Zero To Sixty

We’ve all experienced it: A lousy player (a donk) makes stupid bets that go against all odds, and then hit their set, their straight, or their flush on the river, winning a huge pot. It is frustrating, and I have even written about these bad beats in earlier posts. But in reading over Matthew Hilger’s fantastic Texas Hold’em Odds And Probabilities you start to see why this works. The answer is effective implied odds.

The nuance that many people miss (including myself) is that betting down someone using pot odds is wrong. If the player is reasonably confident of pulling you into an all-in scenario, the odds aren’t pegged to the pot, but to your stack. Look at it this way: If my stack is $1,000 and I have a hand that I’m confident is the best, and I’m playing against a typical freeroll maniac, even pot-sized bets of $100 or more may not get them off drawing to a flush or straight. Why? Because if they hit, they will possible get my whole stack. This puts their implied odds much higher than the 2:1 odds that the pot shows. They are closer to 10:1, which is well worth drawing into for many big hands, from a set to a flush.

This is one of the reasons that freerolls are so hard to play. The implied pot odds can become staggeringly complex. Whether you can you draw this player into an all-in is actually in important question you need to answer when assessing preflop, as well as post-flop decisions. It also makes it quite lucrative to play much looser than you normally would, especially in early play.

Generally speaking I’m a tight player. But in early freeroll play, the implied odds are off the scale with players willing to go all-in at the drop of a hat. I would normally fold 22 or 33, but I’ve started playing those solely for the possibility of hitting a set. Why? The odds of hitting the set are 7.5 to 1, which is generally stupid for most pots pre-flop. But when you do hit the set, if you can ambush someone into an all-in, your odds are very much in your favor. I never thought of this until I read Hilger’s book.

What’s quite interesting is that last night I played 33 and hit a set on the flop. I called some big bets and called an all-in push on the turn. I ended winning his whole stack. These opportunities were completely lost to me before I started thinking this way.

The downside is that you can use the concept of effective implied odds to justify playing practically any hand at any time, which is a pretty big mistake. First of all, you aren’t going to get everyone to stumble into an all-in when you hit a set. Post-flop play thus becomes key. If a player bets high enough, you may have some very difficult decisions: It is quite possible that calling makes sense if he is going to risk his stack but doesn’t make sense if he gets out against a big raise. Secondly, stack size is also important. Taking a flyer on hitting a set is not the best way to use your chips if you’re stack is dwindling. Thirdly, position is important. Leading into someone is not as good as having position on them. You want them to feel like they are the aggressor and setting the tone. Otherwise, it will be harder to trap them into an all-in.

But let’s go back to those maniac donks who appear with massive stacks early in freerolls. Is that a good strategy? Well, it is in early rounds. When you consider practically any hand can win with significant (although not always good) odds, a donk only needs to catch 2 or 3 all ins in a row before they start rolling. If they hit 3 all ins, bet through and miss on 3 large (but not full stack) donk bets in a row, and then catch another all in, pretty soon they are making significant progress based solely on their stack size and the massive effective implied odds of people willing to go all-in.

Ironically, the best friend of donks are 1) other donks and 2) tight players who don’t appreciate the effective implied odds of a freeroll. It’s the second category that can really fuel a donk through the middle of a tournament. Powering through long odd bets after long odd bets against good players for the payoff of one all-in win is a strategy that can work.

Many decent players won’t respect the power of a draw and will just assume the donk is playing a middle pair or top pair with weak kicker. They are foolishly hoping for an all-in, thinking that when the river finally comes they can earn their payoff. When that third suit hits the table or a potential straight draw card falls, they convince themselves that this couldn’t possible be what the donk was aiming for. After all, the odds were soooooo long against it. So they go all-in and find that, indeed, the long draw was exactly what the donk was hoping for.

I did this a lot over the past few weeks, so I’ve experienced it firsthand.

