Reflections on Ed Miller's SSH and how it changed my results

[nsidestrate]

WARNING: This is a damn long post. Stop here if you don't have serious stamina

I think it has been long enough since I've read the book to draw some conclusions about its effect on my game. I was already a pretty decent limit game player before I read it and I've read most of the biggies before it came out. I count ToP, HEFAP and especially ITH as critical books to making me a decent player. I've played for more or less a year and been a steady winner from 1/2 to 15/30. I most comfortably play 5/10 at the moment and I'm trying to convince myself I'm ready to play 15/30 all the time. I'm still around 3 BB/Hr and have been for some time, although I've recently suffered a fairly bad losing run (detailed in my I was too arrogant post.

Off the bat, I'd like to say that I love this book. Several things I read there I just knew in my soul were right the first moment I read them. Other things, I've had to cogitate over repeatedly before I could accept them. So far, I haven't found anything that I'm convinced is wrong, although I'm starting to imagine that one or two things aren't for me.

One interesting issue I have with the book is that I never find the tables where I can apply the "loose game" chart. It requires an average of six people seeing each flop. I am a guy who always hunts for the juiciest tables he can find and I just don't ever see a table with an average number of players seeing the flop above 60%. I consider a table with an average above 40% to be a good table and once in a rare while I can find one with 50% of the table seeing the flop on average. I have not found the table with more than 60% seeing the flop on average once. Perhaps it happens more at the micro-limits -- perhaps it happens more in some juicy casino setting, but it hasn't happened to me yet. And I've been looking.

Also on the subject of pre-flop play, I found that Miller's suggestions fit well into things I was already doing. I have always loved to play pocket pairs since I first started playing -- I reasoned that if I didn't hit a set, I'd always fold and I couldn't lose more than one SB. If I hit a set, I'd jam like no tomorrow and keep good records. It was a winning strategy for me from day one and I still think that pocket pairs are highly playable in every game I've been in. I've since figured out what situations I can continue to play my pocket pairs when I don't hit the set and I continue to make steady money with these hands. If anything, I'm willing to call with lower pairs than Miller. I haven't yet found a book that will endorse my love of Kxs at limpy tables, but someone will write it yet, I'm sure. Its the same idea -- hit the flush or bail. As you get better,, you will find places where your King is good too. I wish Miller "borrowed" Matthew's notation of call 2, call 4 -- I think that was a very useful addition to the poker canon. All in all, I don't think SSH affected my pre-flop play much, but it made me feel better about some stuff I was already doing.

An area that I don't think Miller (or any other author that I am aware of) addresses is an optimal strategy for a very loose pre-flop raiser. I see this very often (as all of you with poker tracxer do too, I'm sure): a player with a pre-flop raise percentage in the 25% or higher range. I've even seen players at 40%. Miller still calls for laying down virtually everything to a pre-flop raise (as does virtually every authority). However, I think that gives up far too many profitable situations against someone who raises more hands than you would even play -- maybe even two times as many hands as you would play. Against someone who will raise any Ace, any pair and pretty much any two face cards, folding 99 or ATs is not clearly the right play. I see this situation very often and I've been formulating my own strategies for handling it, but I'd love for some author to address it with some mathematical rigor. As an exercise for another post, you should try sometime determining what hands one would need to raise 30% of the time or 40% of the time. Try to determine a set of rules and see how many hands you would have to raise to get there. You will find that 40% will require you to raise virtually everything you can imagine, pairs, any 2 suited, any 2 face cards and probably more. Therefore, the strongly worded advice to almost never cold-call raises (in fact to fold most everything to a raise) puts you in a difficult situation with one of these maniacs and I'm pretty sure it is not the optimal strategy.

But the real meat of SSH , the thing that has completely changed my game is the approach to post-flop play, especially flop play. SSH has you playing drawing hands that I probably would have folded (say a backdoor flush, backdoor straight draw with a weak pair or overcards) as raising hands. I'll post more examples later, but I assume for most of us Miller's advice was more aggressive than we had been playing. This also fit into my thinking as I had been noticing that aggression wins money and folding equity is nothing to sneeze at. The section on hidden outs made me realize that I was folding too often when I had good odds to chase.

