LittleWyvern.com

I have been getting back into poker a lot recently. In truth I was never really out of it, but with so much time spent with my writing I was forced to push cards into the background. Over the past few weeks I have really been working at it though. I am finishing up Ace on the River and while the information in the book is nothing terribly revolutionary, it has still helped me to refocus my energies and approach the game in a slightly different way. I am a winning player in the games I play, but I am coming to realize that I should not be content with that position. And for that realization, recently I have spent a lot of time trying to not only win at poker, but become a better player. For the most part when I play I focus on winning and not improving, which may seem a reasonable approach, but I am coming to the realization that it really isn’t. I suppose it may be difficult to explain to someone who doesn’t play very much, but the difference between the two approaches is fairly huge. Trying to win generally involves only the current pot, the current table, players, and cards. I can play my hand and when it is over I will move onto the next. The alternative approach deals much less with the current hand than with the abstract idea of some similar future hand. I still play to win, but instead of trying to simply win the pot I spend a lot of energy thinking about how to play it correctly. How would I have played the hand if I had seen my opponent’s cards? How could I have earned more money or lost less? Why did my opponent play the hand the way he did and what could I have done differently? Rather than play my cards I will make an earnest effort to figure out the cards of every other player in the hand. Even if I have the absolute nuts, I won’t bet or raise until I have decided what the other people are holding (in a straight try-to-win approach I wouldn’t care). I make an effort not to look at my cards until I have watched everyone else look at theirs. I pay attention to the hand motions that each person uses to bet and try to pick up on patterns. I watch their free hands and what they do with them, I watch their postures and the timing of their movements. When the hand is over and I see their cards I try to replay their movements and get a sense of what they were doing. Basically, I am trying to pay much closer attention to the game and the people and maintain that focus for as long as possible.

Anyway, I figure that if I am going to be living in Vegas and playing poker I might as well try to get better at it. In the upcoming weeks I am going to try moving up limits to the $3-$5 game (the highest limit at GVR) and see how I do. Barry Greenstein says that the only way to get better is to play against people who are better than you. I don’t necessarily agree that the $3-$5 players are generally better than I am, but some of them certainly are. It is entirely possible that I might lose a lot of money at first, but I can’t imagine that I won’t improve my game along the way. A few weeks ago I was playing in a $1-$2 game and was generally crushing the table. I was up about $400 and had the most chips of anyone else at the table. I wasn’t playing lucky, for the most part I was just playing well. Suddenly, after about two hours of play, the room manager opened up a new $3-$5 game and read a list of the people who were waiting for that game. Of the ten players at my table, seven of them stood up and joined the new game. I had been killing these guys for two hours, but it wasn’t until they all stood up that I knew I had effectively been beating the $3-$5 game for lower stakes. I will not go so far as to say that many of them did not play differently when the stakes were doubled, but almost to a man I did not consider any of them to actually be good players. We will see how it goes, but I am fairly confident that my winning in that game has much more to do with bankroll than skill level.

Tonight I went back to GVR, but this time it wasn’t to make money. I walked into the room and the floor manager recognized me and offered a seat in the no limit game. I thanked him and replied, “No thanks, I am going to play some 2-4 tonight.” This evening I had a very specific mission with a very specific objective. I was going to sit into the $2-$4 limit game and play every single hand that was dealt. No matter the action before me I was going to at least call every hand preflop. This is statistically a supremely horrible approach to the game, but for tonight I didn’t care. My goal was to play every single hand for two hours and try to break even. In order to do that I needed to outplay my table postflop. Hand selection became meaningless, correct play and hand reading became the most important skills. I was actually pretty surprised with the results. It turns out that in many instances, the cards that you hold are much less important than the cards your opponent holds. That is a poker cliche, but one that holds very little meaning in most low stakes games. People usually only bluff when they miss their own draws, desperately hoping that their opponent did too. However, what happens if you never even had a draw? Of the perhaps 200 hands that I played tonight, only about twenty actually justified a preflop call. Instead I found myself playing with no pair and no draw perhaps eighty percent of the time. There is no way that I can win by showing my hand down, so I am forced to first decide what my opponents hold, and then decide if I can make them fold, and if so… how? After a while I didn’t even look at my cards until someone bet after the flop. Without knowing my cards, if I thought that I might be able to outplay my opponent I would try. I came to the poker room expecting to lose (for once), but I was going to have some fun and learn something along the way. There is a special kind of fun to be had in overcalling a hopeless hand on the turn with the intention of betting the river when your opponents miss their draws. I must have won at least ten hands with less than nine-high tonight.

I expected to lose about two hundred dollars in two hours, but after the first hour I was actually up ten dollars. After two hours I was up thirty dollars. After three hours I was up about forty dollars. In the last hour I hit an especially rough run of cards and finished the night out down about fifty. The cards were rough not because I didn’t hit anything – that was to be expected – but it seemed that on every hand someone would make an incredible hand that I could not hope to beat or outplay. By night’s end I had lost a little bit, but I think that I gained a lot more. For one: when you don’t think about your cards it becomes much easier to play those of your opponents. Also, there are a lot more ways to win a hand than simply having the better cards. And finally, being forced to play my opponents – and not my cards – I gained a lot of practice at reading their hands.

I intend on playing in that game again, next time with the plan to raise every single hand preflop. That will not only force me to play postflop, but it will also put me into the position of a table maniac. I am somewhat hesitant to try the style, not for the amount of money that I will probably lose, but for the fact that it will almost certainly ruin the game for everyone else at my table. I don’t play the part of the jerk very well, but maybe just this once it will be worth it for the education. I guess we will just have to wait and see.