Trading is the new poker in 2012

Regular readers of my blogs will know that I am just as much a fan of trading and sports betting as I am of poker. In fact it wasn’t poker at all that was my first venture into gambling but blackjack. But there are numerous connections with all of these fields if you look closely enough. Having too many bets is the key mistake that kills sports bettors and stops them from making profits. This is the same as someone who plays too many hands at poker and bets too big on too many hands in blackjack when the count is negative.

Also too much trading can lead to you simply not being able to overcome the transaction costs even if you make a good trade. The term selective aggression is often used in poker but the term is equally factual to nearly any risk based market. For me then financial trading simply suits my personality more than what poker does. I tried for years to find the best form of poker to fit my personality and that eventually turned out to be NLHE.

However this does not alter the fact that the variance is very high when you risk money in this way irrespective of how good you are. Losing 25%-50% of your bankroll and it being normal has never really sat well with me over the years. If I made a $1000 trade then I may lose no more than 5-10% of that trade if it moves against me and so my maximum loss may be $100. If that same $1000 was in a NLHE cash game then the entire grand could be gone on one hand and it will do that at some stage.

Not only this but my next buy-in and the next and the next can all go the same way. This can never happen in trading and your risk and variance is far lower if you find a very good trading system. So 2012 will see me playing a lot less poker and I am not really sad about that either. But I will still be playing poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk  and so keeping a look out for my trading and poker results being placed here on a regular basis.

Mass tabling tips in no limit Texas Hold'em

It is often the case when looked at in terms of game theory that whenever you complicate a process that you then require a simpler strategy to execute that process. Multi and mass tabling online poker is one such situation where the process of playing poker can be made all the more complex. Heaven only knows that many poker players struggle as it is playing one table and over complicate that and so imagine what would happen if they tried to play 16 tables at the same time? 
 

One of the key areas that millions of players get wrong at sites like www.pokerstars.co.uk  when they try to add more poker tables is that they think that playing sixteen tables for example just means that you are playing poker sixteen times faster and seeing sixteen times the number of hands. This is true of course but once you have made these connections then you have largely finished. The underlying theory behind mass multi-tabling is that you are sacrificing accuracy for volume and hopefully volume will overcome the accuracy.  However you still have to reach a certain standard when you play more tables but it is a standard that many players fall short of.

When you complicate a process then you need to simplify many of the aspects of it to make the entire thing workable. So playing sixteen tables means that your thinking time is a lot less. This is can be fatal if you are for example involved in too many post flop situations in poker games that require too much thought. So you need to simplify the process and this means play more of a pre-flop game. This also means that you also need to almost make your game “automated”…..if that is the right term for it.

When I play more than ten tables then I am always looking to reduce the number of flops that I play. So this means that I am often three betting or folding and only calling or limping in if my hand is easily playable post flop like with small to medium pocket pairs for example. I know that whenever I call a raise and a call with a hand like 4c-4d then I am essentially playing fit or fold poker and that suits me fine because it is an easy way to play. I may not make as many ptbb/100 playing this way but I will make more $/hour by being able to play more tables.

Building a big hand in PLO full ring

Someone asked me the other day if PLO poker games were a tougher game to play then NLHE.  I responded by saying that this all depended on whether or not you wanted to play full ring instead of six max. In full ring then a lot of the game comes down to hand construction. What do I mean by that? Well firstly a full ring PLO game is more orientated towards the nuts than any other form of poker that I know. So you absolutely need to adjust in this way otherwise you are going to be toast.

In no other form of poker is it correct to fold the current nuts on the flop but it can be in PLO. If you had say J-10-5-5 and the board came 9-8-7 with two suits and you didn’t have the flush draw then you are basically nearly always drawing with other players who have basically the same nut straight but who are free-rolling to a flush. Also you may be against someone holding a set as well and so any paired outs will decimate your straight.

In games like PLO/8 at www.pokerstars.co.uk  for example then you are often warned about the dangers of being quartered and this is often seen when you have hands with an A-2. A Hand like 8-8-A-2 with no flush draw is not shaping up too well on a K-7-3 board. You have the nut low draw but if someone else has the nut low then you have no fall back for high with nothing but a pair of eights and an ace overcard.

So in a multi-way pot then you are often drawing with one player who has another A-2 and losing to another player who has a better high than you at this time. But a hand like 8-8-A-2 is barely playable in PLO/8 because its high potential is minimal. I like hands likes A-2-Q-J where the ace is suited meaning that I have a nut low draw, wheel draw to the high, flush draw to the high and A-Q-J straight drawing potential to the high. This means that I can scope the pot or win three quarters of it.

In full ring PLO then you are essentially looking for the same or similar hand construction in principle where you are looking to scoop entire pots. This is why looking at how big of a hand you can make is critical in full ring because you need to be on the right side of a big pot.

What does poker software do for you

I am often asked as a full time player and poker writer just how effective poker software is and programs like PokerTracker and Holdem Manager for example. Well firstly it needs to be said that these items are designed to keep track of your opponents and so this means that using them for free poker games are not really what they are designed for. But to answer this question properly then you need to come at this from another angle and a look at what happens and what has happened in the world of financial day trading is instructive.

