Saturday, Match 25th: Hard Hands

I had an interesting experience today (over the course of losing $4,000, although I suppose that’s only 75 – 100 BBs, and I shouldn’t stress too much over it, even though it’s not too fun.) Previously, I had slotted my downswings into three fairly identifiable pattern groups: (i) a prolonged stretch of being card-dead (frustrating, although there’s really nothing you can do except wait it out secure in knowing that the deck will eventually turn around, (ii) a series of so-called “bad beats”, where opponents seem to catch miracle card after miracle card on you (undoubtedly one of the most frustrating features of the dreaded downswing), and (iii) a long string of second-best hands (probably the most costly of the three). Viewed in the macro sense, of course, downswings are always made up of a combination of the above three, even though one usually seems more prevalent than the others in any given bad stretch. Today, though, I realized that there’s a 4^th, slightly more subtle pattern – I suppose it’s somewhat of a spin-off of the “second-best hand” pattern, but I maintain that there’s a noticeable difference, and it’s the following: today, my losses were the result of being dealt an inordinate number of hands that were simply hard to play. That may seem like a somewhat nebulous concept, but unlike the standard 2+2 refrain that there is always an optimal way to play a hand and any deviation therefrom is necessarily incorrect, that simply isn’t true. There is, as Sklansky has written, an optimal way to play, and that is the way you would play if you knew your opponent’s cards. Given that poker is a game of imperfect information, of course, you don’t know them, and thus there simply isn’t an optimal strategy for any given situation (unless of course you have the absolute nuts, and your opponent bets into you on the river.)

Anyway, back to this 4^th “losing” pattern: over the course of 500 hands today, I simply got dealt hand after hand where I felt opponents were taking shots at me (and it was across all my tables, so it wasn’t just the case of opportunistic opponents trying to run over a guy who was having a rough go of it that day) and I was pretty helpless to do anything about it. I would get check-raised when a scare-card hit on the turn, and decide to call-down only to be shown a turned two-pair. It seemed like a majority of my reads were simply flat wrong. Every time I’d try a re-steal with a very legitimate holding from one of the blinds, the stealer would either hit, or throw his hand away without putting in any more money on the flop. In fact, that last point is a pretty important feature of the dreaded downswing as well: when your winning hands drag miniscule pots. The ideal flop, of course, is not only one that hits you in the face, but also gives your opponents a little something they want to continue with. I won a decent number of pots today, but never really got paid off, and it left me scratching my head wondering whether I should have played my hand differently (when the truth was that I probably simply wasn’t going to make any money off the hand anyway since it completely missed my opponent.)

Whether this little ‘discovery’ actually proves useful to any extent (either for myself or anyone else), or whether it’s merely a pointless exercise in semantics remains to be seen, I guess. If anything can be learned from this, I suppose, it’s this: I’ve often thought of myself as pretty much as tilt-proof as they come. I’m very patient when I go card-dead, and really don’t let bad beats or 2^nd best hands get to me all that much, understanding that a “bad” beat, by definition means that I wanted my donkey of an opponent to continue with his hand. But this 4^th scenario is perhaps the one that has in the past had the potential to really make me consider changing my style (which would be quite irresponsible, considering my long-term winrate.) Now when I get dealt a high number of hands that are simply hard to play, and I feel unable to get a good read on how to deal with opponents I’m pretty sure are just taking shots at me, I’ve got a new strategy: just leave the table. Seriously. I was sitting at a few 50/100 shorthanded tables today that ordinarily I’d slobber over. 2 or 3 laggy fish at each, but I was just getting hammered, which was encouraging the fish to get unpredictable on me, which I simply had a hard time dealing with. So I just left, and took the rest of the day off, leaving behind two pretty juicy tables. So I suppose the following is directed at people who are already proven winners, although there’s probably something anyone can take away from it: with some downswings, there’s nothing you can do except smile and shake your head at how unlucky it was that you got hardly any playable hands, or that your opponent caught some miracle cards, secure in the knowledge that you played every street correctly. Other putrid stretches have more insidious, and potentially detrimental, features…ones that aren’t necessarily apparent at first glance, and might make you wonder whether there is some more serious flaw you need to address. Some hands are simply tough to play correctly (for anyone, myself included), and have the effect of shaking your confidence and leading you to wonder whether you need to change your style. Luckily, however, they’re typically rather few and far between. But sometimes (just like the stretches where you go a few thousand hands without seeing aces), they present themselves in higher concentrations – while I’ve found these stretches to be a little more trying than those in which my opponents simply catch the cards they need, I thought perhaps that addressing it here might help some others to at the very least recognize this pattern of tough luck, and maybe keep a little more of a level head about it. In looking back over this post, I'm not quite sure I described what I was going for as clearly as I think I initially had hoped for, but I hope it will prove insightful to some nonetheless.