Then he postulates why these types of intelligent, savvy people might be having difficulty with poker. He theorizes 1) lack of mastery of understanding the psychological aspect of the game and he uses bet sizing and bet frequency as examples, 2) bad feedback, which I interpret as variance combined with more variance as well as mixed with some psychology, and 3) emotional decision-making, where Ed gives as an example playing poker using a style that is most comfortable for you rather than mixing up styles or using the style that will win you the most money in a given situation.

If my summaries don’t make sense or if you want to read more, I encourage you to go to Ed’s article.

The article itself is interesting, but a couple of comments to the article triggered responses in me as well. First, a comment from a rated chess expert:

When I played a series of games against friends who were around 1100 strength, I had trouble at first. I was making defensive moves but what I was defending against were threats that these 1100 players didn’t have any chance of seeing.

After a while I learned which threats I needed to pay attention to, and which ones I could ignore (as in “he’ll never see that”). Then I started winning faster and more easily.

I suppose this makes sense. It’s the equivalent of out-leveling yourself in poker, or FPS; Fancy Place Syndrome, where you make plays or worry about your opponents doing things or being able to read your plays, when in fact your opponent hasn’t got a clue as to what you’re thinking. But somehow this seems much simpler in a chess context than in a poker context. Somehow it seems much easier to say, oh, he’ll never see that opening that I left him and then ignore it, or, he won’t see the fake move that I want to do to draw his attention over there so there’s no point trying to make that feint. Because each hand (or battle) is short compared with an entire chess game, and because there’s so much randomness in the cards, and because it’s so difficult keep track and to manipulate players within a session (I don’t want to use the word “meta-game” because I don’t think the term applies in a single session) on top of the randomness, I think that it’s much more difficult to manage these kinds of adjustments in poker. And even if you do make these adjustments variance may not choose to reward you, and you may not receive the positive reinforcement that the chess player will receive with much more regularly.

On another comment Ed himself replies:

I agree that having gamble certainly seems to help… at least it seems to help get you to the highest levels of poker.

This comment resonated with me. I really don’t have much gamble in me, and more and more I think that not having gamble in me becomes more and more of a reason why I’ve never continued to move up in stakes no matter how many buyins I accumulate in my bankroll. I think it remains an issue when I started playing this level with 6 buyins but am now playing with 120+ buyins and am still hesitant to move up. I never had any interest in playing the “highest levels of poker”, and it shows.

If I grab 2,000 or 10,000 or 40,000 cash table poker hands the pattern is pretty consistent; once I deduct the big wins from obvious bad players I’m near breakeven, or at least my all in EV will be near breakeven. Sure, there will still be hands like set over set, or combo draw that comes in or that gets avoided against aggressive players; other hands that make up big pots too, but it feels as if I’m only winning because of the bad players. And that can be disheartening.

Am I really making much when I successfully float a TAG and take away the pot with QTs that missed the board as much as his hand likely missed the board? Or when I call two barrels with an underpair on a board with a single broadway card on the flop against an expected aggressive player? Or with King high against a blind stealer? Over time these kinds of things add up to a huge amount, but to me this is just staying alive financially, helping me to pay the rake and giving me training and hands to ponder over. The winnings seem to come from treading water against the decent players while waiting for the bad players to pay off.

Of course that’s not entirely true because I also lose some money to bad players when they draw out on me or the times that I fold to maniacs, and I win a lot of small pots when I raise preflop and they call and then fold on the flop. And if I only deduct the big winning hands against the bad players then I still have the small winning hands as well as all the losing hands in the results. But it can certainly feel that way; as if I’m not that good, that the only reason that I’m a winning players is because of the bad players paying me off. In other words I’m not really a “winning player”, I’m just “not a bad player”.

If there are only two type of categories, “bad” versus “not bad”, or “losing” versus “winning”, then it’s fine to be “not bad” and “winning”. But that’s contrary to the competitive, aggressive, best-of-the-best attitude that lies within the personality of most poker players, both the winners and the losers (double-or-nothing players aside?).

We like to think of ourselves as good, or at least better than most. We don’t want to just label ourselves as better than the worst. But maybe better than most of the worst is all it takes to be a winner.

Players call 1, 2, even 3 streets with any pair, and call and chase with any suited cards, gutshot draws, under straights
Means:
- Bet for value with top pair or overpairs
- Don’t fire multiple barrels without equity
- But fold to aggression, especially from passive players
- Keep them on a wide hand range as you evaluate their possible holdings

Players can’t read board texture
Means:
- Don’t bluff wet boards
- Get value when holding two pair or better as the board won’t scare them

Players don’t understand pot control and interpret it as weakness
Means:
- Be ready to call some bluffs
- Checking a street can really open up their calling and betting range, especially if they have any aggression in their game

Players see overpairs and TP as the stone cold nuts
Means:
- Bet for maximum value with two pair and better

And I need to take time to evaluate. I make insta-decisions in a lot of cases but those insta-decisions are based on more experienced opponents. In particular I’m missing value where I could be betting more or where I should be folding when I’ve been outdrawn.

