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Category Archives: Range Rover
This is the 42nd and last installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, .
This is the 42nd and final installment of Range Rover, and I end this column at an appropriate time: after around five years of being a professional poker player, I have stopped playing fulltime, and am getting back to writing books. I am the first winning player i know to walk away from this game – but more than the money, I cherish the life lessons that poker has given me. As I sign off, let me share two of them: the first accounts, to some extent, for the second is the reason I am leaving it.
Poker is a game centred around the long term. The public image of poker is based around hands we see in movies or YouTube videos, and the beginner fantasizes about specific events, spectacular hands in which he pulls off a big bluff or deceives someone into stacking off to him. But once you go deeper into the game, you learn that short-term outcomes are largely determined by luck, and your skill only manifests itself in the long run. You learn to not be results-oriented but process-oriented, to just make the optimal move at every opportunity and ignore immediate outcomes. You learn, viscerally, for much money and pride is involved, the same lesson that the Bhagavad Gita teaches: Don’t worry about the fruits of your action, just do the right thing.
Needless to say, this applies to life as well.
in our lives than we realise: the very fact that you are literate enough
to read this, presumably on a device you own, means you have already won the lottery of life. Much of what happens to us and around us is outside our control, and we would be foolish to ascribe meaning to these, or to let them affect us. Too many players I know let short-term wins and losses affect them, and become either arrogant or angry. This is folly. Equanimity is the key to being profitable in poker – and happy in life.
Why am I leaving a game that has given me so much? There are many reasons: Poker is all-consuming, and impacts one’s
my real calling is to write, and I am pregnant with book but one key reason is that poker is a zero-sum game.
In life, you benefit when others do too. When two people transact a business deal, they do so because both gain value from it. When lovers kiss, the net happiness of both goes up. Life is a positive-sum game. But poker is not. You can only win if someone else loses, and the main skill in poker is exploiting the mistakes of others.
Now, all sport is zero-sum and consenting adults play this game, so this should not be a problem—except for the fact that poker lies on the intersection of sport and gambling. Gambling addiction destroys lives and families just as drug or alcohol addiction do, and i have seen this happen to people around me. I can sit at a poker table and calculate equities and figure out game-theoretically optimal ways of playing—but where is the nobility in this when my opponent is not doing likewise, but is a mindless slave to the dopamine rushes in his head? In the live games I played, I sometimes felt that there was no difference between me and a drug dealer: we were both exploiting someone else’s addiction.
When I write books, i have a shot at enriching myself by enriching others. This can never happen in poker. And so, my friends, goodbye.
Addendum: You can read all the archives of my column on the . Here, briefly, are some I enjoyed writing.
My first column, , talks about the importance of thinking in terms of ranges, and its applicability to life.
are about the importance of mathematics in poker. , , ,
deal with some basics of exploitive poker, while ,
and & talk about game-theory optimal (GTO) poker.
is about the importance of putting volume.
I had great fun writing this series of pieces of probability, randomness and the nature of luck in poker and in life: ; ; . I fed into my interest in cognitive psychology and behavioural economics for those pieces, as I did for these: ; ; ; ; .
deal with temperamental aspects of poker.
is about the politics of access, and
about the ill effects of excessive rake.
talks about poker as an addiction, and
expand upon this subject using personal experience.
Posted by Amit Varma on 21 May, 2015 in
This is the 41st installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, .
The next time you are sitting at a poker table, faced with a big decision for a lot of money, take a few seconds off and think of Steve Jobs, naked after his morning shower, walking to his closet to pick out the clothes he will wear for the day. Does he tank over what to wear? No, he doesn’t. He just takes out a black turtleneck, a pair of jeans, and that’s his outfit for the day. Through the last years of his life, in fact, that was his outfit for every day.
Jobs wasn’t lazy or devoid of imagination. He had just cottoned on to a phenomenon called . Basically, neurologists have found that every decision you take tires you out a little bit, and robs you of energy. Through the day, Decision Fatigue accumulates, as you get more and more pooped. So if you want to use your energy optimally, the smart thing to do is to automate all trivial decisions, or get them over with quickly, so you can bring all your powers to bear on the big decisions that really matter. Basically, don’t sweat the small stuff.
Jobs did this by wearing the same outfit every day, as does Mark Zuckerberg, thus eliminating one early decision at the start of the day. You could do this by having the same breakfast every day (or letting someone else decide for you), parking in the first available spot instead of searching for the perfect one, and so on. One way to deal with Decision Fatigue is by . When I shop, for example, I don’t look for the perfect item to buy, but pick the first adequate one. This is Satisficing: making quick and easy decisions instead of perfect ones. If I’m buying a TV or a T-shirt or a portable hard drive, I won’t agonise for hours over all the different models available, but just pick the first one that seems satisfactory. I’ll devote more scrutiny to big ticket items that really matter—like buying a house, for example.
Consider the implications of this for poker. Poker players typically play sessions that last for many hours, sometimes upwards of 15, which is tiring in itself. They have to stay focussed, observe the action even when they’re not in the hand, and in live games, where such things matter, interact with others for the sake of conviviality. Add to this Decision Fatigue. In any session, you will face dozens of decisions, some of them big ones, increasing the likelihood of your getting exhausted as the session goes on, and thus more prone to errors. So what is one to do?
The obvious answer is to automate. At a beginner level, if you have a starting hand chart for every position, at least those preflop decisions won’t consume energy. As you grow into the game, you can have default decisions for more and more situations. But there is one huge problem with playing like this: you run the risk of becoming predictable, and therefore, exploitable. As you rise up the stakes in poker, you need to start balancing your ranges. This involves a huge amount of work off the table, so that decisions are easy while actually playing. I think of it as akin to a batsman spending thousands of hours in the nets till it becomes reflexive for him, in a match, to lean into an elegant cover-drive against a half volley outside off. Test cricketers don’t actually make a decision on every ball w they just follow their reflexes. They have to hone their second nature.
