Just a Cooler

As I, and I think most poker players use the term, a cooler is a situation where you believe that both players were correct to play a big pot with the hands they had. Of course only one of them won, but in your opinion, the loser of the pot didn’t make a mistake. He had a hand strong enough to warrant playing a pot of the size that he did, and he was simply unlucky to run into a stronger hand.

In a weird way, though, this “luck” can be a function of skill. Think about it this way: what do you mean when you talk about “getting better at poker?” How do you know when you’re better? What, specifically, do you want to do differently when you say that you want to get better or play better?

Presumably, you’re talking about learning to do some things you can’t do now, things like making tough folds when you’re beat or getting some extra value when you’re ahead. In other words, you’re talking about redefining what counts as a cooler for you and for your opponents. You’re saying that there exist some situations right now where you feel like your hand is too good to fold, but if you were better you could find a fold in those same spots. Your goal is to take some situations where your hand currently seems too good to fold and develop the discipline and/or the hand reading skills to be able to fold in those spots. To get better, you want to reduce the number of situations that count as coolers for you.

Or, by saying that you could get some more value out of hands you’re just checking or calling now, you’re saying that you there exist some situations where your opponent would, correctly or otherwise, feel obligated to put money into the pot with a hand weaker than yours. Another option for getting better is to create new cooler situations for your opponents.

There are two ways of doing this. One is simply taking advantage of opportunities that already exist. It’s possible that you are too passive with your value betting, or that you don’t widen your value range as much as you could against loose opponents. In these cases, the cooler already exists in the sense that your opponent has an inferior hand he’s willing to play a larger pot with — you just need to learn to take full advantage of it.

The other option is to create situations where your opponents will feel obliged to pay you off. When you widen your range for betting or raising, your opponents must either widen their own ranges or lose money by folding the best hand too often.

This is getting pretty abstract, so let’s look at an example. A player in early position raises, and you call in the big blind. The flop comes 10 6 3. You check, he bets, and you raise. What should his range be for continuing, either by calling or by raising?

That depends on how he expects you to play. If you’re a giant nit who would never check-raise here without a set, then he can fold made hands as good as a set of threes. He might be correct to call with draws depending on the size of your raise, but let’s suppose that he doesn’t have many of those in his early position raising range. The only way you could cooler him here is with a set of tens versus his set of sixes, and of course if you have the sixes and he has the tens, the result will be the same, so in the end you aren’t really winning anything.

If you were to widen your raising range in spots like this, one of two good things would happen. Either you’d win a lot of pots by making your opponent fold, or he’d get wise to your new strategy and widen his own range accordingly. He’ll certainly stop folding 3-3, and he might continue with his overpairs as well.

Now there are more ways for you to cooler him. He won’t be able to get away from hands that he could fold before, so you can get him set over set or set versus overpair. Essentially, you’re much more likely to win a big pot when you flop a set now.

The price you pay for this, of course, is the money you lose when you raise without a set and he doesn’t fold. If the end result of your new strategy is to create more cooler situations for both of you, then you haven’t gained anything except variance. The two of you will push money back and forth more often, but no one will come out ahead in the long run.

The way out of this bind is to have better equity with the bottom of your range than he has with his. If he’s only continuing with sets and overpairs, then there’s no sense in check-raising slightly weaker made hands such as A-10. If he folds, it doesn’t matter what your cards were, but if he doesn’t fold, your top pair has few outs against an overpair or set.

Draws, however, perform reasonably well even against strong ranges. In some sense, running your 5 4 into your opponent’s A-A is as much of a cooler for you as running his A-A into your set of threes is for him. The critical difference is that you have 48 percent equity when you’re on the wrong end of the cooler, whereas he has 18 percent when he’s on the wrong end.

Getting better at poker, finding new value, is about forcing your opponent into more coolers while getting away from more of them yourself and/or making yours less expensive. Thus, you should always be reluctant to write off a loss as “just” a cooler. A cooler for the player you are today may be a hero fold for the better player you will be in the future, and the sooner you recognize it, the sooner you will be that better player. ♠

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.