The Off The Wall Poker Strategy Series

[kingcobra]

I want to see if I can get a little discussion going on here among the more experienced players as well as provide some food for thought among the newer or less experienced players so I'll be throwing a few ideas out here from time to time. I'm not looking to just go with some widely accepted notions though as that wouldn't be any fun really. Instead I want to challenge some of them to a certain extent anyway and I'll be playing devil's advocate at times but in the end by thinking about things more we'll all profit.

All of these positions are entirely my own, I never bother pushing the ideas of others, if you want to read theirs you go to their sites or buy their books or whatever. In some cases there may be some writers that may agree at least partially, but these ideas started out as my own and along the way I've found a little support here and there which is nice in a way but on the other hand I like to buck trends and that's often where the biggest advantages are.

With the plethoria of poker information out there, folks are arming themselves like never before and gone are the days where you could play against a whole table of poker neandrethals and you were the only player with even a clue, and although you stood out they didn't even have the ability to pick up on what you were doing to them or even notice you. Thus the optimal play was to take advantage of their tendencies to play weak/loose or loose/overly aggressive because that was the poker culture there.

Nowadays the level of play has improved significantly at all sites even though there still is a lot of variance among rooms. You've got your large, fairly educated, multi-tabling sites like Poker Stars and Full Tilt, where even at the lowest stakes players seem to be fairly up on the strategy de jour. You've got the medium educated rooms where a lot of players are playing tight but they don't quite get what they are doing, and then you've got the fish laden rooms with a few tight players and a bunch that are still pretty much clueless although not to the extent you used to see a few years ago.

So each of these rooms have a certain poker culture so to speak, although they all suffer from what I call the piggyback syndrome. They are trying to learn how to play poker on the backs of others, as if optimal poker was something you learned the correct moves like chess for instance. They read books, they join training video sites, they post on forums, they get the ideas of others, they get others to look at their own hands and make suggestions, etc.

Now all this is beneficial and in fact it's necessary but it won't make you a top player. To get there you have to develop your skills of poker thinking. Poker is a game of incomplete information and is extremely complex where you're looking to outplay your opponents using tactics that have the best long term expectation when all the variables aren't known. You won't get that reading how Doyle Brunson plays pocket kings, although it does definitely give you some useful information.

I've read a lot of poker books and what I get out of them more than anything is some good insight into how to beat these types of players. In any event what you want to do when you read a poker book or encounter the ideas of others is to look at the whole thing critically. Some of the ideas will be very good ones and you want think about why they are and if they could be improved. Other ideas may not be so good and you want to think of why they aren't and how you could best take advantage of them.

So most players want others to do the thinking for them and that's not the ideal thing to say the least. The reason why these so called educated TAG's that are so prevalent claim that you can't beat another TAG and you should stay out of their way is that no one has written about doing it effectively enough yet and they haven't looked into their own weaknesses enough.

So that's the goal with this series, to try to get you to think a little more about poker situations, poker strategies, and poker tactics. So I'll be touching on some things to the extent that it may be evocative, and I'm not looking to write book chapters here even if I did have the time, and it's better I didn't really because the point is that you're going to have to take the ball here and do the rest of the thinking in order to profit. Feel free to add your ideas and comments though and if the past is any indication I'm sure there'll be plenty of opportunity for that

[kingcobra]

OK well let's get right to it and this topic has been one of the most fun ones to discuss. What we want to do here is think about the tactic of pre-flop raising. You always read things like it's always correct to open with a raise or it's never correct to limp or it's seldom correct to limp or whatever. I don't think I've ever read a good explanation of why the hell this is true. You do get some circular arguments though such as if you don't agree you're not a good player and such. Sometimes you get a half decent explanation such as wanting to build the pot or a lame one such as wanting to think the field but no one goes into this very much. It's just accepted pretty much uncritically like if Jesus had said it. Come to think of it there are scholars that interpret the Bible but in this bible no one is even doing that. So that's not our style so we're going to look into this a little more and at least try to do some thinking here.

