The ShortStack Song....

Here is our little opus to our loyal shortstackers, and a little hello to our haters as well......ENJOY!!!

A very special thanks to Taylor Mayd for recording and mixing the song for us. Look for his first album out in November.....

Dealing With the Consequences of Being Results Oriented

I wonder if it will ever be possible to escape the tyranny of the overplayed mantra of "you must focus on the long-term, young grasshopper."  This advice would be great, but only if delivered in a dojo or a confessional or perhaps from high on a mountaintop in Tibet.  Everyone can understand this on an intellectual level- this has never, to my knowledge, been contested.  Yet to repeat it, as I have been guilty of many times in the past is to ignore the mechanisms which truly allow someone to enjoy success in poker for the long run.

When I was outside today talking to my Ipad (an article for another day), I realized that in many situations it is often far wiser to babysit your mood than it is to invite marginal situations.  What am I talking about?  While this will vary greatly from player to player and game to game, what I am referring to for myself personally, as a shortstacker, is usually one of two situations:

1.  I get 3-bet all in and have to decide whether to deviate from the script and make a close call against a seemingly aggressive and relatively unknown opponent, knowing full well that the profit is measured in a few theoretical dollars to defend a raise one-tenth of the size of the call.  The variance is enormous and the metagame benefits are tiny, if they ever even existed in the first place.  After all, does my opponent ever need know that I just folded A9s or 66?  He will most likely just assume I was on a straight steal and forget about this hand 5 minutes later.

2.  Someone open shoves on my big blind from the small blind.  I am holding a hand like A7s.  I know that the call is usually correct, but it is actually much closer than most of you will realize.  As that is a discussion for another time, I will just state the obvious fact that you aren't a monster favorite over anything, particularly after paying the rake.


These two situations are basically identical in that I must risk a relatively large amount of money to score a tiny amount of equity with no ancillary benefits.  Even if I prove that I am willing to take a flip with perhaps somewhat the the worst of it with the benefit of the dead money from the raise or the blind, the chances of being able to leverage the outcome of these situations in any given session is very small.

But wait!  The Mantra of the Long-Term says you should always take a profitable situation.  I will counter that with the other great poker mantra of It Depends.  What does it depend on, exactly?  Why, your mood of course!  If you are feeling good and know that the outcome of making this call won't hurt you or it will be fun to take the gamble, do it.  If you know that making a bad call or losing $160 to defend your $12 raise will scorch you, you should decline.  Better still, if you even have to ASK yourself if it will bother you, I can guarantee you that it will.

Monitoring your mood, I have come to believe, is one of the most important ongoing actions you can take at the poker table.  Virtually every time that we sit down we will experience a wide range of painful consequences that vary drastically in their intensity.  And just as you won't have the energy to run five miles every day when you wake up, your ability to cope with the swings in this game is far from stable and can run the entire gamut, often within a single session.

In my best month ever at the cash game tables where I made over $20,000, this was the exact approach that I took.  I woke in the morning and immediately sat down at just $1/2 tables with a sprinkling of some $2/4 game.  If I felt good, I would begin opening some $3/6 games and perhaps even some $5/10.  If I was having fun or doing well, I would continue playing high, but if I began to dread shoving 75s heads up for $200, I would drop down to whatever level that I felt comfortable at.  By doing this and only taking on the level of pain that I felt I could appropriately handle, I could play longer and more often.  The end result was not only my highest grossing month ever, but also my highest volume as well.

In conclusion, we can not escape that we are results oriented.  This is part of our most basic mental wiring and most of us have as much control over this as we do control over how fast our grass grows.  In essence, if we are to believe in the long-term, we are required to trick ourselves and our natural thought processes.  Basically, we must delude ourselves into seeing things for how they really are.  Rather than to engage in such a bizarre contradiction, I believe that we are much better suited to simply ride the ebb and flow of our emotions than to deny their existence.  We are all results-oriented.  Deal with it.

Tap Lightly on the Glass

The following article is a piece that I had written for publication for Parttimepoker.com.

Conventional wisdom tells us that we should do everything we can to avoid educating the fish.  This seemed simple enough to understand, and for the first six and a half years of my career I accepted it as gospel.  If they don't ever play any better, they can't ever beat you, right?  In an online session where you can always find a good game and might never see the same face again, I couldn't agree more.  But what about giving away a few gems in a live setting?

Back when I played baseball as a freshman in college, my team ran an annual fund raiser called the “Night at the Races” at the local Elks Lodge.  This was a rather embarrassing affair where we had to name a small wooden low-rider horse and then "ride" it by sitting on it and peddling our feet as drunken rednecks gambled on the outcome while bellowing out condescending vitriol in a smoky, cramped space.  As if this wouldn't have been memorable enough, it was also the first time I had ever received gambling advice that was just dangerous enough to get me into trouble.  Besides the veritable humiliation, the Night at the Races also spread notable sucker games such as Beat the Dealer and Parish-style blackjack.  Though Beat the Dealer was fun enough at first, I was eventually drawn to the illusion of control blackjack offered that other games did not.  Even though I was failing to exercise this perceived control at the time, the fact that you could handle your own cards and order the dealer to give you more cards seemed good enough.  I knew so little about this game that I didn't even care what the dealer was showing, I just thought that the goal was to get as close to 21 as possible without going over, much like games of paper football in after-school detention.

   

It wasn't long after I sat down that I found myself in a tough spot.  I had a hard 15 and the dealer was showing a 6.  Though I didn’t care what the dealer’s up card was, I did know that hitting a hard 15 meant that I was likely going to be watching my dollar bet sliding into the dealer’s tray.   A couple seats next to me was Paul Burke, our junior catcher and one of the team captains.  He was a great player who would later go on to sign a professional contract with the Atlanta Braves and a person that all the freshmen looked up to.  When Paul noticed my hesitation, he said, "Yelly- you have to expect that the dealer has a 10 for his down card, since there are more 10-valued cards than anything else in the deck."  His basic credibility combined with some quick common sense told me that he was right.  After thinking for a few seconds I decided to do something that I would never have done before- stand on 15 so that the dealer would bust.  To make a long story short, the dealer did just that, I felt like a genius, and thus began what would surely become a very profitable career as a professional blackjack player.  Of course, this would have been lovely, except for the fact that it never happened.  Intermittently over the next 5 years, my little bit of "helpful" knowledge was enough to get me to keep going back for more at our local riverboat casino and bled me to the tune of about $80 a session, which was my average daily take as a waiter at Applebee's.  How strange, I thought.  Why don't I ever win when I am as good as I am?

In the stores of every casino lobby, for $1.99 you can purchase a small card that contains the correct basic strategy for blackjack.  Ask yourself why a casino would sell such a useful item at such a low cost.  Surely the players would play worse without it, leading to a greater short-term profit for the casino, but is allowing them to do this better than earning their long-term business?  Does this card actually accomplish anything?  Yes.  It allows the owner to feel that he is smarter than his fellow tablemates,  even though he is certainly not going to follow the instructions on the card 100% of the time  (he’s psychic, too- don’t forget that).   This concept is not lost on the casino.  They understand full well the value of making that player comfortable within the game while still possessing an unbeatable, albeit smaller edge.  They would rather keep the golden goose alive and hatching than to slaughter it for its meat.

But what about the complete novice poker player?  Is he any different?  Does offering this player (read: potential customer) a bit of sound advice or perhaps recommending a good book really hurt your bottomline?  Should we really take the fly-by-night mortgage broker approach and punish them as harshly as possible on the first confrontation for merely being ignorant?  Much as getting a hot stock tip hardly makes you a solid day trader, no green poker player has ever immediately started crushing the games after being taught that 92o sucks.  Though Paul had no idea what he was doing when he gave me my first good tip about blackjack, he was definitely on to something...

