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May 19, 2009

I only blog when I run bad
Blog by : INTERNETPOKERS
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Well, it's been less than a week since my last blog update. For those of you who read my previous entry or subscribe to the RSS (gogo), you'll know that I'm trying to update my blog on a weekly basis now, and am offering free coaching to people who comment on the previous week's blog if I miss a week. Unsurprisingly I got a large number of comments, so keep it up since it makes me look like I actually contribute to CardRunners.

Just kidding of course, ha!

Seriously though, I don't care about you guys.

Actually, I have a couple videos that should be coming out soon. Since I'm under 21 right now, I don't intend to attend the WSOP, so I should be picking up some of the slack during the Summer while the other fools are donking around in Vegas.

So since I'm going to be writing regular updates to this blog, I might as well include some poker junk. As I said in my previous post, I recently came back from a long hiatus, so I'm getting back into the flow of playing poker daily. I will admit that I've been worse lately at dealing with beats and variance, but that shouldn't be a surprise, since it takes a certain amount of reconditioning to get myself back into the mental fitness that I was in when playing regularly. I'm going to do my best not to complain about luck in this blog, but since I prefaced with that, I will now proceed to basically complain about luck in this blog.

Within the first week or so of coming back, I hit a 220k downswing all at 50/100 and lower. It rattled me pretty bad especially after just coming back from a break and losing a portion of my roll. I began to seriously question myself. I wondered if I still had it, if maybe I had passed my prime and it was time to move down and become 24-tabling $1/$2 rakeback pro. After that I decided to buckle down and play no more games above 25/50 until I was back up for the month. Well, after 4 days, I ended up making about 170k all at 25/50 and lower, putting me back into the green on the month. So, what's my point? No clue. I have no idea what to say about luck. Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad, maybe I'm charmed, maybe I'm not. Who knows.



Omaha is a strange game. I've been playing more and more PLO since hardly anybody plays me at NL anymore, and I think it's kind of hard to wrap your head around the difference in variance. I'd be interested if anybody knows over a big sample how an average standard deviation differs between an NL and PLO player of the same winrate. I've been yammering to my friends about red pro curse this and that, but really, I've had a number of 25BI+ swings just in the last two weeks from PLO. PLO players of course won't find this surprising at all, but it's a bit disconcerting to me, especially when I'm not as confident in my PLO game as my NL, and it's harder to gauge how you're doing based on weekly or even monthly results. But nevertheless, PLO is definitely the game of the future, so I guess learning how to better deal with big swings and studying the game harder is what'll keep me ahead of the curve.

I've been swishing some ideas around in my head, and I think probably in the next blog post I'll write out another fairly long essay. I've gotten it started but want to revise it a little bit more to make it less ramble-y. I've also been thinking about possibly writing a book about online poker - not a poker book per se, as in a technical book that teaches you how to play better, but more of a general-audience book that's an economic and sociological analysis of the online poker world. I've been brainstorming some ideas and sending out some e-mails to poke around a little and see what possibilities are out there.

Man, being out of school for over half a year now, I don't know what to think about going back to school in the Fall. I've already re-applied and been accepted back into the roster, but I'm not all that sure as to how many hours I want to take on. I mean, between playing poker, making videos, coaching, and this other shit that I'm thinking about doing, it seems like I might get overwhelmed again and just shut down. Maybe I'll take it easy and just take one or two easier classes to see if I can handle the pace. I dunno.

Anyway, that's it for this week. For those of you who want to comment for potential free coaching, I decided to come up with something different this week: in order to be entered into the lottery for coaching, you must include in your comment a haiku that includes the word "potato."

There'll be a different requirement every week. It should make it more interesting to read through the comments. :)

That is all,
Haseeb
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May 14, 2009

I celebrate myself
Blog by : INTERNETPOKERS
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February 18, 2009

When lemons give you life, make lifenade
Blog by : INTERNETPOKERS
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So I haven't written a blog entry in a couple weeks. From what I hear, this is not a good way to run a blog, so I'm going to try to be a little more regular with writing entries. I've felt a vague sense of guilt over not having written one yet, but I think I know why that is. The first and probably primary reason is that I have been on a rough downswing since Christmas and have just felt really shitty about poker in general. Unfortunately, that's made me feel a lot less motivated to do extraneous stuff like writing blog entries. Also, I have promised a couple of times to chronicle the latter half of my poker history, and really, I just don't find it very interesting to write about. I'm not really in a positive state of mind nowadays, and it's not very cathartic to try to frame my bitching in some glowing narrative; I'd much rather write some sobstory about how the world sucks and god hates me. So, in the interest of writing anything at all, I'll delay the poker story crap for a day when I am feeling less negative.

[Note: This post is disgustingly long. A friend of mine suggested that I post a PDF version of this blog post, as it's rather hard to read in this format, so here you go - LEMON PARTY]

So the first thing that I should probably get out of the way post is a follow-up to the preceding post I made, "Poker is a Whore," which got an insane amount of views and feedback (thanks in large part to Taylor Caby's props). There were some comments and messages I got from a number of people, either wholly disagreeing with me or pointing out some inconsistencies / leaps of logic that were present in the post. As for those people who disagree with me outright, I don't think there's a lot to say other than that if my general point didn't come across then the argument probably isn't going to be resolved. But as far as some of the inconsistencies or leaps of logic, many of my detractors are absolutely right that I took a few leaps of logic and some of my arguments were hyperboles. Specifically, when I said that you can't run bad and still be winning - clearly, that's not true, and it was mostly an exaggerated point for rhetorical effect (obviously if you have a winrate of 10ptbb with a low standard deviation and you win 1ptbb over 100k hands, you're running pretty bad). I was mostly thinking of higher stakes players when writing it. At lower stakes, winrates are higher and SDs are lower so it's not as reasonable of a claim. That was the main point I made that was a half-truth, and I was probably remembering the quote I've read many times on twoplustwo: "someday you will run worse than you ever thought possible." Just think of me like the preachers who will an hour long sermon describing how mindfuckingly hot the fire is in Hell. I just wanted to strike a little bit of the fear of God into my fellow poker players.

