More Ways to Analyze Your Game

In a column last year (Card Player Vol. 19/No. 17), I shared some questions from the quiz that I give to all of my prospective poker students. The quiz is not about right and wrong answers as much as it is a way for me to gauge how someone thinks about poker. Yet, I do have an idea of what I'm looking for in a student's responses. I'm looking for clear, logical reasoning. The more precise a person's thought process, the more likely it is that he or she will respond to my advice. One of my main goals as a teacher is to get my students to think about poker as a game that requires a holistic approach, as opposed to a series of situations, each of which has a predetermined answer to be memorized.

Here are a few more questions from my quiz. Think about how you would answer each question before you read what I'm most looking for in a response.

1. What do you think is the worst possible play one could make at a poker table?

As was the case with one of the questions I shared in my last column, this is a veiled attempt to see how mathematical a student is. What makes one mistake worse than another? In my view, the only way to measure the difference is through expected value. A mistake whose expected loss is close to the size of the pot, like folding the nuts, is often orders of magnitude worse than a mistake whose expected loss is a fraction of a bet, like calling with a marginal hand on the river in limit hold'em.

I once received an answer to this question that read: "I'm not sure. I don't like getting all in preflop, though. I have busted out of too many tourneys doing this." This response is a clear indication that my student needs to change his thinking. He is focusing far too much on results, and not at all on the inherent value of a play. He doesn't say that going all in preflop is a bad play, just that he has busted out of tournaments doing it. Furthermore, this student is not even looking at the results the right way. I would start by telling this student that a person's bust-out hand is often only the final step in a long series of events that led to his elimination.

If I had to answer this question, I would say something like, "Folding a very big hand after committing almost all of my chips, because I thought my opponent probably had me beat."

2. In no-limit hold'em, what factors do you consider when determining the size of your opening raise preflop?

Here, I'm trying to learn how much my student is thinking about the information he gives away with his actions. If he says something like, "I raise big with vulnerable hands like queens or jacks, I raise a medium amount when I'm stealing, and I make small raises with aces or kings to try to get some action," I know he's not thinking at all about how his opponents might be reading him. If he says, "I usually make the same raise size every time, so that I don't give anything away," I know that this student has at least started to think on a higher level. He has moved from "What do I have?" to "What does my opponent think I have?" If he says, "I base it on my position, my table image, the quality of the opposition, and my stack size, but never on the cards I'm holding," I know I have a student who is already on the same page that I am, and we'll be able to get into some deep concepts pretty quickly.

3. If stacks are extremely deep (500 big blinds or more), with what hands would you consider calling all in preflop against a good player, getting very little price?

I have two reasons for asking this. The first is to see how well my student processes poker lingo. If I get an answer like, "A-K suited, A-K offsuit, pocket aces, kings, and queens" (and again, this is an actual answer I've received), my first thought is that this student cannot quickly translate the terms "500 blinds" and "very little price" into a poker situation. When I meet with this student, I'll rephrase the question for him into something like, "Let's say you're in the World Poker Tour Championship and you start with $50,000 in chips. The blinds are $50 and $100. You raise to $300, the player in the next seat raises to $1,500, and then everyone folds to the button, who moves all in. With what hands would you call?" When I say it that way, I usually don't find anyone who will call with pocket queens, let alone A-K offsuit. With students like this one, I'll spend a little extra time teaching him the language of the game. What good are lessons if the student can't understand them?

My second reason, of course, is to learn how my students value their hands. A player who will call with less than aces here needs to learn more about relative hand rankings. Two kings are usually a fantastic hand, but when a good player has committed 500 blinds before the flop, kings are basically worthless. A surprising number of my students initially say they would fold even aces here. To those players, I'll be explaining tournament equity, and how wonderful it is to be a 4.5-to-1 favorite for all of their chips. This is one of my few quiz questions that, in my opinion, has a correct answer. That answer is, "aces, and only aces."

I hope these questions have got you thinking. Perhaps now you have a better idea of how to judge the merit of a poker play. Or, maybe you're thinking more about how to avoid leaking information about your hand through your actions. Or, you might have been one of those players who will "always go broke with kings," and you're now rethinking that position. Maybe you're wondering if you need to be more precise when discussing poker with your buddies. Whatever the specifics, the idea behind posing these questions in this space is to force you to reconsider what you're doing at the table. I hope you have done that, and I hope you see many improvements in your play as a result. 0x01 graphic