I’ve actually included two hands here because the first hand weighs heavily into my actions in the second hand. In this first hand I open from the button with a standard hand to open.

When the big blind 3 bets, most of the time I fold here. Though I have position I don’t have a strong hand. If I know that my opponent 3 bets from the blind a lot I might consider calling or even 4 betting. Here I have not stats on my opponent so 9 times out of 10 I fold. This is that 1 time that I decide to call.

When he comes of firing on this flop, he could have an over pair, a one card flush draw, or a fairly wide range of hands. Again, with some history I can narrow that range. Again, without history, most of the time I fold. But this is another time that I decided to do the unusual and raise his flop bet.

His shove over my raise doesn’t tell me too much. He could have a big pair, but he also still could have a single flush draw or a made flush or a smaller pair. Regardless, I have nothing and fold.

Just a few hands later, same opponent, same table. Neither the opponent nor I have played any hands since the one above.

I flop a hand that has showdown value. There are some gutshot draws out there and weaker Aces that I can get value from so I bet the flop and he raises. I call because his raise could mean a number of things; a weaker hand that is testing to see if I have an Ace or not, a draw that wants to stop meet from betting the turn so that he can see the turn and river for cheap, or a hand that beats me like AK/A8/88. I don’t raise because some of these hands have me dominated and I’d just like to get to showdown relatively cheaply.

On the turn I check/fold to a known good or passive or tight player. But this is $25nl and 1) bad players can think that their A2 is still ahead, and 2) hyper-aggressive players can be trying to fold my Ace with their KQ or 77. I didn’t know much about this player, only what had transpired in the hand above. So I check/called the turn.

On the river AK becomes less likely for him as I have one Ace and one Ace and two Kings are on the board, leaving him only 4 combos of that, though a lot of KQ/KJ type of hands that beat me. 88 becomes more likely, but JJ/TT or even 77/66/55 are not out of the range of possibilities too if, especially if he’s one of those hyper-aggressive postflop players that are trying to get me to fold any Ace that I might hold.

In retrospect I think that I put too much faith in what happened in only one previous hand. Yes, my hand still has some showdown value on the river, but only against certain types of players who have a much wider range of hands in this situation. To some extent I think that I overvalued my hand but I think a larger portion of my mistake was to overvalue my guess as to his style and therefore his hand range based on not enough information.

Now say that both of you lose your rackets and have to borrow rackets from a community center. Sometimes you get a good one and other times the racket is partially broken or chipped or it’s a kid’s racket and is undersized. Your opponent is subject to the same random variations and might have a good racket when you have a broken one or vice versa. Now you expect the results of your matches to vary more because your starting situation is now varying. For every 10 matches under these conditions you aren’t surprised if you have won 8 when you had the good racket often or 4 when you had the kid’s racket often.

Now imagine that the court is closed down and you have to play on a multipurpose playground that is covered with small, smooth gravel. The ball sometimes goes where you expect but also may very well veer off slightly or widely from where it would go if the court were flat. There are also a few holes so if the ball catches the edge of one of these the ball may fly off in any direction. And the balls are not even round anymore. Sometimes you get ones with dents in them, like ping pong balls that have been stepped on. You’ll swing a beautiful stroke only to catch the edge of the dent in the ball and have it go straight into the ground or flying out of bounds. Now the game is really unpredictable. How often do you expect to win under these conditions?

Then you have to share the equipment and can’t play the same opponent all the time. You are put in a pool of 6 players and randomly you play one of the other 5. According to the community center tennis rankings you are slightly better than all your opponents, but sometimes they mis-book you and you end up playing two opponents at once. How often do you expect to win now?

Finally, put yourself in some post-apocalyptic future where this last version of tennis is the situation when you first try to learn the game. Random opponents from a selected group, sometimes more than one, lopsided balls, randomly assigned rackets, unpredictable playing surface and you’re trying to learn the game. How confident would you be in your abilities?

Compare this with your development as a poker player. You have randomly dealt pocket cards. You have rotating position. You have 5, 6, sometimes more potential opponents in any one given hand. Sometimes your beautiful play with a big pocket pair hits, sometimes you get an awful result with two callers and a JT8 with a flush draw flop. Sometimes your double barrel on a dry board works, other times you are betting for value with a decent hand but a passive player suddenly gets aggressive on an innocuous looking turn card. Sometimes you get it in with a draw and hit, other times you get it in with a dominating hand and get sucked out on.

