Poker Articles

Don't make it easy for 'em
By Lou Krieger

Every poker player experiences losing sessions some of the time - actually a good portion of the time, due to the game's inherent short-term luck factor - but when you do lose, there's no reason why you should make it any easier than need be for your opponents. But that's precisely what many players do. They do it time and time again, and poker is not the only arena where you see this happen.

I'm writing this column the day after Tiger Woods won the 2002 Masters, and the final round of play is precisely what stirred these thoughts in my mind. With all due respect to Tiger's abundant skills, he didn't need to play his best on Sunday to win another in what eventually promises to be a closet full of green jackets. After all, a 1-under-par 71 on the final 18 holes is not exactly burning up the course, yet Woods went from a tie for first place when the final day's play began to a three stroke victory that never seemed in jeopardy at all - thanks to his opponents who spent the better part of Sunday afternoon slitting their own throats and bleeding to death all over the golf course.

Retief Goosen, last year's U.S. Open Champion, who was tied with Woods heading into Sunday's final round, fell four strokes behind after just four holes and eliminated himself from the competition early on. Vijay Singh quadrupled bogeyed the par-5 15th hole, ending his hopes of rising from third position. Ernie Els, the two-time U.S. Open champion played a strong front nine on Sunday and had Woods in striking distance until he triple-bogeyed the par-5 13th hole. And what can anyone say about Phil Mickelson? He's as formidable on Friday and Saturday as he is invariably dismal on Sunday and is still chasing his first major championship as a result. He was in position to go aggressively after Woods, but after two quick birdies he faltered like he has done time and time again in similar circumstances. At this point in his career Mickelson seems acclimated to his never-on-Sunday bridesmaid status, telling an interviewer that he was happy with his third place finish.

Woods' opponents made it easy for him. Because each of them took unnecessary risks to make up ground, and seemingly let the fact that Woods is golf's greatest closer play on their mind and eventually tilt them, all Tiger had to do on Sunday was put in a workmanlike day at the office. He didn't need to mount a challenge, or play inspired, gutsy golf to win. He just had to play it safe and play consistently and the Masters was his. He could, and did, eschew the kind of do-or-die, difficult shots that produce birdies or bogeys - or worse. Instead, he made the kind of steady, par producing shots needed to ensure another million-dollar payday.

This sort of thing happens in poker too. Maybe it even happens to you. What do you do when you've been dealt hand after hand of 9-7 or its drab equivalents? A recent email from a reader bemoaned this fact. He told me he was playing well but could not win because he was getting nothing but awful hands, and when he was lucky enough to find a big pair or big connectors in his hand, he was getting beaten with them. "What," he wondered, "can I do?"

After all, most of us are going to lose most of the time we're dealt hands like 9-7, and there's not much we can do about it except muck those puppies at the first opportunity. What's more, if we lose while playing a big pair or big connectors, there's nothing we can do about that either, unless we're playing incorrectly. But for the sake of this discussion we'll assume we're playing these hands perfectly and still losing. What then? Do we play differently? Should we mimic the play of whichever one of our opponents took some lesser holding up against our pair of aces or Big Slick and beat our brains in with it, or do we stick with the good, solid play that got us here?

It's often said that poker is a game of incomplete information, but it's also a game of incomplete control too. You can't dominate your opponents simply because you're a better player than they are, or by virtue of the fact that your desire to win exceeds theirs. You can do this in physical sports, but it's not quite the same at the poker table. A good professional fighter, for example, who has trained hard and has the will to win, is going to beat a lesser opponent - and outside of a lucky punch or a bad decision, he's going to beat him all the time.

But poker is different. Cards can turn a lesser opponent into a formidable one, as if one's pasteboards can magically morph a metaphorical 97-pound weakling into a fire-breathing monster. I don't care how well you play; someone who takes a pair of aces against whatever hand you start with is going to be a big favorite to win that particular pot. And it's cards, not the will to win, that tip the seesaw. It's like that classic movie scene when one of the villains takes a sword and starts waving it around his head, making the air whistle forebodingly. For an instant you wonder what our hero is going to do, until Indiana Jones unholsters that pistol you forgot was hanging at his side and with complete aplomb blows a couple of holes in our scimitar-waving friend's body. The pistol, after all, was an odds-on favorite against any scimitar a villain cares to wield.