The other main contention that people made was that you can't really know your true winrate, so therefore my point is moot. Well, the first part of that is true - there is no point in your poker career at which you can know your true winrate due to the enormous variance inherent in poker; that, and the fact that your winrate is constantly changing as you navigate through different stakes, as game conditions change, and as your overall skill level / mental level changes over time. However, at any point in time your true winrate still exists, and obviously it's going to be somewhere in the vicinity of whatever your winrate is over a large sample. So while I acknowledge this fact, you can still know your winrate within some reasonably wide confidence interval - but even if you didn't it wouldn't matter, because there's no operational content to my post anyway. Just stuff to mull over. If you failed to "apply my thinking," nothing apparent would change in how you play poker or anything, so then clearly nothing important hinges on what assumptions you use to approximate your true winrate. There were some other points that were reasonable objections but they're probably more tedious to rebut, and really I found that people were taking my post rather seriously while the main point was pretty simple. Disagreeing on the various details is fine; I'm a blogging poker player, not an apologist.

Anyway, let's settle on a topic for the day. As of late, I've been emoraging pretty hard and been feeling vindictive about poker, which is a pattern of thinking usually followed by a lot of insecurity about what I'm doing with my life. I was talking to one of my students yesterday about it, and we got into a discussion about life and the value of money and other sappy bullshit that I'm not shameless enough to repeat here. But we got onto discussion of one interesting topic that has come up a few times in my recent past: the relationship between emotion and rationality in thinking about poker. What I mean by this is not the relationship between intuitive and rational thinking in poker (gut feelings or whatever); nonrational thinking is not equivalent to emotion. What I mean by emotion is rather how or what you feel while playing poker.

You can't bring up any discussion about emotion in poker without talking about tilt. Tilt is the inner demon; it is what all players fear. It is the bane of poker, the snake, the thousand-eyed Argos, the sphinx. Tilt is the bitch god that watches everything you do, waiting for a reason to devour you, to strike you down, or just to make you shove every hand preflop. Everybody knows what tilt is, it's in our gut, we know it like we know anger or fear. But if we want to lift ourselves out of our ordinary language and understand our relationship to this game we have to define what tilt is a little more clearly.

As it happens, the phenomenon of tilt has been well studied by many people of greater insight than me, and tilt itself, under different names, has been a part of human performance since ancient bumfuck whenever. It's an integral part of sports psychology, or just the psychology of performance in general - all sorts of people learn how to deal with tilt, such as athletes, concert pianists, actors, portfolio managers, etc. I'd say the cleanest and most reasonably inclusive definition of tilt would be as follows: tilt is when your ability to perform is negatively affected by irrelevant past or future events. Sounds vague enough, but I don't think it's too vague. It covers pretty much anything - if you lose a stack the previous hand and then you play worse the next hand, that qualifies as tilt since an irrelevant past event is affecting your ability to perform. The same could be said if you had just gone through some messy shit in your life (got in a fight, bad day, whatever) and that made you play poorly. It also takes into account tilting because you're anxious about something in the future. Looking in the other direction, it seems to be appropriately exclusive because it doesn't include something like somebody deceiving you with a metagame play or switching gears which causes you to make a mistake - that doesn't qualify as irrelevant to the performance itself (the same way that a portfolio manager making a "bad decision" based on poor research doesn't count as tilt, although the past events clearly made a negative effect on his performance). One thing that this definition is pretty unclear about though are instances of tilt that involve physical inconstancies, such as being drunk, being tired, being sick, and the like. Let's just call this a special case of tilt, and ignore it for the time being.

Of course this is not meant to be groundbreaking by any means, but this methodology forces us to think more clearly about concepts that are too integrated into our language and thought to be brought into focus. So we've established a pretty wieldy definition of what tilt is, whose essential phrase is "irrelevant past or future events." If this is the truest definition of what it means to tilt, then we can infer what tiltlessness means: simply, to not tilt is "to not let one's performance be affected by irrelevant past or future events." Well, there's a somewhat clich© notion known as "living in the moment" - is that the same thing? "Living in the moment" is more difficult to adequately define and has some aesthetic/spiritual baggage, so let's just say that they're similar. But the core of the idea is the same I think. In order to completely escape tilt, you must sever your emotional attachment to the past and the future, and only think about now - how do I optimize my play now, what is my opponent thinking now, how are our strategies interacting now. There are things that escape us when we tilt, when emotion starts to affect our thoughts - anger or indignation at being down or having a bluff called, anxiety about being on the losing end of a match, or having your concentration waver while something else in your life is hanging over you. You start to desire and think about things that are beyond your immediate situation, and the analytical thinking gets relegated to your subconscious, your auto-pilot. In order not to tilt, nothing else can matter but what matters in that moment - you must be reborn into a new situation, and your past experience and choices can no longer matter, all that can matter is what you do in that moment with what the moment gives you. You alone with the moment. That is what completely tiltless play is: utter self-containment (or maybe it's self-exclusion).

With this characterization of totally tiltless play, we can return to the initial problem - what is the relationship between emotion and rationality in poker? I think that the most common answer to this question is as follows: emotion is what causes tilt, since emotion is what makes us react to irrelevant past and future events; if we played purely rationally, then we'd be tiltless, so the goal should be to purge emotion from poker. The ideal becomes total indifference.

Well, aside from maybe monks or autistic people, nobody can experience poker that way. Each and every one of us, even the most seasoned of grinders, has some emotional attachment in every game he plays. We gets pleasure from winning and displeasure from losing - if that weren't the case, we'd have no reason to ever play poker or get good at it in the first place. You must love to win in order to sacrifice all of the time, mental energy, and potential opportunities for the sake of getting good at poker. So clearly on the most basic level, emotion must have some place in poker, since these emotions are what drive us to put in hours and to better our skills. But I would go even further to argue that not only are emotions invaluable in the context of playing poker, but they can also be rational.

