Poker is Beautiful

When I first started to play Texas hold ‘em, I read in a book that poker is extremely complex, even more so than bridge. Having played some bridge, my first reaction was to respectfully disagree with the author. Pretty much anyone can learn how to play any form of poker in five minutes, whereas I had to read an entire book just to play bridge at the beginner level. Some time later I came across a post at rec.gambling.poker that supported my contention. The poster argued that poker is not like basketball, where there is a huge range of skill levels, from klutz to Michael Jordan. In any limit poker game there are only four options: fold, check, bet, or raise. So even the best player is far too restricted to distinguish himself much from the novice. After one and a half years of playing poker and reading books, I am forced to radically revise my initial assessment.

When someone is better than you at basketball, you can immediately see why you are the underdog. You can observe all the steals, slam dunks, and turn around jumpers that the guy makes as he wipes the floor with you. Poker is different. The skillful poker player makes moves that a novice cannot even begin to identify as being skillful, let alone attempt to emmulate. I'm not going to delve into the myriad factors that must be considered, nor the process by which those factors must be analyzed in order to derive the correct action at the table. I will just say that they are not intuitive and must be learned through careful study and application.

Another important aspect of poker is that of chance. Even if you play expertly, you can still lose a lot of money. As a general rule, a professional poker player should have at least 300 big bets in his bankroll. That means that if you are going to play $20/$40 hold 'em for a living, you should have a bankroll of $12,000. That might seem like a lot of money if you are really a winning player, but that is what you will need if you want to be 99% sure that you won't go broke. Since a good player might lose a lot of money IN THE SHORT TERM, it should come as no surprise that a bad player might win a lot of money over that same short term. Even the worst players have occasional runs of very good cards, allowing them to delude themselves into believing that they are skillful players.

Due to the element of chance in poker, many bad players never recognize that they are bad. And due to poker's hidden complexity, even those who acknowlege their weaknesses will not become stong players without diligent study of the game. These two factors explain why poker is incredibly profitable for those who play it well.

Internet Donkeys

One of the great feelings in no limit poker comes from sitting at a table with one or two really, really bad players (aka fish, pigeons, donkeys, etc.). You just wait for your good hands and pound the pigeons, either by betting into them with the knowledge that they will call, or by slowplaying and letting them bluff off their entire stack. It's really a predatory endeavor. Last night I had been playing online for a few hours when I identified a few of these internet donkeys, and despite their incompetence I was down about $40 due to a few unfortunate suck outs which need not be discussed here. But then the poker gods smiled upon me by giving me some premium cards while at the same time giving the donkeys some marginal or good cards that they could overplay against me.

Hand #1: Both Donkey #1 and I have about $100 in our stacks. I get KK in late position. Oh so tasty. Donkey #1 calls for $1 in early position, another player limps, and I raise to $5. Everyone folds except for Senor Donkey. Flop = Q 7 5 rainbow. Very nice. Pot = $12. Donkey bets $5. I raise to $25. Yes, this may be a bit of an overbet, but I figured Donkey Kong probably had a Q, giving him 5 outs against me (unless he had KQ. QQ is out of the question because he would have raised or limp reraised preflop), so I wanted to force him to make a big mistake. Sure enough, he calls. Pot = $60. Turn is a not so worrisome 6. Donkey bets $20, leaving $50 in his stack. I raise to $50, knowing that if he calls this one he is totally pot- committed and will put in his last $20 on the river no matter what card comes. But he reraises me all in and I call immediately. The river brings some nice insurance, another K, and of course the pot comes to me. I go to check the hand history, hoping I didn't suck out on the guy by hitting my set on the river. I felt better when I saw his hand, which made complete sense: QJ. This is a hand I won't even play from early position, let alone call big preflop raises with. Donkey #1 gets all star status in my buddy list.

Hand #2. I get JJ in middle position. Everyone folds to me and I raise from $1 to $5. Donkey #2 cold calls from late position. The big blind also calls. Flop is J Q 7. Wow. I know I'm getting paid here. The bb checks, and I also check, assuming that Donkey #2 will make a ridiculous overbet in an ill-conceived attempt to steal the pot. Sure enough, Donkey #2 bets $10, bb folds, and I pause for dramatic effect, then "reluctantly" call. Turn is a Q. No need to worry about straight or flush draws anymore. I make a tiny bet of $5 into the $35 pot, hoping it will look like a pathetic bluff. Donkey #2 takes the bait and raises to $25. Again I pause and call. The river is a 3. I assume Donkey #2 has nothing and that he will not bluff again after having been called on the turn, so I make a fairly small bet of $20. He immediately calls and my full house wins the pot. Can you guess what he had? K7s. Impressive.

Hand #3. I played this hand pretty poorly and still got paid, making Donkey #3 the Michael Jordan of quadrapeds. I was under the gun (in first position preflop) with AA. Hoping that Donkey #3 would raise, I just called the $1 blind bet. Actually, the guy to the right of Donkey #3, who had been playing a tight and solid game, raised to $5 and Donkey#3 just called. Unwilling to slowplay my bullets out of position against both a good player and a donkey, I made error #1 by reraising to $25 (too much). This should have told Donkey #3 that I had a very big hand. Tight/Solid guy got the picture and folded after about 2 seconds. Donkey #3 immediately called. Wow!! The flop comes A J 3 with two hearts. Now, an aside: while it's almost always nice to flop a set, I don't really like to flop sets of aces because it means that the other guy is very unlikely to have an ace and therefore will be afraid of the ace sitting there on the flop, especially since I represented a strong hand preflop. Unless he has JJ or 33 (highly unlikely), I don't figure to make much more money. However, there was already $55 in the pot, so I could not complain about my monster hand. I made a $5 fake bluff and he raised to $25. Sweet!! But then I made error #2. I was a little afraid of those two hearts out there, which was really pretty silly. The chances of him having KQh or KTh were obviously small, but Donkey seemed firmly attached to his hand, and again, I refused to slow play my three of a kind. I couldn't forget all the times I flopped sets and slowplayed them on two-suited boards, only to see two more flush cards come and turn my once herculean holding into a monumental pile of donkey dung. So I reraised to $50. It was only when I glanced at my stack that I realized the stupidity of this move: I only had $25 left with two rounds of betting to go. Now it had to be obvious even to the most foolish of donkeys that I had AT LEAST one ace in the hole, if not two. If I had just called the $25 raise, it would have put more than $100 in the pot and left another $50 in my stack. With two rounds of betting left, it was very likely that I would be able to get him to call for his last $50 WITHOUT representing a monster hand, e.g. by betting $20 on the turn and $30 on the river. Both of those bets would be small fractions of the pot, so I would be giving Donkey #3 excellent odds to call. But there was no going back. Anyway, Donkey #3 thought and thought. What he was thinking, I will never know. He typed "hmmmm" into the text box, and after about 30 seconds he reraised me all in. Almost as a reflex I called him, and the turn and river brought the 9c and the 8h, respectively. The dreaded heart flush draw had come through!! I panicked as I waited for the showdown, praying his cards would not be revealed on the screen, as that would mean that my trip aces were no good. About 2 seconds later the torture was over, and the $200 pot came to me. I checked the hand history, expecting to find that Donkey #3 had one of three potential hands: AK, AQ, or AJ. In fact he had QQ. Truly amazing.