The 2+2 Forum Archives: Bad Reasons for Making Plays

Hey guys. This is the probably last time I'm going to link to my blog, as I realize this forum isn't for self promotion. This last entry I made was written with the 2+2 STT forum in mind, so I want to make sure a lot of you read it.

Bad Reasons for Making Plays

I remember the first time I played online poker. I would raise preflop anytime I had an ace, because anytime I flopped an ace I'd have the highest pair possible. I couldn't believe my bad luck whenever another player had an ace and won just because his other card was higher than mine. I'd like to pretend that this was when I was 10 years old or something, but that was my logic when I was about 17. It's important to keep examples like this in mind. I was NOT a dumb person by any means. It wasn't that I didn't understand probability or that I couldn't comprehend the nature of the game. It was simply that I never cared to look into the math behind the game or even to sit down and think for 5 minutes about what was happening. I'm a little bit embarrassed to admit that because, man, how ridiculous does it sound to you? I didn't even think about the fact that those who called my preflop raise were likely to have an ace, or that their kicker would almost always play and beat mine. And that if they didn't have an ace, they'd often fold to any substantial bet when my Ace hit, unless they flopped a bigger hand (I forgot to mention it but I think it goes without saying that I'd play for my whole stack anytime I flopped top pair).

The point, besides embarrassing myself, is that a lot of perfectly normal to intelligent people will make what you would consider terrible plays, and they do have a reason for them. Even if that reason is just "a pair of aces is the highest possible pair." By understanding other players' motivation for making plays, and understanding your own, you will be better able to capitalize on the mistakes of your opponents, and to correct your own. It's said all the time, but still not said enough: You win in poker by exploiting your opponents mistakes. Please never ever forget that if you want to make money playing poker. So, let's get started on common mistakes then, shall we?

A very common mistake that winning players make, and one I'm currently getting away from, is taking a line in a hand because it's the way they are "supposed to" play it. I call this the copy-cat syndrome. This usually comes from seeing similar hands played in similar ways by other winning players, and sometimes just by habit. In a Party SNG, you get AKo UTG+1, blinds 15/30, you probably raise to somewhere near t85. Why? Because that's what we do. To be clear, there is nothing at all wrong with making that play. The problem is with the reasoning. If you really don't have a good reason to raise there, and to raise to that amount, then you fall into this category of mistake makers. If you stay an SNG player your whole life, under the same structure, you probably won't have a big problem if you continue to play this way. The problem occurs when you try to play a new structure, say 6max NL with 100xbb stacks. You realize that you don't know what to do, and you'd like someone to tell you the standard preflop plays, flop plays, whatever. What has happened is that you never had to think about your preflop game at all, so you didn't, and now you don't understand the game the way you should. Same thing goes for post flop play, but to a lesser extent. There are many reasons to raise preflop: To win the blinds, to isolate a weak player, to get money in the pot when you have the best hand, to semi-bluff, to disguise your hand, to create an image, etc. You should be thinking about your reasons for making EVERY SINGLE play you make if you want to improve. At minimum, when asked the reason behind plays, you should be able to answer.

Next up, one that I think I almost never commit anymore, but often did. I call it the "I've seen him make that play with x" excuse. Please don't misinterperet the name of it, as watching your opponents, and knowing what they have done with certain hands is great. The mistake happens when this "read" overrides a very important idea known as the gap concept. Let's say you have ATo in the BB, and Mr. W open pushes in MP. Nevermind the stacks or anything else, and forget about the tourney structure implications for a moment. For this example, you should call if ahead, and fold if behind. Now, let's assume that most players would only push in his shoes with AJ or better. But you know Mr. W, that LAG, and you've seen him push A8o in a spot just like this. You think that since he'd push hands as bad as A8o or worse, you might be ahead, and you call. It should be obvious why this thinking is terrible, but many players give in to it. If it isn't obvious, then you learned something I didn't intend to teach anyone. Congrats. You should realize, that even if Mr. W pushed hands down to A5o, you're likely still behind his range, and should muck your ATo. Don't let the doubt that Mr. W's laggy play put in your mind cause you to make a mistake.

In the last example, the reason I call the thinking an "excuse" is because many players would like to play more hands, and are holding themselves back in order to play better. They then sometimes make excuses in order to play more hands. We learned that often times "tight is right" and that we just have to sit back and be boring if we want to make money, but we don't like it. That's a problem. As long as you are fighting this urge to play hands, you will undoubtedly give in sometimes. We should not want to play more hands. We should want to play in a way that is most profitable. Word that however you'd like: a way that minimizes mistakes, a way that chooses the best play as often as possible, etc. We should, at our core, want to play as well as we can. Then we get to play exactly the way we want to. Yay.

So, why do we make these mistakes? Most mistakes in our game occur because of some kind of weakness; usually submission to either a laziness or a temptation. The example I gave of myself earlier and the copy-cat syndrome example fall under submission to laziness. We could figure out how to play better just by doing some thinking, studying, calculating, but we'd rather take the easy way out. The excuses we make in order to play more hands fall under submission to temptation. For whatever reason, maybe impulse to gamble, we are tempted to play more hands than we probably should.

The good news about all this is that I am now sure that no matter how many books full of good information are released, poker will always be profitable. Why? For the same reason that not everyone in America has a perfect body when we all know that enough diet and exerscise will get us there. You have to want it and work for it. The bad news is, you have to want it and work for it. I was hoping that my natural intelligence and logic skills would carry me to the top of poker, but it looks like I might have to do a little work. And you might too.

47outs.com

Edited by Jman28 (03/09/06 07:56 PM)

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