Now, it's important to clarify what exactly I mean by an emotion being rational because it's a deceiving concept. When I say rational, what I mean is "furthering one's ends or goals." This is different from the idea of "justified emotions" - for example, the idea of "justified anger," the idea that you both can and should get angry if somebody insults you. Essentially, this is a social idea which boils down to "people think it's appropriate or obligatory to exhibit emotion X in situation Y." This is much different from the idea of rational anger, which would be distilled to "in order to further one's ends, one should exhibit emotion X in situation Y." So getting angry at your child if he does something bad is rational because the act of getting angry will discourage the child from repeating the behavior. Of course, the anger is a justified emotion too, but for a markedly different reason.

What I want to argue is that a lot of people talk about and approach tilt as though it were synonymous with emotion, and ultimately I think it's downright wrong and actually an ineffective approach to understanding the problem. Let's instead use the framework I mentioned in the previous paragraph, and apply it to poker - the social context that we'll assume is the community of professional poker players. Let's look at what are some justified (socially normalized) emotional responses to situations. One easy to grasp example would be getting hit and run - anger is considered to be a justified response to getting hit and run. If you get angry after somebody hit and runs you, this is considered normal and a totally acceptable. An example of an unjustified response would be to show contempt after winning against somebody (i.e., berating somebody who lost to you). This would be considered unjustified and scummy/mean/a douche thing to do. Now what about rationality? How do decide which emotions are rational and which aren't?

Let's use the previous examples. If we get angry at a hit and runner, does this further our ends in any way? Well, I'd say pretty clearly not - the hit and runner won't be less inclined to hit and run us if we get angry, nothing positive comes out in our external (outside from poker) life from getting angry, and it has the possibility to negatively affect future hands that we play in poker. Clearly, getting angry at getting hit and run has no value to our ends. It is an irrational response. How about berating somebody who just lost to you? Well, I'd say it probably depends - berating somebody who has lost to you has the possibility of making him want to play you again, and if he's an inferior player then this is a pretty negative outcome. However, it may end up aggravating and tilting your opponent and discourage him from quitting you. In that case, it can have a very positive outcome. Of course, you also have to take into consideration what you think is the value of your reputation as somebody who doesn't berate others (that is, not the monetary value, but the value to you). So berating your opponent can be rational, or it can be irrational, depending on how you think your opponent will react to the beration.

Now let's try to focus on common forms of tilt and try to judge them in regards to rationality. When a poker player loses a big pot, he tends to feel upset or possibly angry. Different players feel this response to different degrees, so let's think about the gradations of this reaction after losing a big pot. On the extreme end of the spectrum is a player who gets very upset and angry when he loses a big pot. What this reaction will do is threefold: first, it will discourage him from losing big pots in the future. This is a good thing, because it will motivate him to want to play big pots well , and it will also encourage him to try to lower his own variance - this effect is therefore rational, because it furthers his ends, whether he knows it or not. The second effect it has is that it makes him want to get his money back so as to feel unwronged (as an angry man feels unwronged when he punches the person who insulted him). This has a very negative effect on his immediate expectation, and is the most recognizable form of tilt - the desire to get even will cause him to take gambles to try to play big pots with less regard for his holdings, will discourage him from folding hands (since he knows folding means he loses the pot), will get him to try to force more action, and can cause him to disregard his bankroll management. This effect is not merely negative - it's disastrous. The last effect that this reaction has is the external effect: the effect that it has on a person's life. If one is moved to anger easily by losing hands in poker, then not only does it immediately detriment one's emotional experience, but one's emotional threshold is lowered in general. Clearly, it is better to be more emotionally resolute. So, beyond being absurd, anger as a response to losing a big pot is overwhelmingly irrational.

On the other end of the spectrum is complete indifference. That is, if you lose a big pot, you don't feel anything at all. You are totally detached from the money you're playing with; all you're interested in is playing your own game. What are the effects of this response? Well, externally it's beneficial - to not feel negative in your life when you lose at poker gives you an emotional composure that's hard to disrupt. Most poker players feel terrible when they're going through rough patches, so having to totally forego negative experiences is nice. However, there are also a few problems with this response. First and foremost would be that it when you don't feel bad about losing a big pot, your natural self-conditioning is impaired. Imagine one of those kids who are born without the ability to feel pain - clearly, these kids will have fewer subjectively negative experiences, because they won't feel the pain of falling down, touching very hot things, running into objects, but ultimately it causes them to have enormous difficulties learning to avoid these negative stimuli. Foregoing the negative reaction also foregoes the conditioning that comes with it, and so if you feel the pain of falling down, you'll learn to stop doing it. Perceiving the pain is precisely what forces you to adapt in a way that optimizes your performance. That's not to say that people who are indifferent about winning or losing money will be clueless and just throw around money - but what it does mean is that they will be much less adaptive than players who feel stronger reactions to losing. I think when you imagine this type of attitude, you shouldn't think about a stoic character like Jman shrugging off his losses, but think more of somebody like Guy Laliberte, who drops 500k and doesn't bat an eye, continuing to enjoy his afternoon. There are lots of advantages that players who have strong emotional ties to poker have that those who don't cannot, and like I said before, the desire to improve is closely tied to the desire to win.

The last type of response is I think the most tempered one. It is to feel negative about losing a big pot, but not to feel angry about it. This player will think about big pots that he lost and question himself and feels uneasy whenever it seems like he might've made a big mistake (even if he is being results oriented), but doesn't translate this negativity into anger or a feeling of being wronged . Instead he uses this emotional momentum to channel into constructive patterns of thought and re-evaluation. The effects of this sort of thought can range drastically - some people don't have the emotional composure to distance themselves from poker, and so can feel pretty negative in their lives when they're doing poorly, and yet other people can segregate their insecurities about poker from the rest of their emotional experience. Some people have slight tilt, some people are inclined to take breaks, and other people are driven to put in more rigorous hours and study the game harder. But ultimately what I want to say is that in order to be a great poker player, your ideal shouldn't aspire to some kind of enlightened indifference. To be a great poker player, you have to struggle, to doubt yourself, to crave winning, and to hurt when you lose.

