Article of the Month Voting - Deadline 12/31/06

[mchilger]

ITH is sponsoring an Article of the Month contest. Each month Members can submit articles to the Forum. The Forum will vote on their favorite article and the winner’s will be published on the home page and newsletter. The winner receives $100 (cash or stake). The process will work as follows:

- We will start a Sticky each month in The Poker Tutor and Articles Forum titled January Article of the Month contest, February…etc.
- Members have until the 20th of each month to submit an article in that thread.
- On the 20th, we will post a poll for Members to vote on their favorite article.
- Whichever article has the most votes by the 1st will win.
- Please focus on poker strategy. Lessons learned and hand examples are always great topics. Feel free to turn one of your posts into an article.

If you want to make a submission, please simply reply to this thread with your article.

Thanks and good luck! Matthew

[BaltoBruiser]

Are there any limitations on how long/short the article should be? Or are there limitations on the subject matter of the article?

Thanks,
Bruiser

[mchilger]

Max is 1500 words. A good size is about 1000 while 800 is the minimum. Most of my articles run in the 900-1100 area. Any subject is fine, although I prefer articles that focus on strategy.

Matthew

[OgreMkV]

Turbo SnGs: Why and How to play them
by OgreMkV

Personally, I find ring games insanely boring. Just the thought of playing for hours with nothing ever changing drives me to insanity. I enjoy the challenge of increasing blinds and the fact that players will go away. So I play sit-n-gos.

I have found that for a beginning player (like me) the Stars $3.40 turbos (single table) are excellent proving grounds. The early game can be quite insane, with some good opportunities for a careful player. Mid game is a good place to learn aggression. Late game teaches valuable short handed and heads up skills. Another plus is that the games rarely last more than 40 minutes. So three or four can easily be played in 2 hours.


The Early Game Chaos
These inexpensive SnGs can be very good for your bankroll because many less experienced players cut their teeth on them. However, be careful. Remember this saying: "The greatest swordsman in the world doesn't fear the second best. He fears the worst because he can't tell what the idiot will do."

I consider the early game here to be when there are more than six players. Here is when it is most dangerous for you to get involved in a hand. This is the time when that maniac will hit his fours full of eights to your pocket queens.

On the other hand, your premium hands will usually be good. But do not over-commit to any hand. His ten high flush still beats your TPTK. It's OK to check the river if he does. You should be playing top ten hands and pocket pairs.

Be prepared for several callers at any blinds up to about 25/50. If you don't hit, get out. If you do hit, make sure that you make at least a pot sized bet. If someone calls with his flush draw, he made a mistake. Remember that.

You should also be playing tightly to get a tight table image for those players that are paying attention. It will serve you well in the mid game.

Hopefully, you've gotten a few premium hands and gathered some chips. If you haven't gathered some chips, all is not lost. You still have time and things are about to get a little easier... well, at least less chaotic.


The Mid Game
Mid game in these SnGs is between 6 players and the bubble. This is where you switch gears and become more aggressive. If you are below average in chips, you will need to steal and get a little lucky to stay alive. If you are above average in chips, you can play big stack against the shorties.

Now the blinds are probably high enough to make stealing worth it. Watch a few hands, see if 3x the BB is enough to steal. I would encourage you to not make a play with any two here, unless your M is less than 5. But you can lower your starting hand requirements considerably. Suited connectors and almost any Ax-suited are good hands here.

The smaller stacks will be trying to play for 3rd and it will be easy to get their blinds if they don't have a hand. If they reraise all-in, be careful.

If you do get callers, then a continuation bet will almost always win the pot. The continuation bet is your friend and will earn you some nice pots.

The Late Game
Either on the button or after. You should be getting extra lessons in aggressiveness here. You do not have to play every hand. In fact, I will occasionally fold the small blind to keep my tight image. I know some of you are going to go crazy when you read that last bit. Here's my thinking.

First, would I fold any playable hand here? No. I'm referring to having 72o, 93o, T2 (unless you are Doyle) etc here. You might get the big blind, you might not. If I raise, I would rather have a chance of winning the hand than automatically folding to any reraise. If you do that more than once, everyone will notice and you'll be forced to wait for a hand.

On the other hand, a fold, once in a while, will allow you to say, "see I still only play good hands, so when I raise, you'd better have something."

I believe that this forces the other players to respect your raises a lot more than they normally would.

Play very hard here though. Pairs, two face cards, Ax, etc are all premium hands, once you're in the money.

Button play. Again, do not get over committed to a pot. All it takes is one bad hand for the chip leader to be the new short stack. If you are the chip leader, be very patient. Steal a pot now and then, but let the short stacks fight it out. If you have a premium hand, call their all-in.

