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But I thought Bill’s feedback needed a new post to properly address. If you haven’t been following the discussion, definitely check out Bill’s post Online Poker Isn’t Rigged . . . Again!.

Bill makes essentially two points. First, he doesn’t think the risk/reward ratio is there to make it worth a big site’s while to try to rig their deck, and second he thinks actually rigging the deck is a lot harder than I made it sound.

Why Rig A Deal?

Bill said:

So, if we’re talking about a top ten room then I would say that the motivation for rigging the game favors not rigging it. As I articulate in a previous post there are so many other ways for a poker room to increase its profits from you that are entirely legitimate. And if you took the time to brainstorm a bit I’m sure you could come up with ten or fifteen more suggestions of minor tweaks the room could make to the game that would generate more hands per hour and/or more profits for the room. Until someone can answer for me why a room would go to all of the trouble to rig the game before having exhausted these other much more simple methods then I simply cannot buy this argument as being logical. Granted, a poker room might act in an illogical manner but if we’re to assume that all actors act in a logical manner then this doesn’t hold up.

I do sort of dismiss this argument, and I do so for two reasons. First, Bill poses a false either/or here. He suggests the cardroom could increase profits either in legitimate ways or by rigging the deck, and he prefers the legitimate ways. But obviously cardrooms could try both at the same time. There’s no reason for me to think that a cardroom would order these options in a “try all legitimate options then try rigging” manner.

Second, Bill says, “if we’re to assume that all actors act in a logical manner…” which I always think is a poor assumption. Most people aren’t strictly logical thinkers, and online cardrooms have, in my opinion, demonstrated many times over that they are run by people who often don’t make entirely logical decisions. And, beyond that, even “logical” people can be prone to making rash decisions when doom and gloom appears to be forthcoming. I’m reiterate the scenario I posed in the comments of the previous post. A major cardroom does an analysis of its traffic and concludes that even though it appears healthy to the casual observer, it’s actually in danger of losing a critical mass of customers within two or three years time. I could easily see a manager panicking and making an “illogical” decision under these circumstances.

Before I move on to the meat of this post, I want to reiterate that I’m not accusing any site of being rigged, and the vast majority of claims of rigging can be dismissed nearly on face. My whole point in this series of posts is to encourage people not to stick their heads in the sand. A site’s deal could be altered now and not yet have been discovered, or at some point in the future an honest site could turn dishonest. It’s possible, and the player community should be as vigilant as reasonably possible. That’s my argument.

How To Rig A Deal

Moving on. Bill argues that rigging the game to the benefit of a cardroom is neither easy to accomplish nor easy to conceal:

One of the other factors such an argument fails to properly consider is that over 90% of poker players are break-even or losing poker players. So what exactly is a fish? How are you going to rig the game in favor of the fish when there are so many fish and so few sharks? How would you determine which players to rig the action for and which one’s to shaft?

In my previous post, I mentioned that cardrooms could alter the game to improve their profitability. It’s been suggested by others that by rigging hands to favor “the fish” one could do so. That’s certainly a reasonable place to start, but I’m not arguing that helping out the fish means more money for a cardroom. That argument comes from other people, not from me.

My only point is that there likely exists some change one could make to the deal that would improve cardroom profitability. If you don’t grant that point, then you’re claiming that no-limit hold’em as it stands is essentially the perfect game for a cardroom to spread.

In any event, I think Bill is chasing his tail a bit here when he talks about how it’s hard to identify the “fish” from the “sharks”. I don’t think that it’s necessary to solve that problem at all. The theoretically dishonest cardroom cares about altering the game to make more profit, not necessarily helping one set of players against another.

Having said that, I do concede that if a cardroom were to explore these options, they might start by considering ways to blunt slightly the advantage a skilled player has. Here are possible alterations to the deal that might accomplish this goal without being too complicated:

1. The cardroom could skew all-in confrontations to slightly boost the chances that the underdog hand wins. For instance, once two players are all-in, it could quickly calculate the equities of each hand and then deal cards such that the underdog hand consistently wins slightly more often than it “should”. Perhaps it could turn all 80-20 confrontations into 78-22 affairs. I mention this change first because it’s a specific one I’ve seen posited before.
2. If the proposal above is too blunt an instrument (and possibly too detectable), then the cardroom could slightly shade the odds in favor of the player who called all-in at the expense of the player who bet all-in. So if I semi-bluff all-in and you call me, I would have a slightly worse chance than I “should” to win the hand.
3. If you’re worried about detection, all-in hands are possibly not the best ones to alter since hand histories report the results of them with nearly complete information. So perhaps you alter the deal in non-all-in situations to slightly favor the player who called a bet over the player who made the bet. This would have the effect of making plays like firing turn barrels less effective since the calling player would “get there” more often than they should between the flop and turn.

