"But the winds of change - they fill the air …"
There's nothing like a good home poker game. If you don't play in one, ask around, as there's one going on somewhere near you (probably tonight or tomorrow night), and they'll surely have an empty seat.
Home games add a completely different dimension to the joy of poker, because you're playing with friends (and acquaintances who will become friends). Games among friends provide a completely different level of bonding and intimacy than you'll ever get in a casino (and light-years beyond what you'll find on the Internet).
Back in the "old" days, home poker games typically took place on the kitchen table - maybe with a blanket thrown over it to provide a feltlike surface. The chips were wafer-thin plastic things (almost always red, white, and blue), and the cards were a ratty deck rescued from a hall closet, with "6S" scrawled on the joker to replace the lost 6
.
But that's not the case now. I've been invited to home games hosted by friends of my son, where the garage has been converted into a home poker parlor, with posters of Chris Moneymaker and Isabelle Mercier lining the walls. The table is real felt, the cards are expensive plastic. In some of these games, the chips are the 11.5-gram sets you can buy in any game store these days. In at least one of the games, the chips are custom-made casino-weight.
This all brings me around to the topic of this column.
Recently, I got together with some friends and colleagues here on the Isle of Man for a cash game. Not having our usual set of chips, we had brought a case with a full set of PokerStars chips. Those chips are white, red, green, and black, but carry no denominations on them. Of course, we had to agree on the stakes in the game; ultimately, we settled on £100 for 500 in chips with 1-2 blinds. That is, we called the white chips "1", the red chips "5", the green chips "25", and the black chips "100." A couple of the players were a bit confused by this, and wanted to understand what the cash value of each chip was. Well, that's easy enough: If £100 gets you 500 in chips, then each white (1-unit) chip is worth 1/500th of £100, or 20p ("20p" is the British notation for 20 pence - one-fifth of a pound). Then, a red 5-unit chip must be £1, a green 25-unit chip £5, and a black 100-unit chip £20.
"But that's going to be hard to keep track of," said one participant.
Being the pedant that I am, I couldn't refrain from a lecture.
"Doesn't matter," I began. "If it'll help, think of them as tournament chips. They're 1, 5, 25, and 100. If there's 100 in the pot and somebody bets 50, you're getting 3-1 pot odds. The actual value of the chips has no bearing. Our 1-unit chip could be a penny, a pound, or 100 pounds, and
your decision, whatever it is, should be exactly the same."
"You're suggesting that if I have to make this call, it doesn't matter whether the decision is for £1.50 or £150?!"
"In a poker game, it matters not a bit," I replied. "You are being offered, in my example, 3-1 pot odds. Whether the monetary value of that call represents a candy bar or a weekend in London is immaterial."
"There's no way that I'm going to have the same decision process."
"Then that's a hole in your game," I finished triumphantly.
Ultimately, the other players made me shut up and we proceeded to have a delightful time. All bets and raises were quoted in chip-unit values ("It's 120 to you …"), as if we were playing a tournament. If somebody had to rebuy, he put in another £100 and received 500 in chips. At the end of the evening, we each simply totaled up our chips and divided by five, and that's how many pounds we took out of the kitty.
During the game, though, an awful, terrible thought appeared in my head (visualize the
Dr. Seuss Grinch, planning to steal Christmas from the Who community).
"You know, you really don't need to know the buy-in when you start playing," I pondered out loud. "You could have a hat with four slips of paper in it: 1p, 20p, 50p, and 100p. Everybody buys in as many times as he wishes for 500 in chips, keeping track of each buy-in. When the evening is over, you reach into the hat and pull out a slip of paper. That piece of paper tells you the value of a 1-unit chip. Then, you settle up the cash."
Needless to say, my friends were aghast. "You wouldn't know how much money you were playing for!"
"Exactly! You would have to play your very best poker game, and not think about the real-world value of the bet or call you're making. It would remove some of the confusion and myth about the decisions we're all making at the table. It takes you closer to a pure game of poker."
Once the boos and catcalls had quieted down, we got back to more interesting topics, such as who was on the U.S. $100,000 bill (Salmon P. Chase), and who wrote
The Pina Colada Song (Rupert Holmes).
I doubt that I'll ever get anybody to actually try my idea, but it might be a great teaching vehicle for poker. To the degree that you are thinking about the spending value of a bet or call you're making, you're letting technically irrelevant factors intrude upon your poker. You will hear it said that the best poker players have no respect for money; I think this may be another way of saying the same thing.
Now, there are a couple of caveats that I need to add to the discussion before I finish:
1. Let's suppose that you are a completely disciplined player and you totally ignore the cash value of a chip that you're about to throw into the pot. That doesn't mean your opponents are the same (and, in fact, they probably aren't). As a good example, Freddie may be far more willing to bluff 100 in chips if those 100 in chips represent $1 rather than $1,000. Don't lose sight of that.
2. Depending on your bankroll, it may be correct to make decisions that offer slightly lower expected value (EV), but with the benefit of reducing variance. But if that's true, your bankroll is probably too small for the game. We've just said that you're giving up some EV to protect your bankroll from variance. If you had the proper bankroll for that game, you wouldn't have to give up the EV.
As I said, I don't really expect this "pick the buy-in after the game" format to become the new rage in home poker. But, I hope that it will give you some clarity about the decisions you make when playing poker, and perhaps help you remove one or two holes from your game.
"And you can't set your hat down, just anywhere."
Lee Jones is the poker room manager for PokerStars.com, and the author of the best-selling book Winning Low Limit Hold'em.