So when you think about to avoid tilt and how to optimize your emotional relationship with poker, you shouldn't try to think of emotion as the bªte noire. Being intimately attached to your poker experiences is integral to becoming a fuller player. You shouldn't think about trying to squelch your emotions, but instead you should try to evaluate them rationally, and then channel them into positive endeavors. So when you are going through a big downswing, instead of telling yourself that a "real poker pro" would be completely indifferent, what you should think instead is this: first, you should recognize that your negative reaction to your downswing is not merely "justified," but it's also to an extent rational (a process known as hypercognition). Feeling bad about losing is essential to getting better.

Secondly, ask yourself how you are using this negative energy that the downswing has imbued in you. If you don't confront this question, then naturally the negative energy will take the form of negative effects on your poker game, making you more inclined to tilt, loosen your bankroll or game selection standards, and feel angry or vindictive about poker in general. Instead, you should consciously make yourself focus this negative energy on positive endeavors - use the desire to win money back as an impetus to study the game more rigorously, to review sessions more frequently, to sweat your poker buddies to keep your wits sharp, or whatever else that you feel you can do to turn that negative energy into positive momentum.

The third and I think most subtle element of coping in poker is the ability to reframe your narrative. This idea is rarely discussed, but I think it's tremendously important to being an emotionally resilient poker player. It's impossible to play poker without framing yourself in some sort of a narrative - when we start our careers, we imagine how we're going to study and improve and move up stakes; we are all infatuated with the journey from rags to riches. Even for those people who no longer think in terms of moving up and down stakes, we are always framing our efforts into narratives of how much you'll make this month, next month, how much you made last year, how much you'll make next year. A downswing is an unexpected blotch on this narrative. Any downswing is always going to frustrate the benchmarks that your narrative has arbitrarily defined for you. The ability to reframe your narrative is basically the ability to allow yourself to wipe the page clean and start anew from your new situation. You must be willing to repudiate your old goals and expectations and to supplant them with new ones. This means that in the middle a bad month, you don't think yourself, "Ugh, my goal was to make 20k, but now I'm down 10k. I'm screwed, I'll never be able to make that money back, I should be up 10k by now," but instead, "Okay, well I had a downswing and that was pretty unfortunate. My goal for the month is now just to get even; if I can get myself into the green on this month, then I've accomplished something!" This helps you to keep your spirits up and a positive mindset, making poor results much more manageable. Don't let your goals become your master; become the master of your goals.

Tilt builds up gradually. Every moment that something goes wrong, a small increment is added toward your tilt threshold. Once you pass that threshold, then you start to tilt and make mistakes, and the further it goes, the more severe your tilt becomes. The obvious metaphor would be a thermometer that measures the temperature of water as it boils. Tilt itself, however, is not uniform. Downswings are a different species of tilt than the sort of tilt you experience within the window of a single session. Dealing with short-term tilt and long-term tilt are thus totally different skillsets, and I think that there are two main aspects to dealing with short-term tilt.

The first aspect is preventative conditioning. Being realistic about your own level of self-control is essential to being emotionally intelligent - even the best and most untiltable players will know (or approximate) their limits, and will have enough self-awareness to know when their own emotional stability won't be able to prevent them from some level of tilt. If Jman loses 7 buyins, even if he doesn't feel like he's tilting, he knows that he should quit or take a break. He doesn't tell himself "no, I'm not tilting - I know that I am very good at handling tilt, I think I'm playing fine." He has preventatively conditioned himself to quit after he's down however many buyins, or when he starts to feel the first tinges of anger or frustration or whatever cocktail of emotions that he thinks precedes tilt. He doesn't have to know through his own intuition that he's tilting in order to engage in anti-tilt measures. That's the point of preventative conditioning - the state of mind we call tilt harms not only your poker judgment, but your self-judgment as well. The only way to keep yourself in check when you no longer should have faith in your own self-diagnosis is to condition yourself preemptively (like a sort of superconsciousness). So taking the previous metaphor and butchering it a little, preventative conditioning would be to say "okay, after one minute of the stove being on, I'm going to take the pot of water off the stove, even if my thermometer doesn't seem to say it's boiling." This secondary rule will forcefully prevent tilt even when your inner thermometer is lying to you.

The second aspect of short-term tilt is to slow the buildup of tilt. Like I said, tilt builds up gradually in small increments. The two ways to stop the pot from boiling over are either to set a rule to take it off the stove when it will probably start to boil - or to turn down the heat on the stove so that it takes longer to boil. This would be the idea behind slowing the buildup of tilt. Essentially what you want to do is look at every possible incident that adds an increment of tilt to your tilt threshold, and to condition yourself so that it's less likely to have an effect. For most people, the obvious candidate would be the loss of a big pot. The goal would be to condition yourself to not let this negative event contribute to your tilt threshold. There are numerous ways to do this, and since it's a pretty subjective experience, different people have different solutions to this problem. Some people force themselves to shift the notion of "winning the pot" to "making the right play," some people repeat to themselves vague mantras like "that's poker," and yet other people have other convoluted mental mechanisms for dampening this effect. The important thing is that you find what works for you, and then you commit yourself to consciously applying it as often as you can. The unconscious association builds up between losing a big pot and some mental process that dampens its tilting effect, which allows you even in your least self-aware moment to keep your inner demon at bay.

Ultimately, keeping emotion and rationality both in check is one hell of a balancing act. The key is self-awareness, which means not just to be keeping watch over your emotions, but to understand yourself in relation to the game. Less self-aware players might think only about what they're doing internally to the game, but truly self-aware players understand themselves as part of the poker-playing system. It's like the difference between thinking about a pool player who only thinks about the pool cue and which way he wants the ball to go, as opposed to a great pool player who will think not just about what he wants to happen on the pool table, but also thinks about the way that the rest of his body is positioned with respect to the cue. He understands how his every movement and nuance is contributing to the quality of the body-cue-table system. In the same way, you yourself are the least visible factor in any poker game you play, and often you are the easiest part to overlook.