Clearly, helping the semi-competent player who regularly wins the annual perfect attendance award at your local cardroom hardly makes any sense, but creating a long-term customer out of the curious gentleman who strayed a little too far from his regular craps game is sheer brilliance.  Though his motivations for wandering into the unknown might not be entirely clear, two things are for certain: he wants to enjoy himself and he doesn't want to look like a complete fool.  Obviously, berating this man's bad play is such a horrendous breach of good business policy that it warrants no further discussion.  Likewise, being courteous and sportsmanlike should be so obvious that it also need not be mentioned further as well.  But how about the heretical example of offering up a quick tip about something as remedial as pot odds or schooling him about the long odds of drawing to an inside straight and ask yourself which of the following it is more likely to accomplish: creating a dangerous adversary or potentially igniting a long-term interest into a game that on the surface seems so simple but is actually highly complex?  How about recommending a good introductory read such as Winning Low Limit Hold’em by Lee Jones or Getting Started in Hold’em by Ed Miller?  Will this man immediately stop donating to the Average Joe Poker Pro Fund or will this game instantly become more interesting than its upstairs 3-card variant on the blackjack felt?

From where I stand, I can only see the upsides to taking this approach.  After all, these novice players getting their feet wet in the game for the first time can never usurp your knowledge when you are the source of that knowledge.   You now know what they know, but they will never be able to grasp the depth of what you know and what it took for you to get where you are.  The next time they come wandering through and there are several open seats around, don’t be surprised if they choose to sit with you for being the helpful and kind soul that you are.  That tiny bit of knowledge that you drop on them will probably never be particularly helpful, but like Paul’s little blackjack tip, it might get them to keep coming back for many years to come.  After all, as we all know, you can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin him once.   

Correspondence With My Horse, Drew Chapman

About a week a half ago, I decided for the first time ever that I would back a player.  I have long been opposed to this idea due to the fact that winning players shouldn't need to be staked and, of course, the awful experiences of numerous other people.  This was different, though.  First of all, Drew never wanted anything more from me than advice, and secondly, he was already a winning player.  Though I won't give out the exact details of the arrangement, I will say that he has a strong winning record in the $8 HUSNG's on the Cake Network, which you can read at his blog, Heads Up Chicago.

After having some correspondence that night with Drew, I realized A) he is probably ready to step it up, perhaps into the $25's and B) that it would be a fun project on my part.  Partaking in this new field started me thinking on what normally goes wrong with such agreements, namely backing losing players and stressing their results.  I feel that these problems can be eliminated by putting someone into higher volume and/or bigger games provided that they are already winning, yet not properly rolled and also that the staking operation should be worthwhile as a recreational cost.  After all, if you are ever stressing the results of your horses, you are just playing above your roll!  I also believe too many people are involved in staking because they are trying to get rich.  I believe that other than the legendary staking operation of Sheets and Bax, you should do it with the goal in mind of creating a small supplementary income stream.

All that being said, I strongly urge anyone who is interested to check out Drew's Blog.  Though it is early in the making, it is very clear that he is going places in this game and the quality of the writing and analysis is just plain excellent.  Currently he has hit a rough patch and looking for advice on how to break out of it, though I think he has already figured it out.

Hey man. Thanks a lot for your encouraging comments on the blog, that means a lot.

Things are going okay. I still haven't completely "recovered" as it were from the slump of the last week-two, but things are looking up a bit. I had a decent session the other day, made about $60 in 3 hours. Of course, later that day I lost about half of that back in the course of two games, but it was at least, finally, a winning session in which nothing went too seriously or bizzare-ly awry.

In terms of the 25s, my record for this week is 8 wins/9 losses, so not great but not horrible. I've been good about employing focus and judgement, which has helped. 

I played a little recreationally last night. I have discovered a new way to play poker purely for fun when I'm not concerned about profitability or over-analysis of my game [read=when I'm tired/want a beer]: don't play hold 'em. Specifically, I hit up the micro and low stakes 8-game SNGs on Stars, which can be tons of fun, as I really enjoy razz and 2-7 draw without having the same degree of technical knowledge of those games as I have with HE...
Anyway, tomorrow I get back on the horse (no pun intended). Perhaps I'll have a little pre-game study session with Moshman's book and/or some videos to prime my brain, as well as possibly some physical exercise. I have been experimenting with such tactics to see how they affect my play, to some success; specifically, I've noticed that when I've spent part of the day out being mentally & physically active in other ways, my game benefits... I will let you know how things shape up. Thanks again for all your support!


-Drew




Having games that you play for "fun" is always important.  Ironically, when you are not playing for money, per se, you are often encouraged to try those things that you always wondered about that might be able to push your game to that next level, yet the fear of "playing incorrectly" (according to what we we THINK we know) often paralyzes our actions.  Besides, when playing for fun when are never auto-piloting the decisions and we actually become much more mentally active than we normally are when trying to play "well."


-Lorin




Something just occurred to me, and I wanted to run it by you. I think that i've been thinking about this stake the wrong way, and I'll tell you why. So far I've been treating the $25 games too much like the $5s & $10s; that is, I game select for opponents with a negative ROI, and play them with the same mindset and in basically the same way as I play my lower-stake, & mostly lower-skill, opponents, because I play them during the same grind sessions through which I try to eke out my profit. This raises two problems: 1) I'm not in the right mindset. I'm grinding, mostly playing ABC poker because that's mostly all that's needed to beat the smaller games. This means I'm not using these $25s to really push myself and learn how to play the "new" game at the higher level, and I'm leaving myself vulnerable to opponents who are playing a more nuanced game/whose focus is fresher/etc. And, 2) the losses that I take from the $25s have a more pronounced psychological effect on my session, for the reasons I mentioned in my previous blog posting. If I win $30 over the course of 4 matches and then lose most of it in one, the degrading effect on my confidence and momentum is significant, and probably makes me less effective. Perhaps if I played on your stake in exclusive sessions, or otherwise separated these matches from my regular grind, it would have an overall positive effect. Thoughts? I should prob turn this into a blog post...


-Drew




Hmmm....since you are very careful about game selection, there is no way of being certain that the fish in the bigger game are any better or worse than those in your regular game.  One thing that is for certain is that since the losses do affect you more acutely at the higher level, some part of you must be playing a little more weak-tight.  If this is true, then your opponents will be playing a proportionally more aggressive game than yourself, making them appear to be tougher, though it might only be you who is getting weaker.  I strongly suggest that you stick with your normal game, but if a player is doing something that you find confusing or frustrating, it is best just to move on.  Even though you are feeling down at the moment, you will adjust as your pain threshold increases.    


I do agree with the idea of game and stake segregation.  It is a known fact that when playing multiple stakes side by side, the larger game affects your judgment and you will pay less attention to the smaller game.  Rather than reiterate an article that has already been executed greatly, I will turn you over this link at Pocket Fives when it has already been explained, particularly Jennifear's comments at the bottom.


-Lorin

Rush Poker, Part II- Strategy Tips

Not too long ago I heard a brilliant saying that I would now like to quote: the man who understands how will always have a job, the man who understands why will always be his boss. Much like leading the horse to water, this post is not just going to be about what I think is good to do, but more importantly, why it should be done.  In the poker world, and often even among many low-mid level professionals like myself, there is an obsession with how to do things and emulating the people who do them well.  Those that developed these concepts and strategies did so because they understand why they work.  If you can follow and understand the "why's" that I will provide below, you should soon be developing similar strategies on your own and will gain deep insights to the intrinsic nature of the complexities of poker.

I will begin by explaining what I like to do on the button and then follow it up with a rather long, yet easy to understand explanation.  The good news is that you can easily execute the "how" for a profit without understanding the "why", yet fully grasping the "why" is necessary if you want to excel.

THE HOW: I open min-raise ANY 2 cards and follow it up with a 2BB c-bet if against only one opponent.  If both blinds call, I give up unless I hit something good.

