Mailbag: Don’t Pay Off

Q: I recently read Andrew Seidman’s response to a question about the key to become a winning poker player. His statement was simple and direct: “Don’t pay off.”

This advice hit me right in the face, given how frequently I look up a big river bet even when I’m pretty sure I’m beat. (What can I say? I’m naturally a curious person, and I’ve always been willing to pay to satisfy my curiosity. But it does get expensive in poker.) I still call on the river when I think there’s a reasonable chance my opponent is bluffing, but I’m very much trying to incorporate BalugaWhale’s advice into my game.

I’m wondering how important you think his advice is to becoming a winning player and how pervasive the instinct is for people to call. In addition to calculating the odds that villain is bluffing, do you use any techniques to discipline yourself against paying off?

A: You should always be suspicious of anything purporting to be “the key to become a winning poker player”. Virtually anyone’s play could be improved in many different places, any of which will help to make her more profitable (or less unprofitable).

Matt Matros recently criticized the idea of “a secret response that, once unveiled, would magically transform an average player into an elite one”, adding that, “great players have a dozen or more traits that help make them the best at what they do”. According to him, though, “one attribute that can be found in every world-class player’s game [is that] they’re all willing to make plays that typical players wouldn’t even consider.” So there are certainly varying opinions on the subject, even among world-class players like Seidman and Matros.

That said, calling too much is a very common and very expensive leak. Most players could improve their win-rate considerably by folding a few good-looking hands when their opponents’ actions strongly suggest that those hands are no good. I have had a few students who exhibited dramatic improvement when I told them to start looking for excuses to fold strong hands and send me the results. So I do think that Seidman is on to something, even if calling it “the key” is overstating matters a bit.

Learning to read hands is the best route to learning to let go of seemingly strong hands at the right times. Many players stick to rules like “never fold a set” or “always call with top pair on the river if you checked the turn” as a substitute for the more rigorous exercise of hand reading, and this leads to bad calls.

When contemplating a big laydown, I find it helps to consider my own range. What other hands could I hold in this situation? Which of those hands would I fold, and which would call or raise? Where does my current hand fit into that range. If I can identify several stronger hands that I could hold, then I’m more comfortable folding whatever I have, even if it seems strong in a vacuum. When I’m at the top of my range, though, meaning that I’ll rarely have a hand stronger than what I have based on how I’ve played so far, then I’m much more inclined to pay off, particularly if I think my opponent is good enough to pick up on that fact.

To boil it down to one simple rule, I’d say “When in doubt, fold.” There’s nothing unique about what you describe as your “natural curiosity.” Virtually every poker player, myself included, would rather see his opponents’ cards than yield the pot. We also tend to overestimate how often our opponents are bluffing.

I like to keep this in mind, that I can’t necessarily trust my desire to call or to put my opponent on a bluff. Given my, and most poker players’, natural tendency to call too often, I prefer to err on the side of folding when the decision seems close. In all likelihood, it’s not as close as I’m leading myself to believe.

Do you have a question for the Thinking Poker Mailbag? Please leave it as a comment below!