A lot of times, you try to bet yourself out of marginal situations. When it works, you win small pots, when it doesn’t, you lose big pots. This is backwards.
To succeed, you have to win more on the hands you win than you lose on the hands you lose.
You will win hands and lose hands. Recognize vulnerable situations and limit your exposure on those hands. Stop being Mr. Backwards Guy!
I agree. It sounds like there is certainly some injustice tilt going on here and maybe some of the other types of tilt too.
This article is a good, short summary of different types of tilt and what to do about each.
http://jaredtendlerpoker.com/wp-content/uploads/7-Types-of-Tilt.pdf
Thanks, SunPowerGuru. I can see immediately that you are right. This will help my game out a lot.
I was right about the Foals tournament tonight, except when I shoved my first playable hand after the hour break, I won it, and from there I was finally on top of a stack that gave me some room to maneuver, and I ended up getting hot at the final table, played exactly right, overcame the big stack when it got to heads-up, and won the whole thing. It feels good.
GG!
Two key comments here:
First, position is important. Open bigger when you’ll be out of position postflop, and smaller when you’ll be in position postflop. To illustrate…
You have two players who flatted - UTG and UTG+2 - and you’re putting in a raise to only 3BB when there’s already 3.5BB in the pot. This needs to be closer to 5-6BB. Because you’ll be out of position for the rest of the hand, you want to take this pot down now and scoop the dead money with your strong hand, and put pressure on the shorter stacks to fold. While it’s surprising the limpers decided to re-raise you after flatting (???), calling with the pot odds isn’t entirely unreasonable, and isn’t in your best interest.
Of course they fold - this open size is way too large from the button when it folds to you. Your competitors will be playing out of position for the rest of the hand, and since they’ll be disadvantaged and have a harder time realizing their equity, they should tighten their range up to the point where it makes more sense for them to 3-bet 3-4x your raise instead of call with the hands they choose not to fold. If they raised you to 15BB, would you be happy with your AJs, or would you end up throwing it into the muck?
My second comment - not quite as critical, but still important. You have to get out of the mindset of “I have X, I have to bet, and I want my competitor to call,” or “I have Y, and I try to buy the pot by betting big so my competitors will fold.” Here’s a key example of that type of thinking:
You don’t want to be playing aces multi-way out of position. Frankly, the big blind was probably wrong to fold, given he only needed to call 1BB to potentially win a 6BB pot. If you really expect both of your competitors to fold to a 3BB bet when you’re in the small blind… bet 3BB every time you’re in the small blind, regardless of your hand! Or tighten up your range a bit in case they do call, but use a slightly smaller size that makes them indifferent between calling and folding, giving you plenty of value when you do wake up with rockets.
When you start varying your bet sizes based on what you hold and how you expect it to be called/folded, then your hand becomes face up. A smart competitor can figure this out, folding when you bet small, and calling down light when you bet big. That maximizes your pain, giving you less value than you could see when you are betting for value, and losing more than you should when you bluff.
Instead, try to use the concept of merged ranges. Is this a hand that I should bet, either for value or to bluff? If it is, then what’s an appropriate bet size given my ratio of value to bluffs? By making those calculations, rather than betting small to get calls or big to get folds, it’ll move you closer to optimal poker strategy.
Well, my gripe with this hand is that I’ve been getting garbage dealt to me for an extended period of time, the hands have been pretty active, and I’ve been slowly bleeding, and then the one time I get dealt something decent and am actually sitting in late position to make good with it, suddenly everyone goes quiet, and I can’t get any action.
Was 4BB opening to close out the blinds a mistake here? I mean, sure, I won the hand, I got not enough value for it, especially considering how frequently I’m able to play a hand in this table. But that’s not why I posted the hand; I posted the hand because when I’m running bad, this is the sort of thing that happens to really annoy me. A very active table suddenly all gets dealt nothing when the good cards come to me, and no one comes in. It’s a Murphy’s Law kind of thing.
I get what you’re saying. I’ll take AA 3-up in any seat, and regardless of what position I’m seated in, I want to be playing AA. My goal when holding AA is to get one player isolated and all-in. I would have rather had it be the other player, since they had more chips that I could win, but I don’t mind putting the small-stack at risk, either.
