The Most Important Thing

When I first started doing this I was all fired up and enthusiastic and hoped to be posting every single week. Sadly, postings have been rather thin on the ground - I'm almost embarrassed to say my most recent post was as long ago as September '07.
I can't say I'm happy about the frequency of postings.... but all the same I'm not ready to give up. So, my two dear readers, don't remove me from your bookmarks just yet!

There have been ups and there have been downs since the last post. But my overall feeling on the last few months is that my game has improved. Well, actually it's my approach to the game that has improved.

It's a subtle distinction. I've not improved much in the sense of having learnt many brilliant new moves and strategies, although I have done some of that. What I have got better at is this: I now play badly less frequently than I used to. I tilt less.

Something that never ceases to surprise me is that, contrary to expectations, learning the fundamentals and forming an effective strategy is not the most difficult thing in poker.

The hardest thing to do (by a long way) is to consistently apply your strategy.
In theory, it sounds like it should be easy - you learn a strategy that works well and you apply it when you play.

But it's not easy at all. Most of the profit in poker is made by pushing small edges. You're rarely a huge favourite in any hand. So if you keep getting all your money in when you are a 60/40 favourite, you will still lose a large proportion of the time. The maniac who is pushing in on all kinds of flops is not as far behind as you would like to believe. He hits now and again and this keeps him at the table. In the the short term, luck predominates and therefore it's likely to take some time for your good play to show in your bottom line. And another effect of the short term luck factor is bad play being sometimes rewarded.

In the face of this variance consistently playing your best game is far from easy. Over time, you may or may not have the patience to wait for your luck to stabilize and for your just desserts to arrive. Most people don't. The absence of immediate rewards for skilful play, combined with the apparent rewarding of bad play, is a heady mix that is psychologically hard to deal with. Effect seems to be only vaguely related to cause, but really this is a mirage. If you strive to play well consistently, short term variance eventually will gradually give way to cold maths - the cold maths of you having the 60% part of the 60/40 confrontation more often than your opponent. It's what mathematicians call the Law of Large Numbers. But beware - it is easy to fall victim to this mirage - and if you do you become succeptible to relying on luck.

That's a roundabout way of saying that the hardest thing in poker is learning how to maintain self-control. It is acknowleged by many experts on the game that the skill edge that even a good player has is slim in percentage points. So loss of self-control in the form of deviations from your best game turns otherwise skilful players from winners into losers, or prevents them from becoming winners in the first place.

Professional player, author, and coach Tommy Angelo uses terms like "A" game and "C" game a lot in his writings. In his wonderful and quirky book Elements of Poker he describes every player as having an A, a B and a C game. Your A game is your best game, your C game is your worst, tilt-ridden game. He doesn't talk about B much, which is odd, but let's worry about B game another time.

The idea is to play your A game as frequently as possible, and play your C game as infrequently as possible. You can work on your A game by learning strategy, analysing hands and the like. To improve your consistency, you look at your C game, and to use Mr Angelo's term, you "lop off your C game". So, what does "lopping off" your C game mean?

Visualise your poker performance as a line graph. Your quality of performance at any given time is represented by how high up the Y-axis your curve is, consistency is how smooth the curve is, and time is measured along the X-axis. A long smooth straight line high up the Y-axis represents a consistently good performance. This is the ideal performance curve.

In any real world performance curve however, there will be downward spikes. These represent periods of poor performance. So a smooth curve high up the Y axis is your A game. Downward spikes represent periodic descents into your C game. With apologies to the author, an image may make things clearer:



When Tommy talks about "Lopping off" your C game he is saying you smooth off these spikes. By lopping off your C game you improve your A game. Or, more accurately, by lopping off the spikes you increase the frequency with which you play your A game.

For a while, I had, in my own way, been trying to lop off my C game. Angelo's concept introduced me to an interesting way of looking at performance: you basically have two games and you work on them both. And it also brought home the realisation that you cannot afford to play your "C" game any significant proportion of the time.

"Significant" is not easily quantifiable but you will know what it means for you. For each player it will mean something different. For me it means avoiding periodic the descents into tilt that have been occurring roughly every 3 months. As Mr Angelo says, he realised very early in his poker career that "tilt was the most important thing". So strategy considerations are going on the back burner for now - I'm going working on the most important thing. Lopping off my C game is going to be my main aim for the next few months.