"I've got a song, I ain't got no melody …"
I've been writing for
Card Player off and on since ... well, I don't know. I'm no Linda Johnson when it comes to writing persistence and longevity, but I'm pretty sure that some of the young players on PokerStars.com were infants when I had my first
Card Player column published.
I've worked hard to bring new material to each column, or at least a new perspective on old material. However, sometimes it pays to review some of the more basic things that come up in a poker game. A good opportunity presented itself recently because a new fellow joined our little home game. He's a great guy named Andy, and he really wants to understand the game. He's a successful stockbroker, so I have no doubt that he's got the intellectual chops to become a very good poker player. And, in fact, when giving Andy brief poker tutorials, I'm often able to use references to the world of investing that make the concepts "dead easy" for him, as they say here in the Isle of Man.
For example, we were talking about trading commodities futures and how so many people go broke trading futures because they invest too great a portion of their capital in a specific trade. Futures contracts (like equity options) are highly "leveraged"; you can make a lot of profit from a small investment. However, the variance is enormous; a single trade going the wrong way can wipe you out if you've bought or sold too many contracts for the amount of money you have to invest. There are well-established guidelines for the number of contracts you should buy/sell given the risk of that particular trade and your bankroll - er, investment capital. But
most futures traders grossly violate those guidelines and pretty soon, one or two of those bad trades wipe them out. Then they decide that it's impossible to profitably trade futures and they go off looking for some easier way to make money. How that may relate to poker, I'm not sure.
Another thing that Andy and I have talked about is discipline. If you're familiar with stock investment, you'll know that there are two fundamental approaches to investment: "fundamental" and "technical." Fundamental investment strategies look at the parameters that affect a stock or commodity price and attempt to predict its direction based on that information. For instance, if Florida has an unexpected freeze, it may kill a bunch of orange trees, driving up the price of orange juice. A technical investor, however, attempts to predict stock or commodity prices based on prior trends. Using past data, he builds a model that will (he hopes) predict future prices. Once he has his model, he makes his bets - er, investments - based on the model's prediction. Technical investors routinely get in trouble by deviating from their models. Their "gut" tells them that the model is wrong. As my friend Mark Johnson says, "If you deviate from the model, you're saying that something is wrong with it. Well, that's the model you developed and tested. What do you know that it doesn't, and why isn't that in your model?"
This brings me to a recent hand from the game in which Andy and I play. It was late - so late as to be early, and I was going to leave shortly. We were playing pot-limit Omaha with $1-$2 blinds. There had been a few calls, and I called from late position with A-2-4-5, with the A
4
. Then Ollie, an aggressive player, raised $15 from one of the blinds. We all called. The stacks were deep, and if I hit my flop, I could win a big pot. The flop was a semimiracle: Q
6
3
. So, I had the nut-flush draw, and any deuce, 4, 5, or 7 would give me a straight (although the 4 or 5 would not give me the nut straight). Ollie immediately bet the entire pot - $105. Everyone folded to me. Folding was out of the question, as I had 20-ish outs. In fact, I was probably a favorite in the hand. Given that, I decided to just call and see if I could bring in the button behind me. If he raised, I would gladly reraise for all of my money. But, he folded, and it was just Ollie and me. The turn was disappointing - the K
. Without hesitation, Ollie bet the pot again, $315. That's when my brain did a weird thing. I had booked a very healthy win that evening, and if I paid the $315 and didn't get there, I would give back a meaningful percentage of the win. I started looking for a reason to fold! I said to myself, "What if Ollie has a set? Now some of your outs are gone, and … " Then, fortunately, the disciplined part of my brain took over. I recalled something that I had read recently on a poker e-mail list. A poster had gotten into a similar situation with pocket aces preflop in a no-limit hold'em game. He wrote, "I decided that I could fold those aces, but if I did, I could never play another hand of poker." I was in the identical situation. This was about as "cut and dried" as poker can get: I had 12 outs to the pure nuts. Realistically, I probably had more like 15-17 outs, making the 2-1 odds the pot was offering me plenty good. Furthermore, that didn't count the $600 or so that Ollie still had after his bet on the turn. If I hit my hand, at least some of that was coming my way. "I can fold this hand," I thought, "but if I do, I can never play another hand of poker." I called the $315. As if to reward my discipline, the river brought the beautiful, harmless-looking 7
, and Ollie bet $500. I raised him his remaining chips, and he called and showed two pair as he mucked his cards.
Of course, about two-thirds of the time, the story doesn't have such a happy ending. If the 9
comes on the river, Ollie bets and I fold, $315 poorer than I'd been when the turn card came down. But what happens on the river doesn't really matter. What matters - and what I'm reminding Andy - is that good poker is frequently similar to investment. You make a plan for yourself and then follow it.
As I said at the beginning of the column, this is not new, it's not rocket science. It's the ABCs of poker, and we would all do well to review them now and again.
"I'ma gonna sing it to my friends."
Lee Jones is the poker room manager for PokerStars.com, and the author of the best-selling book Winning Low Limit Hold'em. R.I.P. Billy Preston.