Again, I’m not sure what game alterations would benefit the cardroom and what alterations wouldn’t. But I think it’s clear that at least some alterations exist that would benefit the cardroom, and I think a dishonest cardroom could use trial and error to try to find some that work to their benefit.

Also, note that these are all simple, systematic alterations to the game. They don’t require identifying “fish” and “sharks”, and they don’t require rigging hands individually according to some complex algorithm.

How To Hide The Evidence

The obvious criticism of this sort of alteration is that it would be detectable. Build a database of a few gazillion hands, run the right tests on it, and viola, you’re a newly minted whistleblower. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s that simple, and part of the reason is that the burden of proof currently lies almost entirely on the accuser and not at all on the cardroom.

Plausible deniability. It’s a powerful weapon. Someone posts an article saying, “I think the deal at cardroom XYZ is rigged subtly in this peculiar way that benefits them. Here’s my data.”

Cardroom has the following response:

1. We emphatically deny it. Why would we rig a deal when we already make so much money?
2. That effect you observed is so small it’s probably just luck.
3. If you go digging through the data enough, you’ll always find something that looks out of the ordinary.
4. Prominent players A, B, and C have won a ton of money on our site. Clearly that makes the deal fair.
5. Our code is audited by 3rd, 4th, and 5th parties. By the way, you’re just some jerk on 2+2.

Yada yada. Standard stonewalling tactics. In the meantime, the cardroom just backs out the offending code and the effect disappears. Just a weird run of cards, guys… nothing to see here.

In fact, the cardroom would likely get early warning that someone was on to them by reading 2+2. It’s not like the AP/UB thing were there were a few offending screen names that could be tracked. We’re talking about a systematic effect that would be reasonably subtle and where no one could easily point to a timestamp on, “See, as soon as we started talking about it the offending parties fled to a desert island.”

In other words, as long as they were sufficiently subtle about it, it would be very hard to detect in the first place (especially because no one that I know that has any skill at this sort of thing is really looking for it), and if detected, there’s simply no smoking gun. Just hire a PR firm and blast away until the controversy goes away.

Hiding The Evidence In An Even Sneakier Way

If you wanted to alter the game more than a few percentage points and still not get caught, you could probably do so nearly undetectably by piggybacking on a well-known effect that’s not well-studied. For instance, card removal.

I saw some post where someone noted that small cards were more likely to come on the river than big cards. A deuce is the most likely river card, an ace is the least likely, and the other cards are all distributed uniformly in between. This effect makes some sense from a card removal perspective. Two big hands might tend to see more rivers than one big hand and one small hand or two small hands. Big hands are more often made of big cards, and therefore the deck should be slightly rich in small cards by the river.

But how big should this effect be? Who knows? Is a 0.01% difference in frequency between a deuce and an ace reasonable? How about a 0.1% or a 1% or even a 5% difference? Sure, you could take a whack at it with simulation, but it’s hard to simulate the way people actually play… and how people actually play is important when we’re talking about card removal effects.

So say this difference “should” be 1%. The cardroom decides they want to systematically shift results to favor one hand type over another… and they look for opportunities to replace big cards on the river with small cards to make that happen. They replace the cards until the small card big card difference is 3% or 4%.

Anyone who went looking would notice that the all-in results didn’t line up with the theoretical results. But then when they attempted to account for card removal, they’d note that small cards came more frequently than expected on the river… an effect that piggybacks on card removal. Time for alarm bells? Or maybe card removal is just a little stronger an effect than we previously thought. Who knows?

Final Thoughts

None of this is too complicated to pull off. I’m going to alter my deal to favor underdogs in all-in situations. I’m going to carry that out by occasionally substituting a high card that would have come on the river with a small card that helps the underdog. I’m going to do it with a frequency such that it’s hard to detect unless:

1. You’re looking specifically for it
2. You have a huge sample of data
3. You know exactly how much of an effect card removal should have and you can back that out of the data and still detect the anomaly

And then, after you detect it, you have to win the PR war to convince the world that this obscure effect you’ve found is real and you’re not just another “OMG IT’S RIGGED!!!!” kook. And you have to keep people convinced even if the effect subsequently seems to disappear or reverse.

