Fold Your Way to Poker Fitness

There are some great poker blog type sites out there.

I like the quirky ones best, and one of my recent discoveries is Tommy Angelo’s site. To be honest I had never heard of him, but when I read his article on folding I cracked up.

I love this: "by 1990 I was folding enough to support my food and rent habit". Dead-pan funny, and at the same time emphasizing the importance of throwing most of your hands away.

I'm with him on that. The first thing any aspiring poker player should learn to do is fold and keep folding. Naturally when you first discover the game it's a novelty and you're eager to be involved in the action....it's simply more fun to play a lot of hands. But calling too much is a big mistake that inexperienced players commonly make.

My own losing sessions are nearly always characterised by a distinct lack of folding. Beginning or intermediate players who can apply the discipline to consistently fold most of their hands are already ahead of the competition, even if they do little else.

Anatomy of a losing session

Yesterday I spent about four hours playing NL $50 online. According to Poker Tracker the net result for the session was a loss of $29.64.

Being well rested and having made a nice profit from a short session on Friday, I was expecting to play well Sunday. However for whatever reason, I felt anxious throughout the session and I definitely played sub par.

I went through my hand histories this morning to analyse my errors. To make it easier to recognise any trends or recurring themes I lumped the different type of mistakes into categories. Ignoring small pots, here is a summary of the mistakes and their approximate frequency:

Calling bets/raises when likely dominated (6 times)
Ill advised late position steal attempts (5 times)
Limping (4 times)
Betting draws when out of position (3 times)
Reraising in dubious situations (2 times)
Calling with gutshot draw (2 times)

My biggest mistake was getting involved too often with hands that were likely to be dominated. I recall one hand where from the big blind I called several bets with Q-4 top pair to lose to my opponents Q-9. To make matters worse I was out-of-position.

The second category is preflop steal attempts. These were plays I made where either my table image was too loose to have a high enough expectation of succeeding, or else I failed to take into account the style of the players whose blinds I was raising.
The basic rule is: do not try light late position steal-raises when the blinds are either calling stations or aggressive. Save your steals for tight and meek opponents.
Postflop, I recall one bad move I made from the big blind in an unraised pot. I had 43o and decide to bet into a K-Q-8 two-flush flop against one opponent who has position on me. He calls and I have to check the turn.
Lesson: Do not try steals on coordinated high card flops, especially when out-of-position. Doesn't it sound so obvious when you put it like that!

Limping also cost me. I was limping far too much, especially from UTG. I limped in several times with KJ, and also with 76s type hands.

I bet too many draws from out of position and had to surrender the pot when they didn't come in.

Next up is dubious re-raises. I was OTB with KQo and reraised an opponent who had open raised from early position. On the flop he made a $1.50 bet into a $5.50 pot; I don't know what I was thinking but I called. I should either have folded or popped him there. He checks the turn and I check behind. He bets the river and I fold. Talk about weak play - even accepting that my preflop reraise was dubious, my opponent did show weakness on the flop and turn and I had two chances to take the pot but failed to pull the trigger.

Next, oh dear the old gutshot draw. Stupidly I called twice on the flop with gutshot draws, and neither time had I any evidence that my opponent would be the paying-off type in the unlikely event that I did hit. And even if I did hit, being out of position would have made getting paid off even more difficult.

Note to self: POSITION POSITION POSITION. From reviewing the hands I also noticed that many of the hands that ended up costing me money I played from out-of-position. A bad idea in case it needs re-emphasising.

The cost of the above mistakes was $36.55. If you subtract the actual session loss from that figure you get $6.91. In theory I would have WON $6.91 if I had made none of the mistakes listed above.

Above are specific, quantifiable mistakes. Less easier to quantify are mistakes such as playing on unprofitable tables. During yesterdays session, many of the tables at my poker room were quite tight. I like a table that has a high VP$IP but most of the tables were low VP$IP. I eventually found one or two slightly loose tables but unfortunately stayed too long after they had tightened up. I think it's important to continually monitor the tables you are playing and not to hesitate to leave if you feel they are becoming unprofitable.

The above are the typical kind of mistakes I make when I'm not playing well. When I'm running well I tend to make these types of mistake far less often. If I could just eliminate these mistakes from my game.....

Scratched Car Syndrome and Maniacs

Ok, Adventures of a Poker Apprentice has become something of a joke. I haven't posted in months, the last time being mid January. Not that too many people (well er.. none actually!) have complained. Of course that could be because nobody is reading this… yet!

But how do people get their blogs noticed anyway? Do they go round posting links to it on forums all over the Net? From what I know of e-commerce, getting hits on a site is a combination of choosing effective keywords (words that people enter when searching Google) and having links to your site on as many similar sites as possible.

