The Last Temptation of LAG

As any of my faithful readers will no doubt now realise, I am what is often termed a "working Joe." I have been a pro on several occasions, but by and large, I like keeping work as work and poker as a (hopefully) profitable hobby. I was fortunate enough, perhaps unfortunate is the right word, to be working in the Internet world during the time of the dot-com bubble. One of the things that tickled me was the huge array of acronyms, driven mostly from chat usage. They are now more than standard to every ambidextrously thumbed kid tapping on a mobile, but the discovery of ROFLMAO and its like tickled me tremendously at the time, and increased that sense of being part of something "different."

Poker has a whole bunch of fledgling TLAs -- three-letter acronyms -- and a couple that I took some time to understand were LAG and TAG. Of course, these aren't really acronyms, as they stand for Loose-AGgressive and Tight-AGgressive, respectively. There not being a standard poker acronym dictionary, I assumed the "G" was for "good," and I created my own versions, LAP and TAP, in which the "P" was for "poor." This never really caught on, mostly because I never told anyone. LAG and TAG remain with us to this day, with LAG strangely gaining a kind of mystique or ascendancy over its more mundane TAG brother. Players talk, proudly, of "lagging it up" and seem to view the whole thing in tortoise versus hare terms, but with the hare not only beating the tortoise this time, but getting the champagne and Courvoisier, P Diddy lifestyle, to boot. LAG is kicking back on the sunseeker on the Riviera with the ladies; TAG is Bob Cratchit fumbling for coal and working the accounts by candlelight.

Part of this romanticizing of LAG has been the stellar, supernova ascendancy of online "über players," winning and losing millions of dollars a month, and invariably they play, or claim to play, a LAG style. These superstars seem to be encouraging whole swathes of arrivistes to play ever looser and take ever-increasing risks with their bankrolls. One example brought this home to me only a short while ago. At the start of the month in question, our hero forum poster was talking about hands in the biggest, regular Omaha high-low limit game on the Net. By the end of this same month, he declared he was broke. Now, either he took insane risks with his bankroll in the first place or he had just lost $50,000 and rising. Now, this isn't even a medium pot for the über players, but is enough for a limit grinder to work his way to a six-figure annual income. And now, nothing.

The problem with these über players is that they are a prime example of the old adage of history being written by the victors. For every superstar bursting into the big games, many thousands burn out on the way. A good percentage of them do not recover. Poker on the Internet is neither scaleable in the sense of the spread of games nor in the sense of transferring skills. The gap between the big game you were good at and the next game beneath it may be massive. Just because a player crossed the divide once does not mean he will do so again. Similarly, a player may find that his skills, styles, and attributes much more suit one group of players and hence one stake of games than another. Whereas it is easy to say change your game, this is not trivial in practice, and many fail. People naturally percolate to the levels at which they are most successful, but if those levels are many times bigger than the stakes you are playing, you simply may never get there -- or worse, get there only once. Lastly, there is the emotional impact. If you have been playing in one of the biggest games on the Net, with a six-figure bankroll, and suddenly find yourself playing at one-twentieth of the stakes or worse, this can be very hard to get over. Ego, peer pressure, and coping with pots that were rounding errors in previous halcyon times are not happy bedfellows.

Back before the Internet explosion -- my, those were the days -- I remember watching one of the very first über players taking on all comers at heads-up limit hold'em. It was clear that he was a prodigy. I once described it, a little gushingly, as watching God play heads up. But this was not so much God, rather a Job with a whole heap of trials potentially waiting to be inflicted on him. Why was this? Because the next-nearest heads-up limit action was one-tenth of the size. Now either our prodigy took a huge leap of faith, or despite his clear skill advantage, he was blessedly lucky. But the fact remains that if he had run bad, he could have had a catastrophe of biblical proportions.

Professional players must see their bankrolls as being this important. Losing your ability to play at the highest stakes you can play is bad; losing everything so that you have to start again can be a blow that becomes impossible to recover from. There is an alternative, less glamorous but more structured and safe. Keep your self-same, mostly TAG game, but instead take limited "shots" at the larger game. That is, in the words of professional investors, run your profits but cut your losses. Take a small, restricted amount of money to the big game, and if you lose it, step back down. If you do not, play on. A player serious about his poker playing should treat his bankroll as sacred, and resist all temptation otherwise.

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.