If I’m a cardroom owner with plenty of greed, not a lot of scruples, and a huge ego, I might give it a shot…. even if I ran the biggest, most profitable cardroom in the world. I might be especially inclined to try it if I thought for some reason that my cardroom was on the way out and I needed to act to save it.

Finally, I feel compelled to reiterate some main points from both articles. I have no evidence or reason to believe that any current site has an altered deal. I don’t know how to rig a site to improve its profitability; I merely posit that it’s possible to do so. If a site were rigged in the ways I’m proposing, it would be entirely undetectable to the naked eye. In other words, “I’ve been noticing my good hands getting beaten a lot recently,” is not an observation that would lead me in any way to conclude that anything was wrong with the deal.

But I do think it’s possible. It’s possible an honest site will turn dishonest in the future, and it’s possible that a site we all think is honest today isn’t. It doesn’t mean a good player couldn’t still beat the game consistently or that any one player would get singled out for the doomswitch. But it’s possible that all is not quite as it seems in online poker.

While the vast majority of accusations about boomswitches and doomswitches are likely unfounded, the possibility of altered or manipulated deals is real. If you play online poker seriously, I would suggest that you approach any claims of nefariousness with a healthy dose of skepticism – but also an open mind.

Today I wanted to talk about two recent 2+2 threads related to these issues.

Triple Draw at PokerStars

According to this thread, with confirmation from PokerStars representative Alex Scott, PokerStars has altered their deal in triple draw.

In non-community card games, it’s frequently possible to run out of cards. For instance, if you play an 8-handed stud game, if every player were to see the river it would require 56 cards (plus burn cards). In a 6-handed triple draw game, theoretically speaking each player could consume up to 20 cards each (drawing five cards on each of the three draws), requiring potentially up to 120 cards total (plus burn cards).

Now obviously we’re never likely to see a legitimate hand of triple draw that consumes anywhere near 120 cards. But occasionally more than 52 cards are consumed. In that case, the accepted protocol is to reshuffle the muck and use the discards to complete all the draws.

PokerStars has chosen to alter this protocol slightly. They reshuffle the muck as you would in a brick and mortar game, but they deal out the cards such that no one will receive a card that they have previously discarded. Presumably, before they deal a card to you, they check to make sure you haven’t gotten it already… and if you have, then they deal you the next card.

Quoting Alex Scott:

I can confirm that this is correct. It is not possible to draw a card which you have already discarded at PokerStars, even in Triple Draw.

and

It’s not an error – the decision was made after much discussion and consultation with Team PokerStars (in fact, the original suggestion came from one of the most respected pros on the team). The theory is that no player would want one of their previous discards back, but there is no way to achieve that in a live game. Online, it’s easy, so why not do it?

I have to say, I think this is really quite a bad decision on PokerStars’s part. Here’s why:

1. Online poker is designed as an explicit analog to brick and mortar poker. In other words, by explicitly mimicking the look of a live game (using the same deck, same table look, same deal, same betting structures and rules, even going so far sometimes as to recreate fake dealer boxes), online poker sites are also making implied assurances that the game will behave like a live game as well. In other words, that the cards will be dealt in a random manner and that each card is equally likely.
2. In a live game you could (and would) never deal the cards according to the rules PokerStars now uses for triple draw.
3. Therefore, this rule change betrays the implied assurance that PokerStars accurately simulates live play.

I find Scott’s shrugging rationalization bothersome: “The theory is that no player would want one of their previous discards back…”

Well, no player wants to get dealt 7-2 in hold’em either. Maybe PokerStars would be more fun if no one ever got dealt offsuit trash hands.

Now one might quibble with my analogy in that removing offsuit trash hands would have a huge effect on the game while this alteration to the rules of triple draw is (admittedly) a pretty minor one. But I think the difference between the two is in degree, but not in kind. They are altering the deal to juice the game – albeit in an extremely minor and subtle way.

If you are tempted to ask, “Why not? What harm could it do?” I would ask, “Why?” If the change is minor and subtle, why make it at all? Why break that implied principle that online poker should simulate live poker for such a silly reason?

I see no reason to manipulate the deal in this way or any other for any reason. Making players happier is a terrible reason to manipulate the deal. Indeed, the rule change itself bothers me less than the justification of it. The same justification could be made to support other deal manipulations that could have effects the PokerStars people don’t fully comprehend… or that they do comprehend and benefit from. In my opinion it’s best not to open that can of worms at all.

