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Roshambo Revelations | |||
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By Sean Carey In the interests of nearly-full disclosure, I must begrudgingly admit that I am not as great a player as my ego and my mother would have me believe.There are leaks aplenty in my game (think a spaghetti strainer), and there are several advanced poker concepts I have yet to fully wrap my brain around.The thing I possess that allows me to be a winning player despite these flaws, is a strong and sober (ok, mostly sober) awareness of the true state of my current abilities. In the corporate parlance for skill development, I am in the realm of conscious incompetence. This is a fancy way of saying at least I know what I don't know. Alexander Pope once said, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing". This applies to poker in more ways than I can even count. A neophyte poker player, or just a bad one, will take a tiny nugget of poker advice, and build their entire game around it. They don't balance it with other information, nor do they really take the time to understand the concept in the context of real life poker situations. These players are unconsciously incompetent, and they don't know what they don't know. I LOVE these players. I always make them feel good when they beat me in a hand. I never rub it in when I win. They are the only reason that a player like myself with an incomplete skill set can still be a winning player. The difference is this : Poker knowledge should never be used to play a hand, but rather to provide insight into how to think about a hand. Example #1 : I had a short conversation with a player at a 1-2 NL game I frequent, when he told me about a poker broadcast he watched where a number of pros talked about the "power of position" in NL Hold 'Em. I obviously agreed with the pros, and told him so. I saw a light go on behind his eyes, and I thought I was witnessing a crucial moment in the evolution of a poker player. You know, like baby's first step. "Can you say raise? Raise?" Boy, was I wrong. This poor fellow proceeded to derail his session and made a gift to me of several buy-ins, when he was seated immediately to my left. I noticed very quickly, that nearly every time I put chips in pot, this fellow came over the top. After felting him twice, I wondered if on the ride home he was now re-evaluating the "power of position" in comparison to the power of a flopped set of 10s or pocket aces. 'Man, I sure hope not.', I remember thinking. Example #2 : I can't tell you how many times I've read that "Aggression is the key to No Limit Hold 'Em". Again, I agree with this conventional wisdom. However, I am also of the personal belief that this piece of advice is in no small part responsible for the fact that in nearly every $10, $20, and even $30-$50 sit-and-go I play in, at least 1 or 2 players push all in and lose within the first orbit. I refuse to believe that there are simply that many maniac players out there. I think many of these are players who have internalized a small piece of the poker puzzle so fully that it blinds them to all the other information available to them. The truth of the matter is that no amount of study or discussion can give you full comprehension of these concepts. They have to be tested and questioned the only place where experiential knowledge is available - on the felt. (or on the pixels, if you must) I recently experienced the joy of moving one of these concepts out of the realm of rigid and mechanical (and horribly erroneous) application and into the joyous light of integration with a now much more complete poker philosophy. I speak of the elusive and ambiguous advice offered by many long time pros, the oft misunderstood need to "change gears". I was in the middle of a 142 player multi-table tourney, and breaking one of the cardinal rules of online poker by having ESPN on in the background for reruns of WSOP coverage. I like it sometimes for inspiration purposes. It turns out that, luckily, this transgression paid out huge dividends. I had been playing tighter than a glam rocker's leather pants, and doing well, but there was one big stacked player at my table who always seemed to "have a big hand" when I raised their blind with a marginal hand like AJ suited or 66. It was beginning to frustrate me, when I took my eyes off the game and caught the footage of Phil Gordon's impromptu Rock-Paper-Scissors tournament. Like a flash, a small piece of poker's meta-game mystery was nudged into the light for me. Conservative plays are, naturally, like choosing rock - they wear you down and don't give an inch. Aggressive plays are like choosing paper - they smother you with bets. Super aggressive plays are like choosing scissors, they cut through weaker or marginal hands like. . . well, like paper, I suppose. (Why waste a simile when there's one there?) How could I not have seen it before? I had experimented ad infinitum with changing gears, but had absolutely no criteria for when I switched from solid to aggressive to Jerry Springer and back. Now I did. I had been throwing rock over and over and over against this player, then backing down when he threw paper. No wonder he was owning me. The next time we clashed I was dealt 88 in the cutoff, and made my usual raise. Fold-fold, and then the obligatory "let the timer almost expire before I raise because it's more intimidating" re-raise move from little Jackie Paper. His raise represented a full 1/3 of my stack. Without hesitation I pushed all-in. Scissors. It took him all of 3 seconds to fold. And the clouds parted, and a single beam of light shone in through the windows and hit my face while the choir in my head sang a celestial angelic chord. When it faded, I set about the business of applying my new comprehension. One should not change gears simply to shake up one's table image, although that can be a beneficial side effect. One should change gears in order to exploit a given player or a given table's tendencies. The changing of gears MUST HAVE AN EXPLAINABLE REASON. Here are my new guidelines - Rock beats scissors : An always super aggressive player will eventually stack off to conservative plays, because the third raise from a premium hand will often price a maniac in to call with short odds to win or drive them off of nice sized pots without ever having to see a flop. When you see a habitual re-raiser, play possum and then give them the opportunity to come over the top where you can really punish them for their insolence. Paper beats rock : A common mantra of the always conservative player is to retreat when encountering major resistance. A raise is the ultimate sign of resistance. If an opponent shows a propensity to fold pre-flop without the top of the line goods, by all means, give them the opportunity to make "brilliant" laydowns by raising liberally with more marginal hands. Use position and stack size wisely to determine when it will be most profitable to throw paper. Scissors beats paper : When you see a player always raising the rock at your table, it's time to maybe take a shot at bullying the bully with almost any two cards. Since the guy who constantly throws paper is more often than not doing so with marginal hands, it becomes harder and harder for them to call a re-re-raiser, as the move positively screams AA or KK. Employing this play requires a strong understanding of pot odds, and a strong reading ability (of both players already in the pot), as the 3rd raise must be structured so that neither rock or paper is getting the odds to call you with a hand that will often turn out to be the best hand pre-flop. Scissors is the hardest play to make, but when employed correctly can be extremely profitable, especially in a short handed scenario. Some players who wield this weapon well include Toto Leonidas and Vinny Vinh. Within two rounds of blinds, I had busted my friend Jackie Paper with a few well timed scissors and some pocket jacks, and moved into the top 10 in chips. Long story still extremely long, I placed first in the tournament and made my first 4 digit cash ever. The money was nice, but the understanding I gained was the real cash from that experience. As poker is played in the long term, any jump in your game means a larger increase in money earned than you can calculate on a spreadsheet. Don't be like I was, be like I am becoming. Don't settle for being consciously (or unconsciously) incompetent, become consciously competent. Don't rely on poker knowledge, as it will lead you to make horrible plays that will do more damage to your bank roll than Bobby and Whitney on a coke bender. Or go ahead if you like, it's your prerogative. The moral of the story? Use poker experience to turn poker knowledge into poker understanding. Or stay asleep and come play with me! Lord knows I need weak competition to survive. : Sean Carey is a writer, performer (theatre/stand-up), and part-time card player living in Austin, TX. Sean uses poker for fun, profit, and spiritual enlightenment. He is not as good as he thinks he is, but's he's better than you think he is. walkyourpathhotmail . | |||
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