One good thing about my long absence from "blogging" is that it's easy to measure any progress since I last posted - and there has been some. The bankroll at the last time of writing was around the 350 dollar mark and now is 1,330. Ok it isn’t a fortune but at low stakes over about 12,000 hands and only averaging about six hours play a week, it's decent.

But six hours a week is nothing compared to how much I had planned to be playing at this stage. I had hoped to be putting in fifteen hours a week but this hasn’t happened. So a plan loosely forming in my mind at the moment is to

-- play more regularly
-- try to structure when I play
-- try to structure how often I play

In June when I went on tilt for a week. That’s right, for a week. I succumb easily to boredom (in life and at the table) but the problem is that boredom at the poker table can cause one to play too many hands, a tendency I definitely suffer from. I’d been watching some $50 NL short-handed games and they looked way looser and more aggressive than full ring games at the same level. To be honest they looked quite scary compared to the relatively sedentary 10-player games I was used to. There seemed to be a lot more action and aggression. But I prescribed myself a dose of 6-max to help alleviate the symptoms of my "preflop looseness" illness, so rightly or wrongly I dived straight in.

In one of my very first 6-max sessions I had AA cracked for a full buy-in in the 3rd or 4th hand of the session. I won't bore you with the details of the hand as nobody wants to hear bad beat stories.

I reacted badly, not shouting or pounding my fist on the desk or anything, just annoyed inside and I let my bad reaction give me an excuse to tilt off several more buy-ins.

For the remainder of that session and for several subsequent sessions my play deteriorated further – I was now playing extremely loose and passive and was really just gambling it up. Eventually my mind went blank and I ceased caring what happened after that.

I think Mike Caro spoke of this feeling, where you have lost so much that subsequent losses have no meaning. Before I said “STOP!”, I had blown 700 bb in a few days. And I have to emphasize that this loss was almost 100% through bad play.

I had tilted before but something in my mind felt different afterwards this time. In the aftermath of this self inflicted mess I felt like someone who had an drunken, yet unmemorable night and now was suffering from a mega headache and memory loss, but without any memories of a good time to ease the pain. I knew I had done something very wrong but I wasn't exactly sure what it was, or how to prevent myself doing it again in the future.

Instinctively I knew the same thing must have happened to many other people so I searched the online forums for advice, and finally ended up contacting a pro I know through his site. I told him the whole story warts and all. Rather than chastise me, he was actually very encouraging, telling me that the very fact I accept responsibility for my own bad play makes me different to 99% of other players. Apparently denial is big in poker. Now I don't believe it is as high as 99% but nonetheless this comment made me feel better and brought home to me the important fact that I'm largely in control of my own destiny.

The introspection and self-analysis continued. I sat myself down and asked myself what motivates me to play. The answers were several: a desire to win money; competitive spirit; intellectual challenge; to test myself, the buzz etc. Certainly not any desire to tilt off my bankroll.

I suppose the main reason I play poker is to win, but in poker winning is measured differently than for example, in boxing. Winning in boxing means winning THIS match. You're only as good as your last match.

But winning in poker means winning over the long term, and to do this you must make correct decisions more frequently than you make incorrect decisions. I've come to the conclusion that this is the thing that gives you an edge against weaker opponents. My working definition of a correct decision is a decision that leads you to:

-- gain the maximum possible when you are favourite or
-- lose the minimum possible when you are underdog.

As there is a big element of short term luck in poker, all you can do is get your money in when you are a favourite. But you are rarely a huge favourite in hold'em, so 30 or 40% of the time you will get all your money in and still lose. But if you make the correct decisions more often than you make incorrect ones over a long time you will come out on top. So unlike boxing, in poker it really doesn't matter whether you win this match. In a sense there is no match, or to put it another way – it's all one long match. That's an easy statement to make but it's a concept that takes a lot of getting used to.

One evening I decided I would make what ever adjustments to my attitude were necessary to help me avoid tilt in future. Obviously to try and eliminate tilt completely might be overly ambitious at this stage but if I was going to make something of any potential I have at poker then I need to find a way to at least minimize it. I realized that to be a successful player you must play for the LONG TERM. This means playing each hand as it comes and making good decisions now, the very opposite of being on tilt.

"Playing each hand as it comes" sounds obvious but it's easy to miss this simple truth as you go through short-term ups and downs. And unless you're constantly aware of, and accepting of this fact, you can never be a consistently winning player. The truth is I was doing ok at these low limits, and an arrogant part of my personality thought that I could be a winning player even if I sometimes played sub-optimally. Which of course is a totally wrong attitude. The other thing is I become something of a perfectionist when I get very interested in something, and it tends to irk me more than it should when small things go wrong. When everything is going well I play great and am on top of the world. But sometimes when “small things” go wrong I have a tendency to think “F*** it”. Mike Caro calls this “scratched car syndrome”.

