Questions about a Scott Fischman blurb on espn

[timmay29]

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/poker...amp;id=2380072

Spee: How do you deal with having a bad run of cards in a tournament?

Fischman:: Usually when I play, my cards don't matter too much. If you keep looking at your cards you will never be a great player. The most important factors are stack size, position and blind level. If I am getting bad cards but am in the correct spot with the right amount of chips, I will push without looking!


Ok now I understand that when the blinds get especially high it is pushing time; that is why sngpt is so popular. But otherwise, I'd think the cards matter a helluva lot... is he perhaps exaggerating a little for the sake of emphasising how important other aspects of poker are?

He also said that he considers the amount of time someone takes online to be a good tell - do you all feel the same way?

[Mike Jett]

I agree with the timing tells part.

[Ibanez8185]

If you are good at reading the players the cards really dont matter all that much. I am a low limit grinder and play ABC poker, but I have noticed a lot of success after I started to play the players, position and stack sizes more than I used to. Of course you will run into a bad run of cards in tournaments, but if the other players dont know this whats the problem. All you need to do is pick on the weak players until you pick up some cards.

[AaronBrown]

Everyone, not just poker players, tends to attribute their success to skill, not luck. When a guy hits a three-pointer at the buzzer to win the game, does he say "I hit 40% of my threes, it was just the luck of the draw"? When your broker recommends a stock that doubles does he say, "It was all luck, it could have gone down to zero just as easily"?

The luck of the cards is very important in poker, even for great players over long periods of time. But it's not the starting hands that matter. You can get great starting hands, but if every time you have AQ someone else has AK, or when you get AA someone else hits a runner/runner straight on the river, you'll lose money.

There are two reasons starting hands don't matter too much. First is they're mostly pretty similar. In a ten-handed game, the average hand wins 10% of the time. 90% of the time, you're dealt starting cards with between 6% and 16% chance of winning. Over 100 hands, even with very good or very bad luck, you don't deviate too far from average.

Second, when you do get a run of bad luck, it deceives the other players. Say you get dealt 10 terrible hands in a row. You fold 9 and bet on the 10th. Everyone folds, because they think you must be very tight. So you break even with the worst possible starting hands. What kills you in poker is to have the second-best hand, not the worst hand.

[jsnipes28]

I think he exaggerates the unimportance of the cards to make him seem like an amazing player and help profess this kind of "rounder" image.

As far as timing tells, it's pretty difficult to gain any knowledge unless it is absolutely instant or possibly last second. But even these must be taken with a grain of salt as a lot of players multi-table and it is just a matter of when they look at that particular table.

[RagnarPirate]

It may be that the consideration of the starting cards has become "automatized". He automatically understands the significance of the starting cards. The thing that he is actively considering is position, blinds, chip stack. I think the best players have starting cards AND positon automatized. They re-assess blinds and chip stacks a couple of times during each level of play (and more frequently at final table). And they are actively thinking about what and how the other players are thinking and the table mood.

[acoustix]

I look at betting size and patterns as a much more reliable tell online. Sometimes it takes me a while to put out a raise or call on one table because I am involved in something on another table. Betting time is highly unreliable these days because tons of people multitable.

[Aaron_C]

I recently lost on the bubble of a $5k buyin event. I went to 4 showdowns in 12 hours only the last was i ever allin and called.
This isn't a bragging session, i didn't even cash. the point is that you can go very deep in a MTT with low blinds and almost never shbow your cards. If you're alot better (like he is) then the cards arnt that important.

It isnice to occasionally have the best hand and get paid though [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[sinners]

I think Scott also knows that those online tells he's talking about are basically very limited tells. Betting patterns and what you know from the player is the way to know what someone is doing and once you know this you can anticipate by using your position and stack against that. Scott must know that.