Adjusting with Aces by Nate Melvis

[jfk]

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I viewed MP as potentially good or excellent but more likely mediocre-to-good

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How did you reach this assessment?

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I had picked up both a preflop betting pattern and two physical tells on him. When he opened for exactly 3x the big blind, he had shown down a steal-type hand, or at least one happy to win uncontested, but when he opened for 3.5x or 4x, it had been a stronger preflop hand. When he said "I'm going to raise" or "raise," his hands had been very strong, and silent bets had accompanied weaker hands. Finally, he handled his chips much more casually, and displayed much more casual body language in general, with a good hand than with a bad one.

I had only played with MP for 35 or so hands but had observed him carefully in the pots he had contested. None of the observed factors are infallible, but they agreed and were thus mutually reinforcing. When you play live tournaments, you will often face unfamiliar opponents and play thirty hands per hour. I've found it's far better to search for information despite small sample sizes than to hide behind standard lines.

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For those of us who find focusing on each hand of play for many hours to be among the greatest challenges of play, how do you go about do this? Did you focus on this player specifically for a reason or were you able to give a similar bit of attention to each at the table? Is it common for you to find a tell of this (apparent) reliability so quickly or was this an aberration?

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I had just processed this information when the dealer burned and turned

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That seems like like pretty quick thinking at the table. I would imagine that you'd anticipated this range beforehand. Is this a safe assumption?

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45% of the time he would have QT or JT. He would usually call and usually check behind with those hands, so my bet would gain roughly 600 chips relative to checking, for a weighted gain of 280 chips.

30% of the time he would have T9 and J9 and betting and checking would be equivalent.

20% of the time he would have T7. Sometimes he would check behind and save me my stack. I estimate my weighted loss at 85 chips.

5% of the time he would have QJ and occasionally bluff with it. My weighted loss by not inducing this bluff is small, 15 chips or so.

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To be frank, I would have a hard time with these calculations at the table (one reason why I don't play high end MTTs). From your article it seems like you had these figures worked out quickly. At what stage of your MTT career did you get to this point. What sort of time elapsed for you to make your river decision. In online tournies where the decision time is more finite can you reach the same comprehensive conclusion?

Also, I'm curious as to the degree to which stack preservation figures into your equation. You mention it but don't quantify its consideration. How crippled would you have felt with a 725 chip stack and blinds of 25/50?

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Even if you occasionally land in a tough spot -- I hope you would play better than I did on this river, for example -- I hope you are be willing to trust your reads and abilities instead of automatically making pot-sized bets and never slowplaying preflop. When you have hundreds of thousands of chips to collect, dogmatic autopilot is among the biggest leaks you can develop.

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Please forgive my confusion, but I'm unclear with this last paragraph whether or not you're content with the decision (if not the outcome). Apparently your range considerations were on target. In hindsight, would you've made a different river play or were you destined to stack off? Might you've put more turn pressure on if you felt stack committed?

Thanks again for the article.

[Nate.]

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I viewed MP as potentially good or excellent but more likely mediocre-to-good

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How did you reach this assessment?

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Hm. Hard to remember. First off, I had found those tells/betting patterns, and better-than-good players would be less likely to have those. If memory serves he'd also missed a clear river value-bet or paid off too light or something. I want to say that he also did some talking at the table and showed that he was at least somewhat conversant with some basic concepts.

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I had picked up both a preflop betting pattern and two physical tells on him. When he opened for exactly 3x the big blind, he had shown down a steal-type hand, or at least one happy to win uncontested, but when he opened for 3.5x or 4x, it had been a stronger preflop hand. When he said "I'm going to raise" or "raise," his hands had been very strong, and silent bets had accompanied weaker hands. Finally, he handled his chips much more casually, and displayed much more casual body language in general, with a good hand than with a bad one.

I had only played with MP for 35 or so hands but had observed him carefully in the pots he had contested. None of the observed factors are infallible, but they agreed and were thus mutually reinforcing. When you play live tournaments, you will often face unfamiliar opponents and play thirty hands per hour. I've found it's far better to search for information despite small sample sizes than to hide behind standard lines.

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For those of us who find focusing on each hand of play for many hours to be among the greatest challenges of play, how do you go about do this?