THE WHY: Stealing the blinds is important.  In fact, it's huge.  As David Sklansky has said in several of his earliest works, all hands of hold'em begin as a battle for the blinds.  This concept is so simplistic and obvious that the fact alone makes it easy to overlook.  Those who believe that the game is just about winning huge pots are slowly losing money to people who are comfortable with this very basic truth about the game.  Min-raising makes this very easy, as it is a simple odds play and therefore only needs to work 57% of the time to break even since it is so cheap to do.  I can already guess what some of you might be thinking: if this is so easy and effective to do, why not do it all the time in any kind of game?  To answer this, we must now ponder the flip side of this equation by asking "why not?"

WHY NOT?  What prevents you from doing this normally is your table image.  This is one of those concepts that I had previously explored in theory for short stacking (in which case it is a very sound strategy and some players actually use it or something similar).  Even otherwise nitty and uncreative players would soon go to great lengths to prevent you from doing this and though your great hands would get payed off nicely, your marginal to medium-strong hands would suffer greatly after the flop, as it would be very difficult to figure out what to do with a hand like QJ when the flop is J95 and you face a large check-raise by a TAG.  Naturally, much more of your hands fall into the second category.

WHY NOW?  The constant shifting tables in a large player base make it very unlikely that you will face the same lineup in the blinds in the same steal situation more than a couple of times per session at most.  The small blind, who has made half the investment as the big blind, has little incentive to stick around with a couple of turds in the mere hope that he can make a 3-bet bluff to pick up your $2 raise when he can fold immediately and hope to pick up aces on the very next deal...even if he knows what you are up to!  Given that he can move on to the next hand with precious little thought, it is easy to assume that this is exactly what he will do, approximately in the ballpark of 60-70% of the time on average.  Essentially, this means that you are only facing one opponent over half of the time and his cards are completely random and you will have position on him the entire hand.  Knowing this, as well as the strong incentive to try to cash in on another lotto ticket immediately if he folds makes him more inclined to refuse to get tricky and just pass.

Attempting to steal the blinds in Rush poker is very similar to a back alley mugging in the real world.  With no witnesses around, your crime is not only more likely to succeed, but also very importantly, it is less likely to face retributive action from others.  Once they have folded their hands, the other players have been moved away from the crime scene and allow you to do your dirty work without their scrutiny.  While this has no bearing on the current situation, it makes it more probable that you can continue to get away with this for a long, long time.

But doesn't raising the minimum give him great implied odds?  Absolutely not...in fact, his implied odds are very poor.  A little known secret about implied odds is that they are only available when you choose to cooperate with your opponent and pay him off with a lesser hand.  Therefore if you are raising with trash, I recommend that you only commit a large portion of your chips if you make at least two pair or better.  Too many people instinctively believe that implied odds are a necessary component of specific two card combinations like 98o or 54s.  Unfortunately for them, flopping a large hand with their own breed of trash will occur very rarely and far more rarely will you have a hand that you are willing to commit with yourself.  The likely result is that they will frequently call with their pus and then fold to your tiny continuation bet.  Furthermore, by keeping the pot very small, you can fire another cheap bet of around 1/2 pot if your opponent check calls and a scare card comes on the turn.

The min-raise also has a very strong and yet subtle psychological aspect to it.  When you make this play, since calling is very cheap and folding feels compellingly weak, your opponents will often become indignant and call with a hand that has no post-flop potential out of stubbornness alone.  The small post-flop pot combined with a complete lack of information of you as a player makes them more likely to fold than normal because the incentive to play the hand out with some potentially very difficult decisions is simply not worth the hassle to many players.

WHAT ABOUT FACING LIGHT 3-BETS?  The question is: is it really light?  Here is how I would recommend determining if the 3-bet is indeed light.

1.  The small blind has 3-bet you.  For the reasons above, the incentives for the small blind to both plan and execute this kind of bluff are simply not there.  He also does need to be at least somewhat concerned that the BB might have picked up a large hand behind him, and although not likely, this is just one more facet to discourage this play.

2.  His stack is below 100BB.  Since short stacking is not allowed in these games and the typical reg is always sitting with a full stack, you must assume that anyone with less is either A) almost broke B) playing on scared money and C) just not all that likely to be very good.  Playing with a stack of 20BB or less can give you an automatic advantage and 100BB or more gives you maximum maneuverability against most players at the table.  Anything in between is no man's land and all good or aspiring players know this.  What's more?  Good players are also the ones who understand that defending your blinds matters.  Therefore, if a player has less than 100BB, be apt to give him credit for what he is representing.

3.  You see that your opponent in the BB has more than 1 entry in the game and you see him playing day after day.  This is the one who is most likely to be pushing back at you with air.

It is important to realize that the advice I am providing here is not new or original.  It took me about 15 minutes of play to realize that this was possible and therefore it was no surprise to be reading about it by other more well-known players.  When advice such as this becomes wide spread, good counter strategies are likely soon on the way.  The obvious solution would be to start light 4-betting opponents who fit the above criteria.  This was also very clear when I noticed that my legitimate 4-betting hands were causing most 3-bets to fold.  In light of this observation, I find that flat-calling with your best hands is preferable to 4-betting.

Originally, I was hoping that HUD's would never enter the scene.  This is not because I don't believe in them as a strategy tool.  After my rants against them this past summer, I came to grips with the fact that I must suck it up and learn them or put myself at a serious disadvantage to those who harness their power.  I did not want them in this game because I felt that this gave me a better edge against certain sectors of my competition who would be weakened without them.  I am also concerned that they will hurt the profitability of the plays recommended above, but these plays are sturdy and powerful enough in their own right that they should be effective in this particular arena regardless.

Given the news that PT3 and HEM are now offering fixes to make their HUDs usable in Rush poker, I will have to take this advance into consideration as I delve further into this game.  At this point in time, I have not had the opportunity to incorporate the new HUD features into this game and therefore am not qualified to comment on their effects (or lack of) at this time.  Hopefully, you guys who are reading this and experimenting with this game will try this out and share some of your insights on its effectiveness.  In a future post, I will supply and examine some hand examples in these situations with some in-depth commentary.  Best of luck!

December and January Results

Cash: $23,619
Rakeback: ~$6,750
Tournament Winnings: $573
Gold Stack Bonus: $323
Gold Card Race: $310
Race Chase: $3,200

Not shown: ~$350 Rush Poker (played on my laptop)
$120 Heads up

TOTAL: $35,145

I was kind of reluctant to post this at first in light of recent security attacks on my FT account, my rakeback account, and the blog itself.  Rest assured, there is no more money in any of these accounts, as I cashed it all away on one misclick against Isildur1 shortly thereafter (though it is still in dispute on a datamining charge).  If said hacking scum is reading this right now, you know who you are and I hope you die in a grease fire.

Essentially this was all made in about 6 weeks time, as I was actually stuck about $500 as of the middle of December and then immediately began to run like Cantu.  Over this span I ran over $5,000 over EV, but would have certainly been happy running totally even or below.  I did manage to skeet by on the January Rake Chase which added heftily to my January total, which also pushed me past the $20k mark for the first time ever in the cash games, which was truly exciting for me on a personal level.

Though I spent the first week and a half away from the tables this month, things are still looking solid, though I have a rather moderate goal of making at least $6k since I have not been able to log the hours.  Other than that, I am very excited to be an official affiliate of Rakebacknation and also have been invited to do some writing for parttimepoker.com, their affiliated site.  Though the details have not yet been worked out, I plan on offering more original content on that platform and hopefully offering my share of deranged humor as well!

As an aside, I would like to send a special thank you to my friend and colleague, Crazy Bear, whose influence on my game boosted my results practically overnight and without his help, none of what you see above would have been possible.

My Favorite New Line and Why it is Perfect for Short Stackers....

One of my Favorite things about Poker, and especially ShortStacking, is using players preconceived notions against them. This is part of the "changing gears" that you hear about all the time, but you can take it much farther than that. One of the nice things about Shortstacking is that you don't have to take the time to establish a table image, as most players already have a preconceived (and misguided) notion about what type of player you are the moment that you sit down at the Table. My new favorite "value line" is nothing new or groundbreaking, but it takes perfect advantage of those notions and the ego that SS haters attach to the style.

