two fish having $1,000 would therefore be roughly equally profitable (though the game with the four shorter-stacked fish is definitely a bit better because the money is divided among fewer “good” players), while either game would be roughly twice as profitable as one with only $1,000 in “fish money.”

It stands to reason, then, that if I want to maximize my wins, I need to stack the fish. With no further ado, here is my recipe for doing that.

“Why did I make that bet?” It’s something you should ask yourself every time you put your chips in the middle. “What am I trying to accomplish?” You may find that it’s sometimes a difficult question to answer.

It shouldn’t be. There are only three reasons to bet in no-limit hold’em.

1. To get worse hands to call.
2. To get better hands to fold.
3. To get worse hands to fold.

Reason 3 is almost a side case. It’s the reason for betting a hand like 55 on a J72 rainbow flop. It’s a reason to make a small bet early in a hand, and usually that’s about it.

The first two reasons are the more important ones. Reason 2 obviously describes a bluff. We’re going to talk about Reason 1 in this article.

To get worse hands to call.

It’s the most important reason to bet in no-limit hold’em. It’s the goal of the game. You want players to call your bets with worse hands. Simple, right?

The trick is to find the situations where enough worse hands will call you to make your bet profitable. To do that effectively, you have to use some hand reading.

Just after Black Friday I had a chat with a friend of mine who plays live no-limit in Las Vegas casinos. “You know this is going to kill our games,” he said. “The internet kids are all going to be taking every other seat, and no one’s going to beat the rake.”

It took half an hour, but eventually I talked him down from the ledge. Las Vegas is crawling with tourists, and they are really, really bad at poker. So what if there are a few more decent players in the game?

I did acknowledge that we’d probably see a few more internet kids in the live Vegas casino games than before. Six months hence, the games are still great, but yes, there are internet kids.

The thing is, these internet kids can be annoying, but I see them make a lot of mistakes. I think it’s because they haven’t correctly adjusted their internet style to the much different live games. The mistakes they make tend to be of the “shooting themselves in the foot” variety. They’re winning in the games, no doubt, but if they just took a step back and thought about their new environment, they’d win more. A quick primer on variance and Onlinecasino.ca. I want to write a few articles about what I see them doing wrong.

To understand why these mistakes are mistakes, you need a little background information. Say you’re playing $3-$6 at an online casino. A respectable winrate in that game, one that indicates that you are “hanging with the regs” so to speak, might be 20 cents a hand. That works out to $20/100 hands which is a bit over 1.5ptbb/100. With rakeback you’re making a little more.

Now look at a $2-$5 live game. Theoretically it’s slightly smaller, but the game (on a good day at least) plays a little deeper, and the preflop raises are bigger, so it’s about the same size. A respectable winrate in this game is $30/hour which, at 30 hands an hour, is $1 a hand. The live game has 5x the winrate. These numbers are for a respectable reg in these games, not for the best player at the stakes. The best players in these games could double or possibly even triple these numbers.

Bottom line is, live games are, on a per-hand basis, MUCH more profitable. Why? Because live games feature people who make absolutely horrendous errors for huge bets on the turn and river. Just two days ago I saw someone call a 3-bet river overbet shove for more than $1,000 in a $2-$5 game on a KKJK7 board. It doesn’t happen every session, obviously, but it’s not uncommon to ship it in on the river for 100BB or more and get called by an absolutely hopeless hand.

Since this is such a tremendous source of profit, live game players have to tailor their strategies to captilize on these opportunities. Sometimes this means passing on smaller edges that present themselves earlier in a hand. Internet players make mistakes that prevent these opportunities from materializing because they are used to exploiting much thinner edges online.

Problem 1. Bad preflop 3-betting.

Anyone who has played in both live and online casinos knows that there’s way more 3-betting preflop online than live. To survive in online no-limit hold’em games, you have to learn how to play a balanced 3-bet, 4-bet, and 5-bet preflop strategy. The “standard” 3-bet range online is AA-TT, AK-AQ. To this range, players add 3-bet bluffs. And in some situations they add more value 3-betting hands as well.

Why is this 3-betting so critical online? Most pots online get opened for a raise. Therefore, players are opening a wide range of weak hands. If you were to 3-bet only strong hands, your opponents could fold every time you 3-bet and play only against your middling hands. Therefore, you have to balance your value 3-bets with bluffs. When an opponent suspects you are bluffing too often, he begins to rebluff you with 4-bets. And so on.

Live games are very different for a few reasons. First, many pots are limped, so preflop raising ranges tend in many situations to be stronger than they are online. This makes 3-bet bluffing less profitable.

Second, many live players call 3-bets way too loosely. Two days ago the under the gun player opened for $20 in a $2-$5 game with a $300 stack. The next player called with a $200 stack. Another player called and it came to me in the big blind. I had AcAs. I raised to $85. Both the under the gun player and the next player called. The flop was J94. I shoved. The preflop raiser called me with 88, and the next player, the one who called $85 preflop and had only $115 left in an absolutely massive pot, folded.

Third, when you 3-bet, you muscle people out of the pot. Yes, players call 3-bets too loosely, but even tourists don’t just cold-call a 3-bet with any old two cards. Say a bad players limps and a good hand-reading LAG isolates to $25 from two off the button. The big blind is the worst player in the game and he has $1,500 behind. You cover the table and you have a playable hand. Is it better to 3-bet light to try to punish the LAG for getting out of line a little with his isolation raises? Or is it better just to see a flop with two miserably terrible players who will ship it in on the river in hopeless situations?

This is the point. Yes, the LAG is getting out of line, and you can punish that by 3-betting lighter. Online this would be a good adjustment, because often it would be the only realistic alternative to folding and making nothing from the hand.

But in a live game, you’re making cents when you could be making dollars. The good hand-reading LAG is not going to feed your $1+/hand winrate. The fish are. When you shut them out, you’re turning your massive live winrate into a paper-thin online winrate. Bad play.

So when should you 3-bet live? Most of the time, you 3-bet when players will call you with worse hands. It’s fine to 3-bet AJ if you think a fish will call OOP with hands like Jc8c.

But say a strongish player has opened and you’re next in the pot. Do you 3-bet JJ? In an online game you often do, but in a live game it’s not as good a play. By getting the pot heads-up with a decent player with the bottom of your value 3-betting range, you’re taking a good hand and turning it into a razor-thin winner (razor-thin by live game standards). Flat calling, letting two fish into the pot, and then stacking one of them when you make top full might be more profitable.

AA is a special case. There’s more incentive to 3-bet AA even against a good player because the potential to get stacks in preflop is so valuable. Even KK isn’t nearly as good to 3-bet because when stacks go in you’re against AA a decent percentage of the time. But I virtually always 3-bet AA even when fish are lurking because I can get it in against AK or QQ and have enormous equity.

In conclusion, I’m not saying 3-betting preflop is bad in live games. I do it a fair bit. But I tend to do it more for value and less as a bluff. If I do it as a bluff, I typically do it with a hand that has little-to-no value even against a fish if I called to see a flop. I’m not in a live game to play for thin edges against decent players. I’m in a live game to see flops against horrendous players, and that’s what I do.