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Hm. Well, after a while you find common things to look for. Speech while raising and raise multipliers are two very common ones. As far as willingness to focus... I was at the World Series and I love playing poker. Getting sleep helps. Realizing how much this sort of information works in one's favor is also good motivation to look for it. But really, it's sort of like driving. There is a vastness of information but you learn how to sift through it, and to keep sifting.

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Did you focus on this player specifically for a reason or were you able to give a similar bit of attention to each at the table?

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This guy had played a handful of pots already, and he was sitting directly across from me, so I'd had plenty of time to look at him. He was also a talker. So he got more attention than most, though to this day I can remember stuff about a couple other guys at the table (even though I busted quickly). Definitely pay attention to everyone, but obviously the ones making more decisions will give you more to look at. (Also, you'll be more likely to play pots with looser ones.)

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Is it common for you to find a tell of this (apparent) reliability so quickly or was this an aberration?

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It's common, especially at the World Series, where (a) people are cowed and (b) mediocre players are often trying so hard to make a perfect decision that they end up giving away a ton of information. (That is, part of what keeps weak players from giving away information is laziness, and that laziness is absent at the WSOP.)

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I had just processed this information when the dealer burned and turned

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That seems like like pretty quick thinking at the table. I would imagine that you'd anticipated this range beforehand. Is this a safe assumption?

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Well, obviously the range after the turn is very much related to the flop range I'd been thinking about already. Another thing I didn't mention is that when he called my initial thought was, "that looks like a guy who just made top pair."

So when I began to process the hand logically, the first thing I was considering was that he had a ten. So I didn't go down any logical dead-ends before hitting the likeliest result. (Logic and the flop range dictate that a ten is likely, but without the physical read it might have taken longer to come up with that.)


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45% of the time he would have QT or JT. He would usually call and usually check behind with those hands, so my bet would gain roughly 600 chips relative to checking, for a weighted gain of 280 chips.

30% of the time he would have T9 and J9 and betting and checking would be equivalent.

20% of the time he would have T7. Sometimes he would check behind and save me my stack. I estimate my weighted loss at 85 chips.

5% of the time he would have QJ and occasionally bluff with it. My weighted loss by not inducing this bluff is small, 15 chips or so.

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To be frank, I would have a hard time with these calculations at the table (one reason why I don't play high end MTTs). From your article it seems like you had these figures worked out quickly.

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Well, over the table it was more like, "he has one pair too often, and he's not totally predictable, so I can't fold for this price. Also he will likely feel tied to the pot if I bet. All-in!"

It takes a while to type, but given the hands you post I bet you go through these types of considerations pretty quickly.

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At what stage of your MTT career did you get to this point.

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Wow. Tough. Last summer I lived with some world-class players. I hadn't played too many live MTTs before that. So yeah, probably sometime last summer.

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What sort of time elapsed for you to make your river decision.

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My chips were in the pot within about a second and a half.

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In online tournies where the decision time is more finite can you reach the same comprehensive conclusion?

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My pause would have fit well within any site's allowed decision time. That said, I wouldn't have been working with as much information online, so I wouldn't have had the same base of good information going into the river, which would have made any tough river decision take longer. There are reads to be had online but rarely do I have this much opponent-specific information to work with unless Villain is a regular.

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Also, I'm curious as to the degree to which stack preservation figures into your equation. You mention it but don't quantify its consideration. How crippled would you have felt with a 725 chip stack and blinds of 25/50?

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It was so early that I was working as if $EV roughly equaled cEV. I had an eye toward accumulation, because chips beget chips in these mammoth weak fields, but I wasn't going to take bad bets to try to build my stack.

750 is enough to work with at 25/50, especially because live opponents handle push/fold situations (offensively and defensively) so poorly.

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Even if you occasionally land in a tough spot -- I hope you would play better than I did on this river, for example -- I hope you are be willing to trust your reads and abilities instead of automatically making pot-sized bets and never slowplaying preflop. When you have hundreds of thousands of chips to collect, dogmatic autopilot is among the biggest leaks you can develop.

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Please forgive my confusion, but I'm unclear with this last paragraph whether or not you're content with the decision (if not the outcome). Apparently your range considerations were on target. In hindsight, would you've made a different river play or were you destined to stack off? Might you've put more turn pressure on if you felt stack committed?

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In hindsight I think he bluffs rarely enough, and my physical reads on him were good enough, that checking and evaluating (possibly folding) is slightly better than pushing.