The blinds here can get very interesting if the early game lasted a while. Remember your M and play accordingly. If you are in bad shape, then everyone else is too.

Final Thoughts
These same patterns apply to any SnG or MTT for that matter. It’s just very easy to see the pattern in a turbo SnG because of the speed at which players fall. Don’t be surprised to see an all-in and a call on the first hand.

Don’t play scared. This is a $3 SnG. If losing this game will destroy your bankroll, you shouldn’t be here in the first place. Play back at someone with nothing… don’t do it often. Use this game as your aggression training ground. Get in there and mix it up some. Try a squeeze play. Try the rope-a-dope. It does work.

[the_hawk]

The Action-Reaction Link in Poker
by the_hawk

“… for as a man shall sow, so also shall he reap.” (Galatians 6:7)

We normally see the above in a slightly simpler proverbial form, along the lines of: “… as ye sow, so shall ye reap.” However it is worded, the message seems clear. We get what we deserve in the end. There is a clear and definite link between our actions and the consequences. We are in control of our own destinies. Many poker players - particularly those with at least a moderate level of experience and a degree of commitment to the game - are acutely conscious of these sentiments.

Beginning poker players often struggle with the concept that the link between actions and their consequences are often far from straightforward, at least in the short term. Poker books, articles and forum posts constantly remind us to remember the sometimes debilitating effect of luck and variance on our short-term results. However, in poker the link between our actions and their consequences is often much subtler than we sometimes realise.

Let’s take the general issue of bluffing as an example. This illustrates clearly how players at differing levels appreciate the action-reaction link in different ways. Beginning players often overestimate the importance of bluffing. More importantly, they typically view bluffing as a means to an end - as a way of stealing pots to which they are otherwise not entitled. Here, there is a trivial link between the action (the bluff) and the reaction (whether they win the pot). They will only see value in the immediate success - or otherwise - of the bluff. Most importantly of all, their decision-making processes are centred wholly on the immediate hand in question. The decision to run a bluff is based on whether they think it will win them this hand.

As players become more experienced so their view widens a little. They realise that bluffs won’t work every time. Soon they are comfortable with the idea that a bluff may only succeed, say, one time in three, but acknowledge that one time in three is good enough to turn an overall profit providing they keep making that bluff when faced with the same situation over and over again. This is rather like the beginning-to-intermediate player becoming comfortable with the notion of pot odds. If the right pot odds are on offer, a call can lose most of the time but still prove profitable in the long-term providing the player keeps making the call when faced again with a similar situation.

Incidentally, this type of thinking applied to starting hands gives some players great trouble. A pair of aces on the sort of table where many players are seeing the flop and calling all the way to showdown is extremely profitable in the long term. However, if the table conditions are extreme enough, even AA might win less often than it loses. This means that the hand will prove very profitable overall, but some players believe they are “entitled” to win the pot more often with AA than they do - and they find the lost pots hard to bear. Note that we said lost pots. The money is coming the way of the AA player eventually.

But let’s return to bluffing. Players having a yet more sophisticated view than we’ve seen so far consider the wider value of bluffing. They see bluffs both as a means of stealing pots and of enhancing later non-bluff value bets. They realise that if one is caught bluffing they are more likely to be “looked up” by opponents next time when they’re actually holding a good hand and are betting for value. Here, their perspective has extended not only beyond the hand in question, but also outside the context of bluffing itself. The link between actions and their consequences becomes much less straightforward.

A highly advanced view of bluffing completely eliminates the obvious link between actions and their consequences. In The Theory of Poker, David Sklansky describes a game-theoretical analysis of bluffing. He shows that in certain situations one can deploy bluffs at an optimum frequency to turn a hand that is an underdog into a hand that is a favourite - irrespective of any strategy the opponent uses. This is a key difference that sets this view on a higher plane than anything we’ve seen so far; it literally doesn’t matter what the opponent does - the bluffer’s long-term expectation is precisely the same. A key element of this approach is that whether or not to bluff is decided at random. If the action is essentially randomised, we’re clearly going to have a tough time figuring out the link between action and consequence. And that’s precisely the point - if it’s tough for us, it’s next to impossible for our opponents.

Let’s summarise this by looking at what we want our opponents to do in response to our bluff. In the beginners’ view, we want our opponent to fold when we bluff. A level up from that, we want them to fold often enough to make the bluff profitable. Next, we would like them to fold but we’re gaining value for next time even if they look us up. Finally, it literally doesn’t matter what they do.