This is why online grinders, whether they are playing cash games or tourneys, multi-table with such ease. Most decisions are automated. Of course, since most of us are playing exploitive poker instead of GTO, we also have to be observant for mistakes to exploit—but even this becomes second nature with practice and hard work off the tables. So here’s my takeaway from this: to reduce decision fatigue at the tables, and to become a better player overall, you need to put in lots of work off the tables. If you do that, there’ll be many black turtlenecks and jeans ahead of you, and Steve Jobs won’t be naked no more.
Posted by Amit Varma on 14 May, 2015 in
This is the 40th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, .
Once upon a time, a poker player went to a Zen master in the hills, Quiet River, and prostrated himself at his feet. ‘Sensei Quiet River,’ he said, ‘I have something I need to ask you. I am a poker player. But I am not as good as I can be, despite studying both the mathematical intricacies of the game and the psychological tendencies of others. Something is missing. I need you tell me what it is?’
Sensei Quiet River just looked into his eyes.
‘Here,’ said the poker player, whipping out his smartphone. ‘I have all my hand histories here. Let me play them for you. Please tell me my leaks.’ He switched on the hand replayer on his phone and held it up in front of the Sensei. But the Sensei ignored it and kept staring into the player’s eyes. Many seconds passed. Finally, the player understood.
‘I get it now,’ he says. ‘The problem is not in the math or the psychology. The problem is me.’
Sensei Quiet River smiled.
I wrote, ‘We lose money in poker not because we think too little but because we feel too much.’ I promised to elaborate on it this week, so here goes.
Poker is a challenging game not because of mathematical complexity but because of human frailty. You can master it in a technical sense: you can understand equities, put people on ranges accurately, balance your own ranges, and so on. You will never be perfect at this, but you can easily be adequate for the games you play. But techniq temperament is the other half.
Even if you know all the right moves to make, you still need to have the discipline to detach yourself from the short-term outcomes of hands or sessions and play correctly. It’s hard to do this: we are all emotional creatures, casting a veneer of rationality on our reptile brains. We get tired, upset, elated, we give in to greed, sloth, arrogance, and, most of all, anger. Every poker player is familiar with a phenomenon called ‘Tilt’? What is tilt? The sports psychologist Jared Tendler, writer of a brilliant book called , describes it as “anger+bad play.” We get angry, so we play bad. And why do we get angry?
In his book, Tendler identifies different kinds of tilt. There’s Injustice Tilt, where you feel you are getting unluckier than others, and it’s just not fair. There’s Revenge Tilt, where you take things personally against certain other players at the table (maybe they gave you a bad beat, or they 3b you frequently). There’s Entitlement Tilt, where you feel you deserve to win more than you are, because you’re better dammit. And so on.
Our emotional condition at any point in time can cause us to play sub-optimally, even when we know what the optimal play is. This is most likely to happen at times of stress, and poker is an incredibly stressful activity, because there is always lots of money involved – not to mention ego. We often equate our sense of self and our well-being with the money we have – though we shouldn’t – and having it taken from us can destroy our emotional equalibrium. It isn’t easy, as that saying goes, to keep calm and carry on.
Let me now end this column with a tip. The next time you are at a poker table, facing a difficult decision, buffeted by emotions, here’s what I want you to do: Imagine that Sensei Quiet River is standing by your side. What would he do in your place? Do exactly that, and see him smile.
Posted by Amit Varma on 29 April, 2015 in
This is the 39th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, .
Being human sucks in many ways, but one of its great advantages is that little thing called the imagination. We can imagine away our frailties and pretend to rise above our cognitive limitations. We are all Walter Mitty and Mungerilal, so this following thought experiment should appeal to you. Imagine that you are not a human being, but a computer designed to play poker perfectly and take the money of puny humans. Now tell me: what would change in the way you play the game? (Pause and think about this before you go to the next para, please.)
If you were God, you would know what cards your opponents held and the rundowns of all future boards. But as a computer, you wouldn’t need that information. You would play game-theory optimal (GTO) poker, with a strategy guaranteed not to lose in the long run regardless of the hands others might have or what they might do with them. Most of us humans, on the other hand, play exploitive poker, for which the hands and tendencies of others do matter. Let me illustrate the difference.
You are heads up in a hand, and on the river make a pot-size bet. Your opponent is getting 2 to 1 to call, and needs to be right one in three times to break even. Now, the aim of GTO poker is to make your opponent indifferent to calling or folding. You will do this by having what is known as a ‘balanced’ range jn this spot. Because you are offering him 2 to 1, a balanced range here would have 1/3 bluffs and 2/3 value hands. (Note that the composition of a balanced range depends on bet sizing, or the odds you give the opponent. If you bet half-pot, giving him 3 to 1, a balanced range would have 75% value hands.) Being balanced in any spot means that your opponent has to play perfectly to break even—and if he calls too much or folds too much, you make money. Basically, you cannot lose, and are thus likely to win.
Unless you’re playing high stakes online cash games, you’re unlikely to ever actually need to play GTO. The cash-game poker I play is exploitive poker. I try to identify mistakes my opponents tend to make and exploit them. In the above example, if my opponent tends to give up too often on the river, I will increase the number of bluffs in my range. If he is a calling machine and never folds, I will have 100% value bets in my range. While this is exploitive, this is also exploitable. By deviating from GTO to exploit his mistakes, I offer him (or someone else) a chance to exploit me. If i start bluffing more because he folds too much, he, or another player, could increase their calling frequency against me.
A computer would aim to play GTO poker, and it would do this by building balanced ranges for every spot, starting from preflop, across streets and board textures. This is incredibly complicated, and humans can just come to an approximation of this. This is useful, for understanding balanced ranges help us understand our own mistakes, and those of others, even if we don’t actually intend to play GTO poker. But my question at the start of this piece was not supposed to turn into a lecture on game theory. Indeed, my own answer to that question has nothing to do with game theory or exploiting others.
In any game I play, I tend to assume, correctly so far, that I can acquire the technical knowledge to beat the game. My big leaks are temperamental ones. If i was a computer, I would not feel any emotion, and would thus avoid all the pitfalls of being human at a poker table. We lose money in poker not because we think too little but because we feel too much. I shall elaborate on this in my next column.
