October 7 - Farming

Lately I've been feeling that too much of my poker time is engaged in farming. The definition, from technopedia:

Farming refers to a gaming tactic where a player, or someone hired by a player, performs repetitive actions to gain experience, points or some form of in-game currency.

Farming is similar to the poker term grinding, but at this point the meaning of grinding has expanded to include virtually any kind of poker playing, so I'm using farming to emphasize that I'm talking only about repetitive, non-challenging play.

For me this means playing in low-stakes games where I'm fairly confident in my edge, but progress (in terms of both bankroll and improvement) is slow.

Why is farming a problem? Well for one thing, it's boring. It can also be unfulfilling as you don't feel you're accomplishing a worthwhile challenge. When you're farming, you're probably not getting better. Real improvement requires pushing your boundaries - it won't happen by going through the motions. Perhaps most importantly, it takes time away from possibly more efficient ways of accomplishing your goals.

Based on associations from our school days, "playing" sounds like a lot of fun and "studying" sounds like a drag... but more and more I'm finding that in my poker work day, studying is the interesting, creative, and fun part, whereas playing mostly feels like going through the motions.

This is partly due to a change in how I (and many pros) approach poker. In the old days, players approached every hand as a completely new problem and tried to outwit their opponents in the moment. These days - especially now that solvers like PioSolver and CREV have become so prevalent - serious pros spend a lot of time away from the table developing robust strategies. Playing is mostly a matter of implementing the strategies that have already been worked out in advance. Naturally, this takes a lot of the fun out of the game, since playing just feels like reciting what you already know.

The first question that comes to mind is, why not just focus on being more creative and improvisational while you play? One answer is that the method described above is so damn effective. Poker is a volume business, after all, and if your livelihood depends on beating the game for many hours a week, week after week, it's incredibly attractive to have a strategy that you know works and is easily replicable. Additionally, it can be reassuring to have solid reasons based in evidence that your plays work. "My strategy is maximally exploitable for .6 bbs/100" sounds more grounded than, "I think I'm better at guessing what my opponent is thinking than he is at guessing what I'm thinking." (The true value of these approaches is somewhat debatable, but it can feel good to have something concrete to point to.) Finally, if something goes wrong, the pre-fab strategy is easier to fix. You can just go back in with the software and figure out how to adjust. But if your ability to out-guess your opponents goes haywire, it's very hard to know how to fix it.

So that's the dilemma: crafting sound strategies away from the table is an excellent way to make poker more profitable and reliable, but it can leave the actual act of playing feeling dull and monotonous.

What's the solution? I wish I knew! Here are a few ideas:

1. Have realistic expectations - No job is all fun, all the time. I've been reading Deep Work by Cal Newport and he says that for most people, four hours is the maximum amount of deep, challenging mental work you can do a day. So you probably couldn't do eight hours of creative, demanding work every day even if you wanted to. Maybe we poker players should see playing as akin to the part of an office worker's day that involves sending emails and attending meetings. Any job is going to have some amount of repetitive, non-demanding tasks that are necessary to keep the ship afloat.

2. Keep your eyes on the prize - It's easier to stick with a repetitive task if it's tied to a goal that you value highly. Your goal could be something poker-related, like making it to 5/10, or something outside of poker, like buying a house. Either way you should be very clear in your mind as to how your daily grind is helping you achieve your goal. If it's not helping you achieve your goal, you might need to reconsider how you're spending your day.

3. Hone your craft - Early in your poker career, the variance of the cards can make the game exciting. However, this is a little like watching a coin flip and going, "Wow, heads! Oh my god, tails! Holy shit, heads!" The novelty wears off pretty fast. Fortunately, there's another kind of variance that's deeper and more interesting. You can never step into the same river twice, because the river has changed and you have changed. Game conditions are always changing and your game is always changing. Therefore, no two sessions are really the same. It's possible to find a sense of satisfaction in an ever-more precise and masterful application of the strategies you've devised.

That's all for today. I hope some of these strategies are helpful for you. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts: does poker feel like farming for you? And if so, what do you do to spice it up?

October 14 - Innovators and Honers

I came across these paragraphs in an interview with Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering:

One way I like to divide players up is into innovators and honers.