The basis is this: If you flop a big hand that is obvious, start with a bet. Lets say you raise preflop with AQ of hearts and get a caller. The flop comes down 9 6 3, all hearts. You flopped the nuts. Conventional wisdom, and natural urges tell you to slow play and let them catch up. The problem with this is that they are going to be very suspicious of any flop check with a big move later, and unless they have a set or maybe the K of hearts, you might get some money from them, but not much. So since there is nothing to lose, bet it. It looks like a steal and since most players see SS'rs as tight, overly aggressive push-monkeys, they aren't going to buy it. They will call with a lot of single pairs, weak draws and ANY overpair.

Now that you have set the stage and got them involved, check the turn. It almost doesn't matter what the card is. Check it. Now it appears that you took a shot to win the pot but you are a spineless, unimaginative push-monkey and are giving up. This sets the stage for the next step....

Shove the River! By playing this line, it appears that:

You missed the flop and continuation bet the flop to take it down. Their call scared you. The turn didn't help (or you would have shoved, that is what you do, after all) and then, when you smelled weakness, you tried to buy your way out of your bluff by shoving all in (it only costs a little for you to shove, you are a Broke-ass SSer after all and it is the only move you know).

I have found that this is almost universally how they perceive this line.

Imagine their chagrin (and my titty-rubbing joy) when they call and I turn over the nuts to crap all over their A-9 (or whatever crap they tricked themselves into thinking was good enough to beat your "Bluff") and show a play so imaginative that they NEVER saw it coming from a "simple-minded Shortstacker".

There are of course a few exceptions to this line, but it works great when you flop that obvious big hand and want to extract value (it works very well when you flop the trips on a paired board as well). It really tends to throw opponents off balance because now they can't pigeon hole you into a non thinking shove monkey which is where they are comfortable with you being. Play around with it a little but I guarantee that it is a VERY worthy addition to your arsenal.

If you generate any feedback with this line or have variations, please let us know. We love the discussion.

P.S. Congrats to our own Short Stack Hero, Lorin Yelle for buying his first House. He closed last Friday and moved in Yesterday. He now has a Righteous "Man-Cave".

Alternative Line #2: The Mega-Raise Pot Shove

Unlike the previous example, this one does not actually need to be AK per se, but rather any medium-strong hand with showdown value. Here is the criteria needed:

1. You are in one of the blind positions.
2. You have a medium strong hand that doesn't play particularly well post-flop out of position, preferably in this order:
AK, AQ, AJ, 99, ATs, 88, KQs, KQo, ATo, KJs
3. You have no more than two limpers in the pot and first limper must be very loose, with a VPIP of 30% or higher. The higher the VPIP, the looser on the above scale you can go.
4. You raise to approximately 1/3 of the effective smaller stack.
5. You shove all in on any flop when called.

The theory: You do this because the alternatives are to limp (which clearly sucks and will never show any real profit), make a normal raise, or move all in. Making a standard raise makes your stack size really awkward for post-flop betting and makes these hands very difficult to play since you will miss the flop about 2/3 of the time. Moving all in is a fine, though sub-optimal play. Even a fish realizes that he needs a showdown value hand to call a bet this size and it will scare away his business virtually every time.

So let's be straight here from the get-go: usually when you attempt this play, your opponent will fold. In that regard, it is no different than shoving over a raise with your premium hands. You don't expect to get called with those hands in every instance, though you are happy when you do. When he does call, take a look at what happens in the example above. By raising one third of the effective stack, you are facing your opponent with a pot-size bet on the flop and offering him odds of 2:1 to call. In other words, you are putting him in the position of making the largest mistake.

Surely, for a bet this size on the flop, your opponents will only be calling when you are beat, right? Wrong. Here is a list of common calls you will see in this spot:


1. Top pair or better
2. Any pair
3. All draws including gut shots
4. Overcards
5. Naked aces

In a nut shell, very few good hands and a whole lot of complete shit. Once again, this play in not done for any kind of deceptive purposes, but rather is a strong psychological lure for weak-minded opponents and gamblers. By targeting exclusively loose opponents who have pretty much already told you explicitly that their hand was not good enough to raise but they wanted to see a flop anyway, you are seducing them into making a bad play.

Of course, when you flop a relatively strong hand, you should either bet very small or check. Typical opponents who are bad enough to call a raise this large in the first place are primed to make a hopeless bluff at such a large pot. By relatively, I mean relative the the board and your opponents likely calling range. A hand like AK on an A-2-2 board is extremely strong and even weak opponents are not likely to stack away with QJs in this spot (though they sometimes will!), but of course he is not getting helped by any free cards, so give him a chance to piss his money away.

Why does this play work? Perhaps it is best not to ask such questions. Never in my career have I been bad enough to get lured by such an obvious ploy, so I can't even begin to imagine what is going through the mind of someone who does. Admittedly, this play was not created by myself, but rather snatched from the hands of a short stacker who is much better than me. When reviewing his hand histories, I was astonished by the horrible calls his opponents were making, including a K7 on an A-A-5 board when he was holding KQ! I began making this play indiscriminately only to soon find that it was never working when I wanted it to, and "working" when I didn't want it to. It has only been recently that I have found it to work astonishingly well against very loose opponents. Against typical opponents or unknowns, you are better off either limping or moving all in with these types of hands.

Don't be that Guy: An introduction to the "Kruger Complex"

We all know that guy. Unfortunately, most of us have been that guy even if only for a moment). But let me urge you.....DON'T BE THAT GUY!!! In case you are wondering to which guy I am referring, it is the guy that bitches and complains that the game is rigged and yet continues to play anyway. He will swear that the game is rigged, speak knowingly about the "Doomswitch" and try to utterly convince you that the poker site that he plays at deliberately rigs the deck, just to keep him from bankrupting every player on the site and thus ruining their business. Their arguments are sincere, numerous and ultimately, retarded. This kind of mindset not only taxes your emotional bankroll and limits your ability to accept the realities of, and therefore improve your game, but it also proves to everybody around you that you are, indeed, a total douche bag.

Lets start by looking at their arguments and pointing out the stupidity of each in turn:

"Everytime I get all in and am ahead, somebody hits a 4 outer to beat me! This game HAS to be rigged!!!"

This is the most common one. This generally develops from two main shortcomings. One is the general disability of the people dumb enough to believe this shit to accurately figure out the outs that beat them. They also tend to believe that if they are ahead, they deserve to win. The other main reason that this theory stays around is the phenomenon of SELECTIVE MEMORY. The brain doesn't usually bother to register the 3 times out of 4 that AK holds up against AT (that's right, you should only win that 3 times out of 4 so quit your bitching. It is not a guaranteed win.) That is the expected result so your brain doesn't bother to take much notice. It will, however, go bat shit crazy when it fully expects to win and doesn't. The rush of adrenaline, mixed with shock, anger, diappointment, and then some more anger (not to mention the deep seeded psychotic, murderous rage directed at the galloping donkey that beat you) is a pretty potent cocktail of mnemonic devices. No wonder you remember every single bad beat. Of course it seems like you always get sucked out on. In your memory it is 100% true, but in reality the universe tends to work itself out as it should, and you, even in all your poker glory, are no exception.

My next favorite theory is the "deep" one that provides the motivation for the site to cheat you. I mean, every murder (especially of a bankroll) has to have a motive. The motive, the pundits say, is that the poker sites want to keep the fish around, to keep them contributing rake to the site. In order to keep the fish from going broke, they have to take money from the "good" players to keep the fish in the game. They do this through bad beats. This argument is stupid for many reasons. First of all, fish are fish for a reason. They will keep coming back. Period. Have you ever known somebody that thought that they were good at poker just give it up? No. Nor will they. They may take a break for a couple weeks to raise the cash for another deposit, but after they grab some cash from mom's purse, they will be right back. The sites know this. Another debunker for this asinine theory is that it is always the douche bag that is down to the felt that is the biggest proponent of this theory. The only problem is, he is the argument against his argument. If the sites are doing this to share the wealth and keep everybody in the game, why do they keep busting you? Because they know you will come back. Saddle up to the hook and have another worm Mr. Fishy....

