My latest poker strategy article, He Has to Have Something, is now appearing in the November 2013 edition of Two Plus Two Magazine. It deals with a bit of sloppiness to which even otherwise good hand readers often fall prey:
” The bottom line is that you need to do that work of actually identifying the hands that you think it makes sense for him to bluff with, rather than simply saying “I can beat a bluff!” or “It’s hard to have a hand better than mine!” There are many cases where it’s actually quite difficult for your opponent to show up with a hand worse than yours, and he has to have something.”
Also appearing is the conclusion to Carlos Welch’s three-part series about how small stakes players can make the most of the World Series of Poker:
Small stakes tournaments in Vegas are some kind of weird lovechild of skilled WSOP events and your average home game where players routinely get splinters from shoving a pile of toothpicks into the center of a dinner table and yelling “I’m all in!” If you want to have a good summer, you have to handle this ugly baby with care.
Yeah, Carlos is a little funnier than I am.
That’s the nittiest qualifier of “I made a change to highlight my point.” Thought you were going to actually change something. Don’t you worry people will read that, construct an entirely different scenario from the hypothetical, and then discredit your ‘generous’ interpretation, simply because they don’t know what you changed?
great article by the way. really like this hand as a talking point in general.
I am borderline retarded and misread the change. Ignore everything! Good article! So well played by Hero!
Thanks, glad you liked it. I was confused by your earlier comment, glad you clarified. For those who are curious, the actual flop was Qd 3c Ts. I think that putting up more possibilities for Villain to have flopped rather than turned a draw does more to define his flop checking range and makes betting less good for Hero on the turn.
I was just out of it when reading yesterday and was also 10 tabling. Eyes saw one thing and brain read another.
I like this article. One point that I’d be interested to hear more elaboration on is the idea of not letting your hand color your hand reading process.
In your Value Targeting series on TPE, you recommend a method that relies heavily on comparing your holdings to potential holdings of your opponents. I realize that targeting hands from which to get value is a separate skill from reading hands and should be treated as such, but it seems like there is some inherent dissonance between hand reading and value targeting when considering the fact that one is relying on what you hold and the other is not. Since both will be happening simultaneously during a hand, how do you make both work together? Or do you see those two processes as working together in harmony rather than in conflict?
Interesting question and not something I’ve thought enough about, pedagogically. For me it’s a two-step process: I do the hand reading first, then I choose a part of it to target based on my hand. I can see how that would be challenging for people new to both processes, though. I’ll have to think on that, thanks for pointing it out.
As Andrew says, this is a two-step process.
In fact, the process of first figuring out villain’s range without taking your hand into account at all (except in terms of blockers) and then figuring out what to do with your hand, is a simpler description of the so-called “REM process”: Range, Equity, Maximize, that was introduced in the book “Professional No Limit Hold’em.”
In the REM process you first figure out villain’s range (without looking at your hand, as Andrew describes). Then you figure out your equity vs villain’s range, and then you choose the best course of action.
In fact, this is not even accurate: The actual full version of the REM process involves building a game tree and calculating the equity in each branch of the game tree. For example, when you want to figure out the EV of shoving, you need to estimate not villain’s whole range, but just villain’s range for calling your shove. And then you estimate the equity only against this sub-range.
Overall, one of the points of the REM process is that it is very important to make poker decisions methodically. And that means working according to a certain algorithm or procedure, at least until that process starts getting more intuitive. In each step of this process, you want to avoid coloring your estimations by psychological factors, and one of the ways to do that is to isolate that step and only look at pertinent information. So when you estimate the range with which villain will call a shove, the only relevant information if the action in the hand, the board, and what villain knows about you; and when you are in the Maximize step, comparing the different alternatives, the only pertinent information is the EV of all the alternatives.
What about check/jamming the river in the example hand and turn your hand into a bluff? If he’s betting most of his draws and monsters on the flop, and then his range is pretty much capped at like A9, unless he checks back JJ on the flop. You can c/raise or c/jam the river and make him fold pretty much his whole range in that spot, no?
Interesting thought. You may even be able to over shove the river for the same reasons if you think he’s not the type to hero call. I think that may be the classic Ed Miller line although I’m not sure this is the correct board for it.