'Acceptable' Ways to Lose

If you take poker seriously, there are many ways of losing a no-limit hold'em tournament that you should consider unacceptable. Here are just a few examples:

1. You call a large all-in preflop raise with the Q J because you can't bear to fold such a pretty hand.

2. The tightest player at your table goes all in on the river, and you call him with only top pair because you think this is the one time in his life that he's bluffing.

3. You move all in from the button for 5,000 with rags, trying to steal 150 in blinds, and the big blind wakes up with pocket aces.

In all of those cases and many similar ones, you might blame bad luck, or you might claim that the odds were in your favor when they weren't. If you find yourself thinking that way, you need to be more objective. In order to improve your chances in future tournaments, you must realize that you took unnecessary risks, and basically got what you deserved.

On the other hand, you could lose in what I would consider an "acceptable" manner. When I refer to acceptable ways to lose, I don't mean just getting all in with the best hand and having your opponent draw out on you, although that is often both acceptable and unavoidable. I'm also referring to voluntarily putting your money in with the worst hand. As strange as it sounds, it often can be the correct play, even when you get knocked out.

Let's face it, if you are one of a thousand players to enter a no-limit hold'em tournament, you might get very lucky and win it all, but realistically, you can expect to be one of the 999 who are eliminated at some point. Not all eliminations are created equal. Being ousted in an acceptable manner demonstrates that you were exercising solid tournament strategy, which bodes well for your long-term success, and also should be a great boost for your confidence.

You might be wondering why acceptable vs. unacceptable elimination is a distinction even worth making. I assure you that it's an important subject because many players, especially newer ones, take the survival concept to the extreme. It's true that tournament poker is about survival, but it also involves taking certain calculated risks. When you become too concerned with avoiding elimination, you too often end up either folding the best hand or folding when you are getting favorable pot odds to improve. Plus, you are taking yourself out of situations in which you have the chance to accumulate chips. Taken together, all of those factors severely hurt your chances of making it deep into the money, and in any standard tournament, that should be your primary goal.

"But wait a minute, Matt," I can hear you saying. "Let's say you're heads up in a pot, you fold, and it turns out that your opponent had you beat. Then, weren't you correct to fold?" Even ignoring the concept of pot odds, I would tell you that this is not necessarily true. You are correct to fold if you can somehow tell, with a high degree of certainty, that you are beat. However, if there is enough of a chance that you are folding the best hand, you could be hurting yourself in the long run, even if you were correct in that particular instance.

Here's a simple example to demonstrate what I mean: In the middle stages of a tournament, everyone folds to you on the button, and you raise to three times the big blind with K-K. The small blind folds. The big blind looks at his hand, looks at your stack, and quickly moves all in. He has you covered, so if you call and lose, you're gone.

Clearly, you have an automatic call here. The big blind could have pocket aces, but he also could have plenty of other hands. Your button raise looks like a steal attempt, so the big blind's range should be fairly wide. He probably will put you all in with most pocket pairs or any big ace, plus there's always the chance that he's attempting a resteal with rags. In short, any thought of folding kings would be foolish.

But let's assume that this is your first-ever poker tournament, and all you want to do is survive as long as possible. You are pretty sure that you have the best hand, but not 100 percent sure, so you lay down your pocket kings. The big blind gives a disappointed, "Aw," and shows his pocket aces. You give a big smile and congratulate yourself on your brilliant laydown. Of course, in reality, there was nothing brilliant about it. You should have called, but instead you folded when you figured to be a heavy favorite. This was perhaps the one time in 20 that your opponent had pocket aces. Basically, you got lucky by making the wrong play at the right time.

In that regard, this is very similar to the scenario I described at the very beginning: calling a large all-in raise with the Q J. Let's say you make that call, your opponent turns up the Q Q, but you make a straight to win. You made the wrong play by calling, but the results made everything seem OK. Everyone is quick to berate someone for making this type of bad call, but you rarely see someone get criticized for making an equally bad fold, mainly because we don't usually get to see the cards that were folded. But between the two situations I described, I'd rate folding the kings as the much worse mistake. In both cases, you made the wrong play, but with the Q J, you are at least giving yourself a chance to get lucky and accumulate chips. With the K-K laydown, you are making the ultimate weak-tight play, and you can't expect to have any tournament success by playing weak-tight.

The point I am making is that going all in preflop with K-K against A-A is clearly an acceptable way to lose a tournament. There are some rare instances when you can get away from K-K preflop, perhaps very early in a major tournament, but not often. For what it's worth, I've folded K-K preflop three times in 12 years, and each time I was correct, but that demonstrates how rarely you can expect to do it. If you start looking for too many situations to fold K-K preflop, not only will you end up folding it as the best hand too often, but you will be adopting a mindset that virtually guarantees terrible tournament results.

By examining K-K vs. A-A, I chose a very obvious example of an acceptable way to lose, but there are many more of them, and not all of them are as simple. Next time, I'll discuss some more of these acceptable losing scenarios, and why you should welcome them as part of a healthy lifetime of tournaments, rather than looking for ways to avoid every single one of them.

Matt Lessinger is the author of The Book of Bluffs: How to Bluff and Win at Poker, available everywhere. You can find other articles of his at www.CardPlayer.com.