You Don’t Play Poker As Well As You Think You Do

You don’t play poker as well as you think you do. You’re not alone. Almost no one plays poker as well as they think they do, though what other people think of themselves needn’t concern you.

You don’t play poker as well as you think you do. In my opinion, you need to embrace that truth before you can really improve.

Near the beginning of this year’s Word Series of Poker (WSOP), well-known player Mike “Timex” McDonald offered to short the vast majority of tournament poker players through a Twitter account named @BankOfTimex. His idea was simple. He would bet against anyone — even Phil Ivey — to cash in a WSOP event. You could bet however much you wanted on any player in any event (even multiple times the actual buy-in), and if your player cashed, Timex would pay you the amount of the cash as a percentage of how much you bet.

But there was a catch. You’d have to pay markup to bet on the player of your choice.
Markup is equivalent to money line odds that a sports book might post. Say the Yankees are playing the Astros today. If the Yankees are a big favorite, a sports book would require you to put up extra money to bet on them. So to bet the Yankees you might have to put up $200 to win $100.

If you wanted to bet on Phil Ivey in a $5,000 tournament, Timex would take your action. But he’d demand markup. For instance, he might want you to pay $1,000 to get just a 10 percent share (worth $500 face value).

So an example transaction might work like this. You could pay $1,000 for a 10 percent share of Phil Ivey in a $5,000 tournament. Then if Ivey cashed for $60,000, Timex would pay you $6,000 to settle your bet. Of course if Ivey failed to cash, Timex would keep your money.

Timex shut the operation down just a few days after he announced it due (at least in part) to the operation’s questionable legality.

But the idea is interesting. Timex said he had started the Bank Of Timex for a reason: Most players overrate their prospects in tournament poker. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem by itself, but for the widespread practice of selling shares to the public at markup.

Go to any large poker Internet forum, and you’ll find players trying to raise a stake to play tournaments. First, the prospective players list their qualifications (such as they may be), and then they list the prices for shares. Markup is the norm.

For example, someone might list ten WSOP events that they would like to play. The total of the buy-ins might be $33,000. With zero markup a one percent share in this tournament package would cost $330. This would entitle the buyer to one percent of all tournament cashes.

But let’s say this person charges 1.3 markup. That means you have to pay 1.3 times face value to get your one percent share. Thus, it’s $429 for your one percent share — a $99 premium over face value.

In many cases, prospective tournament players will sell the majority of their action this way. Say, for instance, the player sells 65 percent of their action. At 1.3 markup, these sales would raise $27,885 toward the $33,000 in buy-ins. Thus, the player need put up only $5,115 of their own money to qualify for over a third of their potential winnings.

This is a great deal for the players, as they get to play the equivalent of $11,550 (35 percent of $33,000) worth of tournaments for just $5,115 — less than half price. Unfortunately, Timex argues, this is not such a good deal for the share purchasers.
It’s hard to earn 1.3 markup in tournament poker. There’s lots of variance, and fields these days also have lots of competent players. Obviously, if you bet on every tournament player at 1.3 times the entry fee, you’d lose an enormous amount of money. Only the best players will be worth it.

Yet it’s commonplace for fairly good, but not elite, players to offer tournament shares at high markup and quickly sell out. Timex’s idea was to help correct the market pricing by undercutting (while still retaining an advantage for himself) and offering extended share availability for sold out and wait-listed packages.

In other words, players aren’t as good as they think they are. And players aren’t as good as other people seem to think they are either. It’s true for nearly every poker player.

About the same time Timex launched his Bank Of Timex idea, I read a hand posted from a $5,000 buy-in WSOP no-limit hold’em event. The poster is a well-known no-limit cash game player with a long history of success. His question was about a situation where he had a short stack in the big blind. A player had opened the pot, another had called, and he wanted to know what hands he should shove all-in with.

As the thread unfolded, it became clear that this player’s intuition for the situation was pretty far off. He assumed a wide shoving range would be right, and in the actual tournament he shoved with a weak hand, got called, and lost.

If you play primarily cash no-limit hold’em, as this player does, you don’t play many hands with stacks in the one-to-40 big blind (BB) range. If you’ve never sat down with a computer for hours and hours running equities on shoving and calling ranges, you simply won’t be prepared to play one-to-40 BB no-limit hold’em with precision. Raw “poker sense” isn’t enough — at least it’s not enough if your goal is to play nearly optimally.

I point this out not as a knock on this player, but on his single error in this particular tournament, or even on the fact that he charged 1.2 markup for a package of tournaments of which this was one.

My point is that this particular player has a clear path to improve at poker — he can spend some quality time with PokerStove, run equities on shoving and calling ranges, and improve his short stack play. My guess is, given his track record in cash poker, that he will indeed learn from the experience, improve, and be a better player next time around.

But not everyone who makes a light shove and gets snapped off will learn from it. Some will chalk it up to bad luck and never think about it again. Some will lie to others and even to themselves about what happened. Instead of shoving 8-5 suited and getting snapped off, the story morphs into shoving J-J and getting snapped. “The hand played itself, what could I do?” becomes the narrative.

You don’t play poker as well as you think you do. That’s cool. No one else does either. Accept that fact and demand from yourself only that you learn from your mistakes. That way you’ll play better tomorrow. ♠

Ed’s newest book, Playing The Player: Moving Beyond ABC Poker To Dominate Your Opponents, is on sale at notedpokerauthority.com. Find Ed on Facebook at facebook.com/edmillerauthor and on Twitter @EdMillerPoker.