Also read:
Posted by Amit Varma on 09 April, 2015 in
This is the 38th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, .
The answer to , according to , is 42. The computer that came up with this took 7.5 million years to calculate it, though the question for this answer wasn’t known. Well, I have a guess as to what it was.
My guess is that Douglas Adams was a keen connoisseur of Pot Limit Omaha, and he got into the following hand with his friend Richard Dawkins. Adams had T985ds, spades and diamonds, and the flop came K67, one spade and two diamonds, giving him a humongous wrap, a flush draw and a backdoor flush draw. Dawkins potted, Adams repotted, Dawkins jammed, Adams called. Dawkins had AAKKds, clubs and hearts, for top set. ‘Ha,’ he exclaimed, ‘I have the nuts. Take a hitchhike, my friend!’
‘Now, now, calm down,’ said Adams. ‘It is in your genes to be excitable, I know, but I must inform you that your top set is not the best hand here. Indeed, I am actually the favourite to win here.’
‘You’re kidding me,’ said Dawkins, as he looked at Adams’s cards in growing horror. ‘So what percent of the time do I win this hand?’
And that’s the question, dear reader, to which the answer is 42.
As it happens, the turn gave Adams a straight flush, at which point Dawkins became a militant atheist, , but that is not a matter on which I shall dwell today. Instead, I wish to bring up the role of numbers in poker.
on how poker is a numbers game, and to master the game, you must master the math. , I wrote about the hard work involved in teaching yourself the game, much of which involved number-crunching. In response, my friend Rajat, a keen player with a recent live tournament win under his belt, : ‘I’m an old-school player, terrified of numbers. What advice for me?’ This is a reaction many people would have, so here’s what I have to say.
The mathematical laws that govern poker, and indeed, the universe, are not ‘new-school’ inventions. Just as an old-school physicist before the time of Newton was subject to the laws of gravity, so is poker subject to mathematical laws, rewarding those who master them. Indeed, ‘old-school’ players knew their math, as you will note from the vintage of David Sklansky’s The Theory of Poker (1983), and the musings of Doyle Brunson, a man who knew his fold equity, in Super System (1979). Since the internet boom in poker, the math behind the game has been far better understood, to the extent that a talented player who ignores the numbers is like a prodigious swimmer trying to cross an ocean but just refusing to get on a bloody boat.
All decisions in poker come down to the math of estimating pot equity and fold equity and making the best decision possible. You may use your ‘reads’ and psychological insights to get a better sense of your opponent’s range, and how likely he might be to act in a particular way, but all these merely help you come up with the right inputs. The answer, in the end, lies in the math. And here’s the thing: if you ignore the math, that doesn’t mean the math goes away. No, it’s working away in the background, like the laws of nature, ensuring the survival of the fittest – or those who adapt the best, as Dawkins would say.
If you have been winning at poker without caring too much about the math, it is either because you’re playing really soft games, or you’ve been lucky. The way the game is growing in India, both of these are bound to change. So here’s a thought for you: It is a truism in poker we must not be results-oriented, and should just focus on making the right decisions so that we show a profit in the long run. But how do we know what the right decisions are? The answer lies in asking the right questions – as Dawkins did to Adams.
Posted by Amit Varma on 26 March, 2015 in
This is the 37th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, .
Imagine you’re seven years old and you’re sitting in a classroom where an old professor who scratches his ass constantly is teaching you poker. ‘Now children,’ he intones , as if a robotic app is speaking from inside his body and not an actual human, ‘Imagine you have 13 big blinds in the cutoff and the action folds to you. What is the bottom of your shoving range?’
Someone titters from the back benches. The teacher ignores him and continues: ‘I will tell you what your shoving range is. Now everybody write down what I am putting on the blackboard, and learn by heart for exams. Okay? Learn. By. Heart.’ He turns to the board and starts writing with his right hand and scratching his ass with his left. Someone throws a paper plane at him.
Wouldn’t you hate to learn poker like that? I bet it would kill your interest in the game forever. Maybe you could have been a recreational shark, emptying people’s bank balances in your spare time. But no, classroom happens to you, and you take up stamp collecting as a hobby instead, for the sheer adrenalin rush that gives you. What a shame.
Poker has never been taught in a classroom, of course. It is a recent science, and if anyone wants to learn poker, they have to put in the hard yards and learn it on their own. There’s no university course, no poker diploma you can get, no MOOCs on Coursera, and most instructional books are outdated. Friends may help you, you could even get some online coaching, but if you want to be really good, you’ll have to do most of the hard work yourself. And before you learn how to play poker, you’ll first have to learn how to learn.
One of the problems with Indian education is the emphasis it places on ratta maroing – or learning by heart. When I was a student, I would spend all night before an exam mugging up facts from a guidebook, only to forget them the day after the tests. I believe that every time I did this, a small part of my brain died. And I didn’t learn anything about the subject in question.
Why do I bring this up in the context of poker? It is because too many beginning players indulge in their old habits of ratta maaroing when it comes to learning this game. I know tournament players who will know their push-fold ranges quite precisely, but have never, ever, even once calculated the equity of a particular move. Indeed, some tournament coaches begin and end by teaching ranges for different spots, and while this is useful, it would make more sense to teach a beginner to figure out those ranges for himself. Get the calculator out, figure out fold equity against players left to act, pot equity against calling ranges, and so on.& It’s a lot of work, but at the end of it, such knowledge will be deeper than just mugged-up push-fold charts – and as the game evolves, you will have the tools to do so as well.
In cash games as well, where stacks are deeper, you need to work hard at understanding how to play in different spots. Poker is, ultimately, about nothing more than maximising EV. If you don’t spend
lots of time fiddling around with tools like
by ProPokerTools, which helps you figure out equities against weighted ranges, and , which helps you understand how different ranges connect with different board textures, then you can’t improve beyond a certain point.
Let me sum it up: inside your brain there is an old teacher who scratches his ass and encourages you to take shortcuts and ratta maro. Expel him.
Posted by Amit Varma on 12 March, 2015 in
This is the 36th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, .
