Delta Force

Most arrivistes to the world of Internet poker will barely know of the existence of rec.gambling.poker, or RGP, as it was commonly referred to by its participants. This was a noncommercial, noncensored newsgroup, and was really the first mainstream place for people interested in poker to share views. Now, it is mostly a toilet, full of spam and nonsense, and the better conversations have moved to commercially owned forums. Back then, and I was there "back then" in the mid to late '90s, it was a revelation and a joy. Some of my naive and curious blunderings can still be found, although I too moved on pretty early as the garbage levels started to rapidly increase.

One of my favourite posters was a guy going by the sobriquet of Sgt. Rock. Now, this touched my heart because I read the "Easy Company" comic-strip veteran as a kid, but also, as the sewage started to build in RGP, Sgt. Rock was a clear, blue stream of insight and amusement. I think, eventually, he made a tactical withdrawal from the battlefield, and I haven't seen him since. His posts are still very much worth reading, and I heartily recommend spending some time with this military relic.

One of the points that dear Sgt. Rock once made, in a great short series on general factors in winning approaches to poker, was what he called the Delta Factor. This is a great, seemingly obvious idea, which somehow a vast marauding force of novice poker players has overlooked or just do not seem to get.

Say, for example, that you join a table of your favourite poker poison for a session. Looking up from your chips, you quickly nod an acknowledgment to your neighbour. Stunned, you realise he is you; not just like you, but exactly you in every way. Looking around the table, you see that everyone is in fact you. Each of these poker warriors is identical to you in every mannerism, play, and poker psyche. Frowning, you await your first hand. Who is going to win?

The trivial answer is, well, you. Over the long term, clearly, none of the "you's" will have any edge over their clone brothers-in-arms, and the rake will win. This is not as ridiculous a scenario as it first seems. With the wealth of information on poker now available, many players want to know what to do and how to play, but miss out on the crucial "how to think." They post questions to forums, and through the dynamic of a self-selecting group of the "usual suspects" responders, a kind of "groupthink" descends, and very standard ways of playing become the norm. They then sit down in the games of their choice and can quickly find themselves playing against very similar versions of themselves; not quite clones, but clone-ish. Where is their edge?

It is worth pointing out that there is probably a core of play or styles that is optimal. Extremes of tightness or looseness, aggression or passivity are unlikely to be winning approaches. Some games, like full-ring limit Omaha eight-or-better, for example, certainly reward a very narrow range of styles. But it is also clear that if you end up with a very prescribed style, at a certain level in your career you are going to have to add, change, or improvise some kind of "delta factor" into your game. It can be small, but even small changes can be very significant.

A very common "you versus you" example is aggression, or overaggression. Because the use of aggression is one of the first things that is talked about, even at a rudimentary level, and furthermore, clearly works in a wide range of situations, many players simply do not have any other strategy to employ. They have one bullet in the gun. What happens when you face similar aggressive players? Do you try to overaggression them? Do we enter a cold war of escalation where nuclear warheads are replaced by thinner and thinner raises? The problem with such an approach is that it becomes very high variance and requires very high levels of skill and judgement. It is hard. You might not be as good as the other "you's" at doing it. I recently responded to a post on a forum where the original poster simply did not realise that being passive could make you more money than being aggressive against a thinking but overaggressive foe. (Of course, regular readers will remember my column "Today's No-Limit Hold'em World" for more on this.)

I'm not a fan of poker fanboys, but it's clear from watching and listening to someone like Phil Ivey that he does not believe in having a fixed approach to the game. (Interestingly, it's claimed that he has not read much on poker, either.) Although some of the clips or snippets that show him in action on television show an uber-aggro-loose style, some clearly do not. I can remember him passing an overpair to a big raise on a random board in High Stakes Poker, as well as passing a flush draw that many would have pushed. These less glamourous views are mostly forgotten, and it is said that he gets enormous action in the early days of the "big dance," as people "don't want to be bullied by Ivey," when he is in fact playing a tight, sensible game. Ivey has a continual delta factor simply because he does not have a fixed battle plan, and not only does he have multiple bullets in his gun, he has bayonets fixed and covering fire from artillery.

Now, we cannot all be Phil Ivey. But, we can all think, and think about how and where we can add our own delta factor.
Semper Fi!

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, he makes a healthy second income playing a wide range of games. David is also an Omaha instructor for CardRunners.com, a leading source of online poker instructional videos.