Interesting Decisions

I write notes for these articles often while I’m playing and here’s one I wrote the other day: “Instead of focusing on interesting results, focus on interesting decisions.” This came up after everyone was talking about a hand from a few months ago where two people got all in preflop and decided to run it three times. One had K-K and the other Q-Q. On the first board, the Q-Q made quads. Then, on the second and third run, the boards ran out 8-9-10-J to give the Q-Q a straight both times. They discussed the probability of the hand for several minutes and passed a picture of the board back and forth many times. I’ll admit, it is an interesting result. I figured out the probability of it coming out that way with Q-Q winning all three times and factoring in the card removal on each run. It turned out to be 25,684-to-1 to run out that way exactly. It’s obviously considerably less than that for Q-Q to beat K-K each time when running it three times, about 1500-to-1 in that case.

Barring this incredibly interesting result, most of the time, people discuss hands at the table that have less interesting endings. But that’s the problem, discussing the results. I had been trying to figure out why these people that I have played with for years, who have been playing for much longer than I have been playing with them, would be stagnant in their poker playing and I suddenly realized it. They don’t think about the decisions in the hand, they think about how the hand played out.

I thought back to how I developed as a poker player. I remember my first strategy group. We played at a private game in the Fort Worth area. The game would usually start around 5pm but the guys who became my strategy group would all show up early. I would show up early because I was the dealer and they would show up early because they didn’t have anywhere else to be I guess. Before the regular game would start (usually $1-$2 no-limit hold’em or $4-$8 limit) we would play a sit-n-go for $20 or so. We would play different games, sometimes pot-limit Omaha (PLO), sometimes no-limit, sometimes limit hold’em or Omaha-eight-or-better. After interesting hands, we would talk our way through the decisions and discuss the merits of different lines and strategies, not the results or possible results. Then, after people showed up to play the regular cash game, we would put away the tournament chips and play the cash game. I’d deal and they would play until the game broke. Then the others would leave and the strategy group would stay to talk about hands that happened throughout the cash game. Sometimes we’d play another sit-n-go. That was probably the toughest $3-$6/$4-$8 limit hold’em game ever and we learned from each other by talking about interesting situations instead of interesting results.

My next strategy group was a virtual one. A tournament strategy forum started on a well-known poker community site. I was one of the original members of the group and we again focused on interesting decisions in interesting hands, going so far as to not include results in original posts in order to avoid influencing everyone’s advice on how to play the hand. You see, if you take the results out, the only thing that matters is the decision. We developed tournament poker strategies that were very effective for quite a few people in the poker industry. Like my first strategy group, many of them no longer play poker but the ones that stopped finished as lifetime winners and the ones still playing are making a living doing it, many as well known tournament pros.

My most recent strategy group is one that I often lead. When I teach at poker schools or with my students, we don’t discuss results, we discuss decisions. In fact, at the WSOP Academy, we do a thing called hand labs. The pro is the dealer and there are nine students at each table. We play a hand all the way out in a specific tournament situation and when the decisions are over in the hand, everybody turns their cards up and we talk about how the hand was played. If there is an all-in before the river, I stop the action, talk about the hand and then split up the pot based on how I feel is appropriate. If there are cards remaining to be dealt, they don’t come out. I’ve taken the results out of the discussion completely in order to ingrain in these students that the results truly don’t matter.

We’ve all done it. I’ve done it myself, I let the results of a hand effect how I think about how a hand played out. Only when I remove the results from my mind do I have an effective thought process about whether I played that hand correctly. Then and only then is it possible to learn from an interesting hand. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour, and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG