Darkened Poker

There are common two times we send out information

1. After the hand, very costly in the long term
2. During the hand, very costly in the short term

First one is the easiest to get rid and the most costly over all.

1. If they got sucked out on they show their hand to get sympathy.
2. If they made a great lay down they show it to let people know how smart they are.
3. Make a thin call to slow someone down, are wrong but show it anyway to send a message.
4. If their play ends up being wrong they talk about why they played a hand that way so people do not think they are dumb.

All of this is horrible, you do not want sympathy, respect or people to think your smart.  You only want money and all those other things stop you from making money.  Just never talk about a hand at the table, never show your cards unless it is to rake in a pot.  You will stop 80% of your information leak right there and it is so simple.

Second one is a lot harder to get rid of.  There are three pieces of information that we commonly send out that can be very useful to other players.

• Amount we bet, this can be used to deduce the strength of our hand in many situations.
• Time it takes us to bet, says how hard the decision was, # of factors we considered,
• Intent to fold, lots of people signal they are waiting to fold a hand.

Amount we bet, I have a simple rule here, against fish I always just value bet the max I can and do not worry about anything else.  They are fish, they are not making reads and doing anything less is leaving money on the table for no reason. I bet to extract even more if there are draws on the board.  Against great readers I 50% play it straight forward and 50% play it tricky.  That means slow playing, checking to induce bluffs, over betting the pot, re-raise with draws, fail to c-bet, fail to semi-bluff.  I use 50% because that is the frequency it often takes to even get noticed in a live game and when they do it is hard to play back against.

Time it takes to bet, lots of people have non thinking tells.  They call bets instantly if they have the nut draw or instantly all in raise with the nuts or a really big draw like flush + str8.  Don’t let this be you, always take a min amount of time to act.  As you get better and it takes you less time to think about the hard situations you can make your min time smaller and not slow down the games so much.  Others have hardness of decision tells were they think a long time about certain things like calling bets with top pair mid or calling with top pair on a 3 flush board.  All you can do to minimize this is start thinking about what you would do in each situation before the card is turned over so your thinking time is reduced.  Also thing about hands while your not at the table so things fall into situations that you all ready know what to do about. This will eventually minimize the info your giving away.

The last tell does not hurt you but hurts everyone else.  If you make it clear you are going to fold then people will bluff the people to act behind you more as there are less people to go through.  So even though you know you are done with the hand, just sit there like normal until it is your turn to act.  I have had to table change because every time I was in the big blind the small blind made it 100% clear what he was going to fold and the button and cut off were raising me every single time.

If you can do all this you will clean your game up enough that people will ignore you at the table and focus on the easier targets which is what you want.  Keep your game a mystery.

I love playing with people who call out hands to make themselves look smart.  As smart as they think they are they have just made me smarter.  I was playing at Casino Real in a 2 -3 NL Texas Hold’em game with two regulars that are friends and often discuss hands at the table in a low voice between themselves.  Sit close to these chatty types and you can get insight into how they think about hands.  They are pretty smart guys and play well, they just leak to much information for their own good.

Well a couple days before this session I had been playing with them and one of them calls out my hand before the cards are turned over and he was dead right.  I had a set and was stacking some guy over playing AK on a K high and very dry board.  Ok, I know he is watching me and has a line on my all in hand ranges on rainbow boards.  So a very similar hand comes up with him on this day, were I and a few others limp, he makes a pot size bet from late position and I flat call out of position with my 22.  He had made it 40 but we both have about 500 behind and there is 3 other limpers behind that may over call as well.  Sadly only 1 over calls.

Flop:

2 7 J rainbow

I lead into him for $50 as I also know he is a very tight player and I expect time to have an over pair and raise me back.  The 3rd player calls and he min raises me back?  I did not expect the min raise as there was another player in the hand and I would expect all overs pairs to try and either take down the pot or at least get heads up at this point.  Min raise says lets build a big pot,  but dam I hate to fold sets when I am only suspicious.  So I min raise him back to find out where he is at, the 3rd guy drops out and now he re-raises me all in for about 300$ more.  Odd he now goes all in as I am not really pot committed, maybe he is a little pissed about me  raising again and getting rid of the 3rd guy?

Does not matter as now I know so I fold and he tries to calls out my hand again ( Trip 7′s ) and flashes me his Trip Jacks.  His crappy information management just cost him $300.  Had he not shown me how smart he was by calling out my hand 2 days earlier I not have know that he could put my range on that dry flop to only be a set.  So his re-raise of it and raise pre-flop could only mean top set of Jacks.  I would have normally been happy to go broke thinking he had an over pair.

If you see to friends always chatting in low voices to each other get a seat change and be close to them, you will learn their game fast.  Who knows what you will be able to use against them in the future.

KK or Cowboys; there is even more bad conventional wisdom about this hand than AA.  Everyone likes to call KK the Ace magnet.  The conventional wisdom was that you had to play them aggressively because if the Ace fell on the flop you were done.  They also suffered from the same stigma as AA that you should try to get head up pre-flop.

As you can see it is the second best hand in Texas Holdem no mater how many opponents your up against.  Its EV starts and ends a lot lower than AA’s just because 15% of the time and Ace will drop on the flop and another 10% of the time it will appear on the turn or river and the KK’s can loose its best 1 pair status.  What is really interesting is how rarely this is the case.  Against 1 random opponent even in the 25% cases were an Ace drops, only about 3% of the time are they likely to have and ace and have paired up.  Don’t make the newb mistake and completely freeze up every time an Ace falls, your loosing a lot of money in general.  Today people are more likely to have called with small pocket pairs and junk suited connectors than Big Ace hands.  So keep on betting.