In spite of the authoritative air with which I'm writing all this, I admit that I am not the best spokesperson for an essay of this character. I don't handle myself at tables as well as others, I am not as emotionally adamantine as many of my peers, I'm not even particularly qualified to talk about psychology and I don't really have experience training other poker players not to tilt. In reality, I think you could say that I'm writing this out for myself just as much as I'm writing it for others. We all spend most of our time trying to hone our rational understanding of poker, but for a lot more players than realize it, emotional intelligence is what is preventing them from taking their next step in poker evolution. I just hope that maybe some of you got a bit of insight or some better perspective about the emotional side of poker.

Sorry this post ended being so fucking long, I'll try to keep them shorter from now on. Thanks for reading, and best of luck to you all.

INTERNET POKERS
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January 26, 2009

Poker is a whore.
Blog by : INTERNETPOKERS
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Poker is a whore. But I'm sure you all know this by now. I have run absurdly bad against Gus; I should be up several 100k against him, but instead I'm down several, so I'm going to be playing a little lower for a while and hopefully I can reset my luckbox. It's all pretty frustrating though, PLO is just a really annoying game at times. Lately it's been feeling like one step forward, two steps back. But enough of that, I'll talk about some more abstract stuff today. I'll continue my poker story probably in my next blog post.

There are lots of ideas that I have that I tend to mull over in my mind but don't really have discussions with anybody about, since they tend to be pretty abstract or inconsequential and don't really make for good conversation fodder, so I figure that a blog is probably a pretty good place to inform some of these meditations. So the topic of the day is variance. Obviously, everybody knows what variance is. There are two main topics that I think I want to talk about, and the first one has more of a PSA feel to it, so I think I'll talk about it first since it probably is more relevant to the average blog reader.

To put the thesis simply, variance takes a lot of forms, and people don't really tend to acknowledge variance in every form it takes. The word we essentially use for variance in poker is "running bad" (since nobody ever cares to talk about when they're running good; when we're running good we either tell people we're crushing or don't bother to talk to other people about how we're doing). People say that they're running bad in a number of different situations, the most prevalent of which is when they get their money in good, and their opponent ends up sucking out to win the pot. To almost any poker player, this is what it means to run bad. The other situation when people think they run bad is when they get their money into a spot where they're usually making money but they end up e behind. People think they run bad when they get KK vs AA, they think they run bad when they get a set under a set, flush under flush, etc. And most annoyingly, they think they run bad when a stupid program like PokerEV tells them that they're running under expectation. Now, most of these events are reasonable indicators of running bad, quite obviously. But none of these situations are actually synonymous with running bad. Here's a simple fact that for some reason people refuse to understand: you cannot run bad and still be winning. Period. If you think that you're just so good and awesome that you were running bad today but you still won because you're just so good and awesome, you're wrong. You didn't run bad. You may have gotten more KK vs. AA's then you would on a normal day, or maybe you got oversetted twice and still managed to win which has convinced you that you're God's gift to poker, but this whole way of thinking about variance is just deluded and overly simplistic.

For the hell of it, let's try to break down why exactly we think we're running bad when we get KK vs. QQ and lose. I've thought about this a bit, and it seems that the simplest way to analyze this situation in terms of a basic impulse is simply this: "I found myself in a situation in which I am typically rewarded, but that reward was withheld." Every time we as poker players get dealt KK and get all-in preflop, we of course have a very strong expectation of getting rewarded. After all, when we get KK all-in preflop against QQ, we win a buyin more than 4 out of 5 times, so it's a perfectly rational association that we build between getting KK all-in preflop and getting rewarded. In a (gratuitously cynical) sense, we become like Pavlov's dog - the expectation to win the pot is like salivating when Pavlov rings the bell - the sound of the bell being equivalent to getting dealt KK. And so, getting upset about losing a KK vs. QQ is analogous to Pavlov (poker in our case) ringing the bell, but not bringing us the food we were expecting. Now, I don't know if the emotional palette of dogs extends to feeling frustration, but certainly we humans do when our expectations are so betrayed. (And of course, betrayed is an interesting word to use here - maybe our relationship to poker is a lot closer to a dog's relationship to Pavlov than we're ready to admit, but that's a grimmer discussion for another day.)

So essentially, the emotion of having our expectations betrayed makes us feel that we're running bad. As I said before, these events are generally good indicators of running bad so it's not irrational by any means to assume that you're running bad when you lose KK vs. QQ. But running bad doesn't mean anything unless you define it over a window of time. You can't just run bad in a vacuum, you have to run bad over some period of time, whether it be a hand or a session or a month. Now, let's take a look at running bad over one hand - how should we objectively (rather than emotionally) judge what it means to run bad? Well, running bad means simply running under expectation. So in the course of this hand, we have to look at what our standard expectation is - clearly, we got dealt KK and our opponent got dealt QQ, and so we'll win 4/5 of the time. So we're running under expectation when we lose, because in this situation we should usually win. So then we're running bad? Yep, we sure are. Okay, let's move on to the next window. Say we play a session, and we get dealt AA/KK five times vs QQ/JJ, getting it in good every time, and we win three times and lose two times; those were the major hands, everything else essentially broke even. Are we running bad? Well, again, clearly we should be winning 4/5 of the time when we get in an overpair against a lower pair, and we only won 3/5 of the time. Again, we're running under expectation for this situation. Now, just extend this analogy over a month - say you're in the red with KK and AA but still ended up on the month, blah blah blah, you get the picture, running bad. So, in all three of these situations I agree that the conclusion is that we're running bad - but why exactly are these analyses nonetheless incorrect?

