I’m not much of a baseball fan, but I remember a sportscaster a while back saying something that stuck with me.
The season is 162 games long. That means, on average, each team is going to win 54 games and lose 54 games. It’s what each team does with the other 54 games that separates the winners from the losers.
I’m paraphrasing, but the point is there – there’s the stuff you have to do and the stuff you never do, but what you do with the other stuff is what defines you. I was thinking about it today, and I realized that the same sentiment can be applied to poker.
Every instructional book I’ve read on playing poker begins almost exactly the same way – a study of acceptable starting hands, paired against the hands that always get thrown away. Aces are good from any position, but 2-7 off never plays. Pocket 8s and 9s are good from the middle provided the action is slow and there are alot of players, but AJ offsuit might not be your best bet from early position. Yesterday, it occurred to me: the strong hands – the high pocket pairs and suited connectors, the unraised big blinds – those are the hands that correspond to the “games you’re going to win”. Don’t get me wrong – you may not win the hand, but these hands represent the opportunities you’re always going to take because the odds say it’s the right thing to do. Conversely, there are the low three-offs, the double-raised big blind with A-4 off – these are the “games you’re going to lose”. Statistically, these are the hands you have to throw away, regardless of the circumstances. Maybe the flop comes and it turns out you would have hit, but still – you lose more than you win with these weak hands, so into the muck they go.
The difference here is while sports pundits can very easily carve a 162 game season into 54-game portions, that can’t be easily done in poker. I’ve been in sessions where I’ve played hundreds upon hundreds of hands and the fact of the matter is the statistically-obvious situations described above are going to come up alot less often than 2/3 of the time. More often than not, you’re going to need to make some serious judgment calls, use information about the players and the game that you’ve gathered through observation, and consider personal details like your own stack size and level of fatigue when determining what to do with the other less-obvious hands that come your way. Just like the coach puts in a different pitcher or switches up the batting order against certain teams where the outcome might be less obvious, you need to assess and re-evaluate your situation constantly while you’re sitting at the table. If you spend your whole poker career waiting for pocket aces in late position at a full table, you’re giving away a host of opportunities.
Many of you know I spend alot of time playing poker online. Lately, I’ve been discouraged from playing a great deal because players will lose their minds when they take a bad beat. They say things I’m sure they’d never say in person to the player who cracked their aces with 5-6 suited from late position. Long after the hand is over, these players hang around in chat, continuing their “virtual railbird” tirade and generally being a nuisance to the players who are left. In a cardroom, I can call the floor over and have the harassing influence removed – but I can’t do that online, and it forces me to do things like turn off the chat option or mute certain players, which takes away from the social part of the game for me. It kills me that, as mainstream as poker has become, there are still players who think that certain hands guarantee victory and feel a personal affront when these supposed guarantees come up short. These players almost always fail to really look at the situation they were in – maybe their opponent was short stacked and needed to make a move. Maybe he or she called a slow-play early and was getting the right odds to stay in the pot. Yes, suck-outs do happen – but sometimes the situation at hand (literally and figuratively) is what led to a player taking a bad beat.
As an aspiring semi-professional, I know what I should do statistically. It’s developing the finesse to deal with situations that are less cut-and-dry that will make me better than the pack. If you want to improve your game, I suggest you do the same thing.
contemplative