A few days ago, I was shooting the breeze with a friend of mine when he told me about a couple of business ventures he was planning, and the investors he’d lined up for them. ‘You won’t believe how gullible they are,’ he said. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned from poker, it’s how to find fish and exploit them. And there are so many fish in the business world.’
It’s a good thing I was sipping lemonade at the time and not my usual hot Americano, or I’d have singed myself. Having recovered from the shock of his statement, I shook my head sadly. Poker is a beautiful game, and it can teach you a lot about life. But the lesson my friend had learned was entirely the wrong one.
Poker is a zero-sum game. (A negative-sum game, in fact, if you’re playing a raked game.) The only way you can win money is if someone else loses it. So it’s natural that the key skill in poker lies in
of others, sometimes after inducing those mistakes in the first place. It is a mathematical exercise that plays on the frailties of human nature. The game is played by consenting adults, and as your opponents are also trying to exploit you and take your money, they’re fair game. But the real world works differently.
Life is a positive-sum game. This is most eloquently illustrated by what the libertarian writer John Stossel once described, , as the Double Thank You Moment. When you buy a cup of coffee at a café, you say ‘thank you’ when you are handed the coffee, and the person behind the counter says ‘thank you’ on receiving your money. Both of you are better off. Indeed, the vast majority of human transaction, including all business transactions, are like this. Both people benefit – or they wouldn’t be transacting in the first place.
This amazing phenomenon, which we take for granted, is responsible for the remarkable economic and technological progress of the last three centuries. The economies of nations across the world have grown
with the rise of free markets within them. Think about it: if every transaction leads to both parties benefiting, and a consequent increase of value in the world, then the more people are free to transact, in whatever form, the more we progress as an economy and a society. This is why libertarians such as myself consider it a crime to clamp down on any kind of freedom, be it economic or social.
The positive-sumness of things is unintuitive, and many people reflexively speak of the world in zero-sum terms. For example, socialists, with all their talk of ‘exploitation’, the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor and the need for redistribution. But that is not it is not a game of poker. Just as in poker there is no possibility of a Double Thank You Moment, in life, we can all be sharks.
So much for learning the wrong lesson from poker. What does poker teach us about life that is useful to us? Well, the most important lesson I have learnt from poker is not to be results-oriented. Luck plays a huge role in the short term, you only get what you deserve in the long run, so just focus on doing the right thing and don’t worry about the fruits of your actions. The Bhagawad Gita teaches the exact same lesson. Lord Krishna would have crushed the games.
Posted by Amit Varma on 26 February, 2015 in
This is the 35th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, .
Some people, when I tell them I play poker, look at me kind of strange. They may not say it, but inside their heads they’re saying, ‘OMG, he’s a gambler!’ And because I am skilled at getting inside people’s heads and listening to them think, inside my head I’m sayin’, ‘Yeah, and guess what, OMG OMG, you’re a gambler too!’
What is it that gamblers do? They weigh up the odds of a particular situation or event, the risk-to-reward ratio, and make a bet. This is not something that just ha this is the stuff of life.
You walk up to someone you fancy and ask them out for a date: you are gambling. You buy a stock: you’re betting on it to go up. You sell a stock: you’re betting on it to go down. You buy real estate: gamble. You buy a book because you like the blurb and the cover is amazing: ditto.
Little in life is certain, and everything is scarce, because time itself is scarce. You have one life, and the smallest decision you take today could change the course of your life. Maybe you have to choose between the PHD abroad or the comfortable job at home. Maybe you have to decide whether to say ‘yes’ to your boyfriend’s proposal when you know he’s not the dream guy, and you’re settling, and he hit you once when he was angry, but who knows if you’ll ever do better because you’re chubby, and you do love him sometimes. Maybe you get a puppy, betting that the love you get for a decade or so will be worth the pain you feel when it dies, as is inevitable. Everything you do, big or trivial, may be worth it, or it may be a mistake. And the thing with real life is, you’ll never know where the road not taken would have led. Bu you have to choose.
Poker is slightly different. Poker is also gambling but it involves repeated small decisions with relatively little on the line on any particular occasion. And importantly, you get to . Even though luck plays a greater role in poker than in other sports or mindgames, it is not gambling gambling: if you’re skillful, you will eventually make a profit. Good poker players keep making, on average, profitable decisions, and though luck (or variance, as we grizzled vets call it) may hit them hard in the short run, in the long run they will end up winners. In life, on the other hand, as Keynes said, in the long run we’re dead.
A poker player can play a million hands or 20,000 tournaments, and those sample sizes are pretty good. You don’t get those in real life. How many times will you enter a romantic relationship? How often can you switch jobs? You get the drift.
There are different types of gambling. There are casino games like roulette, baccarat and craps in which, in the long run, you’re guaranteed to lose. I disappr it’s just giving money away. Then there’s life itself. You’re forced to gamble by circumstance, but it’s okay, life’s a positive- though one could argue that since we all die in the end, the final sum is zero. At least until then the odds aren’t weighed against you. And then there’s poker, in which, unlike in life, we can put in volume and bring the long run close. So, you, who do not play poker, don’t make fun of us and call us gamblers. All of us are born in a casino, and will die in one.
Posted by Amit Varma on 12 February, 2015 in
This is the 34th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, .
I discovered poker as a grown adult approaching middle age, but I was a hustler in college as well. I was a decent chess player, and used to offer a prop bet to people with the following terms: ‘I will play 10 games with you, and will win all ten. If you even draw one, you win the bet.’ I never made this bet with anyone I’d seen on the circuit, thus guaranteeing that all my customers were patzers, and unlike in poker, the quantum of luck in chess is low enough that I won this bet every time I made it. One of my early victims, dazzled by my magisterial play, asked me what the difference between me and him was. ‘How many moves ahead do you think?’ he asked. ‘The same as you,’ I replied.
published in 1946 showed that, contrary to what you might expect, novices and expert players think more or less the same number of moves ahead. The difference in quality arises because the experts think the right moves ahead. Their candidate moves for analysis, in other words, are better moves to begin with. Their skill lies not in depth of analysis, but in understanding the nature of a position, which, in turn, comes from better pattern recognition. A grandmaster will look at a position not as a conglomeration of individual pieces, but in chunks of pieces that form recognisable patterns. He will understand the positional vulnerabilities of different kinds of patterns, and the tactical motifs that recur in these spots. In a spot where a novice thinks ‘If I threaten this piece, he’ll move it here to counter me,’ the grandmaster may think, ‘His pawn structure has weakened his dark squares, let me exploit that weakness and exchange off my weak white-squared bishop for his strong knight on c6.’ Guess who is more likely to win.
