If someone said he'd gone to Giants Stadium wearing Dallas Cowboys gear, and then wanted to know what to do when some of the fans started threatening him, what would you tell him? I'd probably tell him that he shouldn't have worn his Dallas Cowboys gear to Giants Stadium in the first place.
This idea is also relevant at the poker table. A lot of people want to know what to do at a certain stage in a hand - after they've already made a questionable decision earlier in the hand. A common example would go something like this: "I raised to half my stack before the flop, and then the next guy moved in. I had only jack-deuce offsuit, but I was getting three and a half to one on my money, so I had to call. You would've called there, right, Matt?"
My response to this question is, yes; if I had somehow found myself in that situation, I would've called. But the only way I could've ended up in that situation is if I had fallen out of a spaceship and been flung into my seat, only to find that half of my chips had been committed. Or, possibly, aliens might've taken over my brain when I decided to raise to half my stack in the first place.
I call problems like whether to call with J-2 after pot-committing yourself "alien problems." If one of my students hears me say, "That's an alien problem," he knows what it means. It means that he's asking the wrong question. In the above example, the question is not whether to call with J-2 offsuit when you don't want to. The question is, why did you get yourself into a situation in which you have to strongly consider calling a reraise with J-2 offsuit? A far better play than raising to half of one's stack with J-2 is raising all in with J-2. And, of course, in most situations, the best play with J-2 is folding. But if you never open for half of your stack with J-2, you never have to worry about calling a reraise with it.
The pot-committing raise is an example of a bad play early in a hand that leads to a difficult decision (an alien problem) later in the hand. Overthinking that alien problem may cause a player to overlook his earlier mistake. But alien problems can be dangerous in other ways, as well. A student of mine played a hand in a major tournament recently that went something like this: An early-position player limped in. "This guy had been playing almost every hand," my student said. "And once, I even saw him limp in behind another player with ace-queen. He didn't even raise." There were two other limpers for $400 each, and my student made it $4,000 to go with pocket tens. This created the first alien problem in the hand, as I would never make a raise that big; but this is a minor point, and somewhat of a stylistic difference between my student and myself. Only the first limper called. The flop came down Q-7-4 rainbow, and the early-position player led out for $5,000. My student had $13,000 left. "What would you do, and why?" my student asked me.
"I'd fold," I said, "because I read this opponent as being a loose-passive player, and I'm very confident he has a queen."
My student couldn't believe this response, and said he had read the situation entirely differently. To explain his reasoning, he asked me: "What if you had limped in for $400 with a hand like king-queen and then called a raise to $4,000?"
"That's an alien problem," I replied.
"I know it's an alien problem, but let's just say you had done that - limped and called a big raise with king-queen. Now, on a flop of queen-seven-four, would you bet or check, given the stack sizes?"
"I would check," I said, "but I don't see how that's relevant." I explained that what I would do in the limper's spot has nothing at all to do with what the limper would do in the limper's spot, especially since he had already proven himself to have a style quite different from mine. In effect, my student created his own alien problem in this hand by attributing a certain playing style to his opponent, and then trying to come up with a read based on that style.
Many good players check to the preflop aggressor with top pair, especially when stack sizes are relatively small. But most players who limp in behind limpers with A-Q don't usually lead into a preflop aggressor unless they have a hand. My student used his knowledge about good players, instead of his knowledge about passive players, to make his read, and he was punished. My student moved in. The limper, of course, had K-Q, and my student was eliminated from the tournament. What do you do if you've been the aggressor, and a player who almost never bets or raises suddenly leads into you? My student turned this question into an alien problem, and alien problems almost never result in a useful analysis. The answer is, you fold, unless you have a strong hand.
Asking the right questions in poker is almost as important as, if not more important than, knowing the answers to those questions. If you're analyzing a hand and find yourself fixated on a difficult decision, first go back to earlier in the hand and ask yourself if you could've done anything differently. Similarly, if you find that you were dead wrong about a read, go over the thought process that led to your read. You might find that you used certain assumptions about your opponents that simply didn't apply - as my student did.
Part of successful play is to avoid creating difficult decisions for yourself. As I've written before, close decisions are usually not worthy of long analysis. If a decision is close, in the long run it won't matter much what you do. What will matter is putting yourself in fewer tough situations, either by learning how to make better reads, by playing in a such way that you avoid difficult decisions on the later streets, or both.
When thinking about hands you've played, see if you can spot yourself walking into Giants Stadium in a Dallas Cowboys uniform. And keep your analysis relevant to this planet, not some alternate one. Alien problems will serve no purpose for you, or anyone else in these earthbound poker tournaments.
Matt Matros is the author of The Making of a Poker Player, which is available online at http://www.CardPlayer.com.
