Head Games -- Maximizing Value

The Pros: Ed Miller, Marie-Lizette Acoba, and Jon Tannen

Craig Tapscott: Once you have identified the fish at the table, what are a few scenarios that you can take advantage of preflop to maximize value?

Ed Miller: Fish make plenty of preflop mistakes, but preflop mistakes are for small money compared to the huge money mistakes fish make later in hands. Preflop my three main goals against a fish: 1. See as many flops with the fish as the other players will let me get away with 2. Set up situations where the fish will behave in predictably bad ways 3. Optimize postflop stack-to-pot ratios. I know that most fish make huge calling errors post flop. If the stacks are relatively deep, you can play lottery ticket hands like J 4 and 6 5 because you know the remote chance you stack your opponent in a ridiculous situation will more than pay for all the times the fish flops top pair and you have to give up. I’ll try to sneak into pots with lottery ticket hands as long as I’m not afraid of getting punished for it by one of the better players. Blind versus blind situations are ideal, as you’ll never have other players interfering. It’s important, however, to identify predictable errors the fish makes. For me, it’s not enough just to say, “Oh my god that guy sucks!” You want to have something specific in mind that you’re trying to get him to do. For instance, you think he’ll stack off with just an overpair. You play for the specific, predictable mistake, not just in the hopes that the guy does something dumb. If you aren’t expecting it, you can easily find yourself outplayed by a “dumb” play.

Marie-Lizette Acoba: I’m not a high-stakes player, so more often than not, I find myself surrounded by fish. That being said, I find that position and tight-aggressive play are key to maximizing value in the $5-$10 and under no-limit hold’em and pot-limit Omaha games. There are often several limpers who casually toss in a chip or two and who will fold without a second thought when challenged to call a large enough raise. In situations such as that, my holdings almost never matter. There is enough dead money in the middle to justify an aggressive raise, knowing that 80 percent of the time, it will go unchallenged. Every now and again, someone will decide to take a stand and make a relatively loose call with a “pretty hand,” but I find that most fish are passive players. When they call light and out of position, they tend to fold to a continuation bet after the flop. I, myself, can be a bit fishy at times so I can’t profess to be a “tight-is-right” kind of gal. But I have experimented with several different hand ranges. I find that in the mid-stakes arena there is little reason to balance my range because the fish are never paying attention and that showing down with holdings in the upper end of my range is simply more profitable over time.

Jon Tannen: Even if you’re better at poker than every other player at the table, your combined edges on them will be smaller than your edge against the fish. Thus, you should keep in mind that the fish represents your primary source of profit and behave accordingly. If there’s a fish at your table who’s calling many of your preflop raises, you’ll do best at fleecing him by raising big with your premium hands and smaller with the speculative hands with which you decide it will be profitable to push the action. The same logic applies to three-betting his preflop raises. When you have the top of your range, you should pop him big, because it will be unlikely for him to realize what you’re doing and thereby alter the range of hands with which he continues to put money in the pot. Meanwhile, when you’re three-betting him in position for isolation purposes – a play of which you should make use often, especially if he has yet to show a tendency to four-bet and/or other players at the table have been punishing you for calling the fish’s preflop raises by squeezing you out of pots – you should lean towards making your sizing smaller so as to maintain a relatively high stack-to-pot ratio and give yourself as good of a chance as possible at outplaying him postflop, where he’ll have the chance to make the biggest mistakes.

Craig Tapscott: Share a few situations that you take advantage of the fish on the flop, turn or river and maximize value in a hand.

Ed Miller: Fish tend to misunderstand two basic poker concepts: relative hand values and bet sizing. An overpair, for instance, is a fairly strong hand on some boards after some betting actions, while it’s a pure bluff-catcher on other boards or against other actions. Fish tend not to understand this distinction. They tend to misunderstand the hands their opponents are representing, and they don’t have intuition for how likely their hand is or is not to be beat. Fish also tend to misunderstand bet sizing, often to the point of ignoring it entirely. If I make an $80 bet into a $150 pot on the river, or if I make an $800 bet into the same pot, it’s all the same to them. I either “have it” or I don’t. Of course, as you understand the game better, you learn that the different bet sizes create completely different decisions. Fish also tend to make calling errors as opposed to folding errors. Therefore, I look for opportunities after the flop where a fish is likely to have a hand that looks fairly strong to him, but in reality given the board cards and action is purely a bluff-catcher.

Marie-Lizette Acoba: Bet, bet, bet. That’s all I can say. I remember a friend telling me to, “lead with the nuts.” So many players check/call/trap that they don’t realize how strong this play looks, and how often it will stop a good player from doing the betting for them. I don’t rely on anyone doing the betting for me. I believe that the only way to build a pot is by betting and so that’s what I do. I bet. When I think about how many hand combinations that the fish are willing to play in and out of position, and then calculate the odds of any given hand being able to connect with a flop, it just boggles my mind. So again, I know how hard it is to make a hand, so whether or not my hand has connected when I’m the preflop raiser, I have a pretty high post flop continuation bet and a double-barrel frequency. What does that mean? I bet.

Jon Tannen: Fish tend not to think about your hand; they generally focus only on their hand. Their failure to acknowledge relative hand strength begs to be punished. In the scenario in which the action makes it likely that a fish is holding top pair and you’re fortunate enough to be holding a hand that has top pair beat, you should shovel gobs of money into the pot because he’ll be less likely than a stronger player to think about what it is that has caused you to want to wager so many of your chips. Instead, he’ll just pay you off because he’s too undisciplined to expend energy taking into consideration the possibility that top pair isn’t always the best hand. Many poker players who are mediocre at the game make a habit of tossing around fallacious axioms. One of these is the idea that you should never bluff a fish. In fact, the nature of the average fish causes him to be an excellent candidate for multi-barrel bluffing. The reason is that he’s quite “sticky” (unlikely to relinquish hands that have caught any piece of the board) on the flop and turn but much more willing to fold if he’s failed to improve by the river. ♠