Conflicting Ideas

I’ve churned out a lot of columns in my day, but how many exactly is “a lot?” I recently became curious about this question and decided to investigate. Lo and behold, I discovered that in March of this year, my 100th Card Player Magazine column was published. That seemed impossible! I didn’t know I could write a hundred of anything, although it did take quite a while. Seven years ago, the poker nation was still trying collectively to wrap its head around online professionals, soaring TV ratings, staggering book sales, and a 200 percent increase in World Series of Poker main event entrants. The scene has shifted dozens of times since then. Anyone remember the advent of multitabling? The first online heads-up display? Or when every main event at every tour stop had a $10,000 buy-in? Through it all, I’ve plugged away at these columns. And now I have a hundred of them.

Since it’s easy to miss one issue of over seven years, and since I know that not everyone reads every word in every issue anyway, it occurs to me that some readers out there have not actually read all of my columns. (Heck, some of you might be reading me for the first time.) So, in an effort to catch everyone up, I decided to review all the columns that preceded this one. But in the course of trying to summarize every piece of advice I’ve ever given, I came across a disturbing problem. Some of the guidelines I’ve put forth seem to be conflicting! Instead of rehashing all my old tips, then, I’ll look at the apparent contradictions in my poker strategy. Let’s see if there’s any kind of logical consistency, or if I’ve simply been making things up as I went along.

Contradiction 1: Know all the odds (“Poker Math Parts I and II” 5/3 and 5/31/2005), except when they don’t matter (“What are the Odds?” 5/30/2006). Back when I first started this gig – in my second column ever, in fact – I wrote: “Poker math isn’t for just the nerd faction of poker players, it’s for everyone. If you can add, subtract, multiply, and divide, you can use mathematics as a weapon at the table.” But just one year later I wrote “what are the odds? is not a useful question for most poker discussions.” Can these ideas really go together?

OK, yes, I can reconcile those two concepts. Pot odds are important, but the odds of a particular hand getting dealt to a particular player are not. It is, however, supremely important to put your opponents on ranges, and assess the likelihoods of their various holdings in that context. Sometimes your opponent is an overwhelming favorite to have a full house, even when a non-poker playing mathematician would call it statistically unlikely. So, calculating odds just for the heck of it is not important. Making an educated guess about odds within a poker context is quite important.

Contradiction 2: Get value out of aces (“Betting Your Hand” 4/2/2010), except when you’re supposed to fold them (“My Confrontation with the Beast” 3/6/2009). In the former column, I discussed making a thin river value bet with an unimproved A-A. In the latter, I had two aces preflop in a no-limit tournament situation and concluded that “the correct play, believe it or not, is folding.”

This is also easily explained. The scenario where I recommended folding aces preflop occurred in a super satellite. That, of course, is the only real world situation where folding aces preflop makes any sense. Value bets are about determining the strength of your hand relative to your opponent’s. That I had the same hole cards in the above two columns doesn’t make the circumstances analogous at all. There’s no right way to play a hand. There is only a right way to play a situation.

Contradiction 3: Don’t make big folds (“Can I Get Away from This?” 1/3/2007), except when you can make big folds (“A Polarizing Concept” 3/4/2011). In the first column, I wrote: “Stop worrying about when to make big folds. Great poker players do not become great by making a lot of big laydowns.” But I closed the newer column by hoping my readers might “find a big fold, or a hero call, in your next tournament.”

This one looks trickier to squirm out of. In my defense, even in the second column I wrote that “I don’t recommend making too many big laydowns.” And in the first column I wrote: “The ‘secret’ to making big folds is to become a great poker player. Then, eventually, you’ll know when to muck a big hand – and when to call with trash.” If we put the columns together, we get that avoiding big laydowns is a good rule of thumb, but the best players know when and where to break the rules.

Contradiction 4: Don’t pay attention to whether you’re winning or losing (“Ignore the Results” 12/26/2006), except when such information will make you a better player (“Patterns in Bustouts” 4/30/2010). The first column is an invective against results-oriented thinking. The second column attempts to lay out “a good approach to analyzing your results.” So should we be analyzing results or not?

Thankfully, upon further review, there’s no conflict here. Both columns urge players not to be concerned with how the cards fell, or how unlucky they got, or even whether they were right or wrong about a certain read. They simply encourage analysis. Neither column suggests that “did I win?” is a useful question. It’s true that the first column focuses on thought process during a hand, and the second focuses on details that can only be known after the fact, but the moral is the same: the outcome is irrelevant, but studying the outcome the right way can help make you a better player in the future.

Poker is a complicated game. Even the many guidelines we’ve come up with often sound contradictory when they’re jumbled together, but that’s what makes poker great. It’s a game of ideas, a game of nuance, and a game that always has another level just out of reach. I’ve been thinking about poker for the better part of 13 years, and I know there are still plenty of concepts waiting for me that I haven’t yet grasped. When I do, I hope to write about these concepts – in a concrete and unambiguous way – in my future columns. ♠

Matt Matros is the author of The Making of a Poker Player. He is also a featured coach for cardrunners.com.