I’ve been wanting to right for a while about an interesting concept I came across on Tommy Angelo’s website, in an article entitled Reciprocality: The Cause of Profit in Poker. The idea is that the long-term profit that a good poker player makes doesn’t come from suckouts or cold decks or avoiding bad beats or anything like that, but rather from the situations where he makes a more profitable decision than his opponents.
In other words, if Player A flops a set versus Player B’s overpair and wins $200, he has not necessarily made a profit. If he makes more than Player B would have had their roles been reversed, then and only then has he made a profit. This is because in the long run, each player will be in each role an equal number of times, and all that matters is who can win the most with the best hand and lose the least with the worst.
Hardly a revolutionary concept, but an interesting way of thinking about the game. In Angelo’s words:
“In the world of reciprocality, it’s not what you do that matters most, and it’s not what they do. It’s both. Reciprocality is any difference between you and your opponents that affects your bottom line. Reciprocality says that when you and your opponents would do the same thing in a given situation, no money moves, and when you do something different, it does.”
I was reminded of this article, which I first saw months ago, when reading something from one of my favorite 2+2 posters (and author of this article in the same issue of 2+2 magazine as my article), Nate Meyvis:
“Shorthanded LHE, possibly even more than other games, is a game best learned at small (for you) stakes. It takes complete fearlessness and involves so much fighting for pots when nobody has anything. In so many other games you can tighten up and reduce your variance while you’re learning; you will get crushed if you play shorthanded like that. You will speed up your process by studying how your opponents play their draws (in every game, not just shorthanded LHE). It’s critical knowledge in every game, but so much of short LHE comes down to balancing your play, and since you don’t have very much material to balance with (you constantly miss the flop and don’t have a pair or even a good high card to fall back on) you have to use your draws, good and bad, carefully. If your opponents don’t ever play weak draws aggressively, or always take a certain action with a flush draw, you will get far the best of it by noticing that. So no matter what game you’re playing, pick a guy and figure out how he plays his one-card gutshots.”
I like what Nate’s saying here. Chances are that in nut versus second nut type situations, it doesn’t much matter how either player plays, as the result would be roughly the same no matter who’s playing which hand. But when no one has much of anything, those are the situations where a good player can find a real edge. Learning to play a marginal hand like a gutshot in a more profitable way than your opponents can be the source of a significant edge in a game like shorthanded limit hold ’em, where so many pots are contested between weak hands.
For the record, Angelo goes further with his reciprocity idea than I’ve given him credit for here, applying it to topics such as what you eat for lunch and how rested you are when you play. Anything that affects your bottomline can be a source of profit if you do it better than your opponents do.
Good stuff. I need to work harder at getting paid off. I’ve been taking these situations for granted and am sometimes to eager to get paid, resulting in me—-not getting paid.