Some More Ways to Say It

I've written lengthy columns in this space about my overriding philosophy of poker tournaments, but I can actually sum up that philosophy in one sentence: Get as many chips as you can, as often as you can, in whatever way you can. Do you agree or disagree? Maybe you're unsure. If so, I ask you, if an opponent moves all in on the first hand of the tournament, and he flips his hand over, revealing A-K, would you call with two queens (assuming that everyone else has folded)? This is the standard test question to gauge a tournament player's philosophy. My view is that you should call with the queens, and that it's not particularly close. I wrote a column about it ("To Flip or Not to Flip"; Vol. 18/No. 22).

My argument for calling with the queens is essentially that if you have a 57 percent chance of winning when you need only a 50 percent chance of winning to show a profit, your edge is far too big to consider passing. Like most of my arguments, this one is numbers-based, and it's one that many find convincing. But some players, particularly feel-based players, or players who care a lot about finishing in the money, or players who are just math-phobic, are unswayed. I'd like to address this column to the unconvinced among my readers. I'll try to explain my tournament poker philosophy using non-poker examples. Numbers will still appear, but you won't have to rely solely on the numbers to grasp my point, as I'll try to throw in other evidence, as well. Here we go.

First, consider a professional sports bettor. He makes his living handicapping the games, looking for inefficiencies in the lines, and backing his opinions with his money. He's in a difficult position, because he typically needs to win more than 52.4 percent of his bets just to beat the juice taken by the house. But if he's good, he'll bet every time he thinks he has an edge, and his win rate will be between 55 percent and 60 percent (sports bettors who claim higher long-term win rates are almost certainly lying or falling victim to small-sample-size errors), and he will make a nice living for himself. Now imagine if you told this sports bettor that he should bet only when he has a greater than 57 percent chance of winning. He'll have almost no games left to bet, and he'll have to start looking for real work. The few bets he finds that are strong enough to meet the 57 percent criteria won't be enough for him to earn his living. The poker tournament analogue is, if you wait too long for the perfect spots, you won't be able to gather enough chips to make a serious run at winning -- and winning is where all of the money is.

Or, how about a blackjack player? If you read the book Bringing Down the House (or, God forbid, saw the movie 21), you know the story of how some MIT students got rich by beating blackjack. What kind of edge did they have? A blackjack player never has an edge of more than a few percentage points over the house, no matter how well he counts cards or signals his teammates. Yet, blackjack players can earn large sums of money by making big bets with just the smallest of advantages. Sure, sometimes they take big losses this way, but over the long run, they clean up. Pushing a small edge in blackjack is a tactic so feared by the house that people get banned from casinos for even trying it. If every blackjack player decided to sit out because a 51 percent chance of winning was just too small, casinos would have much less reason to eighty-six card counters. We make money in gambling by wagering with an advantage -- period. It's tempting to think that poker is an exception to the gambling rule, in which you can have an edge much greater than a blackjack player or sports bettor, so a whole new approach is needed. Unless you've already found yourself winning many poker tournaments with the "wait for a big edge" strategy, I suggest that you lower yourself to the level of the blackjack millionaire and start making your money the way the rest of the gambling world does it. The path to making this money will involve suffering many losses as you go, but the end result is all that matters.

Small edges add up fast. Gaming giants like Harrah's have built an empire based on those edges. It would be great if we all could just wait for our A-A to be up against some other guy's K-K. The problem is, it could just as easily be us with the kings against the other guy's aces. That's another thing about building a chip stack by exploiting small edges -- it sure makes it easier to survive after you run into a big hand, or take a bad beat.

To sum up, my poker tournament philosophy is that if you can make a sound investment -- an investment similar to many that have proven hugely successful in all walks of gambling life -- there really isn't a good reason to pass up that investment. If someone told you that you could legally count cards in blackjack and legally vary your bet size as much as you wanted, you would learn how to do these things and you would get rich. If someone told you that he had a surefire system for picking 57 percent winners for the next 10 baseball seasons, you would use his system and you would get rich. And if someone shows you his A-K after he moved all in, you should call with your two queens and take your chances.

Matt Matros is the author of The Making of a Poker Player, which is available online at www.CardPlayer.com. He is also a featured coach for stoxpoker.com.