Another one of my favorites is that there are just too many big hands online as compared to live. It's just not possible. So the Poker sites must be stacking to deck to make hands more exciting. My response to this is simple. You probably haven't played enough live games or you are a total fucking moron. First of all, you are going to see more large hands while playing online. Even if you are only playing 1 table online, you will still see almost twice as many hands an hour as compared to live play. So if you would see one unusual hand in an hour live, you would see one on average every half hour or so online. Now keep that in mind and factor in that most players are playing anywhere from 2 to 24 tables. If you don't see something weird pretty often, you should be concerned. Not to mention, those bumbass bad beats happen live as well. Just last week Lorin and I went to the local casino. We were playing at a pretty loose $1/2 game and on my fifth or sixth hand I raised with 99. Got 2 callers. Flop came 9 6 4 with 2 spades. I bet $25 and get one caller. The turn card is a beauty...4 of spades. I have the top full house and if that guy was drawing for a flush, he just got there. I check, he bets $35 and I just smooth call. The river is the 7 of spades. I bet, he raises, I shove, he calls and tables 44 for a turned set of quads. Fifth hand at the table. I didn't even have to work my way up to that kind of ass whooping. I just laughed. That is poker and it goes to prove that stupid shit happens live. It happens all the time (maybe someday I will tell you about Frenchy and the "one-out-mouth-piss hand").

The reason that it is so important to not be that guy is that you won't really progress in your game if you find shit to blame your results on. Variance is part of the game. As it is in life. I think that one of the things that draws most of us tho this game is that it is so similar to life. You can do everything right and bad stuff can still happen to you. As a matter of fact, it is guaranteed to happen to you. Poker should be teaching you how to deal with those things, not teach you to write it off on some imaginary admin behind a curtain somewhere who is laughing his ass off trying to get you (see pic above, to see how stupid this is). I have seen that truly intelligent and very gifted poker players that hit a wall in their development because they either don't accept the leaks in their game because they don't see their losses being due to leaks, or they live their lives in a perpetual state of TILT because they sit down at the table believing the world is against them and they are going to lose. And they do. It is a self fulfilling prophecy. So for that reason, don't be that guy. You are wasting your time trying to advance in the game if you will let yourself fall into that kind of trap. Also, don't be that guy because it is fucking annoying.....

If you have any other theories on this, we would love to hear them. Both the silly shit that people say to prove the sites are rigged, or the multitude of realities that debunk them. Personally, I could have written for another hour or two on this but I am a little tired of being sober at the moment, so I am going to take care of that.

Hope to hear from you all on this and good luck at the tables (and away from them as well.....)

A New Series: Alternative Short Stacker Lines With Big Slick

AK is the lifeblood of short stackers. Being that you get dealt AK more often than AA and KK combined, learning to maximize your winnings with AK is crucial. Though you are essentially a coin-flip against lower pairs, AK profits most when you are able to avoid a showdown altogether. Combining hand replays with in-depth analyses, this new series is guaranteed to open your eyes to the dangers and opportunities available when playing NLH's most infamous hand.

A Further Examination of Relative Value: Moving Beyond Theory and Into Practice

This hand is a direct continuation of the concept presented in the last post with a very different outcome.

Raising TT under the gun is obviously a standard play and I am naturally hoping for only a single caller, but those hopes are dashed when LostOn4thSt enters the pot in the BB. However, being squeezed in position here is actually better than facing two opponents acting behind me, due to the fact that if the BB and I both check the flop and the last player takes an action, I effectively act last.

So we take a flop and it comes J high with a wet texture. Unlike in the previous example, wet board textures provide many more semi-bluffing opportunities and dilute the quality of the information you receive in response to your bets. Had this hand been heads up, I would normally lead out and give a crying call to a raise because there are many more opportunities for a lone opponent to take a deceptive action on a board texture such as this.

Naturally LostOn4thSt checks, but this isn't just a normal check. He insta-checks. It has been my experience that the insta-check is most often meant as a ruse to lure me into betting and then snap me off with a check raise. But that's not all: LostOn4thSt and I have a lot of history. He has probably won as much money off me as anyone I have played against as a short stacker, in various ways. He always either shows up with the goods or draws out horribly, as he did earlier this session when we got all in pre-flop holding KK and 55 respectively. I spiked my set and he caught runner-runner straight with his fives. The bad beat is not the point, however. He enjoys butting heads with me and would almost certainly enjoy cracking me for a third time in a single session. Therefore his range could be quite wide in this spot, though my experience with him tells me that he still would not pass up the opportunity to re-raise me with JJ+ and AK. It would not surprise me though to have him show up with many top pair type hands, J9 for 2 pair, or a set of nines or sixes. 96 is always out of his range, as he is a good player and though I am sure he would like nothing better than to crack me, he is not stupid either. Of course, he is playing a lot of tables and just as easily could have mentally checked out of this hand so as not to waste any more time than is necessary. However, his quick action definitely gives me pause.

I check my hand and evaluate the action behind me.

Now let's examine the cold caller's range. I have a note on this chap that he has cold called me with AA before, and that's clearly bad news. Truth be told, this is actually a great defense against short stackers that only the clever or the dimwitted tend to use. Typical players are so ritualistic that they just can't bring themselves to make a flat call with a big pair to be deceptive or draw other players in the pot. Opponents who break this long standing tradition give me fits. After all, I am folding TT if I get re-raised by anyone outside of the blind positions, but flopping good is a recipe to going broke against said players. So here is the problem: QQ, KK, and AA are all still in his range. JJ is mostly discounted because most decent players understand well the dangers of building a large pot with a vulnerable hand such as this.

Here's the kicker: just like the previous hand with QQ, I am relying on the third player in the hand to give me the information that I desire from my nemesis in the BB. But get this- in a three way pot like this, the wet texture of the board is now working FOR me rather than AGAINST me!! Here is how:

1) If he cold called me with QQ, KK, or AA, this flop has surely made him panic. If he was screwing around with any of the above hands, now is the time to quit fucking around and take down this pot. He might try a smallish bet against just myself, but with another full stacked player with an undefined range, he is virtually always betting 2/3-full pot with these hands.

2) If he did flop one of the many available draws here and decides to bluff at it, he will either play it strong or choose to take a free card. I know that he has picked up on my range and that he understands that I am just as likely as he is to play this flop fast against two players, so my check has clearly labeled my hand as bricks, specifically AK in his mind. Therefore if he is betting around 1/2 pot or less, he is clearly full of shit, the way I see it.

3) If he flopped a set with 99 or 66, I still expect him to mostly play it strong to build a good pot with the full stacker while his hand still has maximum value. He could have possibly chosen to re-raise me with 99, as players often do to me, but generally speaking a set is a rare hand, so I still am forced to play the odds here. Top two pair is virtually always going pot here, and I don't even concern myself with the possibility of J6 because even fish don't really play that hand.

But in any case....

After my check he bets $10, roughly half the pot. He's trying to buy it because he thinks I completely whiffed!

As soon as the BB folds, it's time to escort this gentleman to Value Town and shove it all in. Since players are never truly predictable in a vacuum, I can estimate that I am ahead about 85% of the time when he makes such a weak play, but there are even greater benefits here. When the betting gets back to him he is now getting slightly better than 2.5:1 to call, and just as importantly, he knows he has no further decisions to make. When I execute this play, I often see some truly horrific calls, like 22, A7, and sometimes even two undercards drawing virtually dead. So not only have I gleaned the value of my marginal holding using a bit of short stacker sleight-of-hand, I have also maximized value by doing so.

