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The Poker Table is No Place for Hope or Faith

April 4, 2008

By Tony Guerrera

Situation 1: Joe Schmoe is playing in a fullhanded no-limit hold’em ring game. Action folds to Joe, and he raises with A Spades 9 Spades from the cutoff. The button and the blinds call, and the flop is A Diamonds A Clubs 9 Hearts. The blinds check to Joe, and he makes a pot-sized bet fueled by two hopes:

1.) One of his opponents has the case ace and will go over the top.
2.) An opponent with a pocket pair will call on the flop
3.) An opponent with a flush draw will call or semibluff

All three of Joe’s opponents dash Joe’s hopes and quickly fold.

Situation 2: Joe Schmoe is playing shorthanded no-limit hold’em. In 100 hands of play there has only been one reraise preflop. Joe raised from the button, the small blind reraised, and Joe folded. This happened around hand #50 of Joe’s session.

During hands #101 and #102, Joe (who has been playing somewhat aggressively but far from manically) opens from the button and the cutoff with raises. Both times, the same player reraises. After not doing much for 8 hands, Joe opens for a raise with JJ. Joe is reraised again - this time by a different player who has never reraised preflop. Being that this is the third time in the span of about 10 hands that he has been reraised preflop, Joe has faith in his JJ, goes over the top, and ends up losing 100 big blinds versus his opponent’s AA.

Hope and faith adversely affect our poker playing. In situation #1, Joe needs to think about his opponents. Instead of betting pot and hoping, he should think realistically about his opponents distributions. In many - but not all - games, a half-pot bet (or even something slightly less) will be ideal. A pot-sized bet might actually force a player with the case ace out of the pot if he has a bad kicker to accompany it. And anyone who mucks an ace with a bad kicker here will do the same with a pocket pair. Instead of betting big and hoping for a monster confrontation, Joe should bet smaller and get value from his hand.

In situation #2, a lot of things happen within a short span of time, and Joe makes a common mistake. At a table where no preflop reraising is happening, the reality of the game is that players are waiting for cards. The player who reraised Joe twice in a row probably had big hands both times. It could be possible that the different player who reraises him the third time observed Joe’s reaction to the prior two reraises, but the texture of the table dictates that Joe probably ran into another big hand. If preflop reraises begins happening regularly, on the order of once every two orbits or so, Joe can reason that the dynamic of the game has changed. But by letting faith replace reason with a hand like JJ and a random short spurt of events, Joe got himself into a lot of trouble.

Tony Guerrera is the author of Killer Poker By The Numbers and coauthor of Killer Poker Shorthanded (with John Vorhaus). Visit him at www.killerev.com.

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