Innovators are the people who like to sit down to a new game and innovate new rules. An innovator who sits down to chess might get very excited because they are learning all these different strategies, and they’re seeing what their opponent is doing and incorporating it into doing it even better. But at some point they have to start studying opening moves, or in poker they have to start studying odds. It becomes for the innovator more work than it used to be, and less fun.

A honer, on the other hand, what they really like doing is taking this established way of looking at a game, and perfecting it, getting it so that they know the exact percentages, and getting an established method of play perfect. A champion might be able to do both, or enjoy both, but I’m more on the innovator side, where I like to come up with strategies, but then once you have to start to study it, I move on to something else or change the rules.

This distinction between innovators and honers seems highly relevant for poker. I think it's fair to say that poker is a game dominated by honers. The poker world focuses to such a great extent on a handful of games and there is such enormous incentive to win that strategic innovations are quickly imitated and assimilated.

Indeed, you'd think by now that most of the major insights available in NLHE and PLO would have been unearthed, but the games continue to change rapidly year after year. Earlier in the history of NL, we saw things like aggressive three-betting and over-betting, which were initially introduced by a small number of players (who were often ridiculed), become accepted by the community as an important part of sound strategy. More recently, we've seen things like wider blind defense and a deeper understanding of the value of passive strategies.

So it's not that there are no more strategic ideas left to be discovered, but it is getting harder and harder to find something new. Additionally, poker presents some special challenges to innovators.

For one, it's generally harder and more time-consuming to create a new strategy than to copy someone else's. It requires a fairly deep understanding of poker to even try to cook up a strategy from scratch. For a professional, any time expenditure must justify itself in terms of profit, and in many cases it's hard for strategy creation to leap that hurdle.

I've also noticed that the type of personality that loves to innovate often struggles with in-game decision making. I'm somewhat of an innovator at heart, but if I'm honest, it's not really the potential for greater profit that motivates me to think about new strategies; it's more the sense that only by coming up with something that no one else has thought of can I really prove how smart I am in a satisfying way. This same desire to prove how smart and unique I am can cause real problems in-game, pushing me to make the fancy or "creative" play rather than the solid one. In my experience the vast majority of pros who have sustained success do so by doggedly applying proven strategies (even if those strategies may evolve), not by barrel-rolling their way through every hand.

RIO instructor Ben Sulsky is an interesting example of someone who's reached the highest levels of success with an innovating approach. When you look at the highest achievers - in poker or anything else - there are some things you can try to imitate and some things you can only stand back and admire. For Ben, I can try to imitate his curiosity and love for the game, but I'm not sure it would be wise for me to try to imitate his approach to playing. It seems to me that he's able to succeed by not just understanding poker better than his opponents, but many times better. That's not really an option for most of us.

That's all I've got for this week. Are you an innovator or a honer?

10/21 - Emotions and Decision Making

Before the headaches started, Elliot had a great life. He had a well-paid management job in a large company and was a good husband and father. But the headaches turned out to be caused by a tumor in his brain. After a surgery to remove the tumor, his life began to unravel: he struggled to make plans or accomplish simple tasks.

By the time he met Antonio Damasio, Elliot had lost his job and his marriage had fallen apart. Damasio, a professor of neuroscience, was asked to evaluate Elliot for a disabilities claim. The weird thing was that nothing obvious seemed to be wrong. Elliot still performed well on memory and IQ tests and was perfectly capable of having a normal conversation. Yet he was no longer able to navigate his day-to-day life.

Damasio performed a series of tests. Eventually he concluded that, while Elliot's reasoning remained normal, he seemed to have lost the ability to feel emotions. He was able to recount in detail events from his life, but displayed no emotion towards them. A test involving disturbing and violent images also left him unmoved.

This lack of emotion left him curiously unable to make even simple decisions. Damasio describes the the process of deciding on a restaurant for dinner: well, it's been less crowded lately, so maybe the food isn't as good...but if it's less crowded, we might be more likely to get a table... This process of listing relevant factors would go on indefinitely without ever arriving at a decision.

Partly due to his experiences with Elliot and other patients, Damasio developed a theory about the role of emotions in decision-making. He argues that we need the "lift" of an emotional connection to choose one option over another.

What does all this have to do with us as poker players? Well, many players believe that it's in their best interest to eliminate the emotions associated with poker; or maybe, if they're being more realistic, to reduce those emotions. But according to Damasio, even if this was possible, it wouldn't make you better at making decisions. In fact, it would likely make you much worse.

