Total Recall

A horse walks into a bar and orders a drink. The bartender asks, “Why the long face?” Sorry, wrong joke. Two poker players walk into a bar and order drinks. One is tall and seems happy; let’s call him Jeff. The other is small and seems depressed; let’s call him Mutt. Before the bartender can ask Mutt why he has a long face, he says, “I had kings. I flopped a set, and lost my whole stack when this moron hit a straight flush on the river.” He then looks around aggressively for sympathy.

Jeff, his friend, says, “I remember the hand. Everybody had around 100 big blinds. The guy under the gun folded, and you were next and flat-called. The cutoff and button players both limped, the small blind came along for the ride, and the big blind was already in, making it a five-way pot. The flop was K 6 5. The small blind checked, and you bet about four times the big blind. The cutoff called, and the small blind check-raised to about 10 times the big blind. You and the cutoff called. The turn was the 3. The small blind led out for 20 big blinds, you called, and the cutoff, Sidney, who is old and plays very tightly, went all in. The small blind thought for a while and called. You called like a shot. You and he both had about 15 big blinds left. The river was the 9. The small blind bet his last 15. You shrugged and said something about the pot being too big to fold. He showed the 8 7. You were moaning about your set, and probably didn’t even see that the cutoff had the A 2.”

“So?” says Mutt. He orders another round, but tells Jeff that he has to pay. “I’m tapped out, and you won,” says Mutt.

Jeff responds, “Sure. Now let’s talk about the hand.” Mutt says that he wants to try to forget about it, since it is too depressing.

I will analyze this hand later, but my main point in this column is to discuss the difference in the thought processes of these two poker players. Mutt is relatively oblivious. He remembers only that he lost with a set of kings when someone hit a straight flush on the river. He doesn’t focus on the way the hand was played and when the money went in. Jeff remembers exactly how the action went. If you asked him, he would be able to go into even more detail about the playing styles of everyone at the table. When you think and/or talk about poker hands, are you more like Mutt or more like Jeff? In order to eliminate mistakes and improve your play, you must be more like Jeff. He wasn’t even in the hand, yet he still has a better idea of what happened than the guy who lost his whole stack.

One of the great strengths of the best poker players is that they have a phenomenal memory for exactly what occurred in every important hand. (Near the end of this year’s World Series of Poker, John Juanda mentioned a hand that I misplayed in the pot-limit Omaha tournament two weeks earlier. Can you imagine how many hands he must have added to his memory bank during this year’s tournament?) This benefits them in two ways. Obviously, it is much easier for them to analyze their own play. You can’t really look for things that you could have done better if you don’t remember exactly what you did, and why. The other benefit that great players derive from their accurate recall is that they develop an almost uncanny ability to figure out what their opponents are doing. They are capable of watching what is happening during a hand and matching their opponent’s behavior to some previous patterns that they observed. A famous philosopher once remarked, “Those who don’t learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.”

If you have difficulty developing this sort of total recall, you definitely should work on it. First, you have to pay careful attention, even when you are not in a hand. You can’t remember something that you didn’t notice in the first place. Second, replay the hand in your head. Try to be as specific as possible. Focus on chip-stack sizes, betting patterns, behavior, and anything the key participants did or said during the hand. If you are on a tournament break or decide to take a quick break on your own, you may find it beneficial to jot down your impressions of some key hands. If you are friendly with other players in the game, go out for a drink and discuss the hands. See if they have some insights that you might have missed, or if they disagree with you about the correct play of some hands. Part of the reason that the old Mayfair Club in New York produced so many excellent players (Dan Harrington, Howard Lederer, Erik Seidel, Mickey Appleman, Jay Heimowitz, and so on) was that they often discussed hands in detail with each other. Playing online poker makes reviewing hands even easier. I often use Full Tilt Poker’s instant-replay feature to review exactly what my opponent had and what he did.

Now I will try to briefly analyze the hand described earlier in this column. Limping in with kings from early position is fine, but dangerous. It is especially dangerous when you get a lot of limpers and miss the flop. Mutt was lucky enough to hit his set, but any flop with three of a suit should cause him concern, especially when he was check-raised. The turn added straight potential to the hand, and Mutt had only one card left (the river) to fill up. There is a case to be made for folding here, rather than getting most of his stack into the pot with, at most, 10 outs. Why do I say at most? One of his opponents might have the flush with the 3 in his hand, and the other might have a set, too. Then, he’d have only seven outs. On the river, when Mutt called his last 15 big blinds, the pot had around 250 in it. He was getting almost 20-1. I know it is hard to turn down that price, but in reality, his chance of winning the main pot was probably at least 100-1, and his chance of winning the side pot was better, but not near enough to justify the call. Those last chips represented about 15 percent of his stack, a substantial savings.

Steve “Zee” Zolotow, aka The Bald Eagle, is a successful games player. He currently devotes most of his time to poker. He can be found at many major tournaments and playing on Full Tilt, as one of its pros. When escaping from poker, he hangs out in his bars on Avenue A — Nice Guy Eddie’s at Houston and Doc Holliday’s at 9th Street — in New York City.