Layoff Poker

It’s a consummation devoutly to be wished: You hold pocket aces in late position, put in a good size raise at the first opportunity, like you should, and narrow the field to just two players. So far so good. You like the chances of your aces holding up. The flop comes 8-4-2 rainbow, a flop that seems safe enough, since your foes are unlikely to have called your good-size raise with 8-4, 8-2 or 4-2. Small sets are a possibility, of course, but when it’s checked to you and you bet and get called by just one — very straightforward — player, you can discount that possibility somewhat. You put your foe on a good eight or an overpair. You’re not scared, nor should you be. No monsters under the bed, at least so far.

But here comes a 7 on the turn. Villain checks. You bet. He raises. Now you have that familiar sinking feeling. Were you trapped by a slow-played set? Did his 8-7 suited just turn into two pair? Did he call with 6-5, drew to a double-gutter and get there? You don’t know. You’re not sure. But you’re not at all inclined to give up on the hand. After all, he might be bluffing. Or you might pair up or ace up on the river to beat him — unless your pair gives him a full house, or unless he’s already made a straight. In any case, you’re committed…committed to losing more than you have to because you feel, fatalistically, that there’s no way out.

Is this true? Is it really true that you can’t escape further damage? After all, why not fold? Why not save those chips for a time when they’ll do you more good?

The possibility that he’s bluffing could hook you to the hand, so let’s remove that from the equation. Let’s say that you know this player inside and out. You’ve never seen him check-raise bluff, but you have seen him check-raise trap many times. Nor is he the kind of player who might put you on overcards and think that his ragged eight is the best hand. No, he’s a just another straightforward, unimaginative player who just barely knows how to check/call the flop and check-raise the turn. For the sake of this example, let’s assume that you’re 100 percent certain he has you beat. Yet you call. Why is that?

Could it be that you feel you’re owed? We all know how rarely pocket aces come around. When they come our way, we naturally anticipate winning with them. Why not? They’re the best possible hand, and we’re good people. We deserve to win. Thus burdened by this feeling of entitlement, we tend to underestimate the strength of our foe’s hand, and overestimate the chances of beating him on the redraw. Our thinking is skewed by the emotional attachment we have to those beautiful bullets. We want them to win. We need them to win. If they don’t win, it’s a tragedy and a shame, but not so big a tragedy and a shame as folding now. That would be just unfair.

You see this sad rationalization in an even more common circumstance: when a player holds pocket kings and there’s an ace on the flop. He raised preflop, driving off (he assumes) all hands except premium ones. Well, what’s a premium non-pair hand? A hand with an ace, of course. But when that ace hits the flop, our holder of K-K suddenly loses all perspective. He puts his foes on underpairs or draws, even when his foes start raising like flags. Why? Because pocket kings come along as rarely as pocket aces, and he feels like he’s owed. This, friends, is the phenomenon of the stealth ace. To a player holding pocket kings, an ace on the flop will actually, physically, totally, vanish from view. It simply won’t be seen. That’s called denial, kids, and denial trumps discipline every time.

Discipline, you know, means more than having rigorous starting requirements. It also means getting away from hands when you’re beat. If you can’t fold aces when you know, with every fiber of your being, that they’re just no good, then you don’t have discipline. If pocket kings leave you to the tender mercies of the stealth ace, you don’t have common sense. All you have is a feeling of entitlement, and this feeling, even if it’s justified (which it’s not), puts your focus on entitlement instead of perfect play. This can only hamper your perceptions, warp your decisions and degrade your results.

I’m not saying there aren’t times you should stick with your pocket aces or pocket kings. If the chance that your opponent is bluffing or overplaying his hand plus the chance that you can beat him on the river add up to a favorable gamble, by all means go for it. Players do bluff, and players do overplay their hands. But they don’t do these things as often as you think — not when your thinking is torqued by desire or dreaded entitlement. In the games most of us play, things are mostly what they seem to be. The cleverness, trickery and chicanery we assign to other players are more likely to come from our own subjective reality than from the hard facts of the cards. In other words, if you’re holding an invested hand like A-A or K-K, and you come to realize that the only way for your hand to hold up is for the other guy to be bluffing, you’ll believe he’s bluffing, just to defend your emotional investment in the big hand.

Get away from that. Get out of that. See things as they are. Sometimes other players trap us, but sometimes we just trap ourselves. There’s always a way out — a way to minimize collateral damage — if you’re bold enough and honest enough to take it. When folding is the clear-eyed, unsentimental thing to do, then fold. Leave that feeling of entitlement to other, lesser, minds. Remember: The universe doesn’t owe you anything but an education — and it gives you lessons every day. Your lesson about getting out even when you think there’s no way out doesn’t have to be a costly one, so long as you can learn it, and use it, when you need to. Entitlement hands may break your heart — but that’s much better than letting them break your stack. ♠

John Vorhaus is author of the Killer Poker series and co-author of Decide to Play Great Poker, plus many mystery novels including World Series of Murder, available exclusively on Kindle. He tweets for no apparent reason @TrueFactBarFact and secretly controls the world from johnvorhaus.com.