Why do I write about chess in a poker column? Well, there is exactly the same difference between beginning poker players and experienced ones. Beginners think in terms of what hand they have and how it connects with the board, and graduate to this from thinking about their opponent’s hand, and from there to considering what hand the opponent puts them on. But good players think . They never ask, in any spot, ‘Am I ahead here?’ but ‘What is my equity here?’ and ‘How can I maximise my EV?’ They have a better sense of how specific ranges interact with different board textures, and can plan for future streets.
For example, let’s say you call with KJ on the button after a nit raises UTG, and the flop comes 876 two-tone. A beginner may give up when the nit c-bets, but a pro will usually continue in the hand and take down the pot with either immediate or future aggression, because the flop texture is terrible for the UTG’s range of big pairs and high cards, and most turns and rivers are bad for him. Indeed, this will be practically a reflexive decision for the pro, requiring no thinking at all. He would play this hand better than the novice not because his reads are better or he has a better poker face or suchlike, but because he understands
Here’s one thing common to both chess and poker: the bad player does not know what he does not know. So here’s a tip on how to get better at both games: , and stay humble. The day you stop learning, you will be the fish at the table.
Posted by Amit Varma on 29 January, 2015 in
This is the 33rd installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, .
One of the ironies of poker is that at a nine-handed poker table, all nine players believe that they are profitable, if not the best player at the table. This obviously cannot be the case. Poker is a negative-sum game: the rake takes a percentage of each pot or tournament, and winners win less than what losers lose. Also, easily more than 90% of players are long-term losers, and most of the winners are just marginal winners. So what’s going on here?
I have two answers for you: 1. The nature of poker as a game. 2. Human nature itself. Let’s get the easy one out of the way.
Every game contains differing elements of luck, and although poker is unquestionably a game of skill, the quantum of luck in it is far higher than in other games. A winning player’s edge translates into a profit only in the long-term. Over a short span of time, it is difficult to tell from results who is the fish and who the shark. Losers win their fair share of pots and tournaments, which fosters the belief that they are better than they really are. But their flawed self-assessment is a consequence not just of the nature of poker, but of human nature itself.
A few decades ago, the writer
created a fictional town named , where, he wrote, “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” This gave its name to the , also known as , a tendency humans have of overestimating their abilities. This tendency crops ups across contexts: in studies, people have been known to overestimate their driving skills (everyone can’t be above average) and terminally ill cancer patients have also, poignantly, overestimated their chances of survival.
You will see the Lake Wobegon Effect in poker, as also its sister, the . Wikipedia defines the Dunning-Kruger Effect as ‘a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude.’
In the context of poker, a player may think he is better than he is because he lacks understanding of the game, or the intellectual tools to perceive his own weaknesses. I see this around me in many players. They don’t understand the long-term nature of the game, focus only on their own hand and don’t think in terms of ranges or equities, are results-oriented rather than process-oriented, and consider pots they win to be a validation of their skill while attributing their losses to bad luck. Some of these guys avoid putting in the hard work to get better, and ra some of them are simply not capable of improving. This is not a defect in character any more than being human is.
How can you guard against the Lake Wobegon Effect and the Dunning-Kruger Effect in yourself? Here are two things you can do. One, always ask yourself what your edge is in any game you go to. If you can’t define this precisely in terms of how you are exploiting the specific weaknesses of others, you don’t have an edge. Two, keep track of all your scores, and see how much money you make over a decent sample size of sessions. Your brain might deceive you—but the numbers won’t lie.
Posted by Amit Varma on 15 January, 2015 in
This is the 32nd installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, .
There is no term in poker that is as dangerous for the novice player as ‘made hand.’ Newcomers to poker divide all hands into two categories: made hands and drawing hands. If they have hit a pair or better, they say they have a made hand. If they are drawing to a flush or a straight, they call it a drawing hand. This is a terrible way to think about poker, especially when it informs your decision-making. For example, some players I know find it hard to fold a made hand, and never raise with a drawing hand because they ‘haven’t gotten there yet.’ This is fundamentally flawed thinking.
To explain myself, let me present a couple of axioms to you.
One: Every Drawing Hand is a Made Hand: There is one term that should dominate your thinking all through the course of a hand: equity. On any street except the river, equity refers to your share of the pot if every possible combination of outcomes was accounted for. Beginners think of a made hand as one that is 100% there, and a drawing hand as one that isn’t there yet. But if you look at equities, most of the time a made hand just has a big share of the pot, and is sometimes even behind the drawing hand. Consider, for example, that on a board of A67 with the 67 being spades, 89ss will win a pot against AK 52.6% of the time. Which is the made hand, then? What does the term, ‘made hand’ even mean? How much equity does a hand need to qualify as a made hand?
If 89ss has more equity there than AK, is 89ss a made hand? If not, why is AK, which has less equity? Where do you draw the line? At AsTs, pair and flush draw (46% against AK)?& QJss, the bare flush draw (32%)? The gutty T8 (22%)? What about AQ (16%), an otherwise fine ‘made hand’ that is a ‘drawing hand’ against AK because there’s a better ‘made hand’ around. Consider, in fact, that AQ, which is 16% against AK, is 83% against AJ and 55% against a range of all sets, Ax hands, and plausible flush and straight draws. So how would you classify it?