Anyhow I really did learn a huge amount from this bad experience and through hard work and more disciplined play I’ve managed to get my game back on track. I even surprised myself with my reaction after having aces cracked for a buy-in a few weeks ago - I genuinely thought: "I got my money in with the best hand, I couldn't do any more, so move on….". And I did.

On to other slightly related things. I already mentioned that I have taken up playing short-handed. I recently looked at my PokerTracker stats and these show that since moving to 6-handed I see I have become a more aggressive player both pre and post flop and also slightly tighter:

Jan '07: VP$IP=27.0 AF=2.1, PFR=8%.
Sep'07: VP$IP=24.8, AF=2.5, PFR=10.6%.

Not sure what an optimum VP$IP for 6-handed NL is, but around 25% feels right at the moment. I used to think of myself as a tight aggressive player but if I’m honest the real tight aggressive players are playing around 18% of their hands, while my VP$IP has always been between 24 and 27. I think this makes me more "slightly loose" than "tight". But for 6-max that's ok because:

1) My opponents are far looser.
2) The blinds bite more often so you get blinded-off if you play too tight.
3) There are fewer strong hands out there.
4) To get your big hands paid off you need to be seen to be involved in the action.
5) You still play tight in the early seats, allowing you to loosen up a lot in late position.
6) You can raise and re-raise with a very wide variety of hands from late position.

An adjustment I've made for short-handed play is to re-raise more liberally preflop, especially if I believe my opponent is raising light, and this often seems to be the case.
So in certain situations I'm re-raising with hands like 99, KQ and AJ. I don’t do this indiscriminately - I usually choose my spots well and they are mostly folding to a re-raise.

Overall I've taken pretty well to playing short-handed and now actually prefer it to full ring. Along with playing short-handed, another thing I thought I would never do is to play more than one table but I've taken up two-tabling. I’ve been doing this for two months and I'm still adjusting. Concentrating on two tables at the same time means I'm inevitably losing out a bit on observing and inputting notes on my opponents, but the compensation is that my hourly rate has increased quite a bit.

Occasionally the power of observation pays off big time. One day after work I hit the tables, opening up two $50 tables. I found two apparently loose tables which I started off watching and after a few minutes I bought in for $50 on each.

Table 1 was very loose, with over 50% off the players seeing the flop, and also quite passive. I won around 40bb fairly quickly on this table, basic bread and butter play, just betting TPTK solidly and getting paid off by middle pair or an out-kickered opponent. Nothing spectacular.

Table 2 was quiet. I was mostly folding and not paying a huge amount of attention. But then I noticed a player two to my right push all-in $50 preflop after another player put in a standard preflop raise. The all-in player turns over T5s and loses to his opponents JJ.

Hmmm, pretty reckless but an interesting development. I decide to sit out table 1 for a few minutes and concentrate what’s going on at the table with the apparent maniac.
I get dealt A5s in the bb, someone calls in mp and Mr. All-In pushes from LP. I'm tempted, but decide to fold and this time he collects the blinds unopposed. He shoves his stack in a couple of more times, shows rags and loses. In the chat he seems unconcerned: "Here goes again!!", he says.

By this stage he's thrown away at least 4 buy-in's and I'm almost salivating at the mouth while I wait for a decent hand. I'm thinking that 99+, AQ+ should be enough. But I need to get to him before the sharks smell him.

A few hands later he pushes all in preflop from UTG, the next player folds and I'm looking down at AA in middle position. Naturally I call, and he turns over K7s. I have a hairy second or two when an OESD develops on the turn, but my aces hold up and I double through.

The Gods seem to be with me because five minutes later I'm again dealt aces. A player to the maniacs right raises 4bb and of course nutter shoves in his $50. The initial raiser has my $90 covered.

I think about it for a few seconds and decide to re-raise all-in to push out the original raiser. He folds, maniac calls but his Q2o doesn’t manage to hold up! Nice, I’ve trebled my buy-in in about ten minutes. Thinking back on the hand though, re-raising to push out the original raiser was probably incorrect. I moved all-in to get heads-up with the maniac but with aces should I have risked letting the initial raiser in by just calling? Hmmm......even if I credit the initial raiser with a hand as strong as QQ I’m still a big favourite against two opponents, as confirmed by twodimes.net. So I would be getting over 3 to 1 on the pot with my chance of winning at 2 to 1.

cards............%win
Ac Ad................67.16
Kc 7c.................14.08
Qs Qh...............18.51

More later……Take care - hopefully it won't be seven months 'til my next post.