Every racket and bat-and-ball game has the concept of a sweet spot. It's that confluence of just the right timing with just the perfect meeting of surfaces to produce magic: home run; six; ace. Competitors in these games strive to find and meet the sweet spot. The conventional wisdom is that for the poker player, there is no sweet spot - that a good poker player can adapt to any game and circumstance. It's survival of the fittest, even when the jungle and the animals change. In fact, a kind of perpetual joke on some forums is the cry of the neophyte that he "can't play with all these crazy, dumb, wild players … I need a
proper game to win" - to which he is normally subjected to a torrent of Internet-style abuse, Internet-speak one-liners and picture-only posts. LOL. O RLY?
But maybe there is more to this than meets the eye. Maybe there is some kind of sweet spot of player and game.
My first spell as a poker pro ended ignominiously. Although, by the standards of the day, I had won well, I had spent better, and I was compelled to return to the world of work, this time 200 miles away from my spiritual home in the North to the "streets are paved in gold" South of England. Eventually, I found myself in a local poker school and sunk my teeth into regular tournaments and cash games. These teeth were promptly kicked in. Although I did well in the tournaments, as I had in the North, I was routinely battered in the cash games - so much so that an infamous private-game host invited me to his special amateur-only domain. In luxurious settings, this game included only millionaires or fish.
I was not a millionaire.
As an additional amusing anecdote, a local pro, hearing of the invite, warned me away from playing. At the time, I thought it was because the game involved cheating. As years passed, and some small wisdom was gained, I realised that he just did not want to see this nice young kid on the scene go broke.
How had this happened? How had I gone from winner to loser in one smooth, easy stroke? One answer is that the players were a lot better, and outclassed me. There is certainly a large degree of truth to this. A more accurate diagnosis was that the style of play I had developed, whilst fine-tuned for fleecing overaggressive or poor players, was not fit for purpose versus players who had at the minimum a reasonable grasp of the game and did not go on explosive tilt every third hand. This struck home in a multiway pot-limit Omaha hand in a post-tournament cash game. A pot that was tiny suddenly crashed into life on the turn, with three players, including myself, suddenly going all in. I had the nut straight. The player to my right asked what my freeroll was. Silent, I twitched embarrassingly. Everyone had other outs to improve, except me. I was essentially the dead money in the pot, freerolling everyone else.
(For those of you who must see how the story after the story ends, I did rebuild my game and basically abandoned tournament play almost altogether, playing cash games exclusively, first live and then online, with some small success.)
A lot of these memories started to percolate through my mind as I recently played some smaller-stakes no-limit hold'em. Unfortunately, real-life expenditures had eaten away at my bankroll and I was compelled to step down in stakes. The first thing that struck me was how much tighter these games were compared to the stakes just a level or two higher. Not only was the style of poker chalk and cheese, but even the incidence of a complete lemon sitting down with no clue whatsoever seemed much higher than in the lower stakes. Plays from one game would be disastrous in the other. I also knew, from previous experience, that the games above the middle stakes changed in nature once again. How would a player moving through these stakes cope? It is clear that he will have to restructure his game pretty quickly or find himself moving down in stakes again. But how many players are capable of this? How many players can seriously overcome the weight of experience and their own tendencies to play in a drastically different way? A player who might have the perfect game for a middle-stakes level may simply never get there because he can't beat the lower game and can't change the style he currently has. Conversely, I suspect that some players will make more money in lower-stakes games, which they beat comfortably, than trying to take on different stakes that do not suit their temperament or style.
This is really an argument for serious record-keeping and continuing vigilance in how you are playing and how successful that playing really is. A cash-game player should keep records of not only wins and losses, but how he performs at different stakes and how comfortable he feels playing in different styles of games. Self-awareness is key. Finding that sweet spot can be priceless, and both more satisfying and more profitable than trying to rebuild a game in order to move it to an artificially higher level or a completely different style of play. From experience, I know that is not easy.
Freeroll, anyone?
David has played poker all over the UK for the better part of a decade. Originally a tournament player, now focused on cash play and almost entirely on the Internet for the last three years, David makes a healthy second income playing a wide range of games.