Two: Every Made Hand is a Drawing Hand: Unless your opponent is drawing dead after you flop a royal flush or quads, every made hand is a drawing hand in the sense that it is drawing to bricks. Not just that, on the flop, against a drawing hand, it is drawing to runner-runner bricks. This is why AK is behind 89ss on that Ax6s7s flop. This is why, in PLO, a hand like AK45r is so shitty on a 367 two-tone board. You have flopped the nuts – the ultimate made hand, one would think –& but if you’re up against two guys, and one has a higher wrap-FD (T985ds) and the other has top set with backdoor FD, your equity in the hand is, sit down before you read this, 7.5%. That’s right, you flop the nuts, go all in joyfully, and win just 1 in 13 times because your runner-runner brick draw is just so unlikely. Your best made hand is actually the worst drawing hand here.
Made hands, drawing hands, these terms melt into one another and mean nothing anyway. When you play poker, you should think of nothing but equity. Whether you have 80% equity on the flop, or 49% or 23%, your aim is to have 100% by the time the hand ends. Sometimes you do this at showdown – but a lot of the time, you do this by making the other guy fold, so that his share of the pot becomes yours. To do this, you need to understand his range, your equity against his range, and your fold equity against him (ie, how likely he is to fold to your aggression). As James Hetfield famously said after a 22-hour cash-game session, .
Posted by Amit Varma on 01 January, 2015 in
This is the 31st installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, .
I played an interesting hand the other day that I would have played differently three years
ago. The game was nine-handed, stacks were deep, and I had KTdd on the button. A loose player raised UTG +1, MP2 called, cutoff called, I called on the button and the blinds called. The flop came K72 with two spades and a club. (The king was a spade.) Original raiser checked, MP2 bet, cutoff folded, I called, small blind overcalled, the others folded. Both MP2 and SB are straightforward players, and MP2 check-calls flush draws in this spot, so he certainly had at least a King. Given position and his bet in a multiway pot, he probably a stronger king than mine. SB’s overcall disappointed me, because he is not the kind to mess around here with A7 or 99, and had either a king here or a flush draw. And if he had a king, it had to be stronger than mine.
The turn was the ace of spades. The flush got there, as did an overcard to the king. Both of them checked. At this point, the novice in me from three years ago would have checked back, thinking I had showdown value. But my read here was that my hand simply could not be good against both these guys, and I needed to turn it into a bluff to win the pot. I bet big, and they both folded, saying that they had KQ, and MP2 whined about how I always get lucky on the turn. So of course I showed him my hand, putting him on tilt, and he later stacked off to me. Yum yum.
Well, here’s one of the most useful lessons I learnt through my journey in poker: showdown value is overrated. Too often, we take a passive line with medium-strength hands thinking we have showdown value, so why inflate the pot? But there are two circumstances where it might be profitable to take a different approach. One, when we can bet those hands for thin value and get called by worse often enough for it to be profitable. Two, when we can turn it into a bluff and profitably make better hands fold, like in the above instance.
Often, on an early street, we adopt a particular mindset for a hand and don’t modify it as the hand progresses. For example, we get into pot-control or bluff-catcher mode on the flop, where that might indeed be justified, but fail to shift gears on a later street when it becomes profitable to do so. There are all kinds of situations where it makes sense to turn our made hand into a bluff. Maybe we 3b in position with JTs, the flop comes QJ3r, we call a donk bet, turn K, call again, river T and villain checks. Our two pair is often beat here, and better hands can fold given we are plausibly repping the ace, and depending on the opponent it is sometimes correct to check back and often correct
to bomb river. Similarly, in PLO, we could bang the river when a flush completes to get a straight to fold, even though we have showdown value with a set that didn’t fill up.
That said, you should be clear about your reasons in turning a made hand into a bluff, and not do so just because raising makes you feel macho. In the live games I play, I often see players make testosterone-laden raises in spots where no better hand folds and no worse hand calls. Do not burn money in this manner. Remember, it is better to be rich than manly.
Posted by Amit Varma on 11 December, 2014 in
This is the 30th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, .
One of the most important skills for a professional poker player, it is often said, is knowing when to get up. When exactly should we quit a session? Should we have a stop loss? Should we get up as soon as we reach a pre-decided profit? Should we play X number of hours, no more, no less? What are the factors that determine how long we sit at a particular table?
The rational answer to this is clear. We should continue in a game as long as it is +ev to do so, and get up as soon as we feel we’re no longer profitable on the table. How much we are up and down should not matter. We need to think of all poker games we play as being essentially one lifelong session, and the score on any one day should not affect our decision. At any given point, all we need to ask ourselves is: Is my staying on this table a +ev decision? Whether you are stuck 3 buyins or up 4 should not be a factor in that decision.
In practice, this advice is not that easy to carry out. For example, I have a tilt problem, and shift from my A-game to my C-game if I’m losing a lot and fatigued, playing recklessly and trying to recover. Tilt has perfect timing and usually comes towards the end of sessions, when stacks are deep and mistakes are costly. I am obviously not +ev when I tilt – but tilt not only shatters my emotional equilbrium, it also affects my judgement. I
continuing in the game, though I really should be getting up.
To prevent this, I have set a stop-loss for myself. When I hit that stop-loss, I quit the game, regardless of how calm I feel, because tilt could be just around the corner. This is not something I recommend to you if tilt is not a factor in your play, and you make decisions with as much clarity 15 hours into a game and 10 buyins down as you do at the start of the session. But how many of us can manage that? If you do have a tilt issue, and tend to magnify your losses by chasing them, a stop-loss might be a handy tool.
When I am winning, on the other hand, I usually sit till the end of the session. There was a time when, at a particular game, I would play for six hours every day and then leave, because I’d begin to get tired. As I’d mostly win, I got a bit of a reputation for hitting and running, though this was not my intent. So, as a point of principle, I started sitting till the end of every session, and realised that this made a lot of sense because stacks are deepest at the tail end of sessions, many other players are tired and tilted and more , and that is when my edge can really turn a hefty profit. If fatigue affects your play, of course, you should factor that in and leave before your edge dissipates and you’re the fish on the table. But tilt and fatigue aside, there are no good reasons to quit a juicy game.
One big mistake I see some players make is win small and lose big. They become taala-chaabi and book their profit as soon as they’re one or two buyins up, but continue buying in when they’re down, trying desperately to recover, and lose far more than they win in a winning session. In his book, , Tommy Angelo quoted a friend of his named Cowboy Bill as describing one such player, ‘He eats like a bird and shits like an elephant.’ Make sure you do it the other way around.