A Glimpse Into the Mind of The Short Stack Hero

This is just an example of how I determine a line post-flop as a short stacker BEFORE I commit any money to the hand. This replay is a hand that had developed during a sweat session with one of my students. Although at first glance this appears to be nothing special, this is a common scenario where many short stackers tend to get lost because they do not understand the proper analysis. Though sweat sessions don't tend to be the ideal teaching tool, particularly for short stackers, I was very happy that this hand came up because this is a frequent danger spot.

Key concepts to note:
1) Position
2) Number of opponents
3) Board texture

When I raise from early position, as a short stacker I generally give my opponents credit for picking up on my tight image, therefore, I can usually (though not always) expect them to re-raise with better hands because they expect that I will be getting all in with them. So the first player calls. Given that the overcaller will be forced to play this pot out of position against two other players, I can expect him to re-raise all hands that beat me and even a hand such as AKo virtually 100% of the time, particularly because the original caller's stack is only 40BB. I can also expect him to re-raise with JJ and sometimes even TT.

Now that their pre-flop ranges are somewhat defined, we take a flop. The fact that the flop comes up K high is not necessarily a disaster. The board is very dry, particularly when coupled with the fact that I have removed two queens from the deck, reducing the probability that either of my opponents could be holding precisely QT, the only legitimate drawing hand that fits this flop. The only thing questionable here is my position after the flop.

Since AA, KK, AK, and JJ have mostly been eliminated from my opponent's ranges, this board is not particularly bad. A partial concern here is giving a free card that beats me, namely to gut shots. However with only 4 outs to a gut shot, I am far more concerned with getting my money in bad on the flop than letting either opponent draw for free. The question that remains, however, is how to get my opponents to reveal the accurate strength of their holdings without overcommitting myself in a potential two-out disaster.

Given that the board is so dry, this is surprisingly easy to do, though it really is a function of several years of experience reading common opponent tendencies and bet sizes. The small blind begins by checking. No matter the strength of the small blind's hand, I expect him to check every time. He clearly is never folding anything that beats me, but of those hands that do, I expect him to almost always either check call or check raise. Far more importantly, I am interested in how the last player to act will respond to both of our checks, but I already have my line in place.

After two players check, many online players will tend to bet despite the quality of their hand. I have noticed, however, that the size of their bets is often teeming with information. The presence of the third player in the hand tends to glean higher quality information than when he is absent, and coupled with the dry nature of the board and the effective stack sizes, I can expect that he will:

1) Value bet precisely between 2/3 to full pot with top pair and two pair strength hands with the full intention of commitment.
2) Check behind sets, which have pretty much been eliminated from both players' ranges, with the exception of a set of fours.
3) Check behind on a miss or weak draw.
4) Bet 1/2 pot or less with 2nd pair type hands, open straights, and sometimes even gut shots, and complete air.


Therefore my plan with this hand is to check fold if the last player bets EXACTLY $13 or more or bets $10 or more and gets either raised or called by the small blind. If he bets $12 or less and the small blind folds, I will check raise him all in, or if he bets less than $10 and the small blind just calls, I will check raise both of them all in, because now my stack-to-pot ratio is very good to get it in with 2nd pair and perceived weakness on both players.

I prefer this to leading out because in order to get back the right quality information, I need to bet a substantial portion of the pot, approximately $13 or more. At that point, it becomes a very expensive probe and I am nearing a threshold where I might find it difficult to fold even though I am almost always getting my money in with very little equity. Betting less than that will often get low quality information because it would appear exactly to be what is was: a probe with a weak hand. Furthermore, if I lead out and do not get raised (as I would expect to after giving the illusion of flop commitment and they like their hand), then I will have to push the rest in on the turn, barring some highly unusual information. Due to the dry nature of the board, I can reasonably expect that they might tread somewhat cautiously with the few semi-bluff type hands in their ranges, fearing that I may be slowplaying on a board such as this, yet even still, most players are so senselessly terrified of giving that free card that I can also expect that the last player will still bet a K even when he is highly suspicious of being beat and then proceed to talk himself into cashing away for the rest.

But that is not all- if the last player checks behind, I now get to see how the small blind reacts on the turn. I am somewhat concerned about an A or J hitting on the turn, but the quality of my hand has still not been defined enough to be all that concerned about getting drawn out on. Just to restate, I would rather get drawn out on holding a weakish hand having only invested $6 than be drawing to 2 outs having invested $45.

When the turn is a veritable blank and the small blind leads out for pot, most all bluffs have now been eliminated from his range and he is betting to take this pot down, most likely getting a little leery of the developing flush (once again, for no good reason). His bet sizing is unrestrained and very much looks like he is committed. I can now safely fold with a clean conscience.

On a final note, had the small blind bet another amount, I would have to re-evaluate how to proceed, but given the actual turn card and his decisive action, with the player left to act no longer being any concern and given his flop inactivity and barring any unusual draw out (namely a low set) I am effectively playing this hand heads up.

Drunken Musings on Poker and The Book of Five Rings

In his seminal work "The Book of Five Rings", Miyamoto Musashi laid down a treatise for out thinking your opponent in combat. A major basis for this philosophy was using all the tools available to you. For example, samurai at the time carried 2 swords. A long sword called a Katana (which was the standard weapon of the samurai) and a mainly ceremonial short sword called a Wakizashi which was basically carried to be used when indoors after the samurai had politely surrendered his Katana at the door. The right to carry 2 swords was reserved only for the samurai class, so as a mark of station they all carried them. In combat, however, no samurai used both swords. This seemed asinine to Musashi, if you had two swords, why not use them. He was never defeated in battle by the way and retired a legend (and still is today).

He expounds on this principle further when speaking of a carpenter and his selection of material. Know what kind of wood is good for what and use it accordingly (this was a note to Generals about the use of their troops but follow along). Use stong but gnarled and knotted wood for supports inside the wall. Use the straight and even but weaker wood for decoration, etc...you get the drift. Now take a second and apply that to your poker game.

We all have our own skill set. We have been trained through our devotion to this cruel mistress of a game to push all the small edges. Too often I think that we apply that concept to cards, pot odds, position, dead money and all the other galaxy of concepts that we try to keep in our head. When was the last time you tried to push YOUR edge? When did you use YOUR skill set to establish situations that give you an edge? Are you disciplined enough to wait for the right situation? Are you better at post flop play? Do you have the ability to fire a 3 barrel bluff when you need to? There is a reason that even Top Pros don't play exactly the same. Nobody would argue that Phil Hellmuth and Daniel Negreanu aren't both great poker players, but their styles are very, very different. They were both able (as well as every other truly great player) to figure out what they do well and use it. They took the wood they had and used it to build a palace....

Another great example of this is Bruce Lee and his Art of Jeet Kune Do. Unlike most other styles which taught all disciples to fight the same way, Jeet Kune Do stressed taking the natural strengths of an INDIVDUAL and finding the style that worked for THAT INDIVIDUAL. Bruce's system was based on Wing Chun Kung Fu, Boxing, French Fencing, and the Japanese Tea Ceremony (I couldn't make this up, I'm not that clever) because that was what worked with his personality and his bodies natural abilities.

Now don't get me wrong, we all have to work on our weaknesses. Which we all do. When was the last time you stopped and thought about what advantages you have over your oppenents? Lorin and I are pretty good examples. We have entirely different skill sets. He has more discipline (when it comes to poker) than any person I have ever met. He is also very competitve and very analytical. He wants to find THE answer. You put those together and he is fucking ICEMAN from Top Gun. He doesn't make a mistake and will wear the whole table down until they get frustrated and do something stupid. He is too proud to get impatient or make a mistake. I, on the other hand, have very little patience, rely a little more on reads and look for AN answer, not necessarily THE answer. We traditionally played very differently, but fortunately we have found a system that allows both of us to use our particular skill sets, and helps us develop those skills we lack while providing a safety net of sorts.