So where's the message behind all this metaphor? It's here, and it's simple. Poker is a long, long game. And if you begin to play sub optimally, or play down to the level of your opponents - in particular, if you play down to the level of those really poor opponents who are playing incorrectly but just happened to get lucky - you are making it easy for them to beat you.

The player who sent that email to me was, in actuality, wondering if he ought to make it easier on his opponents. That was really the nature of his question. And if he began to deviate from optimal play by taking longshot chances in order to recoup his losses, he'd be making it much easier for them to beat him.

If he were to do that, he'd become the fish instead of the fisher, and his opponents would have to do nothing more creative or mysterious than play solid, by-the-book poker and they'd be favored to take his money. There's no need to ever give away an edge. After all, if we are playing against opponents who call too often, and do so with weak hands, all we have to do to win in the long run is to play straightforward poker. We're OK as long as we stay away from what Mike Caro refers to as "Fancy Play Syndrome," the kind of sophisticated, tricky play that works against experts who pay attention to what we are doing, but is consigned to failure when employed against opponents who play only their own cards and have no idea whatsoever about any seeds of misinformation we may be trying to sew on the green felt fields of battle.

I think most players realize this. What they do not realize, or seem to rebel against with every fiber of their bodies, is that poker is a game of very long duration. Because of this, it is quite different than most sports, which are divided into segments designed to attract fans who want a long enough game to give them their money's worth but one that's short enough to provide resolution within a couple of hours. Because of that, strategy differs. After all, a lost game is a lost game, and the score does not matter. Tomorrow both teams begin with a clean slate.

When a hockey team is losing by a single goal and there are less than two minutes to play, they will pull their goalie to put an extra attacking skater on the ice. After all, they want to tie the game and send it into overtime. And if they're unsuccessful and lose, it doesn't matter whether they lose by one or two goals. A loss is a loss regardless of the score. But losses carry over in poker, and that's a big difference. The money you lose today affects your bankroll tomorrow. If hockey were a single, season-long game, divided into three-period segments only for its audience, you can be sure that no team would ever again pull its goalie until the last segment of the year. After all, why would they risk surrendering an additional goal into an undefended empty net that would count against them if the game lasted the entire season, when there's no compelling need to do so?

But gamblers do this all the time, and not just poker players either. Horseplayers and sports bettors always seem to be looking to get out for the day too, even though they are also playing long-run games. So do poker players. But in reality, when the truth of the matter is considered and extant factors such as immediate ego gratification are ignored, what difference does it make if you win or lose today? It doesn't - and you know that.

The only results that matter, that make a difference in the long run, are your results for the year, or a lifetime, and it takes one hell of a long time to get into that long-run groove - where the results you achieve mirror the expectation of your play. Until you reach that groove, you're looking at results that are significantly influenced by short-term variance. It takes quite a while for the influence of short-term luck to leach away, and for your results to approach those you can expect to achieve based on the game's mathematical parameters, and your skill level relative to that of your opponents.

So what if Goosen, Singh, Els, and Mikelsen would have no chance of beating Tiger Woods in the long run? I'm sure if you took the cumulative scores achieved by each member of this foursome and compared it to Tiger's score over the past five years, you'd find Tiger far ahead of the field - but any of these guys can win in the short run.

So why did these guys hand the greatest golfer of his generation an additional weapon? Why play against him as if you're saying, "Tiger, you're a terrific golfer and a really nice guy, so we're just gonna go easy on you. Get out there on Sunday and play a safe, sound, workmanlike round - even a boring one is OK; the fans won't really mind and neither will the sponsors - and the championship is yours. We won't put any pressure on you at all. We guarantee it."

But poker players do this all the time. Many, maybe even the majority of players, take untoward risks and play longshot hands because they want to get out for the day. In their heart of hearts these players realize poker is a game with an extremely long horizon, yet many seemingly lack the resolve and the will power to play that way. But they may not realize that in addition to hindering themselves, their actions make it much easier for their opponents to keep beating them.

When you get down to it, good, solid, straightforward, by-the-book play will allow you to beat the majority of your opponents. This might not have a lot of adrenaline rushing, hold-your-breath anxiety, but it's as near to a guarantee that you'll wind up as winner in the long run as you'll ever see at this game. Maybe the pros on the PGA tour don't realize this, but you ought to know better. After all, you're a poker player.