Overdoing the Overbet?

Recently, my friend Vinnie was playing a no-limit hold'em tournament. He has a very aggressive style that, when clicking on all cylinders, enables him to accumulate chips very quickly. In this particular tournament, his style was working quite well. By the time the blinds reached the $300-$600 level, he was up to about $20,000, and appeared to be in good shape as one of the chip leaders.



Unfortunately, he then lost an all-in confrontation against a medium stack, which cut him down to a still-respectable $9,000. At that point, I came over to check on his progress. He told me about the hand he lost – a simple coin flip gone bad – but after that, he began a series of hands that left me a little surprised, and they are the focus of this column.



The Hands



Everyone folded to him in the cutoff, and he went all in for $9,000. The button and blinds folded, bringing him up to $9,900. On the very next hand, he moved all in again, and again he won the blinds. He folded the next few hands and paid his blinds. Then, the action was folded to him on the button. He moved all in and won again. A couple of hands later, instead of moving all in, he raised to $1,800. No one called, and he flashed me the A A with a look of disgust.



Finally, he went to the well once too often. He moved all in from middle position with the K Q, got called by a big stack holding the K K, and was eliminated short of the money.



His Logic


Sometime later, I asked him why he chose to continually move all in instead of making more reasonable raises. He responded, "I just wanted to build my stack by stealing the blinds. The bigger the bet, the more these guys were afraid to call. As long as they didn't pick up any big hands like pocket aces or kings, they would have kept laying down hands for me over and over."



"Don't you think they would have caught on to you eventually?"



"Hell no! All these guys do is concentrate on their own cards. If they get a big hand, they might call an all-in bet. Otherwise, they just get out of the way."



"But couldn't you accomplish the same thing by tripling the blinds? Why risk your entire stack?"



"I'm telling you, these guys are far more likely to call if I make it $1,800 than if I move all in. All they care about is how strong their hand is, and how much it costs to call. They aren't even thinking about what I'm doing."

Examining Vinnie's Logic


As I watched him play, I thought there was no way it could be correct to continually move all in for more than 15 times the big blind. However, I know that Vinnie spends a lot of time thinking about strategy, so I did not want to give up on his reasoning so easily. I forced myself to think about his logic of choosing such a superaggressive plan of attack, and it led me toward two trains of thought:



1. I could not know for sure if Vinnie was accurate in his description of his opponents, but it did seem like they were laying down hands for him repeatedly. Of course, it's always possible they really had garbage, but it's also possible people were laying down decent hands like 9-9 and A-J. If they were, Vinnie was gaining a definite advantage by moving all in rather than tripling the blinds, because it's very likely they would have called smaller raises with those hands.



2. As Vinnie suggested, one of the greatest shortcomings of inexperienced players is that they concentrate too much on their own hands, without fully considering what their opponent might have. By repeatedly moving all in, Vinnie took advantage of that tendency nicely. If his opponents had stopped to think about it, they probably would have realized how unlikely it was that Vinnie was consistently picking up hands that were worthy of going all in. Instead, they just focused on whether they had a hand worthy of calling an all-in bet, and thus there's a good chance that some of them folded the best hand several times along the way.



All in all, there is a crude logic to Vinnie's reasoning. If the cards run his way, and his opponents continually give him too much credit, he can do some serious damage in any given tournament. But even if he gauges his opponents correctly, I just don't think Vinnie's strategy is a viable long-term winner. Here are some of the reasons I gave him for believing that to be true:



1. The most obvious downfall is that he could run into a big hand, which is exactly what happened. Since he has already moved all in, he has left himself no way out. Even if his opponents are folding hands like A-Q and 10-10 to his all-in raises, he still figures to run into a top-level hand at least once along the way, if not more.



2. No matter how unobservant his opponents are, I think that sooner or later they will catch on that he is going all in much more than his fair share. You can face only so many all-in bets without beginning to question whether the person is actually making legitimate raises.



Vinnie and I clearly disagreed on this point. He said I was giving players too much credit, that while he and I would certainly question the legitimacy of the raiser, the typical inexperienced player does not stop to think about it. I can't honestly say whether he is right or wrong, but I do know that one of the worst mistakes you can make is to underestimate your opposition, and I thought Vinnie was clearly in danger of doing that.



In addition, I argued that it would not necessarily require an explicit effort on his opponents' part to notice what he was doing. I think that their subconscious can register Vinnie's pattern, even if they aren't paying close attention to his actions. They see him raise, and even if they are entirely focused on their own hands, somewhere in the back of their minds a voice says, "Isn't that guy raising far more than everyone else?"



As I said, I have no concrete evidence one way or the other regarding that idea, but my gut feeling is that the subconscious minds of even the most unobservant players will help them to see the pattern of Vinnie's raises.



3. Along that line, what happens when Vinnie has a strong hand and wants action? As we saw with his pocket aces, his pattern was to make a smaller raise rather than move all in. Sometimes that move works, and against weak opposition, it probably works more often than it should. But again, Vinnie is falling into a clear-cut pattern, and he cannot hope to achieve long-term tournament success by becoming predictable in that manner.



And, I still have the gut feeling that somewhere in the subconscious of even the weakest, most unobservant opposition, the shift in Vinnie's raising pattern will somehow register. A voice will say, "Hasn't this guy been moving all in all the time, and now he's making a smaller raise?" Maybe an inexperienced player won't know what to do with that information, but I think it will at least make him wary, to the point where he will probably continue to stay out of Vinnie's way with semistrong hands.



I agree with Vinnie that a strategy of frequent all-in bets can work better against some players than others. But having said that, I'm still not in favor of it, no matter how timid the opposition is. To me, overdoing the all-in move is like shooting dice with the odds stacked against you. Maybe you'll never run into a big hand. Maybe your opposition will never loosen their standards against you and call with semistrong hands. And maybe, even if you get called by a better hand, you'll draw out and move full speed ahead toward the prize money.



Maybe all of those things will happen, but the much more likely scenario is that they won't. Vinnie found that out the hard way. Hopefully, you won't have to.



Matt Lessinger is the author of The Book of Bluffs: How to Bluff and Win at Poker, available everywhere. To find other articles of Matt's, check out the Online Poker News newsletter at http://www.cardplayer.com/.