The OODA Loop

In certain circles, I'm known as King of the Acronym, or KOTA. After all, I'm the guy who gave the world ICTAFCOA (increasing commitment to a failing course of action), LPOOP (little pairs out of position), and LIGARA (like I give a rat's ass). And while I would love to claim credit for the acronym you see in the title of this column, that honor goes to fighter pilot and military strategist John Boyd, and comes to me by way of Grady Talbot, former fighter pilot, savage poker player, and all-around good guy. Since I'm always looking for new ways to think about poker (and always just two stumbly steps ahead of my deadlines), I share with you now the OODA loop -- Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. We'll start with a highly simplified explanation of the loop, which, trust me, doesn't nearly do justice to this complex and elegant train of thought.

Imagine that you're flying a fighter jet and are closing in on some unknown foe at speeds approaching (this is just a rough approximation) a jillion miles an hour. Obviously, you need to observe, orient, decide, and act pretty damn fast, but here's the interesting thing: Regardless of your relative skills or the performance characteristics of your respective planes, whoever gets through the OODA loop fastest will likely win the fight. Why? Because the slower party will soon be making adjustments to circumstances that no longer exist. He zigs when you zag, and by the time he zags, you're, I don't know, off zogging somewhere. He's trying to play catch-up, but he can't catch up because he's reacting to events that are already in the past. And at a jillion miles an hour, events get into the past fast.

Naturally, in poker, we're not approaching our foes at a jillion miles an hour. Nevertheless, we're all engaged in OODA loops of one form or another, and if you can get inside your opponent's loop -- make decisions and execute plans faster than he does -- you're giving yourself a powerful edge. Let's examine this through the very common situation of a hyperaggressive player who's abusing position by raising from the button every time.

Observe: You notice this very aggressive player raising big and blowing limpers off their hands.

Orient: You note that you'll be under the gun when this fighter jet next has the button.

Decide: You decide to limp in with a hand that you would otherwise fold.

Act: You limp-reraise and successfully capture his button-raise with a bluff.

Now, let's say that your foe takes note of the move, and although he folds to your raise this time, he plans to three-bet you the next time that you try the same trick. Ah, but you're already out ahead of him -- as you won't try the same trick. Instead, you'll mostly go back to folding hands that should be folded and deny your now-alert foe the chance to play back at you. However, if you get a little situational luck and pick up a big pocket pair in early position, you can essay what looks like another limp-reraise bluff and take him off his stack with a real hand. In other words, you're making an adjustment to the adjustment that you anticipate him making. While he's planning his counterattack to move A, you've already moved on to move B. By the time he focuses on B, you're somewhere up at C, or, in fact, at the entire other end of the alphabet.

Here's another example of OODA thinking in action. Recently, I was in a heads-up match against a player who saw me betting about two-thirds of the pot into every textured flop, and then the full pot on the turn when the texture missed. I imagined that he thought I was betting with nothing (which was true), and I figured that he'd soon play back at me to "punish me for my thievin' ways." On the next textured board, I made my standard flop bet, and bet again on the turn when the texture missed. As if following a script, he raised big, putting me all in. Being inside his decision loop, I was quite confident in calling him down with middle pair. This so frustrated him that he soon bluffed off the rest of his chips and, basically, handed me the match. Here we see the direct benefit of OODA thinking (you get reliably inside your opponents' heads) and the indirect benefit, as well (it really ticks them off!).

Here are some common situations in which OODA thinking would put you ahead of the curve:

• You've been pushing the big blind around from the small blind, but just as the big blind is prepared to make a stand, you take your foot off the gas.
• A full table is temporarily short of players. Being the first to ratchet up your aggressiveness, you dominate this shorthanded situation.
• A player is bluffing too much, so you shift into check-call mode to exploit him. When he desists, you start betting to take pots away.
• A savvy player runs a stop-and-go on you from early position, but you recognize it as such and play back at him.
• At the money bubble of a major tournament, someone is attacking the players who are afraid of missing a payday. You make an OODA adjustment and start attacking the attacker.

The next time you play poker, look for opportunities to observe, orient, decide, and act more swiftly than those around you. Winning poker, it is said, is the accumulation of small edges, and while we think mostly in terms of money edges, skill edges, or odds edges, there's also such a thing as a time edge. If you're more nimble in your thinking -- faster -- than your foes, they'll end up routinely and frustratingly trying to hit a target that's no longer there. Time will literally be on your side. And even if it weren't, wouldn't thinking about your poker in such direct and situation-specific ways be a boon to your play? If nothing else, you'll be more mentally engaged in the game, and what's not to like about that?

I'll close with a quote from John Boyd's original Patterns of Conflict presentation: "In order to win, we should operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than our adversaries -- or, better yet, get inside the adversary's Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action time cycle or loop. Such activity will make us appear ambiguous (unpredictable), and thereby generate confusion and disorder among our adversaries -- since our adversaries will be unable to generate mental images or pictures that agree with the menacing as well as faster transient rhythm or patterns they are competing against."

I don't know how that pays off in air combat, but it sure works a treat in poker.

John Vorhaus is the author of the Killer Poker book series. He resides in cyberspace at vorza.com, and in the blogosphere at somnifer.typepad.com.