Posted by Amit Varma on 27 November, 2014 in
This is the 29th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, .
One of my favourite stories about chess has a lesson in it for poker players. A few decades ago, the great Aron Nimzowitsch was playing in a chess tournament when his opponent took out a cigarette case and placed it on the table in front of him. Nimzowitsch, who couldn’t stand cigarette smoke, called the tournament director to complain.
‘He has not lit a cigarette and there is no smoke,’ said the TD. ‘So your complaint is noted, but it is not valid.’
‘I know,’ replied Nimzowitsch, ‘but he threatens to smoke, and you know as well as I do that in chess the threat is often stronger than the execution.’
In poker, too, the threat is stronger than the execution. The most obvious example of this this is the concept of Leverage. Let’s say you open from late position with KJs to 4bb. The button calls, with effective stacks of 150bb. The flop is a dry K74r. You bet 5.5bb into 9.5, your opponent raises to 16. You call. The turn is a Q. You check. Your opponent bets 30 into 41.5. What do you do here?
Unless your opponent is super-spazzy, it’s hard to continue. If this bet closed the action, you might consider calling this 30bb bet – but it doesn’t. This bet carries the threat of a further bet that involves the rest of your stack: 100bb more into a pot of 101.5. So you don’t just have to decide whether to commit 30bb more, but 130bb more. You are unlikely to want to play for stacks with just a single pair.
This is leverage: the threat of future bets in a pot that is growing exponentially bigger. In the above example, your opponent bet 30bb to put you at a decision for 130bb. Maybe had you called 30bb on the turn, he would have checked back the river, giving up on some random bluff he was trying. But maybe he wouldn’t have. It doesn’t matter whether or not he would have lit that cigarette – the cigarette case was on the table.
Leverage can apply at any street except the river, of course. A 3b from a good aggressive player in position who is likely to keep barrelling postflop. A check-raise on the flop. Most of the time, though, you really feel leverage on the turn, when pots are getting big, stack-to-pot ratios are dwindling, and you have to decide how far you want to go in a hand. In the deep-stacked games that I play, I have found that it is on the turn that players make the biggest mistakes: whether that involves calling, folding or just going nuts and spazzing.
The threat you represent does not even have to be a result of your betting
it can arise out of your reputation. If you have a reputation for check-raising rivers a lot, your opponents might give you easy showdowns in position. If the turn check-raise is known to be a part of your arsenal, your opponents, in position, might not bet for thin value or charge you to draw on the turn like they otherwise would. Of course, your threats have to be credible, and against thinking players, your ranges should be somewhat balanced. If every check-raise of yours on the river is with the nuts, then your opponent will know that he is not making a mistake by bet-folding there for thin value. You need to mix it up to . You want your opponent to throw his hands up and say, ‘Yeh kya khelta hai? Main tho baukhla gaya hoon?’
The bottomline: to constantly pose a threat to your opponents, and to thus unsettle them and induce mistakes, you have to be aggressive.
looked into 103 million hands on Pokerstars and found that more than 75% of them never reached showdown. Think about what this means – and put that cigarette case to use.
Posted by Amit Varma on 13 November, 2014 in
This is the 28th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, .
Poker at its heart is mathematical, , and everything else is secondary. You put your opponent , calculate your pot equity against that range, estimate fold equity and then make the most profitable decision. But the math will get you nowhere if you input the wrong values. You first have to put your opponent on the correct range. And you have to accurately estimate your fold equity against him. To do this, you need to get inside his head, you need psychology. Although psychology without math is directionless, math without psychology is pointless, as you’ll end up with the wrong numbers.
This doesn’t apply if you’re
(GTO), of course, where your opponent’s tendencies are irrelevant as long as you’re playing , and the math is all that matters. But you’ll only ever need to play GTO at the highest levels of online cash games. In your everyday poker life, you’re best served playing exploitable poker, looking to make money from your opponents’ mistakes and . Player profiling is hugely important in this context. The better your powers of observation, recall and inference, the more money you will make in the game.
I’ve been running very good recently at a local online game, where PLO is all the rage. The key to my winnings is taking copious notes on every opponent I play. I note down practically every significant thing I see any opponent do. Every time I identify a tendency – any tendency – in an opponent’s play, I’ve caught a weakness I can exploit.
For example, Player A always bets pot on the river when he’s bluffing and 2/3 pot when he’s betting for value.& Player B almost always calls one barrel and almost never the second. Player C loves to float out of position with air and will donk-pot the turn if any scare card hits or any draw completes, and will barrel ¾ on the river if called. Player D goes pot-pot-pot when you check to him because he thinks you must be weak and who cares what he’s repping, maybe he’s not even looking at the board. Player E pot controls too much and never bets for thin value, even checks K-high backdoor flush on an unpaired board on the river, which polarises his range when he does make a river bet, and makes your decisions that much easier.
Once you start identifying these tendencies, they become easy to exploit. Against Player A, I once called a pot-sized river bet with 8766ss on a board of T94TA (two-tone on flop but flush not completing) and my sixes were good. I usually double-barrel against Player B, which is an insanely profitable play because of his warped frequencies.& Players C and D increase the variance of the game, but give you tons of value as long as you don’t get tempted to call them down too thin, which can be a leak in itself. And I make thinner river calls against Player E than against others, because while he may be polarised, he definitely isn’t balanced.
The last month has been unusual for me: my bread-and-butter game is live NLHE, where, again, profiling is everything, and most players don’t do it assiduously enough. The biggest mistake a live player can make is to switch off after he has folded a hand, and not keep observing the action and making mental notes. In poker, every nugget of information counts, so I’d advise you to always stay tuned in during a game. Remember, the most profitable seat at a poker table is inside your opponents’ heads.
Posted by Amit Varma on 29 October, 2014 in
This is the 27th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, .
