Got an email from my buddy, Bret. He’s had a bad run of tourneys recently, losing six in a row, and is ready to throw in the towel. Oh, how I feel his pain. Sometimes this game can make you question your own sanity for playing it. You can do everything right.... and still lose. Well, at least in the short term. It’s a game of long run statistics, where you have to ride out the bad times and continue playing solid fundamental poker, even when you’re certain the poker gods are conspiring to throw your bankroll down the nearest well. The game is truly about playing only those hands and situations that have positive EV, which is something that, admittedly, I’m still wrapping my own feeble mind around. As all the pros say, if you get your money in with the best of it, you’ve done your job. The rest will take care of itself.
Okay, that’s all well and good, but six losing tourneys in a row is tough to swallow and, truthfully, needs some closer inspection. Something I’ve started doing is watching my own recent win-loss record on a daily basis. When I hit 5 losing sessions and/or games in a row, I stop playing and go back to my PT stats (Yes, friend, you REALLY need to get poker tracker if you want to win at this game) and see what’s what. I go back and replay the losing hands to see if I was on tilt, if bad luck was the only culprit, if I had done anything subtly (or not so subtly) wrong, if I could have done anything differently, etc. Post-mortems on losing sessions can be a painful, embarrassing process, but, just like an autopsy can often tell a doctor what caused the patients death, we have to back up and examine our losing sessions. Let’s look at one of Bret’s losing hands as an example:
“I'm stealing occasionally, playing fairly tight. I get AA on the button. A raise and a call ahead of me. I make the call, flop comes K73, two clubs (i have one). First player bets 240, second goes all-in, i reraise to my all-in to isolate, but the first guy calls me. He has hit the 7 on the flop. Of course he hits his 8 (eight!!!) on the turn and beats my rockets. I really thought the AA would hold up.”
So what went wrong? Two things, actually. The first is a mistake on the part of Bret. With AA, you quite simply have the best preflop hand possible. But in reality it is only just one pair and can be beaten any number of ways. Heads up against a single random opp’s hand, it wins 85% of the time. In a three way pot, however, it only holds up ~50% of the time. The goal with AA, then, is to get heads-up PRE-FLOP. Slow playing aces and trying to trap into a multi-way pot is a disaster waiting to happen. With a raise and cold call in front of him, Bret absolutely should have re-raised—-BIG-—to either isolate to a single opp, or to take the pot down right then and there. At a loose table like the one he was at, pushing would probably be the right move. At a tighter table, a pot size raise often gets the job done. By waiting to push after the flop, he allowed both opps to see the flop and—-here’s the important part—-get a piece of it. Bret’s hand selection is fine, it’s just he needs to work on the bet size part of the equation. Calling preflop was a mistake—because two other players had essentially told him they were going to play. Bret needed to make an even more emphatic preflop statement that said, "it's going to cost you everything you have to play against me; my hand is that good."
Okay, so then the second thing that went wrong is, well, ahem, uh.... bad luck. Yes, some yahoo decided to play 87 into a raise preflop. That’s just bad poker, plain and simple. I’ll take my AA against cards like that any day of the week. Sure, fifteen times out of 100, the 87 is going to win. But 85 times it won’t. You can't let yourself get frustrated with those kinds of situations. In fact, you want to actively pursue heads-up situations like this. As the guru likes to say, “if you don’t like playing against bad players who make bad calls, who do you like playing against?”
24-Hour Bankroll Change: 1.36%
All-in for now....
-Bug
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