Well, the simple answer is that they're setting constants that aren't really constant. Let me explain what I mean. Look back at the hand where we get dealt KK - when we analyzed that hand, we were looking at the equity of KK against QQ. But if we want to isolate how we're running - our expectation alone, then we have to recognize that it's arbitrary how much we decide to fix what's constant in the hand. In the situation we looked at, we decided to fix the ranges after getting all-in preflop, and that's where we analyzed the equity and then decided who was running bad (and this precedent of course is established by using things like Pokerstove and hand calculators and PokerEV and whatnot). But that setup is arbitrary: why don't we freeze the hand after the flop is dealt (say the flop is Q 7 5)? Clearly in all hands where we get all-in preflop with KK vs QQ and the flop comes out Q 7 5, we're usually going to lose, so in that situation we're not running bad at all. That sounds a little absurd, but why is that analysis invalid? Well, you could say, "the flop comes out differently, that's just one of the many possible flops, and since you don't have any control over what flop comes out when you get all-in preflop, you should freeze the hand at that point." Well, that's the only counterargument I think that could get anybody out of the Q 7 5 argument, but that argument actually ends up collapsing in on itself too. Here's why: we have established with this argument that it's okay to unfreeze a hand and move the moment of constancy (I'll use this term to refer to the point at which the hand is frozen) earlier in the hand. The reason that we provided was because we had no control over how the flop came out. But once we start to talk about control in poker, we set ourselves upon a slippery slope. So by this line of reasoning, if we want to move the moment of constancy up a little higher, we just have to isolate a point after which we have no control over the results. Well, let's take a look at when our opponent flips up his hand - he shows us QQ, but we had no control over what hand our opponent ended up showing up there with. If he had AA, then our equity would not have been 80%, nor if he had AK. So clearly we had no control over him having QQ, so we can move the moment of constancy up one point - to the point of getting KK all-in preflop against his handrange (we could of course, if we so desired, recalculate our equity for getting all-in against his range in general). But we can go even farther. We had no control over whether or not our opponent would jam over us after we 4-bet him - he could have been 3-bet bluffing us and just have folded his hand, so since we had no control over the fact that he happened to have a hand worth getting it in with after we 4-bet him preflop, we move the moment of constancy up even higher; now all we have is that we 4-bet him after he 3-bet us, which of course is lower EV than getting it all-in preflop. But really, if we think about, we didn't have any control over the fact that he 3-bet us in the first place - he just happened to have a hand. All we had control over was our initial raise in the first place. So we move the moment of constancy up again - all we were really entitled to was however much money we win when we get dealt KK and raise preflop (the average BB won per KK is like, what, 4 or something?). But then we take the final leap - we had no control over getting dealt KK. In reality, the only thing we had control over was deciding whether or not to sit out preflop. By deciding not to sit out that hand, we certainly weren't entitled to getting KK all-in against QQ - nor were we entitled to getting all-in with KK against his handrange, nor getting 3-bet, nor getting even dealt KK in the first place. So what are we entitled to? Well, simple - whatever our average winning per hand is.

Boom. And at this point, the argument should make perfect sense. Every time you play 5 hands, your EV over 5 hands is your EV per hand * 5 hands. So every time you win a buyin over 5 hands, no matter what the situation was or how bad your opponent is, you are running way over expectation. Well, you might think that this sort of thinking doesn't allow room for being able to play better or worse affecting your expectation - in reality, the games you're playing in, the opponents you're up against, and the quality of your play at the time all have an effect of your EV per hand. And you'd be right in that regard - but you have to recognize the extent to which we have control over these things. It's important to realize that at any moment you're playing, the set of all strategies that you'd use in response to a any situation is already embedded in your brain - in a way, you don't have control over that. That is, you can't suddenly "decide" to use a strategy that you don't know is a good strategy, or "decide" to not make a mistake in a spot where you're already predisposed to make a mistake. So, for example, if you tend to call too many 3-bets with weak hands, in that moment you have no control over this leak of yours; it's a part of your average EV in that moment. Over time you can change these predispositions and make your game slowly stronger as you gain more and more good habits and break bad ones, and your EV per hand will slowly increase over time. But in any moment, the factors over which you exert genuine control as a poker player are actually surprisingly small. I think they are limited to these three things - one, how hard you choose to table select. Now note, this is not choosing the table - it's meaningless to analyze the EV of yourself in a game with 5 superdonks, because you had no control over such a table existing; you only had control over your table selection standards. So you'll have an average EV per hand for a certain threshold of table selection. The second thing you have control over is your tilt / self-awareness. This is quite obvious - no matter what game you're playing in or how much you're up or down, you always have control over whether to take a short break, whether to get somebody to talk to you to get your head back on straight, whether to quit the game and cool off, or even just take a moment to re-analyze the game and yourself and reset your clarity. This is what decides whether you're thinking through every hand or simply auto-piloting through. And then the third thing you have control over is just when you play, and for how long (which overlaps somewhat with the other two). These three factors are the only things that you as a poker player have genuine control over - everything else is out of your control. Who you play, how bad they are, how long the fish stays, how many KK vs. AA's or AA vs. KK's you get, how many times you soulread the fish, and how many times you bluff off a stack to your table nemesis - these things are only in your control as much as these three factors are in your control. Everything else is simply permutations that were already there, they are simply one of the many possibilities that could happen given the set of your intuitions about poker and the way you react to different scenarios. So, to put the point simply, your EV over any session is simply whatever the EV is of:

  • You playing with your game selection standards
  • You playing in whatever state of mind you're in
  • You playing when and however long you play

And that's it. Thinking about what your EV was when you got all-in with KK vs. QQ, or what your EV was when you played heads up with that huge fish, or what your EV was when you made that monstrous soulread, the simple fact is that none of these analyses actually tell you your true expected value. And certainly your PokerEV graph doesn't. The reality is that your EV is going to be, on average (with the three aforementioned factors presumed constant, which they aren't) whatever your winrate is. That's it. If you're winning 50 cents a hand, and you played 1000 hands, then your EV was on average $500, give or take based on those three factors. So, if you won $1000 over that session but you lost two stacks with AA, you were still running good, because you were simply fortunate to run better in the scenarios you were given other than the two AA stacks. Same thing if you're up 100k over a big sample and your PokerEV graph shows you're supposed to be up 20k more, there's a pretty good chance that you ran good on the whole to have gotten yourself into enough positive scenarios beyond the ones where you got your money in good and lost.