So the standard answer is going to based upon the idea that good players are aggressive and bad players are passive and it's better to be aggressive. For the most part that's true, but just not for the hell of it and the easiest players to beat are the overly aggressive ones who will spew chips with weak holdings and all you need is a hand and to let them hang themselves. So what we want here is selective aggression, and by being selective that's going to mean there's actually a good reason to do it and not just because it's the thing to do or you read it somewhere where the writer wasn't thinking a hell of a lot about the why either.

So what it all boils down to here is that there's two main reasons why we put money in the pot in the first place, and that's betting hand equity and fold equity or a combination of the two. Without getting into this too much this means we'll profit when we have the best hand and thus make more money when we build the pot or we'll get others to fold and win the pot.

So let's look at some situations where a raise is preferred generally and see if we're being selective here.

Let's take the simplest one, and one that no one really questions, and that's open raising on the button. Now this is something that I do often as well but I just don't do it from habit, as I want reasons why I make a move and not just be a Cabbage Patch poker player. So you have a hand and we'll say that based upon its strength it's likely the best hand among the three left, you and the blinds. So you look at the blind defense stats of the two blinds and determine that based upon their folding tendancies the right move is to raise with this, as opposed to folding it since limping is for losers you say.

There are more things you should be looking at though and one of them is post flop equity. There are situations where it's actually correct to limp with any decent hand and here's one of them. Blinds are bad players who hate calling raises out of the blinds but they play poorly post flop. You've got a good hand and you want to collect the most money out of them. Let's say you have AA for instance to make the situation the most obvious. You can win the blinds by raising and you're pretty confident they will fold to it but if you limp then you know that they will both be in the hand and if either catches a piece of the flop you will on average win a lot more money since they have trouble throwing away anything. So being too aggressive here would be a mistake. You wouldn't want to just play aces like this and it's not hard to imagine any above average hand and depending on the players perhaps any hand at all that you could average more EV just by calling due to your superior post flop play.

In some situations where the blinds are real nut cases the difference can even be huge. Let's say that you've got the aces again and you know that the BB will push any pair on the flop, and you're both 100 BB deep. So a player like this you don't even want to think of trying to chase out PF and you're going to win his stack a lot and get a huge payday. Now most players aren't this bad but if they are weak or foolish this is something you need to take into account when you decide to auto raise from the button.

This principle applies generally as well and not just on the button against the blinds. As a rule the weaker the competition the less you should be inclined to raise. What you often end up doing here is running the fish out of the hand who would have played poorly post flop and preserving the genuine hands with the better post flop players. This can often cost you money in terms of EV especially if you consider that the folks you stand to make the most money from have folded, and folded correctly in a lot of cases.

You also want to look at the other reason why you'd raise, and that's to gain fold equity, which does require you to have some in the first place. If you're up against calling stations then getting more money in with a speculative hand where you're probably behind now may not be such a great idea, and wile building the pot isn't a bad idea if you hit, you often may be doing this where you're not getting the odds to put the extra amount of the raise in, and thus costing yourself EV and money.

So we've now got a couple of ideas here, where the weaker the competition the less inclined you should be to raise, and the less fold equity you have, the less you should be inclined to raise marginal hands. There are also hands where it doesn't make sense really to raise with but calling may be preferred to folding. A lot of people throw this stuff away since they think it's weak to just call or limp and that's a leak in their game actually.

There are other situations as well where you may want to limp instead of raise, for instance if one or more players have limped and your hand is too good to toss, but it doesn't make enough sense to raise with under the circumstances.