A Doomswitch For Regulars?

PokerStars gets the finger in another 2+2 thread. This time some regular posters are suggesting that they and some of their friends who are also regular players experience significantly worse than expected results in all-in pots. Basically the thread raises the question that perhaps PokerStars has a built-in doomswitch designed to cut into the winrates of successful regular players by intentionally screwing them sometimes when it deals out cards in all-in pots.

I have seen no evidence thus far that convinces me in any way that PokerStars has implemented this policy.

I don’t really want to talk about the murmurings on 2+2 about PokerStars and regular players because I have no documentation or specific knowledge with which to pursue that topic. But I do want to talk in more general terms about deal manipulation.

There’s two things I’m pretty sure about:

1. Manipulating the deal in software is a nearly trivial task.
2. Poker rooms have both a short and long term financial incentive to tweak the outcomes of hands.

The first point is relatively simple. Any logic that you can think of regarding who should get what cards and how often and in what situations these tweaks should occur can be translated relatively easily into code. To implement most tweaks, it would require less than one day of work for just one developer. If the code needs to be hidden, that could take a little bit of doing, but there are numerous available ways to hide code that are clever and nearly undetectable.

Simply put, it’s entirely doable for any online poker room to “alter” its deal in any way it sees fit and also to hide those changes effectively from a standard, moderately thorough third party audit or inspection.

Can they? Yes, they can.

Would they? In my opinion, they might.

No-limit hold’em is the most popular online poker game right now, and online poker rooms are stuck spreading it whether they like it or not. So far it’s done well for poker rooms, but at the same time it’s not a perfect game from their perspective… assuming a perfect game would generate the maximum possible revenue for them over the medium-to-long term.

I’ve seen it suggested numerous times that online poker rooms would like to see the “fish” come out better than they do in a typical online no-limit game. The theory is that the longer the fish stay in action, the more tables will be going at a time, and therefore the more rake the cardroom will net.

I think the actual dynamics are a little more complex than that, but it seems a relatively easy conclusion that there are some tweaks that a cardroom could make to the game to improve its profitability. Whether that might be tweaking the game to favor fish or some other change, I think it’s essentially undeniable that cardrooms do have some financial interest in altering their games to improve profitability.

So they can do it, and doing it (intelligently) would probably make them more profitable. Sounds like something most businesses would jump at. Yet we online poker players generally assume that no poker rooms are, indeed, altering their deals. Why do we assume that?

Do we think the guys that own these sites would never stoop to something so dishonest? Probably some owners are honest enough, but obviously it’s laughable to assume that all owners of online poker rooms are cut from the most ethically upright cloth available.

Do we assume that the risk of getting caught wouldn’t be worth the extra profit? Many people do assume that, but I think the assumption is flawed for two reasons. First, greed commonly overcomes common sense. Even if it were true that the risk would be too risky, that’s not going to stop some people. Second, I don’t think it’s necessarily true that it’s too risky. If the tweaks were subtle enough, and possibly if they were varied from time to time, it could be very difficult to detect them to any reasonable level of confidence just by analyzing collected hand histories. It’s entirely possible they could do it for years and years and never really risk getting caught.

Bottom line. Do I think online poker is rigged? Not really at the moment. At least good players can still pull a very nice (and fairly consistent) winrate out of the games. But there’s probably some cheating and botting that cuts into any regular player’s winrate. And there may be some subtle deal manipulation on some sites that also cuts into regular players’ winrates as well. I really don’t know, and frankly no one else does either.

I do know that manipulating the deal is relatively easy to do, and I also know that it quite possibly could be profitable to cardrooms to do it. Do I trust them not to try? Frankly, I don’t.

I see no reason to strip naked and go running through the streets screaming, “OMG IT’S RIGGED!!!1″ But I think it’s entirely responsible for all regular players to examine the data periodically and try to uncover any irregularities. If you don’t find anything, great. But I won’t be too shocked if one day we find out that someone, somewhere, has been playing some tricks with the deck all these years.

But automatic decision making has a major downside also. We stop considering alternatives, and we therefore stop improving.

I believe in using trial and error to improve your poker game. I don’t mean that you should start playing randomly and see how many pots you can win. I mean that you should think about the game and try to come up with plays you rarely, if ever, make. If those plays are obviously bad, like checking back the nuts on the river, then toss the idea. But if the play might have something going for it, even if you are skeptical about it, make an effort to actually try it out. Sometimes you’ll find that it works better than you thought.