This makes sense to me intuitively. After all, without emotion, why would I play poker in the first place? You might say, "For the money," but money holds no interest apart from the positive emotions associated with it. When I'm playing my best, I experience the positive emotions associated with curiosity, creativity, and mastery. Conversely, if I didn't feel any pain associated with making mistakes, why would I bother to avoid them in the future?

It seems to me that the project of trying to eliminate emotions from poker is completely misguided. Now there's no denying that going on stone cold monkey tilt and punting off five stacks is a problem that needs to be remedied if you want to have a successful career as a poker player. But rather than approach this as a problem of reducing emotion, it's better to think of it in terms of calibrating emotion in a way that's conducive to good performance.

The tricky part with calibrating your emotions is that, in poker, there are frequent and highly salient stimuli that have little to do with your actual performance. The brain isn't naturally calibrated to handle this: when our ancestors were climbing up a tree to escape a bear, they weren't thinking, "Yeah, the bear might knock the tree down this time; but in the long run I have 56% equity in this tree, so I'm good." But this is basically how we need to think to be successful in poker.

In broad strokes, this means focusing on the process rather than the results. Yet events have a way of drawing our attention back to results in the present. The challenge is to develop such a deep understanding of poker that process-oriented events genuinely become the most interesting stimuli.

It seems to me that the project of trying to eliminate emotions from poker is completely misguided.

+1.

We are not robots and it's pointless to pretend that we are. Also, it's ok to have strong emotions as long as we don't let them change the way we play. The better we know strategy, the easier that becomes.

Take pre flop play. No matter how frustrated we are, we won't ever fold aces. And we won't open 72o. So if we can continue to execute such trivial things correctly in rage, we can train ourselves to do the same for fringe hands that we know are +EV or -EV.

Say, if we have QTs as our weakest default Qx open, while Q9s can be opened if the circumstances are right, but Q8s simply doesn't make money, then we should treat Q8s as 72o for that spot and feel the same way about it.

Absolutely loving this thread! I laughed aloud at the bear in the tree metaphor, brilliant.

October 27 - "This always happens to me"

Many times in my poker career I've had the feeling that something is happening to me way more than it should (it always seems to be something bad). Recent examples include losing with aces in four-bet pots, or my opponents barreling off against me in position. The odd thing is, when I've gone into my database and looked at these situations, I've usually found that they are not happening more than they should statistically, or even all that often in an absolute sense.

So what's going on? I think it's the old story of salience vs. frequency. The brain seems to be much better at recalling particularly intense events than at tabulating frequent, low-intensity events. When you try to reconstruct what's happened in the past, often you end up substituting saliency for frequency: you think the memorable events happened more often than they did, while forgetting or ignoring most of the routine events.

I found that my perception was out of line with reality, but that doesn't mean it was useless. In fact, I realized it was telling me something extremely important: it was highlighting parts of the game that I felt uncomfortable with. In the cases of losing with aces and facing barrels OOP, what was bothering me was different, but both were problems that I needed to fix.

With aces, it was mostly a chance of having unrealistic expectations. On some level I expected to win every time I had aces because I had the "best hand." But aces aren't really that big of a favorite in PLO. If my opponents are 3bet-calling with a reasonable range, they'll have more than 40% equity with their range against aces. So in reality, this is a situation where I'm not much of a favorite to win, and I should expect to lose quite often.

While the feelings of anger and frustration I experienced when I lost with aces were unpleasant, the immediate problem was relatively simple to address. My strategy was correct: I was right to open aces, right to four-bet them if given the opportunity, and right to stack off on most if not all flops. And I could still implement that strategy if I was angry. The risk was in the aces hand causing me to tilt and impact other, more difficult, parts of my game, or negatively impact my relationship with poker as a whole, perhaps demotivating me because "it's mostly luck anyway." I found that if I consciously reminded myself, when a four-bet pot occurred, that I was probably only a slight favorite and could easily lose, it alleviated the in-the-moment tilt. But in a broader sense, the losing-with-aces highlighted discomfort with the level of variance in poker. Dealing with this is an ongoing project.

While aces were mostly a mental game issue, the barreling situation highlighted strategic deficits. Namely, I didn't feel strong in my ability to identify which parts of my range I should continue with, an how. At the same time there was also an element of unrealistic expectations: after all, opponents do have strong hands reasonably often, and they're supposed to balance them with some bluffs, so they should be betting fairly often.