What does all this mean for us in a wider context, as poker players looking to develop our game? It serves as a reminder that poker, despite being simple to play, is a rich and complex game. Of course we should look to fix our leaks but we should retain a healthy degree of scepticism and be pretty sure of our evidence that something is a weakness in our game before taking steps to correct it. The link between action and reaction in poker is often subtler than we realise, and this extends far beyond the obvious issues of variance and short-term results.

[toronexti]

Discipline: Multi-Table Tournaments

By: Toronexti

Not being the most disciplined person ,both in poker and in life, I want to discuss it the topic of discipline. In particular I'd like to discuss discipline in multi-table tournaments, which I believe is far more important than discipline in the cash game setting. For example, in no limit cash games if you aren’t disciplined for one hand you have the option to re-buy and recoup the loss your mistake caused. In tournaments, however, that one small lapse in discipline just sent you to the rail and you’ve sacrificed your buy in and any hope of a payday.

A common strategy for tournaments is to play your premium cards well, throw in some steals – and there you go you’re making a lot of money – this is the discipline I’m talking about. That’s the way people think it works anyway. To a degree they are correct, but if this were the case why do some players do better than others using the same type of strategy? Every tournament player will admit to oodles of luck being involved in any particular tournament – but then why do we see the same players at the final tables over and over and over again? Is it their good fortune? Do they have a fairy godmother granting a Ks fall on the river? It’s hard to say but I’m going to assume no. So what is it about these players that makes them stand out above the rest?

First off, all the well-known online tournament players play multiple tournaments a day not cashing in most. But, regardless of how many tournaments they play – they have two attributes which enable them to relentlessly finish deeper in the tournaments than the average Joe they are playing against. These are: discipline and taking advantage of the situation you find yourself in. Discipline we have already touched on. While taking advantage of the situation often requires we abandoned discipline and play contrary to our basic style. The problem is most people do not realize these two attributes are very hard to reconcile with each other.

Stepping back to cash games for a moment, you should take advantage of every single +EV situation that comes your way (assuming you’re properly bankrolled). In tournaments this is mostly true – but the instances where it is not can make or break you. So, we find ourselves in a predicament – to be a good player you must have discipline, to be a great player you must take the risk associated with playing your non-premium hands.

Personally, I have been struggling with this problem for the last five months and until yesterday had no idea how to solve it. The key to becoming a great player lies in your ability to maintain discipline during the very hands where you are in a position to take advantage of your situation. Basically, every time that it is correct to raise any two cards, does not mean you should. You should pick your spots carefully regarding these situations – because even though they are +EV, they are not necessarily +EV in the long term if you take advantage of every seemingly advantageous situation you run into.

By taking advantage of every single situation that looks the slightest bit +EV you are trapping yourself into having much more variance and probably into being less profitable. Why would you be less profitable if you take every +EV situation? In theory you wouldn’t be – you would just be increasing your variance. However, in practice when you believe you are in a +EV situation in reality you are not. As the common saying goes “poker is a game of incomplete information” so when you try to take increasingly smaller edges you open yourself up to being incorrect more and more often; and since a single mistake can doom your chances of success it lowers your overall profitability. Hence, by taking less of these small edges you accomplish two things: less variance and less tournament ending mistakes. I’m not suggesting you give up significant edges, just ones where even if you are right your edge is still miniscule (e.g. calling an all-in with 22). This becomes truer and truer as your edge gets smaller and smaller – hence you should almost never pass up a 30% edge, but should quite frequently pass up a 1% edge.

The only conclusion we can draw here is that discipline is a key trait to being successful in tournaments. Discipline is such an important trait that not only must it be used in regards to the cards you are dealt – it must also be used in judging which situational edges to take advantage of and which ones to pass on.

Thank you to all the people who took the time to help me fix this article up.
Special thanks to Royze.

[Piemaster]

Given a 41 day deadline, toro posts his article with 8 hours to go.

Reminds me of my student days.

[toronexti]

Maybe there should be an anouncement made in general since no1 is voting.

[Piemaster]

I didn't actually know the voting had started. Better reread all the articles

[irishiain]

[nukeduke]

3 good reads. Thanks for taking the time to write the material guys.

[cybrarian]

I'll echo that - thanks folks, and well done to all 3.

[Mowgli]

[mchilger]

Hawk, congratulations for winning the first article of the month contest. I'll be traveling for a while but will be in touch soon concerning your article.

We'll have another contest this month which I will post soon.

Thanks again to all three submissions! Matthew

[the_hawk]

Belated w00t as I have been on vacation myself. Thanks to those who inspired the article (you know who you are) and to all those that voted. I'm delighted my article came through against a strong field.