Reverse Poker

What is the most common mistake made by poker players? Probably, taking action with inadequate values. But aside from that, the most common error made by my clients (only when they first start taking lessons from me) is betting too little with their good hands.

A good poker hand is hard to get. When you have a good hand, it is human nature to want to get action, instead of having your opponents fold, leaving you to win only a pittance. To get action, many players holding a good hand check when they should bet, call when they should raise, and bet a smaller rather than a larger amount. The idea is that the less money they put into the pot, the more likely their opponent is to stay in. I find this strategy to be unnatural, as well as detrimental. To me, it is normal to want more money to go into the pot when you have a good hand than when you have a fragile hand. So, I think of this faulty strategy as “reverse poker.”

The psychology that makes reverse poker attractive is easy to understand. Poker is a game in which it is important to fool your opponent. Acting weak for a while when an opponent shows the desire to run with the ball in the betting is essentially the same feeling that a martial-arts expert might get when a bully who has no clue what he is up against starts to show aggressive physical behavior. Someone is about to be given a comeuppance and shown where the power really resides.

But slow-playing with reverse poker is not the only way to get your jollies. I happen to be fond of betting my strong hands all the way, getting called by a slightly weaker hand all the way, then having my opponent turn to the guy next to him and asking, “Where could I have folded?” The answer oftentimes is, “There was nothing you could do.” (The answer also may well be, “You should have folded preflop,” but we’ll save that one for another column.)

A big problem if you do not pull the trigger for a while during the early betting rounds is that your opponent may outdraw you. A player needs to protect his good hands against a drawout. One of the most common types of big swings is when a player who could not call a solid bet gets an attractive price and draws out, then gets paid off. It is not fun to flop a set and have everyone fold when you bet, but it is a lot worse when they get priced into the pot and put a beat on you. So, protect your hand.

Defending against a drawout is not the only problem with piddling around in the betting. Another reason to bet your strong hands is to avoid losing your market. This is what may happen when your opponent has a good hand, one with which he might have gone for a sleigh ride, but a scary situation develops on the board and he bails out instead of paying you off. Oftentimes, the scare card is a third card in the suit of the two-flush that came on the flop. A three-flush dampens the action like grandparents at a teenager’s party. Ardor cools and the natural course of the situation is changed.

I don’t know why certain pessimists assume that an opponent will have a hand that cannot take any heat. Even though there are a lot more bad hands than good, the payoff is so large when your strong hand runs into one that is only a notch weaker that it pays to make sure that an opponent who does hold a good hand that’s worse than yours pays through the nose, instead of risking that a scare card will hit and kill most of the action.

I think a lot of the players who usually play reverse poker with their big hands pick up this bad habit by playing too much short-stack poker. Failure to double up is a far bigger crime in deep-stack poker than in a game full of shortstops. That scare card presenting a possible flush may not kill the action when a player has bet half of his stack when making a pot-size bet after the flop.

You need to appreciate the effect of making a cheap bet when you have a strong hand. If on the flop there’s a straight draw or a flush draw on the board, and your opponent makes a straight or a flush, it is likely to cost you a lot of money. I have seen players rant and rave at their “lucky” opponent when that player calls a sum in excess of the actual pot odds and then draws out on the turn. With more betting to come, and you holding a strong hand, the opponent’s call may well be fully justified after the implied odds are considered.

I once did a mathematical study of how many outs you would need in order to justify calling a pot-size bet on the turn if there was a pot-size bet available for all of the chips to go in on the river. My conclusion at the time was that the leverage of a river bet with both players using optimum game theory was such that the would-be caller needed only two-thirds the number of outs that the actual pot odds dictated. My math may or may not have been correct, but there is no question that the existence of a possible river bet by the person drawing means that he is in a substantially more favorable situation than if his call put him all in.

There is one more aspect of the decision of how much to bet that I believe is important but often totally ignored. I have heard it said by some well-known poker authorities that as long as you bet enough to lay an opponent a bad price, you are protecting your hand properly and do not need to chastise yourself if he is lucky enough to draw out. I totally disagree with this line of thinking, and here is why:

Let’s suppose that you somehow knew your opponent’s holding, and over 10 hands were able to bet $1 more than he ought to call (taking into account both the pot odds and the implied odds). Let’s also suppose that he was a bad player. By making incorrect calls, he would have blown a mere $10 by playing as poorly as possible. Suppose, on the other hand, that I bet anywhere from $10 to $100 more than my opponent should call. Well, my opponents do not play perfect poker. In the real world, I would do much better than you, because I gave my opponent the opportunity to make big mistakes; you did not. Wimpy-size bets let an opponent make only wimpy-size mistakes. I will add the fact that my bets with strong hands will look more natural than yours, because I have to bet bigger with those hands to protect them, so I am harder to read than you are.
Bet bigger and win more!

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 (autographed to you) from Bob by e-mail: [email protected]. Free U.S. shipping to Card Player readers. Ciaffone is available for poker lessons at a reasonable rate. 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.