"The Rule"

The 'roll was at an all-time high around early January but in the last few months it's slumped back to November '07 levels. My win rate has also dropped quite a bit. Variance is somewhat to blame - the last few weeks I've had a good number of sickening losses where opponents hit 2-outers on the river.

In one hand with effective stacks of 170bb, I ended up all-in on the turn with J-T on a board of 8-J-T-J after a loose opponent massively overbet the pot on the turn in response to my deliberately weak bet. He'd slow played AA, and in doing so had buried himself, but rose from the grave by catching one of the two remaining aces and rivering me with a higher full house.

Although my opponent got lucky that time, I don't know how many times I've seen things go wrong for people slow playing aces and I've come to the conclusion it is a poor play 95% of the time. I suppose it's not such a bad play if you are willing to fold them post flop, but most micro limit players just cannot release the bullets.

But like I said, I'm not too happy with how I've been doing of late. And I don't see much value spending time assigning a % of the blame to variance and a % of the blame to bad play. I cannot influence variance, except perhaps by playing more hands to even it out. So far I've played around 40,000 hands of hold'em, which I think is still a small sample size. In terms of of probability you often see statistically improbable outcomes across small sample sizes. Like when you toss a coin ten times and get 9 tails and 1 head. Toss the coin hundreds of times and the closer to 50/50 the results become. This won't come as any surprise to those with mathematical backgrounds who know this phenomenon as The Law of Large Numbers.

So I guess it will take a lot more hands before I am unsurprised by short term fluctuations. But like I said, I can't influence variance, but bad play I can definitely do something about.

In any case I know that leaks are more responsible than bad beats for my poor recent performance. I went through my hand histories to try and find out how exactly I've been leaking the past few months. Looking through several sessions in PokerTracker, I can see I'm making a specific type of mistake on a regular basis. It's not the only class of mistake I'm making, but it's a big mistake, and it's pretty much wiping out the profits I make when I'm running well.

Some poker writer whos name eludes me, I think it might be Howard Lederer, said that the biggest mistake you can make in Limit Hold'em is folding the best hand on the river, and the biggest mistake you can make in No Limit is calling with the worst hand on the river. And that's my key leak - calling and losing big pots on the river. I've been doing it enough to badly hurt my bottom line. It's the kind of mistake you only need to make occasionally to do big damage.

The other day I set myself a task:

"Think about why I call and lose in big pots and come up with a way of avoiding doing it in future".

I laid on my bed, closed my eyes, and started thinking. Playing back through some recent big hands I realised that stacking off with the worst of it happens usually when I rush a decision. When I take my time it doesn't happen nearly as much. I noticed that I'm prone to rushing decisions when the pot is big and my opponent has put me to a big decision. And way too often I end up calling when I should be folding.

Here's how it typically goes. I've raised QQ preflop in position and got one loose caller. This opponent plays 45% of his hands preflop and sees a showdown over 30% of the time and is fairly passive.
I flop an overpair on a rainbow board with one jack and two low cards 5 and 6. Opponent checks, I bet 2/3 pot and he calls. The turn is a blank and action is the same as on the flop.

In micro limit against an opponent with such a wide range I'm nearly always ahead here. All I know is he could have top pair with a weak kicker, a straight draw, ace high, two overcards, a set, two pair, or nothing. So while I'm not worried, I'd have been happy enough to take the pot down on the turn as it's hard to put him on any sort of useful range.

The river brings a straight card, and out of the blue my opponent open-pushes for a pot sized bet. An alarm bell briefly rings in my head: "How can I be ahead here?", but is quickly drowned out by noise and a disappointed feeling: "Damn..... he outdrew me. But he could be bluffing......he could have anything.....plays half his hands preflop, very loose player, could have anything. Shit.. too much in the pot, fuck it.....CALL!". Within a second or two I've called off the remaining 2/3 of my stack. And he shows me the nuts.

What clearly happened here is I rushed the decision because I let my emotions confuse my logical thinking and take control of my mind. When clear thinking was needed to bring me to the correct decision (a tough laydown), in a heated rush I called. Thing is I really WANTED TO CALL because I had put so much in the pot..... I didn't seriously consider WHETHER I SHOULD CALL. There was no logic to it, it was just "call and hope".

On paper, the solution to this ugly leak seems simple:

Just Stop Doing It

Unfortunately, people by nature are not highly disciplined and totally in control of their emotions. It's not enough to say to yourself: "Don't lose your stack in big pots", and then just head off into the sunset smugly thinking all is well with the world. Life ain't like that, at least not for me. Telling myself to think logically won't prevent it happening in future because it is not a logic problem. It's a control and discipline problem.

You see, I KNOW what the correct thing to do is but making sure to do it is another thing. To prevent this leak continuously recurring in future I need to create a framework that prevents me from going into the heated rush that poisons my logical thinking and decision making process. Here is a possible framework, which I'll call "the rule":

Wait 8 seconds before acting no matter what

This should work because:

• Waiting a minimum period of time before acting forces you to consider each situation carefully and think logically about what to do. You feel less pressured and thus avoid hasty mistakes.

As they say, it's a no-brainer.

But there are also side benefits:

• When you act within roughly the same time whether you have the nuts, a marginal hand, a draw or nothing, you give away no timing tells.
• Always waiting the same length before acting makes your style of play appear robotic and controlled to your opponents. This upsets and instils fear into some opponents.
• It injects discipline into your game, which is a good thing in itself.
• Waiting slows the pace of game down, which many bad aggressive players don't like. Since they like betting and raising into you quickly to pressure you, slowing them down upsets their rhythm.
• Waiting before acting gives you more time to consider and optimise your decisions when playing more than one table. This compensates somewhat for the disadvantage of having your attention spread across multiple tables.

I experimented with waiting 8 seconds for all decisions before. But through lack of discipline I didn't stick to "the rule" consistently and eventually stopped using it altogether. I should have stuck to it though, because when I did it worked very well and in fact, I started to get a perverse enjoyment out of being really disciplined and robotic. If you've read this blog before you will know I'm a big fan of "Elements of Poker" by the poker writer and player Tommy Angelo. If you've read his book you will find this concept familiar. He coined the word "bliscipline" to describe this state.

Of course the easy part is inventing the rule. It's also easy enough to stick to the rule during routine hands where you're not really put to the test. The hard bit is sticking to it when the pressure is on and a decision is difficult. So I've come to the conclusion that the way to make sure I'll observe "the rule" during difficult hands is by training myself to religiously observe it during easy hands.

I'll train myself and make it a habit, like wearing my seat belt in the car. Do it often enough and regularly enough and eventually I'll feel naked without it. If I observe the rule during routine hands it will become an ingrained habit and will naturally kick in during tough hands.

It'll require conscious effort at first and I'll get impatient. But if I keep plugging away, finally it will become second nature.

Watch this space for an update on progress.

GL.