What stops a donk? Well, when all the other donks start falling out of the tournament, the donk all-in bets will start to go against real hands and their stacks start to collapse. Also, when you get toward the mid to late part of a tourney those all-in bets with flush draws and straight draws on the board start to go away. As a result, the effective implied odds of a donk strategy plummet, and they start bleeding chips.

How about starting out with a totally donk strategy for the first 30 minutes or hour of a tournament and then converting to a tight solid play strategy? Well, there are places where I’ve seen this actually recommended. This is actually a decent idea for beginners, but a much better play is to use actual strategy and probability to guide your decisions. Make each decision tactical and dependent on the situation.

But that’s not easy to do.

I feel pretty good despite the fact that my bankroll is still pathetically low. The reason is that I can see some real growth in my play. All of these grind-it-out tourneys against maniacs and loose players seem to be a pretty good training ground.

On example of progress is in the Carbon Poker Funstep sit’n'go tourneys. These are play money sit’n'gos where when you get past the first two rounds, you actually play for $1 in real money in the third round. In the past I’ve had to play about 4 times or more in round 1 tourneys to win and move on to a round 2 one. Now I’m pretty much a lock to move on to round 2.

One of the differences is that I’m getting better at heads up play. Playing heads up over and over again is grueling, but I’m starting to see some real patterns develop and an underlying key strategy. It’s obvious but not easy: Minimize your losses from middling and poor hands and maximize your profits from big hands.

To my mind this often means folding against early raises. I guess if I think about it, favorable pot odds in heads up are hard, if not impossible. So playing for any kind of draw is dubious unless you have an extraordinary number of outs.

One side effect of this is that if I have a much bigger stack it can be incredibly demoralizing playing against me heads up. I just don’t call a lot of bets unless I have a good hand, and them I’d most likely re-raise. As a result, it takes someone a LONG time to make progress against me. I like that.

Anyway, I feel good. I’m getting better, and it’s starting to show in my results.

I was doing very well in the Absolute Poker $50 nightly Freeroll when I got kicked going all in with AA. It was me against two other players and the one had 85 (can you believe it?) and the other had K5. Guess what flopped? Yes, TWO fives! My AA not only didn’t hold up, they came in last in a three way pot!

It’s quite disheartening, let me tell you. I’m really feeling that I’m dong better now, too. So when I get into the top 200 heading into the home stretch and then lose to a total long shot. Ugh. It is just so frustrating.

Oh well, at least it wasn’t real money!

Hit the flop with multiple players holding QQ in my hand and in last position. With all three flop cards below 10, the player under the gun went all in. Seeing nothing other than trips and AA or KK as beating me, I figured that I had a good chance on the all-in. Trouble was that I had no bead on the player who went all-in, so I had to basically play the odds.

He turned over KK. Rats!

So I got kicked out with a good stack and in a solid top 200 position (400 people left in the tournament) in a $1K freeroll. Oh well, next time!

Binds were $200, and I folded KJ suited to a $725 raise. If it was a loose player I had a handle on I would have called, but at a new table and an unknown entity… I folded.

After a few days of just drifting for one reason or another, I’m back in the swing of things with the Players Only Monday Night Football Freeroll. It’s a big money freeroll–$1000 with an extra $100 for every point scored during MNF. At first break I’m in 394th place out of 948 remaining players (3,000 players started).

I’m playing incredibly tight, sticking directly to card groups 1-6. So far I’ve won two all-ins with a triple and a full house and lost $500 to a bad beat where I had top pair (kings) and lost to pocket aces. That I didn’t lose all-in is the good message there and indicative of my pretty good play.  We’ll see how it goes.

One of the key elements of poker is knowing your “outs,” which is to say how many cards can improve your hand. This is generally looked at in terms of calculating your own odds to win, but I hit a situation today where knowing the outs on the board would have prevented a mistake by myself.

The situation was that there was a flush draw and an open-ended straight draw in the flop. I had top pair and top kicker. Normally, this is enough to win, and with a big enough bet, this would be enough to weed out most draws. The problem is that with the flush/straight draw possibilities, even a big bet may not scare some people off. That was the case tonight.