I don't regret my turn play, because he's so likely to have so few outs, and to pay off the river with one pair (so the effective odds aren't just working against me). If I knew he had top pair I would have bet more, but I was out of position and I was still working with the broader hand range.

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Thanks again for the article.

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Thanks for the very good questions. I hope these answers are coherent. Please ask anything else you wish.

--Nate

[creedofhubris]

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45% of the time he would have QT or JT. He would usually call and usually check behind with those hands, so my bet would gain roughly 600 chips relative to checking, for a weighted gain of 280 chips.

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5% of the time he would have QJ and occasionally bluff with it. My weighted loss by not inducing this bluff is small, 15 chips or so.

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Your hand weighting made no sense to me, because you put in a decent-sized checkraise on the flop, and these hands, which you give him a 50% chance of holding based on his turn action, are no pair no draw on the flop.

Do you really expect people to call you with nothing but random overs, not even ace high?

[Nate.]

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45% of the time he would have QT or JT. He would usually call and usually check behind with those hands, so my bet would gain roughly 600 chips relative to checking, for a weighted gain of 280 chips.

<...>

5% of the time he would have QJ and occasionally bluff with it. My weighted loss by not inducing this bluff is small, 15 chips or so.

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Your hand weighting made no sense to me, because you put in a decent-sized checkraise on the flop, and these hands, which you give him a 50% chance of holding based on his turn action, are no pair no draw on the flop.

Do you really expect people to call you with nothing but random overs, not even ace high?

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Creed --

Yeah. I only made it a few hundred more, and I think he would have called with all sorts of garbage. As it turned out he called with two overs and a gutshot. He seemed to be the can't-pass-up-a-price type.

--Nate

[novel20]

Nate, if you were doing it again, do you have any alternate line?

[Nate.]

Novel --

I like my line through the turn. He was willing enough to play with garbage in the face of apparently good pot odds, and so overwhelmingly likely to have no pair, that trying to get him to make a mistake by confronting him with an attractive price was the best idea, I think. As I mentioned earlier, given my good physical read on him I think checking might have been a little better than betting the river. (But when I discussed the hand with a world-class player right afterward and got to the river, he immediately said "blah, just shove.")

--Nate

[UpstateMatt]

Nice article Nate. I hope you do more writing for 2+2 (and other poker outlets). Your strengths as a writer are a great compliment to your strengths as a poker player.

One question: this hand came from early on in a preliminary event, and as such, you were working with an effective stack of about 40 big blinds. For this particular situation - i.e. trying to take advantage of probably steal hand / average opponent - how does your strategy change over a variety of depths. For instance, would you have played it the same PF at a depth of 200bb? how about 20bb?

It's not obvious to me what the ideal depth(s) to do this at is , but it struck me that 40bb might be non-ideal, particularly out of position. You are likely going to check-raise the flop for value most of the time, thus creating something like a 28bb pot going into the turn, with somewhat less than that left behind. That strikes me as likely to produce a lot of tough situations if you still just have one pair.

Thoughts?

cheers
matt

[creedofhubris]

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45% of the time he would have QT or JT. He would usually call and usually check behind with those hands, so my bet would gain roughly 600 chips relative to checking, for a weighted gain of 280 chips.

<...>

5% of the time he would have QJ and occasionally bluff with it. My weighted loss by not inducing this bluff is small, 15 chips or so.

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Your hand weighting made no sense to me, because you put in a decent-sized checkraise on the flop, and these hands, which you give him a 50% chance of holding based on his turn action, are no pair no draw on the flop.

Do you really expect people to call you with nothing but random overs, not even ace high?

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Creed --

Yeah. I only made it a few hundred more, and I think he would have called with all sorts of garbage. As it turned out he called with two overs and a gutshot. He seemed to be the can't-pass-up-a-price type.

--Nate

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I think you have to give him at least ace high or a gutshot to call you there. And since you've got two of the aces blocked, he's much more likely to be holding a gutterball type hand. People have to suck super hard to call with no pair no draw like your putative QJ dude. As you can see, even with the nut outs from the gutshot besides his "my overs might be good" outs he thought long and hard before calling you.

It's unrealistic to assume people are crappy enough to just autocall you with random hands; this is a tournament and those extra few chips you checkraised are still actually a meaningful amount.