In that field then the leading traders all use software of some description. Whether it be Bloomberg terminals or live feed with software like Indexia or whatever, speed of access is pivotal to how you succeed in this field and also as a poker player. But what needs to be underlined here is that in no way does any type of software or coaching automatically make you a winner and I really don’t care who this upsets or what type of coach you have.

There are just too many aspects to being a successful poker player to mean that any piece of software can make you successful. On sites like www.pokerstars.co.uk then you will have the option to play against any number of over 100,000 players at any one time. So it is obviously to your advantage to know how the people who are sitting on your table are going to play and what mind set they have and ideas about the game.

However there are just too many skills that you need to exercise yourself and a successful online player in my opinion needs two factors working side by side. Firstly they need their very own experience and expertise and they then need to marry that with very good software which then acts in the capacity of a second pair of eyes and ears. In the accelerated pace of online poker then this is a very valuable thing to have at your disposal because it is simply impossible to keep track of dozens of players at the same time when you are multi-tabling.

Getting the education right

Having come into poker around 1994-1995 then I came into the game at a stage that was in its infancy. There were a few books around but nothing at the level that is around today. This means that you get your education off on the wrong foot in terms of preparing for the environment that is about to arrive some years later. There are many ways to play poker and the online poker sites these days even offer free poker.

However all this fades into insignificance compared to playing poker for real money. The more money that you play for then the more people do to get that money. So when poker become more serious then the measures that people took to get their hands on that money became more serious.

There were numerous players making $500k per year in around 2005-2007 from playing online (unfortunately I wasn’t one of them) but these people have all drifted by the wayside just a few years later. It is no surprise just how many people have resorted to cheating in that time. It kind of reminds me of an interview that I read given by a casino pit boss in Las Vegas who remarked how casinos didn’t hate card counters because they took money from the casinos.

The reason why they hated them was because they knew from past experience that when counters fail to make money then many often turn towards cheating as a way to keep their income level going. This happens in poker as well because many poker players who were considered good a few years ago have suffered as a result of the games becoming tougher to beat and especially online.

To get around this toughening process then you simply have to get your education right and this was something that I got wrong a few years ago. My own story regarding my poker education is one of a mish-mash of books, websites, coaching videos and 1-2-1 personal coaching mixed in with an awful lot of DIY……..clearly not the best way to learn a profession.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk

How good do you need to be?

In order to be a poker pro or to make significant money from the game then how good do you need to be? Well at the highest level or even at the middle stakes levels then poker is all about understanding what strategies your opponents are using and how to find a way to defeat those strategies in the poker games that you play in.
  

Let us say that your opponent likes to raise from position and then c-bet flops with most of their range heads up. Clearly then this is an exploitable strategy because of the simple betting sequence of raise-bet. If you always know that a sequence will go raise-call-bet then the bet becomes meaningless. In fact this is probably no more than a standard line taken by your opponent in a heads up situation.

So you do not need a very good hand to continue here as the hand comes down to a battle between your nothing against their likely nothing. So bluff raises and floats then become part of your range of possible moves to combat their lines. So clearly then the game of online poker becomes like a super advanced version of the game of rock, paper, scissors where selecting strategies not just to beat your opponent on this move but to beat their line of thinking and method of operation come to the fore.

In this context then poker becomes difficult to grasp for many people who have been brought up with hand charts and how to play certain hands in certain situations. So asking how to play a hand in a certain situation is really a case of asking the wrong type of question. Higher level poker is much more multi-layered than that and you are not even scratching the surface of playing poker when all you are asking is a question that is nothing more than on the first level of complexity so to speak. This is why many players struggle to jump from low stakes poker to higher stakes poker because it involves learning a whole new game.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk

Fold equity is the key in modern online poker

I spend a lot of time on poker forums these days and the discussions that I have with certain players are illuminating. However I do feel that there are certain problems with regards to some players and how they play poker games like NLHE. I have felt now for some considerable time that a short stack approach has far more viability than a big stack approach for many people. I think that this is especially the case with novices and even intermediate players.

If you play a short stack and you play that short stack well then your decision making process is far simpler and I will look at an example here to show you what I mean. I was looking at a cash game on www.pokerstars.co.uk recently when a player who I didn’t know was playing an 18bb stack after only buying in if I remember correctly for 20bb (may have been more).

It was folded around to the button who made it $3.50 (the stakes were NL100) and the small blind called. Now here is my take on this situation. Clearly the button doesn’t need to have a strong hand to raise from that position but when the small blind called then they too were representing a weak hand otherwise they would have raised. The big blind re-raised to $12 and the button called with the small blind folding. The flop came 10d-6d-4c and the big blind shoved what he had left and was called by the button who showed A-K. The big blind had Q-J and a jack came on the turn and he doubled up and immediately left the table.

Now here was a guy that played a short stack very well. He sensed weakness after buying in for the minimum when the button raised and the small blind called. This put $8.50 into the pot and with him only having $18 on the table then this represented a big increase in his stack. But I liked how he just didn’t sit there and wait for big hands to come along before he made his move. On this occasion then he ran into the button with a proper hand but the fact was that he played his short stack well during that hand and deserved the luck that came his way and you have to admire that in a poker player.