The expectations part could be addressed in much the same way as the aces issue, by reminding myself in the moment that what was happening was normal, and I should expect to lose the hand fairly often. The strategy part, however, required a lot more work. Learning to play your ranges properly OOP on flop, turn, and river is a huge project. This is a good point to keep in mind: a good mindset is nice, but without the necessary skill and knowledge, it's of little use. This sounds confident, but sometimes poker players forget it, and assume if they can just get their mind in a certain state the results will follow.

I was reminded of this recently when I watching Jungleman play in the GPL. As often happens when things aren't going his way, he was verbally spewing, criticizing his opponent, and basically appeared to be tilting. Many people would assume this would be a crippling roadblock to success at poker, but Jungleman has had more success than almost any poker player on the planet. The thing is, he knows a hell of a lot about poker, so his C game is probably better than my A game. Winning at poker isn't about achieving a zen-like state of mind (although this may be helpful), it's about being really good at poker.

But back to those barrels: the reason they were unpleasant, and therefore salient, was that I wasn't confident in my strategy. In a lot of spots, I simply didn't know what to do. To solve the problem I needed to vastly improve my postlfop knowledge and decision making. Not an easy task!

Well, this one has gotten pretty long. Is there anything in poker that "always happens" to you? Have you ever gone back in your database and checked how often it really happens?

November 18 - The Undertow of Honesty

One of my favorite casual games is Coup. It's a multiplayer bluffing game. A few years ago I wrote an analysis of heads-up Coup that, oddly enough, became one of the most popular things I ever wrote.

Coup has some features of what Richard Garfield calls a chip-taking game. That is, it's a multiplayer game where other players can attack you, so getting ahead early serves little purpose besides making yourself a target. There are various things you can do early in the game - amass coins, attack other players - but they have little relevance for the ultimate outcome. As players are eliminated one-by-one, the game eventually ends up in a heads-up battle for victory. If you make it to that point, it's absolutely devastating if your opponent knows your hole cards.

With that in mind, it doesn't matter much what you do in the beginning of the game, as long as you don't reveal your hole cards. In other words, do anything but play your actual cards. Yet even though I know this, it takes a lot of effort to force myself to bluff continuously.

In a sense, your cards offer a "suggestion" for an action. It's easier to follow that suggestion than to make up your own. There can also be a sense of dissonance between your actual cards and "fake" cards when you're bluffing and it can be strenuous to keep both in mind all the time. Additionally, honesty is valued in social settings, so on some level bluffing can feel dishonest or unfair.

The connection to poker is obvious. One of the most common leaks of novice poker players is playing too honestly: their actions map to their cards in too direct and obvious a fashion, allowing their opponents to know what they have and outmaneuver them. This shouldn't be surprising, since playing honestly is easier than playing dishonestly for all the reasons mentioned above. I suspect even many professional players have a bias towards honesty that they may not even be aware. The ease of honesty exerts a strong, continuous pull.

How to escape the pull? Some weaker players adopt the "opposite" strategy: they bet their weak hands and check their good hands. While this may trick someone who thinks you're playing honestly, it's fundamentally a terrible poker strategy. It's just as predictable as the honest strategy, just inverted, and has rather serious added problem of shovelling in the most money when your cards are the weakest.

Nonetheless, I think we can learn some things from the opposite strategy. The frequency with which you see weaker players adopt this strategy suggests to me that ease and congruence are key factors in choosing a strategy. Opposite players have flipped the paradigm, but it's still a simple one-to-one relationship: bad cards -> aggression, good cards -> passivity. So their cards "tell them" their action and the relationship between cards and action is consistent and easy to remember.

So while the opposite strategy is not good, it does suggest that we should be aware of ease and congruence in building our own strategy. That is, our strategy probably needs to feel natural and orderly for us to be able to execute it consistently. This presents some challenges. First, imposing order on poker, which is at its heart a chaotic game; second, establishing an order that is obvious to us, but not to our opponents.

What I've noticed when watching expert players is they seem to have found a sense of order in playing a balanced strategy. In other words, whereas a weak player experiences feelings of ease and congruence when they play honestly, an expert player experiences those same feelings when they are bluffing at an appropriate frequency.