I put all these unpredictable elements (random quality rackets, lopsided ball, uneven surface) into the tennis game to emulate the variance of the cards in poker. And I’ve intentionally added them gradually to push the concept of just how much this variance can be a factor in the results. You can imagine the poor tennis player who was used to winning 7, 6, or 5 out of any 10 matches in optimal playing situations now expecting almost any result after any 10 matches. The distribution of results is going to be extremely wide and even after 100 matches the tennis player might be happy with 75 wins or 45 wins and still believe that they should be winning 60% of the time.

But what of the post-apocalyptic player who tries to learn tennis under the unpredictable situations? He might have a coach that tells him “you’re good enough to win at this level 60% of the time”, but in reality his results are skewed wildly because of the unpredictability and randomness of the playing conditions. He’ll go on winning streaks where it seems that he can’t lose, but how much of it is due to skill and how much due to chance? He’ll go on losing streaks of the same length and wonder the same thing. How does he develop his game under these circumstances, and how does he develop confidence in his game?

This is the difficulty facing the poker learner. If your coach, or a player who has similar skills as you or better, can look at a hand and say “you played that as well as you could given the range of hands that this particular opponent might have in this particular situation and give the odds of various cards coming in the future streets”, that’s all you can do regardless of how the hand worked out. Sometimes you hit the dent in the ball, or the stone on ground, or you get the racket with the missing strings. And sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you’ll go on long streaks of being card dead preflop, sometimes you’ll go on long streaks of missing the flop, sometimes you’ll go on long streaks of facing opponents who fire back at you, and sometimes you don’t. Imagine how tough it is for the tennis player on the uneven court with the lopsided balls and random rackets, and keep that in mind when you try to figure out whether you’re playing your poker game well or not.

Why? Not because I’m in a rush or because I have my tables tiled and they disappear after I make my play. My layout is spread and I can easily scan across all my tables if I choose to do so and I almost never play more than eight tables at a time. But I look away because I can’t do anything about how the cards run out, or because I can’t do anything to affect whether any of my online opponents are going to call or raise.

These make reasons make some sense. But these are poker-tense situations, these are entertaining situations. I’m denying myself the entertainment value of watching these situations. Like watching sports on television or a lottery drawing when I have a ticket I have no influence over the outcome and yet I have some investment, financial and/or emotional, in the result.

But watching these situations tends to cause more difficulties than the value of the entertainment. I can get anxious, worried, excited, exasperated, frustrated, angry. I might yell. I might pound the desk. I might swear, and loudly, or cheer just as loudly. And when I get this emotional over a hand, this high or low, it affects my game negatively. That’s the real reason why I look away.

It’s not as bad as it used to be when I first started out. I don’t get as high or low as I used to but I’m still aware that my heart can start racing or that even after I shake my head my game is still affected in the hands that follow.

I’m not sure what to target as the ideal. If a favorite sports team is playing badly I’ll turn of the television, but generally a large part of my enjoyment of watching is tied into my emotional attachment to the team and I’m fine with that. The problem with poker is that I do have some degree of control over the future outcomes and so I can’t let myself get thrown so badly by my reactions or let my run-bad or card-deadness affect my play or my confidence in my play.

Yet poker emotion, very slight shifts in tension, can easily be magnified. A slight annoyance from being re-raised preflop can lead me to later shove over top of a raise from an entirely different player. A touch of overconfidence from a good run or from watching some coaching videos can lead me to try some very marginal or low success rate plays. Unreasonably low expectation from running poorly can cause me to fold to any aggression from opponents and to shift toward the loose/passive waiting-for-the-nuts style of the under-confident player.

Each decision point in each individual poker hand is a cusp. Players who don’t have the emotional bankroll for their game play scared because they’re afraid of losing. They’re aware how much they have at risk and are afraid of losing it. At any moment they could blow up and lose it all. And at each cusp in the poker hand just a little poker emotion; the annoyance, overconfidence, low expectation, could be the slippery slope that I step on that lets me spin out of control. It’s like a thin layer of black ice on the sidewalk. It doesn’t take much emotion to swing my decision making and take me out of contention.

Because of all those dangerous little cusps, poker heightens and exaggerates the underlying emotional states. Like black ice, if you know that it’s there you can take precautions, but if you don’t see it, aren’t aware that of it’s existence, then you’re doomed to trap yourself. And often even when you are aware and take all the precautions that are in your arsenal you can still fail to negotiate the dangers successfully. Such is the nature of the being human.

And the more that you study the game and try to improve your knowledge and abilities, the more you lead yourself to become emotionally bought in to the results. A high school student who only runs track in PE class cares far less how they perform than another student who has been a member of the track team for years. A poker player who plays once a month and doesn’t think about poker in between cares far less than one who plays 3 times a week and belongs to an online poker forum. That caring, that buying in, that emotional attachment is a form of black ice as well.