The problem with this new-found knowledge is that chasing draws and playing aggressively seems to have two different, but related effects. My win rate has clearly gone up. I am certain that I've won hands I would have folded before and that I've "cleaned up" outs that I would have let suck out on me before. For this, I am grateful. There is a second, somewhet less happy effect, however. I am convinced that this has had a significant effect on my varience. I used to win at a slower rate, but with more consistant results. My wife used to watch me play and as my pile of electronic chips grew higher, she would argue for setting a new floor (or stop loss for you equity "gamblers"). I would rarely fall below the increasing floor she would set. Nowadays, a graph of my results is far more jagged, as I chase more draws and lose more money on hands I would have folded or check-called. I am sold on the fact that I have the correct EV to make these plays and that over time I will earn more than I lose, but it is also clear to me that it involves signifcantly larger swings.

I've been trying to categorize these new plays I'm making and to figure out how I feel about them. In some cases, I think Ed has me chasing edges that are fairly small and carry a high varience cost. I am looking at places where I can reduce my varience without giving up too much EV. It turns out to be quite a project, but I'm slogging away. I do data mining stuff in another life -- so I'm having fun picking through my mountain of poker tracker data to figure out what I think.

So at the end of this uber-message, all I'm really saying is SSH brings a higher win rate with a higher varience. I'd be interested in other people's experience or anyone who is convinced I'm full of crap. I intentionally avoided making this about specific hands and situations, but if people want, I'm pretty sure I can post examples of situations before and after.

[Jezebel]

Interesting post. I'll comment on a few items:

[UnderARock]

Thanks for a great post, nside.

I have three poker books: Hold 'em Poker by Sklansky (my first--and underrated IMO), SSH, and ITH. Given that I started playing for ca$h at the beginning of August after fiddling around at the play money tables for several weeks, I'm sure it goes without saying that I have not fully absorbed the entire contents of any one of these books. And that goes double for SSH.

I also had the same experience of reading it and just knowing certain things were right. For example the bit on "where money comes from in poker" is, in my opinion, an absolute classic.

I'm also with you on Kxs... my most serious fish-like tendency when I first started was a weakness for anything sooted (the flushes are just soooo purty), and I continue to play Kxs at least from MP and LP. I'd love to be able to justify it better!

One of the things that amuses me about SSH is the frequency with which people blame it for ruining their game! If there's one thing that became obvious to me very early, it was that I have to play according to my understanding of the game. I may not be playing optimally, but I'm playing the way I know how. But if I change my game solely because I read in a book that I "ought to" or--God forbid!!--because somebody on the Internet told me I "have to," then I'm in deep trouble, because I'm doing things I don't really know the reason for. In order to change my game I have to study and a) understand the reasons for the changes and appropriate situations to apply them and b) convince myself that they are the right things to do. By these standards some things in SSH are very easy for me to do, and some are not. So I add a piece here, and a piece there. And with added playing experience, I start to see the pieces come together.

I will also agree with you 100% about loose raisers. The book has not yet been written to address the style of play we see today on the internet at < $1.00 levels. (Perhaps we are all writing it here on this & similar forums.) I know Matthew has said that this part of the game has changed a lot even since ITH was published. One of my greatest areas of growth has been that I have learned to recognize players like this (I mean at the table, not the next day when I'm looking at PokerTracker!) and, at least a little, handle them. But it's tricky. I once saw another guy use exactly that ultra-tight by-the-book strategy in dealing with one of these and almost every one of his premium hands got sucked out. Of course he would win with them--over time--but in this one session things weren't going well and he wasn't playing other things he might have made up for it with a little bit. So he was tilting a bit (more than a bit) and it was just egging the maniac on.

I like your suggestion of analyzing raised hands of the maniac. It just so happens that, on checking PokerTracker, one of the best examples of this (given that I have very few opponents with > 100 hands against me) was a gentleman who sat to my right last night. On the second hand of the session he rammed a pair of 3's from the SB and scared me off an A with a crappy kicker that would have been the winning hand. I was not amused. 100 hands later he was down to the tune of 49.5BB. I certainly don't claim this was due to my play--as you can imagine he really did most of it to himself--but I think I will write up a post about what he was raising with, and how I responded to it. It may be interesting, and of course I'd love to hear any thoughts about handling him differently.

[edited to fix a couple typos]

[Hideous_Hog]

Good topic.

I would add to the above insight that any player that starts losing and blames the book needs to reread it. I have reread it probably 3 times, and I keep picking up little jewels that help my game.