In one video Sauce said something along the lines of, "poker at the expert level is about spatial awareness." I didn't understand what he meant at the time, but as my own game improves I think I'm starting to get it. When I'm playing well, in a situation I'm familiar with, there's a sense of my hand "fitting" naturally into a strategic action, round peg into round hole. All is well in the universe.

November 23 - Solve Your Problems with Aggression

I'm a big fan of college football, especially the Michigan Wolverines. Michigan's Defensive Coordinator Don Brown is known for blitzing (sending extra players to rush the quarterback) more often than almost anyone else. His defenses have been among the most successful in the country. He has a saying: "Solve your problems with aggression."

I've found this idea to be one of the biggest constants between most of the games I've played - poker, chess, Magic, and many others. When a problem occurs, most people's first reaction is to adjust defensively, covering up the perceived weakness in a direct way. In my experience this rarely works out well. What seems to happen, almost invariably, is that adopting a passive stance allows the opponent a free hand to create other, often more serious problems elsewhere.

One example is how beginners play aces in PLO. Many new PLO players 3bet aces and no other hands. They usually realize pretty quickly that essentially revealing two of their hole cards is a huge problem, especially with deep stacks. This is correct: it is a problem to reveal your hand when there is a lot of money left to play for. But they usually adjust incorrectly, by becoming more passive, and stop 3betting aces. At this point they likely have no 3betting range at all (although they may not be aware of it). Strategically this is a huge problem because they've surrendered the ability to put more money into the pot with their strongest hands, which of course is one of the main ways you make money at poker.

They're correct that they need to make their hand less obvious, but the better way to achieve this is to play more hands more aggressively. They should keep 3betting aces at a high frequency, but add other hands to their 3bet range as well.

Another example is sideboarding in Magic. A lot of players sideboard by bringing in cards that answer what they perceive to be the most problematic cards in their opponent's deck. This often doesn't actually work very well. Consider the possible ways your answer can line up with their threat:

-You draw the answer but they don't draw the threat. You have a dead card.
-They draw the threat but you don't draw the answer. Their threat does its thing as normal.
-You draw the answer and they draw the threat. This is the best case scenario, but it's still just a one-for-one trade.

Two out of the three possible scenarios are bad for you and the third is only neutral. This shows why this is usually not a good approach to sideboarding. Sideboarding gives you an opportunity to shift the matchup in your favor, but you still took the short end of the stick strategically. In general this strategy is only correct if their threat is truly so powerful that you literally can't win if you don't answer it.

What you'd prefer to do if possible is change the dynamic of the matchup in your favor: change your deck so their threat becomes irrelevant; or create such a serious threat of your own that you either kill them or take control of the game before their threat becomes relevant.

Until next time, solve your problems with aggression!

November 30 - Air Traffic Control

When thinking about performance in poker, the most common comparison is sports. Poker players consider themselves to be like athletes and they try to emulate successful athletes in their approach.

While poker undoubtedly has some similarities with sports, there are also some big differences. Athletes typically compete for about three hours and frequently have days off from competition. Many poker players play six or more hours a day and rarely take a day off. For these reasons, I think poker likely requires a different approach than professional athletics. For most people, high-effort high-intensity focus is not sustainable for six hours every day.

A good example of this is the World Chess Championship which is taking place in New York right now. The players play a total of ten games over the course of about 20 days. The games often last about six hours. In the chess world this is considered a uniquely grueling event. The players take months to prepare and often don't recover fully for months afterwards. Near the end of the match, the players are often visibly fatigued and the play starts to deteriorate.

To me this suggests that the approach to performance of many poker players is not realistic. The absolute best chess players in the world cannot keep up six hours a day of intense mental competition for even a month without wearing down. To expect to do this for months or years on end with no negative consequences isn't realistic.

While searching for another comparison for poker performance, I came up with air traffic control. Air traffic controllers have the extremely important job of coordinating planes so they don't crash into each other. The job has a notoriously high burnout rate. Many people can't handle the combination of stress and monotony.

In many ways, poker players are similar to air traffic controllers. They watch a screen for many hours a day. The job involves stretches of monotony with an occasional crisis, which requires a quick and accurate decision, with potentially large consequences for a mistake.

Overall I think poker players should take the demands and stresses of their job very seriously. Rather than expect to apply six hours of maximum concentration every day and beat yourself up when you fail, it's better to set more realistic expectations for yourself and plan accordingly.