If you are reading this, you are either a serious devotee of the fickle Poker Bitch, or you have entirely too much time on your hands. Regardless, do yourself a favor and before you log in for your next session, put down the book that somebody wrote about how THEY play, and think about how YOU should play. What are your strengths (and how can you use them) and what are your weaknesses (and how can you not let them be a liability while you fix them). What is your second sword? If you can really master that, someday I will probably be reading YOUR book....

Good luck at the tables (and away from them as well)....

Trusting your "Gut"

Let me start this off by explaining in no uncertain terms that I am in no way superstitious. I don't play hunches. I did however realize a few years ago that certain "gut feelings" have merit. It was after I saw a social anthropologist talk about the subconscious and how it pertains to instincts. You see, the subconscious brain can analyse and interpret data way faster than your conscious, thinking mind can. Then it pushes you in the right direction.

Let's think about that. Have you every met anybody that you "just didn't like" and couldn't figure out why? You may have been picking up on subconscious gestures that he was untruthful or insincere. Later you found out some really shady stuff about the guy and said "I told you so". Or has one of your friends talked you in to trying to kidnap a Llama while drunk from a guy known to have a shotgun just to win a drunken bar bet? Yeah, I had a feeling that wouldn't work out very well, and it didn't. It wasn't that I could see into the future, it was that my brain added up all those layers of risk and realized that there was very little chance that this wouldn't end in some kind of disaster. Now, my conscious mind was way too hammered to see all those, but my subconscious (as drunk as it was) knew it was no good.

Even Lorin, as much of a tight ass stickler for the numbers as he is, finally learned to trust this about me, and himself for that matter. After spending years playing poker and watching hundreds of thousands of hands, you should have (as long as you weren't playing too many table to pay attention) accumulated massive amounts of information on the tendencies of players and the type of hand that is going to bite you in the ass. While you can process a lot of that information consciously (K9o sucks...period) quite a bit of it is just filed away in your brain, waiting for the chance to be used.

A hand that I played a few days ago, made this point screamingly loud. I had about 17bbs on the table and hadn't played a hand in FOREVER. I decided to use my tight image to steal a pot from the hijack with 87 suited. I raised. The small blind raised all in and the the BB called. I instantly went to muck my hand, but couldn't do it. I literally had the clicker over the Fold button and could not click it. My reads on my opponents were that the initial raiser had AK and that the BB had AA or KK. And I was pretty sure about this. I still couldn't fold. I thought about it for a minute and called. The SB turned over AQ (I was close) and the BB had aces. I flopped a pair of 8s, and a gutshot. I turned a flush draw and made the straight on the river to pick up a little over $100 pot.

I got up and immediately called Lorin because I had to figure out why I had done that. It was a hugely weird feeling. After a while, we cranked out the math and realized that with my read and the pot odds, my call had a slightly positive EV. We couldn't believe it. I think that my subconscious had worked that out even though all my training says that it an easy laydown.

To make a long story short, if you have been playing poker for years, don't discount experience. If all things are equal or it is a neutral EV situation, go with your gut. Now it may take you a while to figure out the difference between a gut feeling that is boredom or fear (or a bad burrito) and one that is a subconscious tug, but if you listen close enough, you can hear it. If something about a guy's betting pattern seems off but you can't put your finger on it slow down and listen to that gut. As long as it isn't an obviously mathematically stupid situation, go with it. That is why your teachers told you that if you didn't know an SAT question, just go with your first instinct. You know a lot of shit that you don't know you know. And now, hopefully you know that......

Good luck at the tables (and away from them too)

"Clearing the Desk"...and Other "Non-Poker" Poker Tips

One of the things that I've realized (as I am sure that most of you have) is that there is so much more to this game than the cards sitting in front of you.  And no, I will not bore you with the cliche about playing your opponents cards or even playing your opponents.  People way smarter and vastly more qualified than myself have written entire books on the subject.  What I am talking about are those little things, completely removed from the game itself that can cause you to not play at your best.  With how competitive the game is becoming and the overall higher skill level of the players (as compared to say, 3 years ago) means that in order to be successful,  you can't EVER play below your best.  Here are a couple of mistakes that I have made (or still make) and I invite anybody that has any of there own "detrimentals" to post them up so the loyal readers of The Short Stack Hero can all improve our games a little bit.....

1.  Clear the Desk

This is a term that you will sometimes hear in the corporate world.  It generally applies to finishing off little tasks before going home, leaving for the weekend or taking a vacation so that you are not distracted while away from work with those little things hanging over your head.  My experience with it has been a little different.  Just recently I went through a definite downswing for about two weeks.  When looking at it afterwards,  the cause was obvious.  It wasn't bad beats or any crap like that, it was that I hadn't "cleared the desk".  During the same period I was working on a project.  I had no set "due date" to complete the job so I found myself pushing it off a little even though I knew that I should be working on it.  Instead, I would log on to play cards with the thought "I can play for 90 minutes, then I need to get to work".  I found myself being a little too aggressive to try to eek out some winnings in my short time span.  Meanwhile I was slightly distracted thinking about the work that needed to be done.  Then when I would take an (inevitable) loss it would feel twice as bad, because if I had just been working like I should have, I wouldn't have dropped $200.  While it wasn't a huge financial loss, it sure felt a lot worse because of the situation.  We have all heard "don't play with scared money".  I think that playing with "scared time" might even be worse.   Clear the desk before you play, so that you can  bring the full brunt of your focus to the table and not needlessly sap your Emotional Bankroll.

2. Don't Throw Out the Baby with the Bathwater

When going through a downswing (even as short as 2 or 3 days) when you have just been getting your teeth kicked in, one of two things happens.  A donkey will  automatically blame it on bad luck. This may or may not be the case, but they never seem to even consider the chance that it may be of their own doing.  A good player will sometimes over-analyze everything to the point of insanity.  This is the situation to which I am referring.  They think that they must have a glitch in there game so they start trying all kinds of things.  Playing more hands, playing fewer hands, making more bluffs, making no bluffs, laying down to any raise or never laying down, no matter what.

If you have been a consistent, winning player, stick with what works.  There is actually something I say to myself all the time (mainly because I have so much faith in Lorin's System).

System + Time = Money  
And it is so true. Lorin has started telling his students this as well and it is a great way to get through the bleakness of a downswing.  If what you do works, feed it some hands and let it do it's job.  We will all have those standard deviations from the mean.  And while I have found that a downswing is a decent time to do some evaluation and tweaking, don't throw out the baby while dumping out the dirty bathwater.  If a pitcher has a bad game, he may check to make sure that he was arching his back or that his release point is where it should be.  He doesn't just scrap his entire motion and delivery and start over, and neither should you.

Well there are two points to start off with.  I plan on doing more in the series on mistakes (it could take me years to cover all the ones that I make).  I do hope that you will throw up you own little tidbits here on The Stort Stack Hero.  It's not giving away any strategy,  and maybe it will help exorcise some of your own little poker demons by having to call them out into the light of day.

Best of luck at the tables (and away from it for that matter)......

Who Are You, RIGHT NOW?

I am a regular listener to the 2+2 Pokercast with Mike and Adam. In my opinion, it is simply the most entertaining and thoughtful one running, with the most talented radio personalities. In their last one, they were reviewing a recent SCOOP event where former WSOP Champion Greg Raymer was complaining about his luck when he lost deep in an event to Christian Schlager when his quads lost to bigger quads in a game of PLO. He had mentioned that this did not surprise him as he had been running very bad lately. Schlager, ever the one to speak his mind in an apparently frank and obscene way had quipped that anyone who has won the World Series of Poker Main Event loses all rights to ever complain about running bad, ever again.

Is this true? Personally, I disagree with Mr. Schlager.

