Perception and Reality

There have been several columns in Card Player over time — some from me — discussing why there are streaks of good and bad luck, explaining that it would be extremely strange statistically if luck had a nice, even flow like water coming out of a drip line. There’s a fair number of poker players who understand this concept, but in the real world, the vast majority of people seem to have no clue about this sort of thing. Here is an example:

As I write these words, the North Dakota city of Fargo just had its Red River rise to what is called a hundred-year crest height. In fact, the record height of the flood of 1897 was broken by a small margin on Friday, March 27. I am well aware of the Fargo flood threat because well-known poker tournament player Tom McCormick is a friend of mine, and he has been keeping me informed of the situation by e-mail. (The river is still about 40 feet above flood stage as I write this, and I hope the threat has passed without major problems by the time you read this.)

Here is what a statistics professor said about the public perception of the Fargo situation: “If you have a 100-year flood, people will say we had a 100-year flood in 1997, so we shouldn’t have one for another 100 years,” said professor Bernhardt Saini-Eidukat, the chairman of the department of geosciences at North Dakota State University in Fargo. But the professor said that statistically, that is wrong. Fargo could have a 100-year flood every year for 20 years, as only over the great stretch of geological time does it average out.

Other natural disasters show the same statistical variance as floods, often coming in bunches rather than being evenly spread out. Here is an example from my own life. A hurricane coming up the East Coast and striking Long Island and New England is a real rarity. The Great New England Hurricane of 1938 that smashed into Providence, Rhode Island, killing more than 600 people, is the best-known hurricane to hit the Northeast. How long did it take for another hurricane to smash into that area?

One of my most vivid memories is The Great Atlantic Hurricane, which crunched New Jersey and Long Island when I was a child. We lived in Baldwin, Long Island, at the time. Although the hurricane’s eye struck the island out in Suffolk County, our Nassau County still had Category 1 winds. There was a lake that I could see from our attic window, Silver Lake, that at the peak of the storm came almost up to Hillside Court, and the orange railings of its footbridges were mostly underwater. On Summit Road, about 200 feet from our house on Overlook Place, an electrical wire had been knocked down. After the hurricane had passed, it still lay in the road, shooting off sparks from the broken end. I was one of a crowd of children who formed a 10-foot circle around the downed wire, fascinated by the electrical display. An adult arrived on the scene and told us to get back and go home to tell our parents.

This hurricane was the Northeast’s second-worst, as measured by the loss of lives. I recently looked up the date of this hurricane, and was surprised to find that I was a mere 3 years old at the time. The date was 1944, a scant six years after the area’s worst hurricane. Natural disasters can easily come in bunches, just like poker bad beats.

Fargo has been trying to get assistance from the government for an adequate levee system for a long time. A big barrier to getting help of this nature is that extremely rare events seem to get discounted entirely in people’s minds, no matter how grave the consequences (Katrina).

So it is with poker, especially with no-limit betting. If someone hits a winning long shot when you have a big hand, the consequences are severe. Yet, it is common for a player to give a free card when holding a strong hand, because the hand is so hard to beat. (I have noticed that pros who play no-limit hold’em cash games for a living are much more likely to guard against this remote but deadly threat than the typical poker player.)

Here’s an example of failing to protect against a long shot. You are in the big blind with pocket kings and a big stack. Several players limp in and the small blind folds. You, of course, are going to raise. Let’s suppose that the game has $2-$5 blinds, and there were four callers (all participants, including you, have stacks in the $400 to $600 range), making a $27 pot to you. How much should you raise?

The experienced no-limit hold’em player knows how dangerous it is to have two kings when acting first against a large field of callers. Big fields create a treacherous situation that can put your whole stack at risk. I know that many players, perhaps a majority, would raise about $20 more here, hoping to win something reasonable by playing a big pot. This kind of thinking, I consider to be a major error. I would raise about $45 more, and shed no tears if my wager did not get called.

Suppose that you actually have raised $25 more and gotten two callers. Now the pot is about $100 and you flop top set on a board of K 9 5. Do you check or bet? The optimist checks, because he would like to feign weakness, and he sees that there is no possible flush draw or open-end straight draw. I would rarely check such a flop. Every card bigger than a 6 that does not pair the board could make a gutshot straight. You are likely to go broke if that happens. Checking, at best, has an upside of winning less than $100. Usually, checking wins nothing extra, because it looks so suspicious to raise preflop from the big blind, get only two callers, and then check.

Your poker results will improve if you guard against the hundred-year flood. The strong player considers the impact of an event, as well as its likelihood, when contemplating whether or not to make a wager. In the problem we just discussed, a check would be an even riskier play if the stacks were a grand instead of about half that amount. I will go so far as to say that one reason good tournament players often are mediocre cash-game players is that they give too many free cards, trying to be deceptive when their larger stack size asks for better protection against an unlikely but disastrous event. The next time someone makes a gutshot against your set, please remember this column. Did you protect your hand enough? Maybe you were the idiot, not the lucksack gutshot-hitter who busted you.

Bob Ciaffone has authored four poker books, Middle Limit Holdem Poker, Pot-limit and No-limit Poker, Improve Your Poker, and Omaha Poker. All can be ordered from Card Player. Ciaffone is available for poker lessons: e-mail [email protected]. His website is www.pokercoach.us, where you can get his rulebook, Robert’s Rules of Poker, for free. Bob also has a website called www.fairlawsonpoker.org.