Poker players like to make assumptions about how other players play. For instance, “Nobody is going to fold to a min-bet on the river.” We then form our strategy around these assumptions. Some assumptions are good, and some aren’t. Many of the plays we avoid, we avoid because they conflict with one of our assumptions. If we avoid a play because it conflicts with a bad assumption, we play bad. Trial and error is a great way to break down these false assumptions.

Here are three plays you can try today that might help you to break down some bad assumptions.

Ultra Light Blind Steal

In online 6-max games, blind stealing is critical. Blind steal situations occur frequently, and overall winrates even for excellent players are generally quite modest. Learning to steal the blinds effectively can boost your overall winrate by 20 percent or more.

Too many of us get hands like J4o or 95o and click the auto-fold button. When you’re on the button, sometimes clicking that auto-fold button is a pretty big mistake. Your hand strength often plays only a peripheral role in deciding whether to take a shot at the blinds. The playing tendencies of the players in the blinds are far more important, as is the general flow of the game.

If everyone folds to you on the button and you have total trash you’d usually auto-muck, take a look at who is in the blinds first. If it’s two low VPIP players, say players with VPIPs of about 22 or less, then go ahead and open that trash. See what happens. You’ll get enough folds that the raise will likely be nearly break even off the top (i.e., even if you never ever put another dollar in the pot).

When you’re opening wide like this on the button, experiment with raise sizes also. You don’t have to make the “standard” raise; you can raise less or more. Again, trial and error, along with a regular review of your stats in PokerTracker or Hold’em Manager, will help you fine tune your stealing strategy.

Cold 4-Bet Bluff Preflop

Say you’re in the blind, and there’s a raise and a 3-bet in front of you. Will you automatically check the auto-fold for any hand that’s not TT+ or AK? Will you essentially never bluff 4-bet in that situation?

Usually you should balance your play so that, given any set of actions you take, some percentage of your hands are good hands, and some percentage of your hands are bluffs. But sometimes you can examine your opponent’s play and say, “My opponent is never bluffing here, he’s always going with the hand, so it makes no sense to try a bluff myself.” In that case, you can drop the bluffing from your strategy.

But that’s an assumption, and sometimes it’s flawed. I think many people have internalized the notion that a preflop 3-bet isn’t a bluff often enough to make trying to rebluff it profitable. But online 6-max games, particularly at $0.50-$1 and up, are rife with light 3-betting. If you assume that your 3-betting opponent can’t be bluffing, your assumption may be wildly off.

The cold 4-bet bluff can be a very effective tool against light 3-bettors. Look for situations where the two raisers can have a wide range, and attack them.

For instance, say you’re playing $1-$2. A bad player who has been limping into most pots limps in. An aggressive, TAG player makes it $9 to go from the cutoff. Another aggressive TAG player whom you know likes to 3-bet light makes it $31. You’re in the big blind with A4s. You can try a 4-bet to about $58. You’ll get three folds quite often.

The play works because the cold 4-bet looks so strong. Most players haven’t worked it much into their games, so you’ll get a lot of respect. Often you’ll get folds from all hands except JJ+ or AK. When your opponents have wide raising and 3-betting ranges, you’ll usually catch everyone without a premium hand, and your bluff will take the pot down.

Obviously, if you begin to cold 4-bet bluff, some players will adjust and give those 4-bets less credit. Often it’s difficult to get further action with a hand like AA in the big blind when there’s a 3-bet already in front of you. Anything you do, cold-call or 4-bet, looks super strong. Opening up your range with some 4-bet bluffs will make your 4-bet look slightly less strong and over time get you more action on your big hands.

Small Bet and Raise Sizes

Min-betting and min-raising is a donk play. No doubt you’ve heard someone say it. It’s true that a lot of donks like to min-bet and min-raise, but that doesn’t make min-betting and min-raising necessarily bad plays.

Before I try to get you to make more small bets, I’ll give you an example of a really bad min-raise for balance. It’s the turn. You have $300 behind, and there’s $40 in the pot. You flopped a flush draw and called a flop bet. Your flush came in on the turn. Yet your opponent bets $30 at you. You min-raise to $60.

This is a common play “donks” make, and it is indeed bad. It gives away the strength of the hand, yet it also allows big flush draws and sets excellent odds to draw out. I’ve won many pots where I called this bet with a set and then shoved the river (often for 3x the pot or more) when the board paired and got paid off by the flush.