So ultimately, what's the point of this big long rant? Well, the point is - let's simply define running under expectation as winning less than you ought to, and running bad as actually running significantly less than you ought to. Under these definitions, and referencing the fact that of course variance for everyone has grown tremendously in the last year of poker - if you're winning at all, then you're not running bad. Ask one of the many extremely good players who are genuinely running bad, losing over large samples of hands, over months at a time, but who are still much better than you and have higher genuine edges in the games that they play - they are fucking running bad, and let's reserve the word for those people out of respect for how nice it is just to not lose money. Lots of people don't appreciate winning 1/10th of what they consider to be a good month, and allow me to set those people straight by saying that those people are bitches, and if they actually ran bad (or remembered what it was like when they ran bad), they'd appreciate just not being down and would suck it up.

So, all-in-all, if you're not running bad, then shut the fuck up and be grateful. Poker is a whore, but she's like one of those whores in a movie or something who everybody thinks is stupid and doesn't know anything but actually knows all of the secrets of life if you ask her. Even whores have something to teach if you're willing to learn.

Well, there was another topic I wanted to talk about, but this ended up taking me way longer than I expected. So I guess I'll post that later (lol). Procrastination FTW. Next post I'll try to make the continuation of the previous blog post though. So, until next time.
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January 20, 2009

My unexpectedly uninteresting story, Pt. 1
Blog by : INTERNETPOKERS
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January 15, 2009

On hero calls
Blog by : INTERNETPOKERS
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I've been kind of lazy lately, but I thought I might enter in another blog entry since I had a couple of hands fresh on my mind. I'll get around to a lifestory sort of post a little bit later, but for now I wanted to write a bit about hero calls, since I've gotten a few questions about them lately.

Hero calls are an interesting topic, and they're a very misunderstood topic as well. This is in large part because a lot of people are really bad at them, and it's very hard to discriminate through a hand history alone how bad any particular hero call is. A lot of people hero call out of frustration, some people hero call because they refuse to fold a hand of a certain strength because they feel it's exploitable, and most people hero call because they can imagine their opponents bluffing and want to look cool. But a hero call is always interesting - and what I mean by interesting is it is always a high point of information exchange. For example, two people reraising and getting all-in with AK vs QQ - this is actually an uninteresting hand - although it is a big pot, there is no information exchanged when your opponent gets all-in with QQ, and there's no information that he receives when he sees you stacking off with AK. Both players know exactly how their opponents will play their respective hands. There are countless examples, such as getting in top two against an overpair on the flop or a flush over a flush, but in general any hand where two people run into the top of each other's ranges tends to be an uninteresting hand as far as how it affects the exchange of information (and thus, the complexity of the match).

But hero calls are different. Hero calls are when one player calls with the bottomish part of his range when his opponent is representing the toppish part of his range. What this means is that there is a lot of communication that is going on - beyond each player seeing each other's hands, the hero caller is always saying something that he wants his opponent to hear. The message is usually along the lines of "you need to bluff less in these sorts of spots, because I'm willing to call weak hands," in which case the hero call is generally going to be a very marginal one, because the hero caller is aware that it's quite possible that his opponent isn't bluffing as often as he needs to be for the call to be correct. The call is mostly for the sake of ensuring that his opponent doesn't bluff too much or think that he is getting too much respect for his own good. It may of course be that the call is correct and the caller thinks it's very likely that the call is correct, but nonetheless the message is passed on to the bluffer that he needs to bluff less in that spot, because he now knows that the hero caller thinks he's bluffing too much. This leads to both players readjusting their games - generally along the lines of the bluffer bluffing less, and the hero caller hero calling less.

Now, this sort of "you need to bluff me less" hero call doesn't always work the way it's intended. Like I said, its purpose is to get the bettor to make fewer bluffs because he should be afraid that the caller is calling with a higher frequency, and I think it can generally be mapped out like this:

1. If the caller hero calls, and the bettor shows the top of his range (a hand that both players know that the bettor is always betting regardless of his perception of the dynamic), then the call will have moderate efficacy in getting him to bluff less.
2. If the caller hero calls and the bettor shows up with a bluff, then the call will have high efficacy in getting him to bluff less.
3. If the caller hero calls, and the bettor shows a thin value bet (insinuating that the bettor was able to foresee the caller making a hero call at that moment), then the result is pretty unpredictable, and the bettor is in control of the situation. That is, he can start bluffing more if he feels that the caller is going to be too scared to hero call again in fear of a thin valuebet, or he can start bluffing less if he feels like the caller is calling too much (as indicated by the hero call he just witnessed). Essentially, the caller failed to communicate anything to the bettor, because the bettor was already able to predict what he wanted to say. A good analogy would be being out with a friend and you say "PUNCH BUGGY BLUE" but before you finish he punches you in the face. Clearly, he has made you his bitch.

So, that being said, there is another kind of hero call. A good name for it would be the soulread, and it is very different from the previous sort of bluffcall (which usually railbirds or lower stakes players cannot at all discern, and is sometimes also difficult to tell for good players from a hand history alone). A soulread is essentially when you are able to map out most of your opponent's range in your mind, and when he makes a bluff you realize with a certainty that your opponent can't have valuebets often enough because of the line he has taken. So, essentially, the call is made solely with immediate EV in mind, its value does not rest on communicating anything to your opponent (since, in reality, you'd prefer it not to communicate anything at all, because you'd want your opponent to keep taking horrible lines so you can keep soulreading him). In reality, the soulread is to poker as the pimpslap is to pimping, so as awesome as it is to do, it always has repercussions on the recipient that will usually discourage him or her from getting into similar situations in the future. But the soulread always hinges on very concrete range analysis - even if it's not totally conscious or "based on feel," any true (or, well, any good) soulread will always have range analysis at the heart of it. There's nothing mystical about it, just knowing enough about your opponent to see why he can't have enough hands in any certain bluffing spot.

So, that being said, there are a couple of hands that I've gotten some requests to dissect, so I figure this is as good a forum as any to do so.

The first hand I'm going to take a look at is my semi-notorious J high call (you can see the original thread here)

http://www.pokerhand.org/?3718793

Okay, so let's take this hand street-by-street, and I'll discuss my reads as the hand progresses.

I 3-bet preflop with J7s. Obviously a weak hand, but okay for 3-betting as it can make straights and flushes and shit. He calls, and I know that he is calling preflop with a reasonably wide range.