Really interesting topics and nice writing! I enjoyed reading through all of it and 'd be glad to see updates in the future.

All these responses are getting me fired up to write some more! I've got some ideas for this week :)

Eloquent writings, great job!

In Search of New Heuristics

I think you need less M.O.P and more computerpoker. However, if you
insist on "reasons" then I'll do my best...
-Sauce

A heuristic is a simplified approach or rule of thumb that, while not technically correct in every situation, usually helps you arrive at a good solution. Heuristics in poker can be simple, like, "Don't play weak starting hands," or relatively complex, like, "Bet a polarized range of strong hands and some very weak hands, but not middling hands." One way to see the process of poker improvement is as the learning of more and more nuanced heuristics.

In my opinion the biggest development in poker strategy in 2016 was the widespread availability of solvers like Piosolver. These gave us something closer to an objective "solution" to poker situations than has ever existed before. And, as happens so often in poker, a lot of what we thought we knew turned out to be wrong. In other words, the old heuristics turned out to be farther from the truth than we thought.

Here's the catch: while solvers were great at overturning old ideas, they turned out to be a lot worse at suggesting new ideas. Solver solutions often display an alarming lack of any apparent order, recommending what looks like a grab bag of mixed strategies with virtually every holding. On top of that, seemingly small changes to the situation can sometimes cause drastic changes to the equilibrium. So while these programs are certainly fascinating, it's far from obvious how to use them to improve your in-game performance.

The hope was that reviewing equilibria would produce new insights into the game, but this has proven to be more difficult than we might have expected. In the quote I led with, we have Sauce, one of the sharpest players in the game, basically throwing his hands up and saying our puny human brains can't understand poker.

Okay, it's not quite as bleak as that. There have been some good attempts to conceptualize lessons from solvers. For example, check out Sauce's Responding to Various C-Betting Strategies and Daniel Dvoress's Intuitive GTO. And some new heuristics have emerged. For example, "When you have a range advantage, it often works well to bet small with a high frequency."

However, my impression is that such attempts are still in their infancy. The biggest challenge facing poker players in 2017 is using solvers to develop new heuristics that are comprehensible and useful.

So agree, dealing with this level of solver complexity its impossible to include all the input-sensitive disparity of EV pathways into a simplified language model. Therefore the solution seems to emerge from taking necessary first steps of pruning gametrees in a way that honors simplification vs EV loss trade-offs and then conceptualize the take-aways into a keyword that hits the essence.

Snowflakes

The sexiest way to win a chess game is the "sac" - that is, sacrificing pieces for an attack. Chess players of all levels love games where one player goes all-in on an attack, giving up piece after piece to stoke the fires, finally delivering checkmate with their few remaining pieces.

The only problem? These games are extremely rare in practice. A much more common and reliable way to win a chess game is to take all your opponent's pieces. Hence the saying, "It's always better to sac your opponent's pieces." But in general chess players focus far more effort looking for sacs than would be merited simply by their utility in winning games.

The reason is that most people don't really play to win. They play to prove how special they are. And it's not just in chess, I've seen this in every game I've ever played.

The poker equivalent to the sac is the bluff. Poker players love to bluff. There's a sense that if you win with a value hand, your cards did the work, but if you win with a bluff you did it all on your own. Your sheer brilliance overcame all the other factors in the hand and triumphed. A successful bluff gives a much stronger sense of superiority over your opponent than a value bet.

Now obviously bluffing is an important part of poker strategy, but I think bluffing occupies a larger part of the attention of most poker players than would be indicated just by how useful it is in your strategy.

Imagine if I could teach you an idiot-proof strategy that would allow you to crush your games for a much higher winrate than you have currently. Imagine this strategy were so simple I could explain it in a few sentences. Would you be interested in such a strategy? Would you use it?

To be clear, since this is starting to sound like some sort of weird sales pitch, I don't actually have that strategy. But I suspect such strategies exist more often than people think. For example, in many NL games, buying in short and playing a fold/shove strategy with a predetermined range of top X% of hands would probably achieve a higher winrate than most of the field.

The reason people don't apply strategies like this more often is that they can't give them what they want, which is not to win, but to prove how special they are. If your only goal is winning, the simpler the strategy the better, because it can be applied more consistently. But if your goal is to prove how special you are, a simple strategy is useless: anyone could do it! Thus people are often drawn to complex and convoluted strategies, even if they don't produce great results.