When I find someone who speculates on flops with hands like QJ/just overcards in a cash game I buddy list them; they are a rare treasure, and you shouldn't expect to find them just anywhere.

[lapoker17]

nate, i just read this article and i have some serious issues with it. before i get into the bad, i would like to say that i enjoyed reading it - you write very well and i felt like i was at the table. now...

working backwards, you state that described opponent will fold these weak hands to your pf reraise, but will have no problem floating a flop checkraise with dry overs. and "He seemed to be the can't-pass-up-a-price type". these two things seem wildly inconsistent. if you have such a sick read that he completely changes his tendencies depending on street, then you may get a bit of a pass, but that would be quite rare and you never mentioned it.

now, onto the meat of where your NLHE thinking breaks down on a very fundamental level: the fact that he can be raising any 2 here makes it far more important that you DO reraise pf. had he opened for 4x or whatever signified strength, i would be fine with your flat call as his range is now so narrow that we can both play more perfectly against him and by disguising our holdings, almost force him to play imperfectly against us. but his ability to have such a wide range here makes him quite dangerous if we let him see the flop at a price he chooses. the fact that we are oop only serves to magnify the error.

i've played tons of live poker, so i am quite familiar with making some unorthodox moves simply because i can feel they are right at the time, however, the error you made is not one that can be easily mitigated by the fact that you can look into the guy's eyes.

note: stack sizes are always super important and the fact that you are reasonably shallow here makes your mistake less glaring than it would be if deeper. and though i've read your comments in this thread regarding stacks, your lack of discussion of depth in the article leads me to believe it was not that great a factor in your thought process. the article reads as if you are unilaterally endorsing this "tricky play" regardless of stacks.

again, i enjoyed the article, and look forward to your next piece.

[Nate.]

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nate, i just read this article and i have some serious issues with it. before i get into the bad, i would like to say that i enjoyed reading it - you write very well and i felt like i was at the table. now...

working backwards, you state that described opponent will fold these weak hands to your pf reraise, but will have no problem floating a flop checkraise with dry overs. and "He seemed to be the can't-pass-up-a-price type". these two things seem wildly inconsistent. if you have such a sick read that he completely changes his tendencies depending on street, then you may get a bit of a pass, but that would be quite rare and you never mentioned it.

now, onto the meat of where your NLHE thinking breaks down on a very fundamental level: the fact that he can be raising any 2 here makes it far more important that you DO reraise pf. had he opened for 4x or whatever signified strength, i would be fine with your flat call as his range is now so narrow that we can both play more perfectly against him and by disguising our holdings, almost force him to play imperfectly against us. but his ability to have such a wide range here makes him quite dangerous if we let him see the flop at a price he chooses. the fact that we are oop only serves to magnify the error.

i've played tons of live poker, so i am quite familiar with making some unorthodox moves simply because i can feel they are right at the time, however, the error you made is not one that can be easily mitigated by the fact that you can look into the guy's eyes.

note: stack sizes are always super important and the fact that you are reasonably shallow here makes your mistake less glaring than it would be if deeper. and though i've read your comments in this thread regarding stacks, your lack of discussion of depth in the article leads me to believe it was not that great a factor in your thought process. the article reads as if you are unilaterally endorsing this "tricky play" regardless of stacks.

again, i enjoyed the article, and look forward to your next piece.

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lapoker --

Thanks. I've been learning from your posts for many months now and I'm glad you took the time to comment here. (And thanks for the compliment.)

A few things:

-He wasn't opening any two here; he wasn't the type to open J4 or anything. (I thought.) So I had a better idea of what his hand was than just "any two and not a big hand."

-Stack depth was vital in this decision, though I should have probably discussed it more in the article. I've discussed them already in the thread, and besides, it's nothing you don't understand.

-As strange as it might seem, I think that this guy was folding many hands preflop but loosening up once there was money in the pot. That said, it would be very easy for me to have overestimated his propensity to peel with something like bare overs or a gutshot with no overs. I think it's not too wild for him to give himself to weigh overcards on the flop as probable outs, though.

I agree that this play will often be a mistake, but forty blinds deep against an opponent I can comfortably peg as having a hand roughly in the 25th through 40th percentile of hands, who will give me physical information not just preflop but on every street, I think the call was better than a reraise at the time.

Thanks again for your thoughts.

--Nate