Running Bad and Playing Better

Having just concluded three weeks of World Championship of Online Poker action, I’ve got plenty of fresh bad beat stories. Some of them are run-of-the-mill stuff: lost coin flips, running A-J into A-K when I’ve only got 8 big blinds, etcetera. Some of them are cringe-inducing: A-A losing to A-Q, sets losing to flush draws, etcetera.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with them. Everyone who plays poker tournaments has his or her own collection of such stories, and I’m sure you do too. There’s a reason for this: you’ve got to be eliminated somehow.

An old writing teacher of mine used to say that, “If things don’t end badly, they never end at all.” He was talking about romantic relationships, but it’s even more true of poker tournaments. Every player except one will be eliminated eventually, and there are only a handful of ways to lose all of your chips.

Rather than lamenting your bad luck, you ought to pay attention to how your tournaments tend to end. The only way to win a tournament is not to get eliminated, so if your objective is to win, then you need to study your eliminations and look for patterns. Although many situations are unavoidable, the best players probably find ways to avoid losing chips in spots where you’re currently going broke.

I recommend that you keep track of how you’re eliminated from each tournament that you play with at least a broad categorization: was it a bad beat, a losing call, a failed bluff, or a cooler? Assuming that you can find a trend of some sort in this data, this article will talk about what you can do to cut down on each of these types of elimination.

Bad Beats

I love getting bad beat for the last of my chips, because I know that even if I made other mistakes in the tournament, I won’t lose sleep over my elimination. If you manage to get all of your money in good, you’ve usually done the best that you could do on that particular hand. If it happens to end badly for you, well, it had to end somehow.

It’s almost certainly not worth the effort of second guessing hands like this. If your kings lose to A-Q, don’t start thinking that maybe you should have waited to make sure there was no ace on the flop before putting in the rest of your chips. If you’re getting your money in good, then you’re doing something right, so don’t mess with success. There are plenty of better places to focus your self improvement.

Coolers

Here I have in mind situations where your hand was so strong that you were eager to get your money in. You know you’re ahead of your opponent’s range, but then he turns over that one hand you didn’t want to see.

If you’re right about his range, then this, too, is unavoidable and nothing that should concern you. Especially as the average stack size gets shorter, it becomes correct for both you and your opponents to put all of your money behind wider and wider ranges of hands. This means more opportunities for the bottom of your range to rub up against the top of someone else’s, and that’s just the nature of tournaments.

In fact, if this rarely happens to you, then you are probably too tight and nitty. Maybe you consistently get your money in good, but by the time you do, you’ve got hardly any money left either.

On the other hand, one player’s cooler can be another player’s hero fold. It’s worth revisiting these hands and discussing them with trusted friends, not to whine, but to get a second opinion on whether you really had to go broke there. Could you have folded the river? Just called instead of raising all-in?

Early in your poker career, you probably learned some rules: never fold kings preflop, never fold a set on a dry flop, things like that. Those are useful generalizations to prevent you from folding away all of your chips in a search for the nuts, but they are only generalizations. As you become a more sophisticated player, you learn to consider each situation on its own merits. As your hand reading improves, you can make some folds in spots where you previously would have gone broke.

So don’t be too quick to write off every elimination as a cooler. Some are more avoidable than you think, and if you find yourself routinely checking the “cooler” box at the end of tournaments, you should work hard to refine your standards for which situations are really worth the last of your chips.

Losing Calls

When you call off the last of your chips and it turns out you’re behind, this has many similarities to a cooler. You had what you believed to be the best hand, or at least a hand good enough for the price you were getting, but your opponent had something better.

I distinguish the losing call from the cooler primarily because, if this is a leading cause of your departure from tournaments, there may be a very different way to prevent it: stop calling. You can’t just start folding extremely strong hands because you’ve been coolered recently, but if you routinely get that sinking feeling in your stomach, go into the tank, and finally decide that you’re “priced in” and call only to learn that you’re way behind, it may be time for a change.

Experiment with always folding in this circumstance. In other words, when you find yourself torn between calling and folding to a big bet, fold. Don’t try to think it through and work out what your opponent could have or whether he’s bluffing; just fold.

Recent database programs for online poker players encapsulate this problem nicely with a statistic called “River Call Efficiency.” This tells you, for every dollar that you’ve invested in calling river bets, how much you’ve gotten back. If the number is less than 1.0, then you would have done better with a strategy of never calling the river than you have done with whatever strategy you’ve been using.
If you’re routinely calling and losing for the last of your chips in a tournament, then you face a similar problem. Some combination of weakness in hand reading, addiction to seeing showdown and your opponents’ cards, and aversion to being bluffed has resulted in your brain seeing calls where you ought to fold. Thus, you can no longer trust your analysis of these situations. Until you have reason to believe these problem areas have improved, fold whenever you have any doubts about calling. Sure you’ll make some incorrect folds, but overall your results will improve.

Failed Bluffs

Believe it or not, a failed bluff can also be a form of cooler. Bluffs don’t have to succeed 100 percent of the time to be profitable, and in fact if yours always succeed, then you probably aren’t bluffing enough.

With some hands, such as big draws, you should almost always bluff. If you check-raise all-in with 9 8 on a 7 6 2 flop against a frequent continuation bettor and end up losing to a set of sevens, you can chalk that up to a cooler even though you were bluffing. You had an extremely strong draw that you were correct to play aggressively, and your opponent was lucky to hold the very best of the hundreds of hands he would bet in this spot.

That’s only to say that not all failed bluffs are mistakes. If lost bluffs consistently cause your elimination from tournaments, then as with calling, you should probably stop doing it altogether, or at least dramatically raise your standards for attempting a bluff, until you figure out and resolve the problem.

Conclusion

Keeping good, objective records is important here. It’s easy to get bogged down in short-term results and decide that, because you lost a few tournaments last week to coolers, you should start folding more seemingly strong hands. You want to draw your conclusions from the results of dozens if not hundreds of tournaments, not just the most notable few from your recent past. Once you know your biggest trouble areas, then you can focus your study and practice most efficiently and start plugging those leaks. ♠

Andrew Brokos is a professional poker player, writer and coach. He blogs about poker strategy on ThinkingPoker.net and is co-host of the Thinking Poker Podcast. Andrew is also interested in education reform and founded an after-school debate program for urban youth.