There’s something strange that happens to me quite frequently. A friend will ask me for advice on a hand, and I’ll dispassionately tell him what I think is the correct course of action, and the reasons why. For example, while playing PLO he calls a raise in a 3-way pot from the big blind with 9876ds, with spades and hearts, and the flop comes JT2 with two spades and a heart, for a wrap and flush draw. My friend, huffing and puffing with excitement, bets, the next guy repots, the third guy further repots all in. What is my friend to do? It’s an easy fold, I say, because while he has a universe of outs, none of them make him the nuts. With so much action, the likely range of hands he’s up against include higher wraps and flush draws (like AKQ9ds), as well as sets, and against this range he’s crushed like Yokozuna sat on him. ‘Easy fold, you shouldn’t shame yourself by even thinking about it,’ I say, all clear and rational. And yet, I have found that while I give sound advice as an uninvolved observer, I do some incredibly stupid things when I myself am in a hand, especially when it comes to not folding. It’s like Amit the Player and Amit the Poker Thinker are two separate people. Why is this so?
Part of the reason, of course, is that we’re human, and humans crave , and that makes us . Also, our brains are wired in a way that makes us reluctant to fold a hand – any hand. To be specific, we suffer from what behavioural economists term
The term, first coined by the economist
in 1980, refers to the phenomenon where we value something we own more than we would if we did not own it. For example, in , participants were randomly given either a lottery ticket or US$ 2. After a while, they were given the option to trade their ticket for the money or the other way around. Most of them refused the switch, having come to value their randomly allotted gift more than the alternative.
offered a similar demonstration. : “Mugs were distributed randomly to half the participants. The Sellers had their mug in front of them, and the Buyers were invited to look at their neighbour’s mug: all indicated the price at which they would trade. […] The results were dramatic: the average selling price was about double the average buying price.”
You can see illustrations of this all around you. Ask anyone which car to buy and they’ll recommend the model they own. I suspect that many Apple fans who rave about iPhones and diss Android are displaying the Endowment Effect – besides rationalising and validating their own purchasing decisions, of course. (Vice versa also, though I use Android and it really is better.) I have seen it at the poker table when, after the cards are dealt, a player absent-mindedly reaches out for his neighbour’s cards. Nonononono, goes the neighbour, those are mine, thereby displaying an irrational attachment to them even though the distribution is random and he doesn’t even know what they are yet.
More commonly, you see the Endowment Effect in action when a player, to use an old cliché, ‘gets married to his hand’. The most common leak in the world of poker, by far, is that people don’t fold enough. Th we’re programmed not to let go. That is our endowment –& and we must fight it.
For more of my poker columns, do check out the
Posted by Amit Varma on 16 October, 2014 in
This is the 26th installment of my now fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, .
I write these words at the end of a three-week period in which 100,000 dreams have been crushed. The World Championship of Online Poker (), a three-week festival of poker on Pokerstars, has drawn to a close. It featured 66 tournaments, with a total prize pool of almost US$62 million. The Main Event, which just got over, had a buyin of US$5200, with . That’s a cool Rs 8 crore. It’s the stuff of dreams – but most of the over 120,000 people who played the WCOOP were net losers. Just a handful of people won big.
The poker boom was kickstarted 11 years ago when Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event in Las Vegas for US$2.5 million. He’d won his way into the tournament via an online US$39 satellite, and this fairy-tale story riveted the world. Combined with a glut of televised poker tournaments, like the World Poker Tour, featuring hole cards and taking viewers straight into the heart of the action, it led to poker becoming one of the most popular games on the planet. Online poker exploded, home games sprouted up in every city in the world, and millions of people play the game today. The common dream: to finish first in one of the marquee events, like the WSOP or WCOOP main events, and make lifechanging money. (The WSOP main event winner this year gets a cool US$10 million.)
Beginning players tend to be more drawn to tournaments than cash games, despite the success of the cash game show High Stakes Poker. I usually advise recreational players to play mainly tournaments, because this restricts their possible losses while allowing them to indulge in the game they love. And I advise serious students of the game to study cash games, which require greater skill because of deeper stacks, and also feature less variance. Indeed, variance is the key reason why playing professional tournament poker is a hazardous line of work. Tourney variance is off the charts.
To begin with, the rake in a tourney is between 7% to 10%, which accumulates over time and bleeds you dry. Around 15% of the players make it to the money (and top players cash around 15% of the time), but the big money only starts at the final table, and especially the top 3. Winning a tourney has even been described as the biggest bad beat in poker, because you outlast every other player who played but just get between 15% to 25% of the money. And no matter how skillful you are, to go deep in a field of 1000 people requires a lot of luck: winning more flips than is your due, evading coolers, hitting cards at the right time, again and again and again. If you have an edge that’s big enough to beat the rake, it only manifests itself in the long term. Indeed, a sample size required to accurately judge a player’s skill could run into the tens of thousands of tournaments.
The modus operandi of the online tourney pro is
to counter the variance and bring the long run closer. (Note that live players simply cannot put in meaningful volume.) The typical rhythm of a tourney player’s life is to lose a lot, get a big score, rinse and repeat. And when those scores don’t come, they go broke. This is also why most pros
are part of large staking stables. Collectively, the greater the volume, the more likely those big scores become.
Many of my friends are tourney grinders, and it’s a frustrating life. Unlike for cash game pros, most sessions are losing sessions. With relatively shallow stacks, everything is standard, and most pros play the same way. Once you reach a certain level of competence, you just sit and wait to get lucky. Every tournament, seen on its own, is a lottery. And the wheel, it spins round and round.
For more of my poker columns, do check out the
Posted by Amit Varma on 02 October, 2014 in
This is the 25th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, .
The Mahabharata is an amazing piece of storytelling. It was written at least 2400 years ago and it still resonates today in India. One story that speaks to me strongly is of the time when Duryodhana and Shakuni invited Yudhishthira to a game of dice.
Accepting an invitation to play dice with an opponent, using his dice, surely has negative expected value. (One version has it that the dice were made out of the bones of Shakuni’s father, whose spirit resided in the dice and did as he wished. That’s a marked deck if there ever was one.) Yudhishthira gave some spiel about how it was the dharma of a Kshatriya to accept all challenges, but this sounds like
to me. I think he had a gambling problem. He craved .
Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that the brain releases every time an addict gets a dose }