You Bet Your Rational Bippy

Pi and the square root of negative one (i) are standing around the water cooler, arguing politics. Pi says, "Get real," to which i responds, "Be rational!"

I completed another trip around the Sun this week, and one of the birthday presents received from my better half was Volume I of "Harrington on Cash Games." (I've got my fingers crossed that I'll get Volume II next weekend for Fathers Day; if not, I'll get it on order from Amazon.)

Like Harrington's first three HoH tournament books, this one looks to be chock-full of detailed sample hands and interesting poker problems to ponder. For instance, he starts with a 10-page examination of a single hand played out on the television show High Stakes Poker between Dan Harmnetz (A-K), Mike Matusow (Q-9), Dan Shak (A-3), and Daniel Negreanu (9-7). Harrington explains how Negreanu, even though he flops trip nines (flop: A-9-9), manages to get away from the hand relatively cheap by deducing that Matusow also has trip nines, but probably has a better kicker. He also explains how Harmnetz similarly (and quickly) deduces his TPTK hand is no good and bails from the pot, too. Pretty amazing. (In the low stakes games I frequent, the odds of opponents folding trip nines or top two pair are almost nonexistent.)

In explaining how Negreanu and Harmnetz both concluded they were beat, Harrington says that the key principle used is this: assume your opponent's plays are rational. That is, you need to try to figure out first what the opp's bets, raises, and calls mean if they're not bluffing. Once you've done that, you can factor in the chance that they're bluffing and see if it changes things. He goes on to say that almost no one bluffs routinely. In other words, bets almost always mean what they appear to mean.

This statement got me thinking about bets in general and how this might be applied during a session of poker. To start, I believe there are four primary reasons why we--and also our opponents--bet:

1. Get the other players to fold
2. Give the other players the wrong odds to draw
3. Add value to the pot
4. Buy information

Of course there are other reasons, such as semi-bluffing, but those are actually subsets and/or permutations of the four reasons listed above. When we're facing a bet, we need to remember (a) our opponents bet is probably rational; and (b) their bet probably falls into one of the four major reasons listed above. The trick, of course, is to determine which of the four things above our opponents are trying to achieve with their bet.

As an experiment yesterday, I tried deliberately to apply these principles in some $5NL full-ring cash games I was multi-tabling. After first considering my opponent's VPIP and aggression factor, their skill level, the flop texture, and the number of players involved in the pot, whenever I was led into, I asked myself, "Is the opp trying to get me to fold, and if so, why? Is he smart enough to manipulate the odds? Does he think his hand is good and is he simply trying to add value to the pot? Or is he just trying to find out where he is in the hand?"

The graph, below, shows how I did in the 1.25 hour session I played. Most of the time when put to the test, I decided that my opponents either were trying to get me to fold or were adding value to the pot. Whenever they tried to get me to fold, I 3-bet them in response (in a sense to get them to fold and buy information). When I figured the opp was betting for value, I typically folded (unless I had a monster). I also c-bet a ton whenever I was checked to on a flop; remember, an opponents actions are rational, and typically mean what they appear to mean. A check on a flop typically means weakness. My c-bets in these situations paid real dividends throughout the session, adding 20- and 30-cent pots to my stack 1-3 times per lap. They also allowed a couple of my bigger hands to get paid off when I c-bet and the opp didn't believe I was being rational.

Unfortunately, I wasn't perfect in using the system, and lost two full buy-ins that I probably shouldn't have. In both cases, I got married to top pair top kicker, and just wouldn't believe that my opponents' bets were rational. In hindsight, the villains were reasonable players and weren't typically getting out of line. In other words, the fact that they were betting into me should have clued me into the fact that they had something strong. I probably should have folded in both cases. Sure, I might have been laying down winners, but at the end of the day, I would have not lost around $5 or so that otherwise would still be in the kitty.

A key to playing poker well is to not only maximize the amount won when we have the best hand, but also to minimize the damages when we're behind. Win big, lose little. And the trick to this is believing what our opponent's bets are saying to us. Or, as the square root of negative one likes to say, we need to "be rational!"
All in for now...
-Bug