The Calling Demon

You pay off too much. You have trouble letting go of big hands. Bad calls on early streets get you into trouble later. You call when you know you’re beat, saying things like, “I had to,” or “I was priced in.”

Does this sound like you? I’ve got good news: you’re not alone. Most poker players have an innate desire to call and see the showdown. You can’t win if you don’t play, after all, and besides you’re curious about what your opponent has under there. The desire is that much harder to resist when you have a big hand, because they come along so rarely, and in your head you have probably already imagined yourself winning the pot.

I think of this urge like a little demon who is always looking for new ways to trick me into calling when I ought to fold. The demon never goes away, but with practice, you can get wise to his tricks and learn to keep him at bay.

Let Go of Rules

When you were first learning poker, you may have learned some simple rules to help you avoid big mistakes: “Never fold kings preflop.” “Always raise (or never raise, depending on when you learned and from whom) with ace-king.” “Don’t fold a set on a dry board.” “Don’t go broke in a limped pot.”

This is all fine advice for beginners, who don’t yet have the knowledge and experience required to make tough judgment calls and who have more important things to focus on anyway. As you progress as a player, though, your thinking should also progress to be more nuanced and situational. You should understand the reasoning behind rules like these and let that reasoning, rather than the rules themselves, guide your decisions.

There is nothing that you “have” to do. And nine times out of ten, I disagree with players who use the term “priced in” to justify a bad call. That’s the calling demon talking.

When you use rules like these to justify your calls, you are just making excuses for giving in to this understandable but expensive desire. Learn to recognize this desire for what it is so that you can start making better decisions.

Try to Read Hands

The first step is simply to try. Rather than letting the strength of your hand blind you to all other considerations, pause, take a deep breath, and think things through from your opponent’s perspective. Is your hand so strong that he’d be willing to play many weaker holdings like he’d play the nuts? If so, you’ve got nothing to worry about.

But no matter how impressive the absolute strength of your hand, if your opponent raises, and you can’t think of any hand weaker than yours that he would consider good enough to raise, then you may have a problem.

The strength of your hand doesn’t matter much anymore. What matters is whether and how often your opponent would bluff in that spot, because that’s all you can beat. If you think he would bluff less than 10 percent of the time, then you have an easy fold even if you’re getting 6-to-1 with a flush.

When I talk about some of the bigger folds I’ve made, other players often say something along the lines of, “I’m not good enough to make a fold like that.” Well it’s time to start being that good!

Reading between the lines, I take them to mean that they aren’t confident enough in their hand-reading skills to know when they’re beat, and so they use the strength of their own hand as a proxy. In other words, they know it’s hard to beat a strong hand like a flush, and so when they have a flush, they play as though they are unbeatable.

For a simple strategy, this is actually a reasonable approximation of good poker. The problem with this strategy is precisely its simplicity: anyone can do it, and so doing it doesn’t give you an advantage over your opponents. When you cooler them with, for example, flush over flush, you’ll win their stack, and when they cooler you, they’ll win it back. In the end, nobody wins except the house that rakes both pots.

When You Feel Like You’re Beat…

Remember what we said about your natural desire to call? It’s an insidious little sneak that plays tricks with your brain in order to get what it wants. It will fabricate all sorts of fancy justifications to get you to make those calls. Any “feeling” that you should call should be suspect from the start.

So when you get the opposite feeling — when there’s that nagging fear in the back of your mind that you ought to fold — you should take it seriously. It had to fight hard to make its way into your consciousness. If the situation is so bad that not even the powerful calling demon in your head can fight off that feeling of being beat, then you can believe there’s something to it. In short, you think you should call more than you actually should, so if you ever find yourself thinking that you shouldn’t call, then you’re probably right.

A Quick Example

The under-the-gun player limped in at a loose-passive 9-handed $1-$3-$6 no-limit hold‘em table. Two more players limped behind, I threw in $5 more from the first blind with A 9, the second blind completed, and the third blind checked his option.

I was tempted to bet the K Q 8 flop, but it would be almost impossible to make someone fold a king or queen in this game, and if I was against sevens or worse, I was in fine shape anyway. I checked, the other two blinds checked, the first limper bet $15, and only I called.

I checked a 6 turn, which in a passive game is probably a mistake. My opponent checked behind.

The river paired the 8. Of course this meant that I no longer had the nuts, but full houses were such a small part of my opponent’s range for getting to the river that I had an easy value bet nonetheless. I bet $40, and to my surprise, he raised to $150.

This is where it’s important not to let your calling demon run the show. Although I expected to be well ahead even after seeing the board pair on the river, I needed to reevaluate based on this new information that my opponent had a hand worth raising.

Could he be going for value with a weaker flush than mine? As much as I’d like that to be true, I think he would have bet those on the turn and/or make a smaller raise now. You have to be honest with yourself about these kinds of things rather than just looking for excuses to call.

If I was right that he wouldn’t play worse flushes this way, then it didn’t matter that I have the nut flush. I had to put that from my mind so that it wouldn’t distract me from the really important question: would he have a bluff here roughly one-third of the time, which is how often I would need him to to make a call profitable.

I decided he would not. I can literally count on one hand the number of river bluff-raises I’ve seen in this game, and this would be a particularly odd spot for one given that he could have bluffed a scare card on the turn much more cheaply if that was what he wanted to do.

In a loose-passive game, K-8, Q-8, and even pocket kings or queens are very plausible hands for him, and no matter how unlikely they seemed, I judged them much more likely than any hand I could beat, so I folded.

With experience, I’ve learned not to be curious about these things. It really doesn’t matter what he had, certainly not enough to burn $100 or so in equity just to find out. No matter what he showed this one time, it wouldn’t tell me anything about my decision one way or the other.

I’m a lot more interested in playing the best poker that I can than I am in seeing my opponents’ cards, and you should be too. We’ve all got to learn to keep our demons at bay. ♠

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.