Here is the chart:

EV Chart KK vs 1-9 Hands

The graph pretty much has the same shape as AA except it is smaller overall.  You still get a big jump going from 1 – 2 opponents and the EV still flattens out after 5.

Win Rate Chart:

Win Rate KK vs 1-9 Hands

Same shape as AA chart and I would play it the same as I would play AA.  One exception is in tournaments I would not always be quite as aggressive to get heads up even if I was as shorter stacked.  I might let more people to see the flop and look for an Ace free flop before committing the majority of my money.   It is a trade off, it is always good to get your money in as a favorite, but sometimes you can avoid that 25% elimination and build a nice pot that may commit someone to calling you down with second pair on the flop.

Cash game I will always try to get more people in the pot if I can there is really no reason to not go for the max EV sweet spot of 3 opponents.

Next AK

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Darkened Poker

Big Slick the hand that everyone loves to overplay.  It is the best of the drawing hands but it is still drawing hand usually has to hit to win.

New information that was not in the last post.  Rank is how it does against all other hands against that many opponents.  So in this case AK suited is the 8th best hand you can have against one opponent and the 4th best hand you can have against 9 opponents.  Also notice the difference between suited and non suited.  Heads up suited only adds 0.04 to the expected value but against 9 people it adds 0.4.  That is huge, suited makes for great multi way hands.

Charted it becomes easier to make sense of:

EV AK vs 1-9 Hands

Again we see with that the EV almost double going from 1-2 opponents and starts flattening out between 4-5.  Interesting here is the suited version of the hand never stops climbing and plays well against full tables were the unsuited version does not.  The power of suited cards containing an ace becomes very clear against many opponents.

Charted win rate only:

AK win rate vs 1-9 hands

The win rate of AK really drops off sharp going from 1-2 opponents, since it is not starting as a pair it has to hit to win and against two opponents you are unlikely to win the 20% of the time were no one hits and you have high card.  But as we saw in the last chart this loss of 20 % is more than made up for by now getting 2-1 on your money instead of 1-1.  Also what is interesting to note is the suited AK only wins about 4% more of the time but when you getting 8-1 on your money that 4% really adds to your EV.

My take away from this would be in a tournament situation it could go both ways.  If you need to double up then play it hard to get heads up and highest win rate.  If you have chips then try to get 2 -3 opponents and double your EV to try and become a really big stack.  In short stack cash games I would always try and get up to 4-5 opponent and max my EV.  Suited i would even play tricky short or deep stack and slow play it under the gun and if I took the flop with a full table it is not that big of a deal.

It is easy to see why the conventional wisdom of AK will leave you walking home to Huston came into being.  It is only a 2-1 favorite over a random hand and if you over play it and get 2 callers you are not the favorite to win.

Next QQ:

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Darkened Poker

There is a lot of conventional wisdom about how to play pocket Aces and most of it is wrong.   Well this got me to write a poker simulator and have it run 5 million hands of AA vs 1 – 9 other random hands to  see the real story.

AA is the best hand in Texas Hold’em, it has the highest EV ( Expected Value ) and win rate of any hand regardless of how many people you are against.

If we manage to get heads up with it, we are 85% to win and can expect to get 70 cents back in profit for every 1$ we put in the pot.    A lot of people look at the 85% win rate and say you should then only play it heads up as the win rate drops off 10% for each additional person your up against.  True the win rate drops off but for each person you add the EV also goes up so your making more money in the long run.  Going from 1 opponent to 2 almost doubles your EV so that for every 1$ you put in the pot you now get 1.5$ back.

In a tournament where losing the pot might mean your done for the day it probably does make sense to try and ensure you heads up and have the best chance of winning.  But in a cash game were money is the only real concern it makes a lot more sense to go for higher EV’s.

Graphing it makes it become a lot clearer:

EV vs # hand for AA

The biggest jump in EV is going from 1 to 2 opponents so even in a tournament I would still probably not re-raise an all in person to much and still try to let one more person come into the pot with me.  The last large jump in EV is from 3 to 4 opponents so in a cash game I will play a lot more tricky and try to let between 3 – 5 people in the pot with me.  The chart never flattens out so the max profit way to play AA would be to go all in and have everyone at the table call you.  The swings would be wild as you would only win 30% of the time but when you did you would get 9X back on your money.

If your only concerned about winning the graph is:

Win vs # Hands AA

Here you can see that the win rate drops pretty fast at the beginning and at 5 players you stop becoming the favorite.  Interestingly it kind of flattens out after 6 so even if your tricky play messes up and you get the whole table calling you, your never < 30% favorite.

I am not saying by any means that if your on the button and it is folded around to you that you should limp to make sure you get at least two players.  You have the best hand, you want to get money in the pot and you want them to define their hands a bit so you know how to play on the flop.  What I am saying is if someone goes all in in front of you do not automatically re-raise all in yourself to isolate.  Maybe just flat call or min raise again and let a few people play to join the dominated party.

Point is toss away the conventional wisdom about AA, it is not best to play heads up, that is your lowest EV situation.  It do play well against multiple opponents, in fact 3-4 is its sweet spot for winning and max EV.  It does not only win small pots and lose big one’s, if that is happening that means you are a playing scared, do not worry about playing people after the flop with AA, it is not that bad.

Next KK

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Darkened Poker