After all, Vanilla Ice had sold 11 million copies of his debut album, To the Extreme. Even still, I don't see anyone lining up to trade places with him. In fact, I would bet my entire bankroll that anyone reading this wouldn't even cross the street to piss on him if his head was on fire. So where is he now? Does anyone know? Do they even care?!

You see, Joe Hachem was fortunate enough to win the WPT championship the year after he claimed the title at the WSOP. In his own words, he felt like he was floating, that this was even better than his accomplishment the year before even though he had won less than a third of that this time around. It was instant validation, and everyone knew it. Raymer, on the other hand, has pursued a career in poker and has since had no titles to show for it and in a sense has gone the route of Chris Moneymaker. I certainly respect Raymer for his accomplishments and all that he has since done for the game of poker in America with his work for Poker Players' Alliance, but I can sympathize with him as well.

Look back on your own life. Should everything be OK just because you starred in your 5th grade play? Is life simply wonderful because you threw the touchdown pass in your homecoming football game? Will you die happy because you married the prom queen?

All jokes aside, this is a lesson that Platonic would be wise to learn. No ones cares if he was once a baller at the small stakes at William Hill. Today he is just another broke grinder begging for a stake. You are only as good as your last session and the relative size of your bankroll. Nothing else matters. Who are you today, in this very moment?

Beer Goggles and the Myth of Pot Odds

This is a couple of stories from my own personal experience. The poker hand happened just a few days ago. Afterward, while analyzing the hand, I had a sense of Deja VU. I put both stories side by side to show the similarities. I think we have all been at both of these places.

Dancing In the Rain

Well, here is my first Blog entry. I really planned on it being something funny, considering the intro the Lorin gave me. But I have been drinking all night after running a Promo at my Bar and I got home at 4 in the morning and called Lorin to check on him. After a 45 minute conversation, I realised that there was something I should touch on, and that is weathering the storm....

Every player....and I mean EVERY player will have downswings......some so severe that they question how you play this game and even if you WANT to play this game ever again. That is the cruel bitch that we have married ourselves to. Deal with it. Lorin, our own "Short Stack Hero" is worried that he is only on pace to make $4,000 this month. He is pissed, he is angry and he is worried. All I can say is ..

"ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS???!!!"


A $4,000 win in a month at $1-$2 is a dream for most players not named "Durrrr" It is only cataclysmic for Lorin because of his own escalating results over the last several months. Well let me be the Buzzkill and break the illusion. NOBODY WILL EVER BEAT THERE OWN FOR RESULTS FOREVER. PERIOD. All streaks are made to be broken and all streaks come to an end.....that is why they are called "streaks".


This game, and Life in general for that matter, is made up of swings. Call them standard deviations from the norm, call them luck, call them whatever. But they are what they are. Part of being a PRO is dealing with this. It will be rarer for you to run a month with no deviation than it will for you to run a month with deviations from either the positive or the negative.

The thing that separates those that can stick with it, and those who can't is simple. Can you handle it?


This is the only thing that I would say to keep in mind.


LIFE IS NOT ABOUT WEATHERING THE STORM (any single minded retard can do that)



LIFE IS ABOUT LEARNING TO DANCE IN THE RAIN........


If you can take $4,000 from people that have been studying, conniving and scheming to take your money, you are doing pretty well. Especially if that only happens 1 or 2 months out of the year and the other 10 months, you average $8,000. I WISH I could show a $4,000 PROFIT for my WORST month. Hell, as far as cash games go I wish I could show that for my best month.....


Nobody plays this game well when discouraged or downtrodden. You almost have to play this game with arrogance and ignorance. Not to the point where you won't examine your results, but to the point where the results don't matter as long as you are sure that what you are doing is right. As Davy Crockett once said " First be sure you are right, then go ahead....."


Basically, as far as advice from somebody that has been on almost every side of every fence in this game goes, never stop listening, never stop learning, never stop analyzing, but be careful when starting to doubt. Make your game plan, make your play, but don't look at the results too quickly. Make sure that it makes sense to you, then go ahead......


And when the inevitable storm comes, don't focus so much on surviving the storm, take a moment to learn how to appreciate that $4,000 (as bad as that may seem )and dance in the rain......

Tim Wakefield and the Knuckleball: A Metaphor

Enough right now of the frivolities, it's time to get back down to work. For this next entry, I am going to present a metaphor for understanding my short stacking mindset. I used to be a left handed pitcher up until my junior year of college at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. Being that this is the only sport I have played competitively, this is the one that I understand the best.

Tim Wakefield is a knuckleball pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. He has had an illustrious career with them all this time and is arguably neither a pitcher in the true sense, nor even a “real athlete.” His “fastball” is known never to exceed 75 mph, but it doesn't need to. He doesn't have a devastating curveball, slider, or changeup. He basically has two pitches: a knuckleball and a straight pitch (described as being too slow to call a fastball). The key here is that is all he needs. For those of you who might be unfamiliar with the term, a knuckleball is an extremely difficult pitch to throw that is designed to have no spin whatsoever, allowing the ball to drop and curve sharply at angles so severe and unpredictable that even the pitcher and catcher have no idea which way it is going. Picture it like throwing a beach ball into a headwind, except that the beach ball is the size of a baseball and is moving at 55-60 mph. Now try to hit that with a round bat after you have been practicing all week to hit a moving target at 93mph that is speeding in a straight line. Suppose even further that you are prepared to hit that tiny beach ball and you can guess one of three directions that it is going to move, but now all of a sudden a straight ball comes down the pike that is moving far faster, but you have already slowed down your motion in preparation for that beach ball, but by then it is too late and that ball has already slapped into the catcher's mitt. You are fully aware of the pitcher's game plan, but a slight variation in the strategy throws you off completely.

You see, Tim Wakefield was originally drafted to play professional baseball. He was a Double A first baseman with no exotic talents and very little hope of ever making the Big Leagues. One day he was fortunate that a scout was watching him during a pre-game warm up and mixing in a few vicious knuckleballs. The scout was so impressed that he had him throw some more and then it wasn't very long before he was owning batters left and right and had a permanent spot on a top billed Major League franchise. While he certainly has peers and opponents who don't consider him one of the guys or a true athlete, you simply can't deny that the man shows impressive results. He's not trying to be the next Nolan Ryan or Roger Clemens. He never can and he doesn't have to be. He simply found something that he was extraordinarily good at and worked it to perfection. Furthermore, his career is likely to out-perform all but the most genetically gifted and lucky players, due to the fraction of the strain that he puts on his muscles and tendons.

I consider the story of Tim Wakefield to be a great lesson in humility. While we all grew up with notions of the being the best at every facet of life, at some point in time we are either forced to accept our limitations or embrace them along with the strengths that we own. I believe it is fair for me to predict that no one who reads this will ever be a winning regular at Rail Heaven, ever win a gold bracelet at the World Series of Poker, or ever win a World Poker Tour title. But none of us need any of these things to be or feel successful at this game. Don't be afraid to try new or unpopular things and accept that you will not excel at everything you try. Challenge the conventional wisdom and re-define success as a personal venture. Take the unbeaten path.

How We Are Deceived by Our Own Miscalculations of the Future

While not made for poker directly, I believe that this discussion has some very important concepts for understanding other players and our own misconceptions about future probability. For those of you who may have already read the works of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, you will quickly be able to appreciate and enjoy this highly entertaining (at least for us dorks!) talk by Dan Gilbert.

For those who do not see how this applies to the game, I would like to add a disclaimer that I believe long-term success at the game requires melding different disciplines to understanding the game in all its facets. And to people like Microstakes Bankroll Builder, yes, this also includes understanding the mindset and goals of short stackers rather than quickly casting judgment.

A person who seeks long term profit from poker isn't really all that different than someone who pursues art or music for the same reasons. Being able to draw or write a great song does not in any way guarantee you success. You have to understand the rules and regulations of your industry, understand and interpret the impact of the conventional wisdom on your field, understand the desires and needs of your audience, etc.

I hope you all find this both entertaining and enlightening.