Perspective of playing Texas Holdem
The poker information explosion is everywhere, and poker is no different. More has been written about poker since 1985 than had previously been written in the entire history of the game. Once you’ve made a commitment to reach for the stars, you have to decide where to begin.
If you aspire to poker excellence, the first – and probably the most important step – is to develop a perspective that enables you to put each piece of information, each drop of data, each factoid, into a hierarchical structure. After all, some things are just a lot more important than others, and you might as well concentrate your efforts where they’ll do the most good.
Why some tactics are important in poker and others aren’t? Imagine that we could teach you a terrific tactical ploy that would require some real study and practice to perfect – but once learned, could be used to earn an extra bet from an opponent. What if we also guaranteed this ploy to be absolutely foolproof: It would work perfectly every time you used it. Have we piqued your interest? But suppose that we also told you that this tactic works only in very special circumstances that occur about once a year. Do you still want to invest the time required to learn it? Probably not.
While your ability to execute this particularly slick maneuver might brand you as a tough player in the eyes of your opponents, the fact that you might use it only once a year renders it meaningless. In the course of a year’s worth of playing, one extra bet doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. It doesn’t even amount to a can of beans.
Frequent decisions
Tactical opportunities that occur all the time are important. Even when the amount of money attributed to a wrong decision is small, it will eventually add up to a tidy sum if that error is made frequently. Always defending your small blind in Texas Holdem, for example, is a good example. You have to decide whether to defend your small blind every round – and that’s frequent. If you always defend it, you are investing part of a bet on those occasions when it is wrong to do so. At the end of a year, those mistakes add up.
Suppose that you’re playing $10-$20 Texas Hold’em, with $5 and $10 blinds, and you decide to always defend your small blind, even when you’re dealt hands like 7v2*. Just to keep this simple, we’ll assume that your small blind is never raised. Based on the random distributions of cards, you’re probably dealt a throwaway hand about one-third of the time.
At the rate of 30 hands per hour, you’ll be dealt the small blind three times every 60 minutes. If you always call, you’ll wind up calling once each hour when you really shouldn’t have. That’s only $5 each hour, but after 1,000 hours of poker, you’ve essentially given away $5,000. It adds up fast, doesn’t it?
Costly decisions
Playing correctly requires a great deal of judgment -the kind that comes from experience, not books. No matter how skilled a player you eventually become, you’ll never reach the point where you always make these decisions correctly. Don’t worry; that’s not important. Just err on the side of protecting yourself from catastrophic mistakes, and you’ll be on the right track.
Decisions that cost a significant amount of money when they occur, even if they don’t happen too often, are also important. If you can’t decide whether to call or fold once all the cards are out and your opponent bets into a fairly large pot, that’s an important decision. If you make a mistake by calling when you should have folded and your opponent wins the pot – that’s an error, but not a critical one. It cost only one bet. But if you fold the winning hand,that’s a critical error, since the cost of that error was the entire pot.
Now I am certainly not advising you to call each and every time someone bets on the last card and you’re unsure about whether you have the best hand, but deciding to call instead of fold doesn’t have to be correct too often to render it the mistake of choice. If the cost of a mistaken fold is ten times the price of a mistaken call, you only have to be correct slightly more than 10 percent of the time to make calling worthwhile.
Decisions and subsequent actions
Choices can also be important because of their position on the decision tree. Those that are first in a long sequence of subsequent choices are always important, because subsequent choices are usually predicated on your initial selection.
Make an incorrect move up front and you run the risk of rendering each subsequent decision incorrect, regardless of whatever else you might do. That’s why the choice of which hands you start with in poker is generally a much more critical decision than how you play on future betting rounds. If you adopt an ” . . . any cards can win” philosophy, you have set yourself up for a disaster that even the best players could not overcome on later rounds.
Poker’s single most important decision
Choosing the right game is the most important decision you’ll encounter as a poker player. Choose the wrong game and little else matters. Choose the right game and you might even make money even on nights when you’re experiencing a below average run of cards.