Difficult Decisions, Bad Designs (Pooh-Bah?)

[Grunch]

[I guess this is a pooh-bah post, but since I've been a CT for ever, maybe it's just the random ramblings of an old man...]

Difficult Decisions, Misplayed Earlier Streets

In my other life (the one where I get a paycheck) I'm a software engineer. I've been programming for a long while. I've built big systems from the ground up, maintained other systems, and helped on all kinds of stuff. For a long time my professional interest has been the reliability & design of code and diagnosing errors in production software. This is something I've thought a lot about over the years. (This is leading somewhere, I promise.)

Here's one thing I believe to be usually true about software in complex systems. If a piece of code is difficult to write, it's probably because the surrounding system is either badly designed or has defects in it. I'm amazed how often this is the case. A block of code is difficult to write usually because the surrounding infrastructure isn't quite suited to the task, or because some facility or data isn't easily available from that context, or because the code you are trying to write is semantically incorrect. It's almost as if the code knows it's wrong somehow and resists being written.

But when everything is designed well -- both the code you are writing and the system you are adding it to -- code seems to practically write itself. It just flows, effortlessly, right out your fingertips. This is true even with very complex code that you might think would naturally be hard to write. But it's not hard to write if the system is well-designed. It may take time, or a lot of code, but it won't take a lot of wrangling or struggle to get the pieces to snap together.

This does relate to poker. Here's how.

Often times when I'm playing a hand I'll do something on an early street, and then I'll be put in a difficult spot on a later street. I'll have to make a decision for a lot of money where it's very unclear what the right thing to do it. A (not great) example of this came up yesterday, (link). I came in to a (virtually) unraised flop with a weak offsuit connector, flopped a potentially marginal trips hand, and tried an unorthodox (read incorrect) flop line in order to extract the maximum from my 2 opponents. The line I took was passive, and I didn't wake up until the next street, when the LAG led in to me. I raised, the ATM folded, and the LAG re-raised. Now I'm faced with a difficult decision.

Do I have the best hand? Is the LAG overvaluing an even more marginal hand, as he is wont to do? But this LAG is a fairly good LAG, in that he doesn't get involved in big pots late without a solid hand. My thoughts were all twirly, and I was totally unsure about the correct line.

The problem was I designed the hand wrong on the flop. My intention was to get value from the other opponents, but I failed to consider the possibility that I may be the marginal one. The correct line on the flop was for me to lead (or at least check-raise). This would have caused the rest of the hand to play differently. But on the later streets, my decisions would have been much easier, not impossibly difficult as they actually were. As played, my turn was difficult because of things I did wrong on the flop.

This happens all the time. In fact, I believe that in almost every case where I'm faced with a decision that is hard to make it is because I misplayed the hand on an earlier street. That is, when it is hard to make because I don't have enough information. There are also hands that take some work to figure out, but you still may have the information & the tools to do that work. Those hands aren't instances where misplayed earlier streets result in the challenge. Those hands are just the heavy lifting we all have to do in poker.

No, the hands I'm talking about are the ones where you think to yourself, "I have no idea what to do, and I don't know how to figure out what to do!" These hands are difficult because you put yourself in to a difficult spot. These are the hands I look the most closely at in my own play.

Maybe this post will help some of you. Maybe it was just too long, and you didn't read it. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]