Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2530 Location: Edinburgh
Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 7:26 am Post subject: Poker tournament theory.
PTF discusses looser play in tournaments and I'm wondering if this may be more profitable overall than just making +EV decisions. (As in HOH books.)
Instead of looking at a tournament as a series of decisions which are all independent of each other, maybe it is better to look at how you play the tournament as a whole. Maybe by just getting involved more often and playing looser, even to the point of making some -EV decisions, (To maintain the loosness.) will end up as a more profitable way to play the tournament than just waiting for the good looking situations to come along.
Here are a couple of my thoughts on this:
1/ If you have 5 attempts to flip a coin 5 times as heads then there is only one way to win; you have to flip heads on every attempt and each attempt will have 50% chance of working. But if you are given 10 attempts then you have many more ways to get to 5; you can even fail on the first 5 attempts but still win. Therefore each attempt does not need to be 50% correct anymore. Each decision becomes less important as there are more alternative ways to reach the goal.
Playing tight in a poker tournament will give you good situations to gain more chips. But the situations have to mostly go well for this style to be successful as there won't be a lot of them that come up. Playing looser may mean playing some -EV situations but overall it may be more profitable as each of the decisions will be less important (As long as you don't bust.) and the chance of doing well in the tournament may be better.
2/ If opponents mistakes are important as SKlansky suggests then playing looser will allow opponents to make more mistakes overall in a tournament. Again this could compensate for some -EV decisions that have been made.
I'm trying to understand why loose play seems to do so well even with not so great players. (Jamie Gold.) I'm wondering if any of the two points above have any weight to them.
Jamie Gold plays position well pressures opponents, is tricky trapy player you can't put him on a hand. Does some weird stuff on the river like reraising without the nuts when a stronger hand can only call. Does not seem to know where he is at in hands sometimes, pays off too much can't lay down a strong hand. Every time I''ve seen him on the TV he seems like a nice guy. I think he is a good large stack player.
Posted: Tue Apr 22, 2008 12:37 am Post subject: Re: Poker tournament theory.
emmapeel wrote:
PTF discusses looser play in tournaments and I'm wondering if this may be more profitable overall than just making +EV decisions. (As in HOH books.)
Instead of looking at a tournament as a series of decisions which are all independent of each other, maybe it is better to look at how you play the tournament as a whole. Maybe by just getting involved more often and playing looser, even to the point of making some -EV decisions, (To maintain the loosness.) will end up as a more profitable way to play the tournament than just waiting for the good looking situations to come along.
Here are a couple of my thoughts on this:
1/ If you have 5 attempts to flip a coin 5 times as heads then there is only one way to win; you have to flip heads on every attempt and each attempt will have 50% chance of working. But if you are given 10 attempts then you have many more ways to get to 5; you can even fail on the first 5 attempts but still win. Therefore each attempt does not need to be 50% correct anymore. Each decision becomes less important as there are more alternative ways to reach the goal.
Playing tight in a poker tournament will give you good situations to gain more chips. But the situations have to mostly go well for this style to be successful as there won't be a lot of them that come up. Playing looser may mean playing some -EV situations but overall it may be more profitable as each of the decisions will be less important (As long as you don't bust.) and the chance of doing well in the tournament may be better.
2/ If opponents mistakes are important as SKlansky suggests then playing looser will allow opponents to make more mistakes overall in a tournament. Again this could compensate for some -EV decisions that have been made.
I'm trying to understand why loose play seems to do so well even with not so great players. (Jamie Gold.) I'm wondering if any of the two points above have any weight to them.
Thx
EP
Your perspective on the value of loose play is quite accurate. One of the biggest mistakes that tight players make is thinking that it's about the cards. So few hands are shown down in a NLH tournament that the cards don't actually matter all that much. Loose play makes it very difficult for opponents to put you on a hand. They see you playing "too many" hands, so they know your standards are well below theirs. When you have strong starting cards like AK or a big pair, they don't tend to believe you and will call you more often than they would call a tighter player. When the board is raggy, they realize that you could have hit those cards since they've seen you show down weird hands, so they will go away when all they have is overcards.
If you can read your opponents well enough to know when they have a hand they won't lay down, it's easy to lay down your own hand since you are so often playing on air. Also, exactly what is a -EV situation? If I call a raise from a "solid" player when I have 75s, this would generally be considered -EV for me. But is it -EV if I think I can read this guy and get him to fold often enough just by making position moves on him?
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