If you see this trait in yourself, I wouldn't consider it a character flaw. It basically just means you're human. In my experience, almost everyone has some degree of this. The people who have less of it have an enormous advantage in games. One player who comes to mind is Randy "nanonoko" Lew. If you watch his Twitch stream, you can see his understanding of NL is not as nuanced as other players with similar success. He has remarkably little ego invested in his game. He just finds something that works, then does it over and over.

For most of us, we'll never be completely rid of the desire to feel special, nor would it be a good thing if we were. But it's worth spending a little time to think about, "What would my game look like if my only goal was winning?"

Great post. I find this especially true when analyzing my database of the most winning-est players at my stakes. I always imagined them to be LAGs but in fact the majority of the biggest winners are all TAGs. This gave me insight into what I personally felt a big winning player looked like vs. the reality; and that has definitely caused me to re-evaluate what I think I know about winning poker.

Prioritization in Decision-Making

Pro Magic player Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa recently wrote a "What's the Play?" about a turn one decision. You know you're going to cast two cards, the question is which way it's best to sequence them. I won't dive into the specifics of the situation, since many of you probably don't play Magic. Suffice it to say there are many factors in play, but ultimately it comes down to a binary decision. What I really want to talk about is what this example reveals about many people's decision-making process.

The comments section of this article gives us a nice window into how people approach a decision like this. What I found so interesting is that almost everyone answered the question in the same form; and that form, in my view, is clearly inadequate to answer the question.

Let's say there are 10 potentially relevant factors in this situation, but ultimately we must choose A or B. Almost every answer was some version of

I would choose A because factor 3 points towards A for reasons x, y,
and z.

For the most part I agreed with these answers. That is, factor 3 really did support decision A for the reasons they said. However, this answer is missing a piece that is absolutely essential for making a strong case about the ultimate decision. At this point I'd like you to do me a favor: pause for a moment and consider what this answer is missing. From my perspective, this answer is obviously missing something really important. But clearly there exists an informal consensus that this answer is appropriate, because this is how most people chose to answer. I'm curious if you guys will see it the same way I do. Okay, leaving some blank space now...

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In my view the key thing this answer is missing is a case for why factor 3 is more important or relevant than all the other factors. Sure, factor 3 points towards A, but what about factors 1, 2, and 4-10? Why did you ignore all of them? Were they less important than 3? Did you somehow figure out they all came out in the wash and and it all came down to 3? I think an appropriate answer should look like this:

Factor 3 is the most important part of the question because of reasons
d, e, and f. Factor 3 points towards decision A for reasons x, y, and
z. Therefore I would choose decision A.

The second part of the answer is almost useless without the first part. Yet, the first part is usually omitted. Additionally, most readers don't seem to see this as a problem. If someone is going to disagree with an answer in the first form, the one that omits prioritization, they're more likely to disagree with the specifics than the form. That is, they'll say something like, "I don't think factor 3 actually supports decision A for reason x." It's more rare for them to say, "Sure, factor 3 supports A, but you ignored factors 6, 7, and 8."

In poker the ability to key in on the most relevant factors is one of the biggest things separating great players from everybody else. Through forum posts and coaching sessions, I've found one of the biggest things holding back less successful players is they will base their decisions on a reason that is correct so far as it goes, but is far from the most relevant factor in the hand.

For example, they might identify a reason why their opponent's pre-flop range is weaker than normal, and use it to justify a 3-barrel bluff for stacks. And the pre-flop read might be legit as far as it goes. But why was it more important than the additional information we got about opponent's range based on his actions later in the hand? Why was it more important than the board texture? Why was it more important than our own range, blockers, or image? It's not that the player gives incorrect answers to these questions, it's that he doesn't think to ask them at all.

By contrast, great players seem to have a knack for zeroing in on the most important elements of a hand. Their analysis is rarely incredibly complex, it's just a correct evaluation of the most important factors.

I think it's a good idea to think away from the table about what factors in a poker hand are most important. If you can develop a hierarchy of importance, or a structure to your decision-making, it's less likely you'll feel lost in a hand. Otherwise, you're likely to grab onto the first idea that floats by, whether or not it's actually important in the hand.