In this table, small raises were closing the action preflop. I felt confident 3BB would fold both players, and I didn’t want to waste the Aces buying blinds. I felt confident 2BB would get one fold and one call, and from there I’d see what happens. AA is ahead of every hand preflop, and any flop can crack AA for the right holding. I happened to get beat here, but I don’t feel the strategy was terrible. I knew my opponents well enough to be able to induce the pre-flop behavior I wanted. I wanted to eliminate a player, and I got the desired behavior of an all-in, but a bad outcome.
At this stage in the game, a short stack who is half-way all-in preflop is likely to shove with anything from air to the nuts. He could be semi-bluffing bottom pair, he could be on top pair, he could be on a draw. So… I don’t have a great ability to narrow ranges in this situation, and that’s something I’d like to figure out how to work on. But I don’t mind being out of position with AA here. Short of a flush flop or a paired flop, I was ready to call anything here, and I was hoping my opponent would go all-in, or call a bet to put him all-in.
I’ll try to digest your advice and apply it and see if it helps. I get what you’re saying, if 2-3BB raises are inducing folds every hand, I should absolutely do that every hand. I do do this sometimes. Of course, players adjust to what you do. I don’t like to do it every hand because it’s a pattern, and any pattern becomes exploitable, but I do often find situations where small raises can steal blinds, and when I figure this out I take advantage. I think I try to do it within reason, rather than get too greedy and run the risk of getting taken playing cards I shouldn’t have raised, but if I can win an extra several blinds before it happens, it can be worth it to give a few blinds back. I just find that when you do something more than 2-3x in a row, pretty your opponents will pretty much always take a stand to put a stop to it. So I try not to push it too much. But maybe I should push it until they push back.
Why would you stop when they push back?
Because once they realize I’ll lay down to the raise, that’s the end of opening any hand.
If laying down to the raise would be bad, as you described, don’t do it so much. I wonder what they do if I raise back? If he’s just raising to play back at you, it doesn’t mean he has AA every time. If you want to fold there, fold, it’s not horrible as long as you don’t do it too much.
Now pop him again the next chance you get. If he is now going to defend too much, let’s exploit that for awhile. But maybe he just had something good and will go back to folding too much. There’s only one way to find out.
OK, I have to add this, no offense intended.
Maybe it’s been your name all along. When I think “pug” I think about an array of small dog breeds that like to jump around a fella’s ankles and bark like they’re gonna do something. If you growl back at them, they put their tail between their legs and run off. Again, no offense intended, but dogs and their owners are usually a lot alike.
Don’t people get dogs that mesh well with their personality type? I have a big crazy-mean dog. He probably wants to eat you, and I suspect he wants to eat me. He knows this and probably thinks I want to eat him. We exist in the perfectly balanced harmony of mutually assured destruction.
Why are we being aggressive in the first place? Isn’t part of it about control? They will make adjustments, but we know what adjustments they will make, and we are ready for that. If we control the table, we get to control what kinds of hand’s our opponent’s can play. I’m not giving that up because 1 guy plays back at me.
Real aggression isn’t something you do, it’s a raw primal force you have to fight to contain.
Here’s a perfect example of what happens.
I’m… fairly certain you didn’t actually get what I was saying.
The key question is NOT “What do I want to happen when I raise a certain amount with aces in the small blind facing a button limp?” Rather, it should be, “What do I want to happen when I raise a certain amount in the small blind facing a button limp?”
You’ll only have AA in that spot an extremely small fraction of the time. Twice as often, you’ll be holding AKo, not to mention any number of other hands you might want to work into your isolation range. How do you maximize the EV of your whole isolation range? Well, you’ll want to get some folds and scoop the pot with some frequency, particularly short-stacked and short-handed in a tournament, rather than let opponents realize their equity. The weird thing, though, is that this is the case EVEN WHEN YOU HAVE ACES. Your potential to have aces here is what allows competitors to fold Q4 or merely call K8 when you open J9s. You want your opponents to be reacting to your RANGE, not your HAND - and we’ll need to be acting in order to maximize the value of that entire range, not just your individual hand.
It can be a tough concept to grasp, but that’s going to become a major impediment to improving your game if you don’t pick it up.
Raising you a little and shoving at you aren’t the same thing. Calling the allin is like buying a scratch-off lottery ticket. It puts winning or losing totally out of your control. Calling a more modest bet gives you the chance to do something on the flop. Get in there and play some poker.
I obviously shouldn’t have called there. I had a hand that I thought I could steal with, but not a hand I could call a raise with. I was outplayed.
