Shopping for Value at the Poker Market

Although I hate to push a metaphor too far, playing poker really is a lot like shopping. At the poker table or away from it, poker presents a broad variety of things to invest in, from the level of starting hands all the way up to the level of deciding to devote your valuable time to the game (instead of, say, taking up painting). As in life, you'll do better financially if you can make a habit of picking up bargains – things that are worth more than you pay for them – and passing up rip-offs. Doing that reliably requires some knowledge of what things are worth. In both poker and life, that can be a tricky question, as our values can be highly subjective. I personally think a six-pack of Yoo-Hoo would be a pretty good bargain for $4, but many of my friends wouldn't pay a nickel for it. You and I might consider $10,000 for a mediocre painting of sad clowns to be a poor bargain. To Bill Gates, spending more than three seconds decorating the guest bathroom on his private jet might be a pointless waste of his valuable time, in which case it would be worth paying the money not to have to think about it anymore. To choose a more poker-relevant example, two tournament players of equal skill and knowledge might play differently at the final table if one places a much higher value on the championship trophy for first place. Even if both players want the trophy, one might be willing to sacrifice more expectation pursuing it.

If you play poker for profit, many decisions about play can be readily converted into dollars as a common currency. So, when we sit down to analyze a particular poker decision, our goal is often to do the best job we can of converting each alternative into a cash value, and taking the one that represents the best investment. Sometimes this just involves factors within the game: cards, pots, odds, actions, and so on. But often, other factors – trophies, fatigue, marital strife, and so on – affect your decisions. In many cases, external factors are things no one else can decide for you. The best anyone can do is help you work out the objective end of the exchange – how much money you're sacrificing in order to avoid sitting at the table with someone you don't like. Nonetheless, the options you face in play – checking, raising, calling, folding – generally involve purchasing something, or declining to do so. In trying to decide between a raise and a call, you're placing a monetary value on what the additional bet buys you. The tournament player who values the trophy may not explicitly place a cash value on winning (independent of the actual prize). But few players would pursue the trophy no matter what the cost in expectation. Some players are willing to spend a few dollars to increase their chances of winning the trophy, and others aren't. (Of course, the more top-heavy the tournament payout, the more these two goals coincide. For a winner-take-all tournament, they are exactly the same.)

Even decisions that don't seem to involve chips or money are often best characterized in terms of monetary value. If you're trying to decide how many cards to draw in a game of draw lowball, you're still making a decision about monetary value. What's more valuable to you, your pat 9-8 or your 8-4 plus a random card? It may take a lot of knowledge about your opponents to make the right decision, but ultimately you'll probably make the decision that gives you the greatest expectation. The same holds true for some pretty degenerate cases. If you're playing draw for high and you hold quads before the draw, you'll probably take a card, because the value of your hand is greater when your opponents think you might have missed a draw. Although you can think through these questions logically without assigning them cash value, it's still helpful to estimate just how much of a mistake you would be making if you made the wrong decision. And cash is the most readily available medium of exchange.

This way of looking at things is not exactly a profound new insight, but it's easy to forget at the wrong time. When you're trying to decide whether to check or bet the turn, or whether to overcall the river, you may have good reason to review the history of the hand. Who did what when, and what hands can you consequently rule out? How does your opponent play, and do you believe he has what he's representing? But while thinking through the situation is critically important to making good decisions, it's just a prelude to assigning values to what you get in return for your investment. Your decision is no different from that of a player who may have been uninvolved in the hand, and who is told he may have your share of the pot for one bet. Although that player hasn't been involved all the way, the financial details of his decision are no different from yours (except perhaps to the extent that you consider your table image).

Just to give one more example, tournament buy-ins are yet another thing poker players often buy. Playing a tournament for profit means paying the buy-in (including the entry fee) because you think the chips you'll get in return (representing some equity in the prize pool) are worth monetarily more than your investment. Playing for fun means that you're willing to pay the difference between your equity in the prize pool and the buy-in for the opportunity to gamble a bit. Rebuying once you've lost your first buy-in seems like the same thing, especially if you're not on a tight budget (which implies that your second $100 is a lot more valuable to you than your first). If you bust out on the first hand due to rotten luck, a rebuy would seem natural. But if you bust out after an hour of convincing evidence that you're outclassed, you may want to rethink how good an investment the tournament is, even if nominally you'd be getting the same number of chips for the same amount of money.

Decisions about value permeate poker at all levels. We make value decisions about the play of a hand, value decisions about investing our time in playing at a particular table, value decisions about poker-related travel and reading, and most of us have devoted some thought to whether what we're getting out of our involvement in poker is at all worth the effort. Perhaps I'm making a terrible mistake by playing poker and writing columns about it, instead of devoting more time to my day job and writing a blockbuster screenplay. But that's my decision, just as it's my decision to play an occasional junk hand out of boredom. I must be getting something of value out of these things, because I keep coming back. And one of these days that junk hand is going to drag a pot.