Flop comes 862ss. Now, this is a flop that I expect RS_Hustla to be floating a lot, hoping to rep hands later. So, given that read my flop bet is, in a vacuum, probably pretty -EV. But when I bet this flop, I am doing so with the intention of betting a lot of turns to get him off of a lot of marginal floats (random A high Q high crap, T9 97 56 type stuff, and I'm sure 33/44 will fold on most turns). Now, an important thing to realize though was that RS_Hustla was jamming a lot of flops on me in 3-bet pots. I was assuming, then, that on a board like this most of his jamming range would be stuff like big flush draws (stuff that he wanted to jam to get me to fold out AQ/AK rather than slowplay and have to make a sketchy turn decision). He could also of course shove a moderate flush draw or a straight draw, but it becomes more likely that he'd call, and another thing to note is that with a multidraw like 45ss or 97ss, there's actually a reasonable chance that he'd slowpla. So, one of my big reads on RS_Hustla was that he was shove-happy and didn't like to put himself into marginal situations with good hands.

Now, he calls the flop, so I'm going to put his range as being some of the marginalish flush draws that he either didn't feel comfortable or decided not to jam, ace high and occasional weaker high card floats, sets, straight draws, 78 type hands, small pairs, and maybe an occasional gutter. A pretty wide range obviously.

Now, the turn comes an offsuit ace, and this is one of the ideal cards for me to barrel. I can push him off of a gutter that he floated, I can bet him off a straight draw (or bet twice), and the same is true if he has 44 or a 78 type hand. If he has a marginal flush draw he won't be able to jam this turn (or at least I think he won't), and so with a hand like jack high it's actually probably the best card in the deck besides something that pairs me. So I bet out. Now, what do I think he's doing with his hands here?


* 45/68/97 (oesd's) I think he'd call again
* 78 he'd probably call to fold river
* 44 he MIGHT call to fold river
* Weak flush draws he'll call to play river straightforward
* A set he will probably jam but he MIGHT slowplay it, but given that the board has a straight draw, flush draw, and the ace hit and of course he'll put me on an ace a lot, usually he'll just ship at this point
* A small ace that he floated - he will almost certainly jam the turn. Now, this read is actually crucial - I've seen a hand before where he played a hand in a similar fashion, and the reasoning is pretty straightforward - he wants to just ship it in now and prevent a bad card from hitting on the river, maybe get me to call with a JJ that I'm betting thin with, and from his perspective if I have a bigger ace he's just content with losing the pot. Most players would prefer to slowplay a hand like A8 here to try to induce a river barrel, but this player is just jamming the turn the majority of the time.
* Aces up, I think he can probably slowplay the turn or jam, both are reasonable.
* A gutter is rare, but I think it wouldn't blow my mind to see him float again with 9T hoping I'd give up so he could jam the river himself


Now, he calls without too much deliberation (which also suggests to me that he probably doesn't have an ace or a set, since he'd consider jamming both of those hands). Now the river hits an offsuit Q, and I have to make a decision. Do I want to continue and jam this river? Or do I want to check? Well, to make that decision I have to decide what his hand range is and what I think he'll do with it once I check. So the hands he can still have are some of 78ish type stuff, very few 44 type hands, lots of flush draws and straight draws, the occasional Ax, and then some sets. Now, if I jam, I'm probably going to make him fold the 78 and the 44, but he's calling every time with the set and the Ax. If he has a flush draw or a straight draw he'll fold every time, and I beat all of his straight draws and flush draws except for the occasional jack high flush draw that's slightly better than mine that decided not to raise the flop (a Q high fd he'd check back on the river, and a K high flush draw I think he'd almost always get it in on the flop). So if I jam the river, he folds 78 and 44, and then calls his Ax's, w/ a Q8 type thing, and calls his sets. However, if I check the river, what's he going to do? He'll check back 78 and 44, he'll jam his Ax's, jam his sets, and, most importantly, jam all of his missed straight and flush draws. So you can see, between these two options, if I check to call the river then I will always lose my last 1200 if he has Ax or a set or Q8, so you can imagine that we can subtract this from both sides of the equation and just look at what's left. Should we jam to make him fold 78 and the occasional 44, or should we check to call to make him jam all of his straight and flush draws? Well, I thought that he had more than enough straight and flush draws in his range to make checking the river to call better than jamming here, so I checked and called with jack high.

That was a long post and took me longer than I expected to do, but I hope maybe some of you learned something from that. I'll try to post a proper introduction tomorrow or the day after. Until then, GL at the tables all.
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January 13, 2009

The life and whines of an online poker player
Blog by : INTERNETPOKERS
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Hey guys,

So as part of my joining Cardrunners I've been advised to start a blog. To be honest, I've never had a blog before so I'm going to try to keep up the updates on this thing regularly, but I hope that I can produce interesting and thoughtful entries.

I'm kind of busy today so I can't provide a proper introduction just yet, but I just wanted to make a few comments about my joining Cardrunners. Many people must know that I used to produce videos for Deucescracked, and it seems like there are some suggestions that Cardrunners was unscrupulous in acquiring me, or that I sold out, or that my switching sites is indicative of anything about either site. Let me assure you that this is absolutely not the case. I joined Cardrunners because they could offer me opportunities that other sites simply could not. I have no regrets about my work with Deucescracked, and my relationship with all of the people who I worked with there are wholly intact. As much as I enjoyed working there, it is my prerogative to do what I feel is in the best interests of my poker career. I hold no animosity toward anyone in the Deucescracked family, and they respect my decision to leave. There were several sites that offered me a deal to work with them, but I decided that none of them could offer what Cardrunners could.

That being said, I don't want to sound like a zealot and I have enough self-awareness to know that I have to do some proving to show that I'm committed to working for Cardrunners, so that's exactly what I intend to do. Within the next couple days I'll try to post a more comphehensive introduction and a brief story of my poker history, but for now I hope you guys are willing to welcome me into the Cardrunners family - and of course enjoy my videos. :)

Haseeb, AKA DOGISHEAD
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