Min-betting and raising is bad generally when it tips the strength of your hand and yet also offers good implied odds to your opponent to beat you.

But when a smallish bet doesn’t give away your hand strength, or when it could cheaply encourage your opponent to give up on a number of marginal hands that might either draw out or bluff you later on, it could be your best play.

Here’s the upside of making small bets. Any bet, no matter how big or small, gives your opponent the opportunity to fold. That has value, because no matter how small the bet, every once in a while you’ll get the fold. Sometimes you’ll get a fold betting $2 into a $60 pot. That’s powerful.

In small stakes no-limit games, many players don’t react well to small bets. They fold too much. Or they auto-raise them. Small bets can induce bigger mistakes, and they can do so cheaply. Try them out.

Full Tilt, $2/$4 NL Hold’em Cash Game, 4 Players
Hand History Converter by Stoxpoker

BB: $253.30 (63.3 bb)
CO: $113.40 (28.4 bb)
Hero (BTN): $80 (20 bb)
SB: $595 (148.8 bb)

Pre-Flop: Hero is BTN with 7 3
CO folds, Hero raises to $10, 2 folds

I think a lot of these short stackers are stealing more than their share of blinds.

Theoretically speaking, it should be harder for a short stacker to steal the blinds from the button than it is for a full stack. Short stacks blunt positional advantage, so the out of position blinds should be able to defend more frequently.

For instance, say you’re in the big blind in a $2-$4 game with a $400 stack. Consider two scenarios. First, a strong player with $400 opens for $14 on the button and the small blind folds. Second, a good short stacker with $80 opens for $10 on the button and the small blind folds.

Overall, the second scenario is significantly more favorable for you, and you should be able to play a wider range of hands profitably. Apart from the fact that it’s $10 to call in the first scenario and only $6 in the second (a not at all insignificant difference), the short stacker will have less positional leverage and many fewer opportunities to outplay you postflop.

In practice, it appears that many full stacked regulars don’t alter their blind strategy much between the two scenarios, and they tend to err on the conservative side. That fact allows short stackers to slurp up far more than their share of the blind money.

When you’re 3-handed and playing effectively 20BB stacks, theoretically speaking, the money should be flying. There should be liberal 3-betting and 4-bet shoving, and liberal flop check-shoving and calling. The blind money is large enough compared to the stack sizes that you can frequently get your stack in “light” (I put it in quotes because it only seems light to many of us) and still get an overlay.

I don’t see this when I play. When someone gets it in against a short stacker, I tend to see two “legit” hands more frequently than I should. Basically, I think players in the big blind should use the following plays more often when short stackers open on the button.

Three-Betting Light

If an $80 stack opens a wide range of hands for $10 on the button in a $2-$4 game, you can 3-bet to about $22 with impunity with a reasonably wide range as well. First of all, I’ve noticed that many short stackers fold too frequently to a small 3-bet, so you can exploit that theoretical error by making the play more often.

Beyond that, if the short stacker is betting 1/8 of his stack with a wide range on the button (as many do), you can 3-bet a wide range of hands for value, and the bottom of this “value” range might seem light at first. For instance, in full-stacked play one might consider 3-betting with a hand like A8s to be a “light” 3-bet because presumably you do so with the intention of usually folding it to a 4-bet. (Though it can be a decent hand to bluff 5-bet shove with against players who 4-bet at a good frequency.) But against a short-stacker opening a wide range on the button, 3-betting with A8s should be a very standard play. It’s a raise for value, and it’s a hand you should feel ok getting it in with should the short stacker shove on you – provided the short stacker shoves often over a 3-bet as he should.

The other thing about 3-betting to $22 is that it does leave you room to fold to a shove with the worst hands in your 3-betting range. If you’re 3-betting with the right range, the short stacker should know that you’ll fold sometimes to a shove, but usually you’ll call, and most of the hands the short stacker opens on the button will be significantly behind your calling range if they shove them over your 3-bet.

The bottom line of this 3-betting strategy is that it will prevent the short stacker from robbing you blind of your blinds.

Calling And Making A Play On The Flop

Some short stackers play well preflop but get a little soft once the flop comes. You can take advantage of them by flat calling those small button raises planning to make some moves postflop. The two simplest moves you can make are check-shoving and donk betting.

