Proper Practice

For the first three years of my gambling career, I spent ridiculous amounts of time traveling back and forth between Atlantic City, (where I worked), New York City (where my family lived), and Philadelphia (where I went to school). That meant a lot of long trips on buses and trains and a lot of time to kill.

I always had a deck of cards with me, and I would pass the time by simulating hands of hold’em and seven-card stud. It was a lot easier when I had an empty seat next to me, but sometimes I had to deal every hand onto my lap, which was a talent I developed pretty well. I’d look at each hand in turn and decide what action I would take with each given hand.

I know that probably sounds pretty antiquated. But it was in the days before easily-accessible computer simulations, and online poker had not been born yet. So this was really the only type of “practice” that was available besides actually playing. And there’s no question that it was a huge part of my poker-playing development.

For one thing, this practice helped me become extremely aware that, at the time, most players were not bluffing nearly as much as they should have been. Often I would look at a semi-strong hand and decide I would fold to a hypothetical raise. Then I had a moment of clarity: I realized that I should be raising more often to put pressure on my opponents when they had mediocre hands. After years of fine-tuning that realization, The Book of Bluffs was born.

This practice was also the best way to learn about comparative hand values. I knew what constituted a “good” hand, but playing hands openly against each other helped me gauge how often a good hand could expect to be second best. At the time, I remember there being a lot of discussion in the poker world about whether A-K or J-J was a better starting hand. As far as I was concerned, that discussion was irrelevant. It was much more important to sense when either of those hands was in serious trouble, and practicing helped develop that awareness.

The point is this: You can practice poker in a worthwhile manner by yourself, but you have to simulate opponents’ hands along with your own. That may sound obvious to some people, but sometimes players are so focused on their own cards and how they should play them that they don’t think about their hand relative to what their opponents have, which of course is the essence of all forms of poker.

This topic is particularly relevant for me because, a few months ago, I did not follow my own advice. I went down to the L.A. Poker Classic hoping to play in the open-faced Chinese poker event, only to find that it was cancelled. But they had a $1,600 Chinese poker event that would be half high, half low in the middle, so I signed up for that instead.

I’ve played enough hands of standard Chinese poker to be very comfortable setting high-only hands. I did not believe my opponents would have any advantage over me in that part of the tournament. However it had been a long time since I had played Chinese poker with deuce-to-seven in the middle. So on the flight over to the Commerce and in the hotel room, I decided to practice setting deuce-to-seven hands so that they would be fresh in my mind.

Maybe you can anticipate the mistake I made. I set about fifty practice hands, but only one at a time. I did not deal out the entire deck, set all four hands, and then examine their comparative values. As a result, I could not always tell if I was setting my hand optimally. Maybe a hand that seemed correct at first glance would actually match up poorly against other hands based on the cards left in the deck.

It’s not surprising that this mistake came back to haunt me. In the first two limits of the tournament I won a modest amount in the high-only portion, but then lost over a third of my starting stack in the deuce-to-seven portion. Some of it was simply bad cards, but some was also clearly due to playing mistakes. I set my hand, saw what my opponents had, then realized I should have played differently to produce a better outcome.

For example, I had two different 13-card hands, one in which I ended up with jacks in my three-card top hand, and in the other one I had queens. In straight-high Chinese poker, those are decent but vulnerable holdings. In deuce-to-seven they are much less valuable, because any opponent who puts strength in his three-card hand will probably be able to play kings, aces, or trips. Otherwise he is likely to sacrifice his top hand in order to put all of his strength into his other two hands.

In other words, jacks and queens are barely better than any lower pair. Had I practiced correctly, and seen what would happen to someone playing jacks or queens in the three-card hand, I might have gotten a better understanding of why I would be better off to use those pairs to strengthen my five-card back hand when possible. I would have reminded myself how frequently someone would show up with kings or better in their three-card hands.

Instead, I got scooped in both instances in the tournament. Although I recovered to climb back above my starting stack, I eventually busted out, not surprisingly, in the tournament’s deuce-to-seven portion. Maybe the end result would have been the same, even if I had practiced correctly, but I would have felt much better about my showing. Whether it’s Chinese poker, hold’em, or any other form of poker, there’s no worse feeling than knowing you played a hand incorrectly because you didn’t prepare well. And more often than not, you pay the price for it. ♠

Matt Lessinger is the author of The Book of Bluffs: How to Bluff and Win at Poker, available everywhere. You can find Matt’s other articles at www.cardplayer.com.