Fast Games, Big Pots, and Bad-Beat Stories

“The game last night was awesome,” the local pro said. “Every pot was 1,000 bucks or more. It was just crazy.” He was talking about a $30-$60 limit hold’em game at Bellagio, where $1,000 is a pretty good pot.

“How did you do?” I stupidly inquired. A half-hour of bad-beat stories followed!

I have often written that the most important decision for a player is game selection, citing the old poker cliche that the 10th-best player in the world is going to go broke at a table with the nine best. Most people think the game with the biggest pots is invariably the best game. That ain’t necessarily so.

Most poker theorists do not go far enough in analyzing the game-selection process. They see it simply as getting into a game that contains bad players. They tend to overlook how your personal strengths and weaknesses relate to the texture of the game you are in. If you’re a player who is not conceptually sound at adjusting your poker strategies to the texture of the current situation, you need to utilize game selection to place yourself in a situation in which your strengths are in tune with the current texture and your weaknesses are not highlighted by how other players are playing.

Most people love limit hold’em games that are fast and have big pots. They crave the action and love the adrenaline-pumping excitement that the big swings produce; and, of course, the highs are much more enjoyable than the lows. The trials and tribulations of fast games make for great storytelling — although, the stories too often end with the teller on the rail, trying to scrounge up a buy-in from his buddies.

The texture of large-pot games dictates the style that you must play, which differs significantly from conventional-wisdom strategies. As I have often said, there is no autopilot strategy, and fast games are demonstrative of this principle.

For serious players, the game is about winning money — nothing else. If you play poker to win money, you should be judging the quality of the game in terms of expectation. A good game is one in which you are a favorite to make the most money. A game with opponents who play only A-A or K-K and never defend their blinds will be more profitable over time than one in which the pots are huge but the players correctly adjust their strategies to the wild texture of the game. It may not be as much fun to play, but you will rob their blinds endlessly and be able to routinely fold correctly.

Big-pot games are not always as good as they appear to be. The pots get large because there is so much preflop raising and calling, making the flop price to draw small in comparison to the size of the pot. One bad player’s call makes another player’s bad call that much better. Their incorrect individual plays together become correct, or at least more correct, although they generally do not understand this.

The price that the pot lays your opponents who like to draw to any win is always better in a large pot, and many of those players make the same call in smaller pots, when the price that the pot is laying them is much smaller, thereby making their mistake that much greater.

When you are facing large preflop bets, you need to be more careful about the price that you are receiving on your preflop decisions. Your implied price can be large, but it’s an equation that is relative to your preflop risk.

If the preflop entry price is great, many hands that you would like to play in volume pots for a single bet, because of the implied price that you receive from building a large pot post-flop, are no longer playable. The fact that you must now fold many of these hands reduces your volume and thereby reduces your expected win rate.

Long-shot draws become priced right when the pot is laying you enormous odds.

Folding the winner when the pot is large is a major mistake, one to be avoided even at a great deal of cost. The price to pay off a pot is greatly enhanced, causing you to toss in more calls to keep people honest, and creating correct calling opportunities when you can beat only a small portion of your opponents’ range, as you win the pot when they are betting the bottom portion of their range. This translates into much more marginal calling and much bigger swings.

If you’re a player who has trouble maintaining emotional stability through the large swings that you must expect in these types of games, you might want to avoid them. If how you run in a game affects your life outside the game, you need to be very careful in picking big-pot situations — as a big loss can send you to the shrink!

These games require a larger bankroll, as well, because of the enormous swings. You can lose an amount in one night that might take you weeks to make up in more traditional games.

With a bit of luck — the swings of these games require some short-term luck — the stories that you tell of your fast games won’t end with you trying to scrounge up a buy-in on the rail.

Longtime poker pro and author Roy Cooke’s Card Player column has appeared since 1992. A successful Las Vegas real estate broker since 1990, his website is www.roycooke.com. Should you wish to inquire regarding real-estate matters — including purchase, sale, or mortgage — his phone number is (702) 396-6575. Roy’s longtime collaborator John Bond’s website is www.johnbondwriting.com.