Check-shove bluffing is the natural play against short stackers who c-bet too often. Say they’re opening 50 percent of their hands on the button and c-betting nearly every flop when checked to. You can destroy that strategy by calling frequently from the blind and check-shoving a lot of flops. You generally won’t even be risking that much because when called you will often have decent equity and the stacks are short to begin with. For instance, with a hand like QT I would often flat call preflop and check-shove a lot of flops. I’ll win a lot of pots uncontested and when called I will often have at least six outs.

Other short stackers tend to play a sort of fit-or-fold strategy once they see a flop. They check behind a lot when they miss, hoping to check the hand down. Naturally, check-shoving doesn’t work against that strategy because the short stacker’s betting range is strong. But donk betting works instead. You can fire out half pot at a lot of flops and win more than your share. And sometimes when you check the flop and your opponent checks it back, you have an almost auto-win if you half-pot the turn.

Don’t Let The Short Stackers Rob You

Generally speaking, the short stackers aren’t getting it in light from UTG in a 6-max game. But a lot of them know they can open light on the button and get away with it. Don’t let them. Fire back at them either by 3-betting preflop or by flatting and making plays postflop. If they know how to play their stack size well, you won’t really get an edge on them by doing this. But you will even it up a bit and cut into their profit. Don’t be a soft target for the short stackers’ bread and butter.

Here’s a hand I played recently where I used this principle to my advantage:

Full Tilt, $1/$2 NL Hold’em Cash Game, 6 Players
Hand History Converter by Stoxpoker

MP: $674.60 (337.3 bb)
Hero (CO): $207 (103.5 bb)
BTN: $411.90 (206 bb)
SB: $118.05 (59 bb)
BB: $361.75 (180.9 bb)
UTG: $400 (200 bb)

Pre-Flop: Hero is CO with T J
2 folds, Hero raises to $7, BTN folds, SB calls $6, BB calls $5

Flop: ($21) 4 3 3 (3 players)
SB checks, BB checks, Hero checks

Turn: ($21) J (3 players)
SB checks, BB checks, Hero bets $11, SB folds, BB calls $11

River: ($43) 2 (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $43, BB calls $43

Results: $129 pot ($3 rake)
Hero showed T J (two pairs, Jacks and Threes) and won $126 ($65 net)
BB mucked 6 6 and lost (-$61 net)

I elected to check back the flop rather than c-bet because I expected to get called the vast majority of the time. Whenever the flop comes three low cards, particularly with a pair like this one, you can expect loose players to peel the flop with overcards and tight players to show up with overpairs quite often.

Now getting called isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world. Say I bet the flop, and only the BB calls with 66. Usually at least one overcard and often two will fall by the turn and river. I can sometimes use position and the overcards to leverage the out of position player off the pocket pair by firing twice more.

A couple of factors dissuaded me from trying that line this time. First, I have two opponents. Second, the stack sizes are a bit unfavorable. One player is loose and started the hand with only a 60BB stack. I expect him very often to peel the flop. The tighter player in the big blind may call (or raise) with an overpair or flush draw or may muck a hand like a suited connector after a bet and call. But even if the big blind mucks and an overcard comes on the turn, I won’t know whether the overcard spiked my opponent’s hand or not, so bluffing becomes a bit of a risky proposition, and I don’t have a lot of room to leverage with just the 60BB stacks.

So I just checked it back and hoped either to pair up on the turn or for an overcard to come and have it checked to me again.

I did pair, and it was checked to me again. Now it’s time to extract value if I can.

Though it’s not a certainty, I would expect someone with a better jack than mine to bet the turn. Someone with a three might choose to check it again, or they might bet out. So overall, when it’s checked to me again on the turn, I think there’s a quite good chance I’m ahead and there’s a decent chance I can get value from unimproved pocket pairs or even possibly weaker jacks or deuces.

I bet half pot. This is a bet size I like to use in these situations on dry boards. I can tempt calls from pocket pairs and maybe ace-high hands, and if I’m bluffing, I can get out most of the other unpaired hands. Against aggro players, I can sometimes even induce a bluff-raise.

