Crushing Live Poker With Twitter

Dec. 7th – Playing through a bad image can be difficult. You must tighten up, value bet more and bluff less

If you have read any of my past Card Player articles, you know how strongly I think short-term image should influence decision-making within hands. When you are winning people naturally want to avoid you. You will be able to make more plays and have control over the table. This would not work if you were not seen as “lucky” or “on a hot streak”. This may sound pretty silly, but it could not be more true.

Playing poker professionally or playing it part time for a profit is simply an arbitrage of how poorly other losing players understand the fundamentals of gambling. One of the biggest fallacies that goes hand and hand with superstition and luckiness is the concept of independence. If we flip a coin and I win five times in a row, on the sixth trial the odds remain exactly the same, one-to-one or 50 percent. Each trial is independent of one another and previous results do not influence future results. This is one of the simplest yet misunderstood concepts in gambling. It is hilarious to me that big-time gamblers still use tracking cards in games like baccarat where the concept of independent trials also holds true. There is no streak or trend that can be evaluated in these types of games. It does not matter if the bank side has been hit the previous one hundred times, the next hand is still independent from the previous one. The same holds true in poker.

I’ve watched thousands of hours of live poker on the show that I host, “Live at the Bike.” And just as with superstition in other forms of gambling, I can tell you with certainty that the same thinking exists in poker as well. A guy will call your raise with a weak holding like Q-8 offsuit preflop because he sees you as unlucky. And if you are unlucky, the flawed reasoning goes, then someone will reap the benefits of the other side. On the other hand, if you are running hot, your opponents will stay away from you. How do we counter this then? When we have a losing or bad image we must tighten up more, bluff less, and value bet our hands to death. Say we raise with A-A and our opponent calls us with Q-8. If the flop comes out queen-high, it is likely that we will be able to get three streets of value from a player who views us as having a bad image. On the flip side of this, it would be a disaster for us to try and bluff him off of top pair because he thinks that we are trying to drive the action and win some of the money back that we have dropped.

A tighter style of play can be extremely frustrating while we are behind in a session because it is human nature that we want to push the action and chase some of our losses. This exactly why we must not play in this manner. Playing with a bad image should be very ABC and can be quite boring. But at least you know that you will be paid off in the long run.

Now even though poker follows the rule of independent trials there are some other variables that you must take in to account that have to do with human nature. If someone has a bad image, I am less likely to try to bluff them off of a hand because, usually, when guys are losing they are on some sort of tilt and are playing less than optimally. So they are less likely to fold in spots where if they were winning they might. But you can expect to be paid off big if you make a big hand versus their made hand.

Dec. 6th – If you find yourself playing spewy during a session start taking notes at the table. It will really improve your game

A few months ago I talked about not fooling around with electronics at the table. Using Twitter, Facebook, or texting can really put a hindrance on one’s game because you are missing a lot of what is going on at the table. I think that there is one exception to this rule, however, and it has to do with note-taking on your phone. I use an iPhone and commonly will open the native notepad program. When I am trying to do an in-depth-review of myself, I literally write down every hand that I play within a session. You can do this easily by numbering the hands and just indicating fold when you do not play or counting rounds where you start with yourself on the button. If you are using the rounds method, you only have to indicate hands that you play in your notes and then add up the total hands by counting the rounds and multiplying by 8 (standard average players in a nine-handed, raked game where usually at least one person is walking). Even if you only go so far as to list what you hold preflop when you play a hand, this will at least give yourself the ability to evaluate your percentage of hands volutarily put money in pots (VPIP). This can go very far when you are trying to take some of the spewiness factor out of your game.

In a full ring, nine-handed table, you really should be playing no more than 25 percent of your hands. The smaller the game and the shallower the restricted buy-in cap, the tighter you should play. You can also draw from these preflop-only notes what hands are minus expected value (EV) that you are playing and from what position. Say, for example, we see that we limp called in a 60 big blind capped buy-in game with A 2. This is obviously going to be a pretty big preflop error. We can reconcile all of these small mistakes preflop, add them up and see how much money that they have cost us throughout one session. I guarantee that if you are playing $1-$2 and had a $150 positive day, but realized that you limp/called off almost your entire profit, that these notes will help you to play more correctly in your next session.

As you get more comfortable with the note taking you can start to construct full hands with action. Here is an example taken directly from my notes in a $5-$5 game last week at the Bike:

UTG +2 I raise Q J. 2 calls.
OOP Q-5-9ss. I bet $45 one call.
2. I bet $95 call.
10. I check bet $200 fold.

As you can see the hand is pretty short and sweet and I do not write much. I also do not have the effective stack sizes here, as it wasn’t really important to the hand.
I am lucky in the fact that I have a pretty good memory when given little bits of information. I tend to suspect that most of your memories work in the same way. I might come back from a session and only remember the details of three or four hands out of hundreds that I play, but if I am given little bits of information about each hand, like what I hold preflop and the given action, I can remember every hand that I played almost perfectly. I am at a point now where I can basically look back at my notes and count up the dollar amount of mistakes that I made. I sometimes come out of a session review thinking that I should have been up hundreds or even thousands of dollars more without making some simple mistakes. This gives me motivation to play my A-game the next time I am at the casino. For a more in depth discussion about note taking check out my podcast “Seat Open Podcast #5 Note Taking and Delayed 3-Bet Pots” over at Seatopenpoker.net ♠

Want Card Player and Bart to provide analysis on a cash game hand you played? Send full hand details (blinds, stacks, street-by-street action) to @CardPlayerMedia. If we choose your hand, we’ll send you a Card Player subscription.

Follow Bart for daily strategy tips on twitter @barthanson. Check out his podcast “The Seat Open Podcast” on seatopenpoker.net and his video training site specifically for live No Limit players ­—CrushLivePoker.com. He also hosts Live at the Bike every Tuesday and Friday at 10:30 pm ET at LivettheBike.com