What puts me on tilt is that the ONE TIME I do it at a point where it’s CRITICAL to my future of the game, I run into a big pair and get screwed. At least I almost filled a straight here, although I needed a Queen, and so my opponent is blocking me, and with the two 6’s on the board, a Queen wouldn’t have helped me anyway.
We can talk about +EV moves all you want, but with the way my cards run sometimes, it feels like every move I try to make in the game is -EV. Not because of the odds dictated by the cards, but because every single time I try to play a big hand, I end up on the wrong side of it, as though the deck itself contorts to make the board miss me and give my opponent the hand. I know that’s not actually happening, but it’s the perception that the game is out to get me that puts me on tilt.
I win MTTs by playing to avoid mistakes as much as possible, and never trying to do things like bluff or steal. The second I try to do it, that’s when I run into a player holding a monster, or slow playing anything.
So WHY did I call there? Because if I drop the 3BB raise, I’ve just thrown away 1/3 of my stack on nothing. I won’t be able to raise again on some other hand that can make up for it, because it’ll be too much of my chips. From there on out, I’ll have to shove every hand until I double up 3-4 times, and the odds of doing that are poor. I might be able to steal a few times with shoves, and in fact that’s what happened in this case. Follow it out. I got AK, AQ, and something else I forget, and stole blinds on shoves three times, and eventually busted trying to do it again, finishing 14th.
If I don’t make the steal move, I don’t get committed to this pot, I don’t lose most of my stack, I last long into the tournament, and I maybe finish in the money. This was a stupid risk to take, and when I won this tournament on Sunday, I did it by avoiding doing exactly this, playing only the hands I absolutely had to play, and letting everyone else in the game make the mistakes for me.
Don’t externalize this. This isn’t something that a mysterious outside force caused. You made a bad decision, You Pug, not the RNG, not the other guy. That’s fine, it happens, but you shouldn’t blame it on something lease and waste the opportunity.
You should be delighted to find a mistake like that. You have identified a problem and know that, if you fix that problem, you will be a better player. The “problem” is an opportunity to get better. This only works if you own the problem, internalize it, and let it teach you something. One won’t get better blaming “donks” and “bingo” and skewed RNGs.
I had it figured out Sunday, but then I had to read the forums today, and try something I read about. Not that it was a new idea – I have done it before, and will do it in the future at times. But bad on me for doing it in an important (to me) tourney, rather than in some unconsequential table where I can experiment more freely. It ultimately doesn’t matter, because this is all play chips, after all, but I’m trying to take the game seriously.
You’re right. I outplayed myself.
Part of the problemn might be that you are trying to change too much, too fast. Which ones are working, which aren’t? That’s harder to answer when you have just changed several things. You were winning, change one thing at a time and give it a chance to be a real part of your game before changing something else.
I suspect you are working too hard at it and need to put some fun lack into your game. Play a week as the player you hate to play against. Be Mr. Bingo for a week and see what it’s like. Play a different style every week for a month, just for fun. Yeah, you might also learn a little, but mostly just have fun.
I could try it, at low stakes, but lately I’ve actually been running great. 58% ITM last week in SNG, 1st in the Sunday Foals tournament, 14th tonight only because I did something stupid, but in my two SNGs that I played for warmup, I took 1st and 2nd, and I took 2nd in the Disclosure game, which was running concurrently with the Foals tournament. So I was multi-tabling in two tournaments, and doing well in both of them. I’m always looking to improve my game, and part of that is to mix things up now and then so I am harder to predict. I don’t know that there’s all that much to fix, really. I know I can win a lot of chips if I play the way I play when I’m playing my best game.
So the obvious course would be to think about specific things that stop you from always playing your best game.It’s really just another process thing. Form a mental image of you as the perfect player. What does he do, what doesn’t he do? This works well as a meditation. exercise, by the way.
Now, over the next month, add to your perfect you. What kind of hair cut? What kind of clothes? What does the perfect you say, how does he act? The more real you make him, the more real he is. Start adding more poker stuff. Ask Mr Perfect You how he would play in the more common situations, and get him to explain the “whys” to you. Push him until he can explain every single play you make at the table.
Now we have a new invisible friend! Yay!
But the next time you face a hard decision, it only takes a second to wonder what the perfect poker playing you would do, and if we just do that, we are on the way to becoming that perfect self. Yes, I’m saying you can become your own imaginary perfect poker friend!