So in the end what you really want to do is to think first and act second, and don't be afraid to question even what you think are routine decisions, which may not make as much sense as you might have thought once you examine it. This will get you more in the habit of thinking more in general which is generally a desirable trait

[kingcobra]

Today I want to address the strategy of "thinning the field." Simply put, from the first time I encountered this idea and I can't remember how long ago it was, the first time I read the Theory of Poker perhaps I dunno, I felt that this was one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read. I still can't believe that just about everyone subscribes to this idea. Over the years, I think Mike Caro is the only other person who understands the foolishness of this.

I'm going to be fair here and say that the concept is certainly more defendable at the higher limits, the ones that a lot of poker authors play we'll say. The reason is that betting for value and betting to thin the field coincide more, since there are less bad players to make a difference. Still though I wonder how a theorist of no less acclaim than Sklansky, who I generally hold in high regard, would fall prey to what should be an obvious error in thinking.

The concept holds that in many instances it's preferable to play against less opponents. So the strategy is to act in a way which will cause more opponents to fold, giving you a better chance to win the pot presumably. However the goal in poker isn't to win pots, it's to win the most money.

So let's look at thinning the field for its own sake. We're talking putting more money in the pot to get players out. Obviously, there is another reason we want to build pots, and it's to increase our EV, but let's put that aside for now.

Let's start with Sklansky's Fundamental Theorem of Poker. When you cause another player to fold when it would be correct for him to do so then it's not in your best interests. Now I'm not crazy about this so called fundamental theorem although it does have its place in helping us understand certain strategies, however I'll leave discussing its merits and lack of merits for another day. However if we're getting hands to fold that would be correct to do so, and doing this on purpose, as a strategy, that's a big strike against this idea. If we want them to fold we want them to do so when it's incorrect to do so, however it's not the strong hands we're thinning here it's the weak ones. We want these hands to call incorrectly, which will also involve betting and raising, but with a different goal in mind.

It is never the case that we want weaker hands to fold, regardless of how many there are. By weaker hands we mean less of a favorite to win at showdown of course. If there are 9 opponents and we have the best hand, in a perfect world all 9 would continue on as long as we remain ahead of them, meaning it's +EV for them to stay in the hand. As they fold one after another, as a rule the weakest ones will be first to go, and then the next weakest ones, and so on leaving the strongest ones to do battle with us.

Now along the way we're going to lose most other players becuase it will not make sense to the players to carry on, and they will be folding their garbage correctly, but we don't want to encourage this. As a rule, we're not going to just let them see cards for free, although there are even exceptions to this rule if the players are bad enough, or our advantage is big enough, but we want to shoot for both keeping them in the hand and getting them to play along incorrectly, which is the only way we extract the most money from them with the edge and thus play for the most EV.

Now you might be thinking, well what if the best move is for them to fold incorrectly, for instance our advantage is slight and our fold equity is greater, well that's a different matter, however that's not shooting for fold equity it's shooting for max EV and the point here is that EV is what we always need to be pursuing and not merely preferring less opponents as a strategy, as thinning the field does.

There are no hands that play better against less opponents. If you have the advantage against each player then you have the advantage against them collectively. Eliminating a single player who you have an advantage against must result in less EV overall. If there were 50 players at the table and you had aces you'd want each and every one of the other 49 in the hand with you all in pre-flop.

Now with that said by playing aggressively you will fold out more than your share of hands but you'll only do so correctly if your view is how to make the most money out of the hand and not how to get less hands in it. This is especially applicable to big bet poker where you control things a lot more and have quite a bit of latitude as to how much you can make on the hand depending on how you play it, and you've got to shoot for that, not just trying to win more pots, which is for losers.

Thinning the field does make sense to a certain degree in tournaments, where you're after tournament money EV and not chip EV, and taking down more pots is often the correct move. Or perhaps you are weaker after the flop and want to limit your opportunity for mistakes or limit the number of better opponents, for instance with JJ where you fold too often to overcards. However this can also be a crutch and as you improve your post flop play you will be less afraid to play a top 5 starting hand like this and welcome more opponents when it's correct to do so.