Be warned, it is not a beginner's book, and it assumes that you can win at the micro levels.

[fred]

nsidestrate,
Excellent post!

First off - 3BB/Hour!!!!!! You win 3BB/Hour!!!! Impressive.
How many BB/100 do you make?? Do you multitable?? I'm very curious.

Now about the book -
(1) You mentioned there were one or two things in the book that you felt were not for you, what were they? For me, after analyzing PT results, I'm just not sold on playing the suited connectors. (98s down). I wonder if I wouldn't increase my EV by never even playing them. What's your view on suited connectors.

(2) I completely agree with you about finding "loose" tables according to SSHE. I use pokeroffice and pokertracker, I've played over 30,000 hands of .5/1 at Party and I find most tables are in the 30% - 40% range. Sometimes I see in the 50%'s and very rarely in the 60%'s. And this is in the loosest of all loose games. In fact my pokertracker for 1811 players has the avg VPIP for over 30,000 hands at 33.5% (not including myself). PFR is 4.78%. So, unless I'm really missing something here, I very rarely ever see SSHE "loose" games.

(3) For what it's worth, my PT shows K2s-K9s as slighly profitable at these limits. So, if we are looking to squeeze every last cent of profit out of the game, I think you are probably on to something here. And, as you would probably guess, A2s-A9s is 3x as profitable in terms of BB/Hand.

(4) I've too have always wanted to see a chart that would show 5% PFR's do this, 10% PFR's do this etc etc. And then another chart for 15% VPIP's play this, 20% VPIP's play this etc etc. Maybe Matthew in his next book.

(5) Given what you said about your game, I'd guess you VPIP is about 20.75%. Am I close?

(6) I'd love to see some examples of some hands where you used to play one way and now play a new way due directly to SSHE (and your making money with them!)

Thanks Again for an excellent post.

[nsidestrate]

[Wynton]

I absolutely agree that the games the book purportedly addresses are very rare. But while the book probably could have been more aptly titled (something like Incredibly Loose Low-Limit games), I don't think this is a major failing for a few reasons.

First, even if your table is usually tighter, occasionally there will be situations where 6 or more call. So just for those occasional hands, the advice is worthwhile. More importantly, the book is really addressed to post-flop discussions, as you recognize. It is the conceptual discussion of those situations that really sets the book apart. And those concepts have universal application, even if the particular examples set forth in the book are relatively rare.

Indeed, I also found that the real value of the book was the discussion of hidden outs, urging more aggressive play when there are combinations of draws going on. Now I find myself looking for reasons to raise, whereas before I used to reflexively look for reasons to fold.

Finally, there is no question that the Miller approach causes greater fluctuation, even if it is positive EV in the long run. But I think it would be terrific for us to question particular situations in the book, and examine whether there is really enough of an edge to make raising worthwhile.

I look forward to the discussion.

[nsidestrate]

[Ed Miller]

[fred]

Thanks for clearing that up Ed.

I just assumed that .5/$1 Party Poker games had to be looser than 2/4 & up live casino games.

It's just hard to get my brain to accept the notion that if I walk into a casino and play $4/$8 limit that I would walk away from it saying "Damn, these tables are looser than $.50/$1 Party Poker tables." But it's good to hear that can be the case in certain places.

I'm am curious what the explanation for this is. People just want to see more hands when they actually have to travel to a casino ??? Is that it?

[Hideous_Hog]

[grignard]

sorry for not being in the know with the acronyms. you're talking about Small Stakes Hold'em, correct? I just ran across this book this past weekend and picked it up. Looked like a good book. Haven't read any yet.
am now looking forward to it more since these posts.

[vatrlrman]

I loved the book for all the reasons stated above. I know there are hands I have gotten paid on that I would have folded before SSH.

The variance is still something I deal with, and I still drop hands I know I should play, especially if I am running bad that night or something. Its a mental thing I just have to deal with and get over it. I think it is the one obstacle that is keeping me from getting the full pontential out of the book.

I have to also agree the hidden outs chapter was great and is my current reread of the week. In the beginning, what a "tell" that was . If it got to me and I took a little longer....I was on a draw and counting outs That part has come a long way.

I would enjoy a deeper discussion of some of the examples in the book or from real play. Especially since Mr. Miller is around.

Great Post!

[Harley54]

[nsidestrate]