Heads Up With Andrew Brokos

Andrew “Foucault” Brokos is known for his knowledge of the game and experience in shorthanded no-limit hold’em cash games. He also cashed in three consecutive World Series of Poker main events (2006-2008), including a 35th-place finish in 2008, for $193,000. He’s also an instructor for Card Player Pro (powered by PokerSavvy Plus).

Kristy Arnett: Please discuss throwing some wrinkles into your game and what you can do to open up your play and experiment a little.

Andrew Brokos: I think a big problem that a lot of people settle into is playing mechanically. People who play a lot of tables, especially, tend to do this. It’s good for your hourly rate to play a lot of tables, but you do tend to fall into playing mechanically. When you are playing against a lot of the same people, and they are paying attention to that, it’s something that they are going to be able to take advantage of. And if they are kind of playing the same way that you are, you don’t really have any kind of edge on them. If all of you are open-raising with the same hands from the same positions and three-betting the same hands, all you are doing is passing money around, and maybe waiting for someone to go on tilt or make a few mistakes.

If you look over the history of online poker, the people who have made a lot of money in the games are people who started doing something that no one else was doing. A really good example of this took place back in the PartyPoker days. A guy with the screen name “BloodSweatTears” and a few other people started to figure out that people gave way too much respect to three-bets, because back then, people three-bet only queens, kings, aces, and A-K. He realized that if he just started three-betting people brutally in position and with everything, no one was going to know what to do about it. Those people killed the games for a few months. It really took probably a year for most of the poker world to catch up to that. Now, it’s incredibly common, even in the small-stakes six-max games.

What I would recommend for a lot of people, especially if you feel like your game is in a little bit of a rut, is to start doing something that you don’t ordinarily do. It might even be things that you think only bad players would do. It might be min-betting, min-check-raising, limping into pots, four-betting cold in a spot where you wouldn’t normally do it, overbetting the pot, underbetting the pot, and so on. Do something that is not only not part of your mechanical strategy, but not part of your opponent’s mechanical strategy, either. Your opponents are probably very accustomed to dealing with someone who raises their big blind from the button. They know how to deal with that situation. They’ve been in it a million times. They know how to deal with people three-betting them. They don’t necessarily know how to deal with someone overbetting the turn when it pairs, or something else that they’ve never seen before. A lot of times, people are going to make some kind of mistake. Certainly, it’s better if you have a plan, but I think that sometimes you can put yourself in an interesting spot. You can say, “I’m going to overbet this pot here and see what this guy does, just to see how he responds to it.” Then, you can throw it into your game a few more times and see how it’s working for you, and think through it after the session. How did it work out? Were you using it in the right spot? What made it a good spot? Why did it work? Why didn’t it work? How did the guy respond? How can you adapt to his adaptation? All of that is what gets you thinking about the game, rather than just going through the motions and doing what you saw someone do in a video.