I knew that the outs would create very positive pot odds unless I did something drastic, so I went all-in. The trouble is that there were just so many outs available that two other people went all-in with me. At that moment I knew I was lost. This was an important lesson–with so many outs on the board, risking an all-in is very unwise.

I generally use a reference of starting hands so that I don’t get too loose on my opening bets. I misplaced it and found myself just playing “off the cuff.” The result has been some pretty poor poker by me. I got very undisciplined and lazy. I was playing hands I never should be playing like Q8 and I was betting aggressively with middle pair in poor position.

The good news is that I quickly realized this was an issue and got back on track. I did break one of my rules and immediately got burned for it. I generally will never go all-in with unpaired cards unless one is an ace. A very loose player went all-in, and I had KQ. His range of hands could have gone everywhere from AA to T9. I put him on a mediocre hand and went all-in. He had A9, but it was the A that killed me… he won with A high, and my rule proved to be there for a reason: Ace high on all ins is a fairly common winning hand when pairs aren’t in the pockets.

I’ve been too busy to do more than just play casual poker over the past few days. Today was the exception, and I played in the Bodog $500 Freeroll. The key story here was that I hit an unbelievable number of bad beats in a row. I had an ace high straight beat by a flush and triple 4s beat by triple 10s.

What really lost me the tournament, however was some major money hands where I played decent pot odds that didn’t pay. I think I had a couple of straight draws and a flush draw where I was drawn in with the very edge of good odds… 4 to 1 or so. Four to one pot odds with a $200 bet can pay off big, but a few of those in a row that fail to pay off and you are looking at a dwindling stack. That’s what happened to me.

I’m thinking that I may start to err on the side of caution in the future. Some people stretch pot odds to account for various implied pot odds–people betting later, etc. But I’m finding that, at least in the short term, I may need to look at it from the opposite direction. Perhaps I’m not accounting for dead outs or I’m discounting other things. We’ll see. I can say this, however, my play will be a bit more conservative in the future in this regard.

I just lost $12 playing on cash tables at Absolute Poker. The reason is very easy. It’s not that I played poorly or that I played against much better players. The reason is that I played against much looser players. In fact, I was at a table of maniacs–players that will play every hand, play all hands to showdown, and are aggressive with poor holdings.

I figured that in such a setting I would do well. Generally speaking, a tight and aggressive player like myself will just own maniacs. Their aggression is usually punished eventually. So what happened? I didn’t realize the difficulty in doing this against a table of 3 or more maniacs. Basically, you are almost entirely at the whim of chance unless you have the drop dead nuts.

For example, you can have a strong holding preflop and raise. Normally, that would eliminate a lot of the moderate and poor holdings that just through pure chance might improve on the flop. Against a table of at least three maniacs (like I was playing against), such a strategy doesn’t do anything except put more money in the pot. When the flop hits, you have the unhappy scenario of facing the following: At least one of the opponents may have improved his or her hand and possibly one other is excited enough about a dubious holding that they’ll face down big bets to take it to the river.

Here is but one example of many: On the flop my opponent had a flush draw and nothing else. I raised the pot with the expectation that flush draws would fold due to the horrible pot odds. Nope. Next card falls and I had three of a kind. I raise the pot again. My opponent, with nothing more than the hope of a  flush, calls. And… you guessed it: They hit the flush on the river.

Normally, this would happen so rarely that the tight player would rake it in when those flushes don’t hit, but with three maniacs on the table, they will hit good hands often enough that it lowers your number of good pots considerably.

Now the recommendation from experts is to change tables. But I did that a few times and found maniacs at all of them. Such is the problem with low stakes poker, I guess. The other option is recommended by Sklansky–just play rank 1-3 hands and then play your nuts flops to get your blinds money back and more. This is not that effective against multiple maniacs, unfortunately, due to the odds of them improving their hands so much on the flop due to multiples of them at the table.

I’m at a loss.