You could bet more here also. Three-quarters pot would be a reasonable size here, and even a full pot bet would be ok. But when choosing your bet size, remember three things:

1. Top pair is a fairly strong hand for your range in this situation. You want to choose a size that will work for the entire range of hands you will have in this spot, not just for your actual hand.
2. Often you will have two unpaired cards and be looking for folds. However, you frequently will have this first bet called, so whatever you choose to bet, you should be thinking about how a second barrel will line up for the river. For instance, say I had KT here. I would likely bet the turn just as I bet JT. I would expect unimproved pocket pairs to call. Now say the river is a Q. I would certainly bluff this card, and I would bet it hard enough to put a lot of pressure on a hand like 66. I want to make sure I bet an amount on the turn that will leave me with the right amount behind to put in a hard-to-call river bluff.
3. You may want to bet different amounts on different river cards. A river Q is a perfect bluffing card, so you may have to bet only pot to get your opponent off a pocket pair. But a river 3 is a terrible bluffing card because it can’t have improved you and it gives your opponent a likely full house. You may choose not to bluff it at all, or against some particularly nitty players you might want to bomb it with an overbet shove. Again, just make sure your turn bet size sets up a good bluffing opportunity for you given the stack sizes and the potential river cards that can come.

Also, think about how your opponent is likely to read your particular line here. If you’re going for value like I am here, and you choose to pot the turn, you likely can’t also pot the river for value, because that will probably be too much money and it will push your opponent off most unimproved pairs (unless the river card is a really perfect one for you like a 3, and even then pot-pot might get some folds).

So you could play it pot-halfpot, but that line tends to look a little more going-for-valueish than the actual line I took, halfpot-pot. My line looks more bluffy, in my opinion, which is what you are going for in this particular situation.

In any event, I bet half pot on the turn and got called by what is likely an unimproved pocket pair. Why is this likely an unimproved pocket pair?

• My opponent is tight, so he’s not likely to have called my preflop raise with a deuce.
• Same goes for a three, and he’s especially unlikely to have that card because there are already two on board and he has now passed up three opportunities to be aggressive with his hand.
• I think he likely would have bet out with a stronger jack, but even so a jack (better or worse than mine) is definitely in his range.
• With a flush or straight draw, I would expect him to have gotten aggressive at one of his three opportunities, but these hands are also possible as well.

Unimproved pocket pairs fit all of his actions thus far perfectly, and I think they constitute a very significant chunk of his total range.

The river comes nearly perfect for me. Only the aforementioned three or an offsuit deuce would be better cards for me, really. I suppose a jack would be excellent also (and would give me the effective nuts to boot). These cards are good because, in my opponent’s mind, my range still consists of a lot of unpaired hands that I bluffed on the turn. The cards I mentioned are, in his mind, the most safe cards for him. Therefore, he’s most likely to pay off on these cards, and he’ll likely pay bigger bets on them also.

I took advantage of the great river card and went for a full pot value bet on the end and got paid. If the river had been an card nine or higher, I likely would have tried a significantly smaller bet, perhaps another half-pot bet or even a one-third pot. But on the deuce I could go for full value.

That’s the beauty of dry boards when you have a solid pair. You can and will get looked up “light”, particularly if you give your opponent a glimmer of hope that you’re weak (as I did in this hand by checking the flop and betting only half pot on the turn). Don’t miss out on your river value!

Today’s question is about a hand where Login/Register for more.

In more specific form, here is today’s question from Ed (not me, another Ed ).

I ...

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]]> http://www.notedpokerauthority.com/qa/qa-108-home-game-player-takes-up-online-poker.html/feed 14 http://www.notedpokerauthority.com/news/eds-spring-poker-thoughts.html http://www.notedpokerauthority.com/news/eds-spring-poker-thoughts.html#comments Fri, 09 May 2008 13:54:40 +0000 Ed Miller http://www.notedpokerauthority.com/?p=446 Here are some quick thoughts for this warm Spring morning.

• There’s a lot of money to be made on the river in the $1-$2 6-max no-limit games on Full Tilt. A lot of the regulars miss value bets a lot, and they fold too many hands to overbet shoves even if ...

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  ]]> http://www.notedpokerauthority.com/news/eds-spring-poker-thoughts.html/feed 9 http://www.notedpokerauthority.com/articles/combatting-light-3-bets-by-4-betting-or-calling-in-position.html http://www.notedpokerauthority.com/articles/combatting-light-3-bets-by-4-betting-or-calling-in-position.html#comments Tue, 06 May 2008 13:13:00 +0000 Ed Miller http://www.notedpokerauthority.com/?p=445 If you play online no-limit, at least at the $0.50-$1 level or above, you’re bound to run into the light 3-bet. You open for $3.50 on the button in a $0.50-$1 game, the small blind folds, and then the big blind makes it $12 to go.

  Now that’s just a 3-bet. ...

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