Things You Shouldn’t Say

Los Angeles casinos share some characteristics with the biggest tourist attraction in Orange County, Disneyland. Millions of people come through their doors each year and they have plenty of characters (or Characters in Disney’s case). Often these characters are the ones who provide a living for the many professional poker players in the greater Los Angeles area. They certainly aren’t getting their scripts from any of the many talented writers in town. They seem to all have the same few set of lines that they repeat over and over again and most of them are based on logical fallacies.

“I don’t raise with (fill in premium hand here) because it always loses.”

This quote is certainly an interesting study in human psychology. It tells us a few things about our brains and how they work. First, it tells us that humans tend to remember the losses more than the wins. Things don’t change for this person. Jacks and A-K win just as much for them as they do for everyone else, but they focus on the bad things that have happened instead of the good. This is where tracking software has been so useful to the online poker player. Before Hold‘Em Manager and Poker Tracker came into existence, there was no clear data telling us how much each hand was worth on average.

Even logical thinking pros had an aversion to a hand like jacks. They too remembered all the pots they lost with that hand instead of the ones they won. Once that software fell so wonderfully into our laps, we had information and information is power. No longer were we left wondering how good of a hand jacks or A-Q are. We could see it on our screen. That hand is worth x dollars every time I get it. Cool. The second thing it tells us is that these people aren’t very good problem solvers. They think that by not raising preflop that will improve how they do with the hand. There is some logic here. If I don’t raise, I lose less money. You also don’t win as much when you come out on top, and, because there was no raise, more people will play, making it harder for your hand to win against multiple opponents. Anytime I hear someone say something similar to this I know they are a losing player.

“I knew he had X.”

The most interesting thing about hearing someone say this at the table is that it usually follows an action that indicates our character did not “know he had X.” For instance, a person might call a river bet on a board of Q-J-T-3-2 with A-J or A-T and after being shown A-K, say “I knew he had A-K.” Your logic is flawed. If you know for sure that person had A-K, why did you call? This statement is also an interesting psychological study, though I’m less sure of its implications. Is this person compensating for calling with a bad hand by trying to show off his or her hand reading skills? Are they so in tune with the holdings of their opponents, but not in control of their own actions? Perhaps it’s just a simple matter of curiosity.

The real trouble of this statement is in the use of a specific hand. Remember that we are never attempting to assign our opponent one hand, we are trying to assign them a range of hands. Throughout the hand we use the information we are given to narrow that range as much as possible, hopefully settling on a pretty clear picture of the hands our opponent can have. There are occasions where we can be very certain that one hand makes up a very large portion of that distribution, but almost never is there a situation where our opponent can have one thing and one thing only. When we start saying things like “I knew he had X,” we expose a critical flaw in our thinking, one that must be repaired.

“X is hot.”

I love hearing this coming out of my opponents’ mouths and I’ll even sometimes say it just to spark their awareness of the “phenomenon.” If the flop has recently come with a pair of nines on it several times, your opponents might actually be encouraged to play that card no matter what other card is attached to it. It’s important to remember that cards don’t have memories and neither does the shuffle machine. I know it can seem sometimes like there are patterns in the cards. There are not. There’s no need to get a new setup, have the dealer do an extra big scramble, or to ask them to shuffle after getting the cards out of the machine. People mistake the idea of randomness. They think that randomness means “always different.” In order to be statistically random, each item of a set has to have an equal chance of occurring every time an item is selected. This can sometimes result in the same item coming out several times in a row. This is the true definition of randomness and should be recognized as such even though people often have a differing opinion.

These quotes aren’t only heard in Los Angeles, but they are almost exclusively heard coming out of the mouths of lower limit players or those with less experience and perhaps a little less skill. People who understand the math and logic of poker have a better grasp of what to expect when at the table so they are less likely to be influenced by anything that happens in the short term. The problem with live poker is that the short term can last so damn long. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG