This month, WPT Poker hooked up two generations of poker to discuss the changing face of the game.
Poker is evolving at an alarming rate; due to its increased popularity online the game is becoming more technical, more aggressive and tougher to beat with the majority of players well read and up to speed on optimal strategies and tactics. WPT Poker sat seasoned professional Dave ‘El Blondie’ Colclough and online pro James ‘Flushy’ Dempsey down and let ‘em rip.
Dave: So where do you make all your money? Are you an online player or do you play live?
James: Yeah, an online player mainly.
Dave: Doing what? Online cash? Tournaments?
James: Online tournaments and a bit of cash, but normally tournaments. I feel that tournaments online are just a lot easier to manage playing.
Dave: Are you playing 6-handed or heads-up?
James: At the moment I’ve got a current thing where I’m playing in the ten-handed Hi-Lo games on Stars; that’s my current fad.
Dave: Have you found that the Hold’Em cash games have got much more difficult to beat in the last year or so?
James: Yeah. I don’t know about you but I find that I don’t play Hold’Em cash online anymore. I stopped playing it three years ago, I think, and now when I have a little dip in and read strategy forums, I just have no idea what people are talking about! Everyone’s so good!
Dave: I find this really interesting because now that James has been playing for four or five years, all of a sudden the game’s changed on him and he’s thinking exactly the same way as the people who’ve been around for 20 years. Every three or four years the game completely changes around us and the people who survive are the ones who can adapt and change. It’s interesting that you’ve now switched to Omaha Hi-Lo, which is a completely different mentality. It’s a game where you do very little bluffing to be honest. For example, in No Limit Hold’em cash is obviously about playing position and all about bluffing.
James: Yeah, you are playing hand ranges a lot more. When I first started off I was playing Limit Hi-Lo before I ever played PLO, so it’s something I’ve got a bit of a grounding in. I thought that it was something that I was quite reasonable at and, like you say, the Hold’Em games, and even the Omaha games now, a year and a half ago they were absolute gold mines online, but now everyone is playing in them.
Dave: Even, to be honest, the Pot Limit Omaha games in the last six months have just got so difficult to beat. Who do you think are the five or six best whizz kids in England?
James: At the moment, who has come through in the last year? Well I suppose that you have to look at Sam Trickett; he’s one of the people who has translated it into doing something live as well.
Dave: I’m looking at James Akenhead right now.
James: James Akenhead certainly had a great year last year.
Dave: OK then, the second half of the question - which of those is still going to be around in two years’ time?
James: Well, this is the thing. I haven’t been in the game that long and I’ve seen people come and go; people who thought that they were the best, you know? Everyone thought ‘Oh, this guy’s great,’ and then three years later they’re gone.
Dave: You have to understand that in three years’ time the game is going to be completely different.
James: Exactly! Like you say, it’s all about adapting and changing with the game. You’ve been in the game like, forever [both laugh], and even at the highest level you know that you have to keep changing, you can’t stay stagnant; you have to keep learning. I went through a major problem at the beginning of last year. I was down after six months playing online, which is an eternity online. That’d be like three or four years playing live wouldn’t it? And I thought ‘what am I doing wrong, there must be something?’ So I went and talked to loads of people and realised that there was so many things that I wasn’t doing, or wasn’t doing in the best way and thought ‘I’ve got to get these things into my game.’
Dave: But you’ve found a different market that you can beat, haven’t you, really? So it’s probably a very good thing.
James: You just have to adapt. I think that there are some good players online. The biggest difference is seeing some of the live players who I’ve never seen adapting before, and I’ve always thought of as pretty bad; they’ve not really got any scope to change, and they’re now doing the same thing. They’re waking up to the fact that the game has changed. I think live, the game has been much slower with its progression, but now with the younger players coming in it’s sped up.
Dave: What was in fashion 18 months ago online – the standard raise pre-flop with everybody 100% following through; once you’re three-quarters of the way through the tournament everyone was raising in the late positions, and then everybody was continuation betting. You just can’t do this online now because on any non-ace flop, if I continuation bet, I get re-raised, and I know I’m going to get re-raised so I don’t even make a bet now. But live, we’re still at the situation where
James: …you can get away with so much…
Dave: ….you can raise pre-flop and can continuation-bet on any flop of any three cards and you’re going to pick the pot up 60-70% of the time.
James: And with antes, that’s massive.
Dave: It’s huge! It’s a profitable play, but it was working a year ago online and now it doesn’t work anymore; everybody knows about it.
James: What I find now is that there are just some crazy things going on, like I just don’t open from late position without a hand. You just don’t get away with it anymore, do you?
Dave: Well, there’s a saying online isn’t there? ‘Under-the-gun is the new button now’ because it’s the only place where you still get respect for a hand.
James: For ages the game was about raising and getting the blinds, or raising and then continuation-betting, then online, and now live. Live certainly, it’s about raising and then the re-raise gets it. Now, online, the three-bet is like the previous standard open, and if you three-bet it, will you get four-bet? It’s crazy. I’ve been in too many situations where you get the four-bet and then you get the five-bet. I won a pot the other night playing against Chris Moorman, so again the history is that these players know what they’re doing, but anyone else watching this hand in isolation would think ‘What the Hell is going on here?’ It’s 500/1000 with 70 players left in a reasonable $300/$400 multi-table tournament, we’ve both got 60,000 at 500/1000 and we’re both in the top five/top six stacks. He’s opened in late position to 2,800 and I’ve re-popped with pocket tens to 9,000. He’s then made it 17,000, I’ve moved all-in, and he’s snap-called me with A-J. Two years ago it would have been like, ‘What are you people doing?’ but now it’s fairly standard against your regulars to get it all-in pretty light. It makes it difficult – the lines are so blurred.
Dave: And that in turn makes it even more difficult to win tournaments.
James: It gives you a massive increase in variance.
Dave: It becomes impossible to avoid those sorts of coin flips or, even worse, it’s impossible to stop getting your chips in with A-J against A-Q or A-K because you can never read them for A-K anymore.
James: Yeah, exactly. People like Mickey Wernick always say ‘Find a better situation,’ but it’s becoming so that’s not really possible anymore –people’s ranges are so wide that you can’t read them as well.
Dave: I’m sure the average IQ when you started was probably higher than when I started. When I was at my height the average IQ of a player that I was playing against was probably about 120ish, and now it’s probably more like 135 because we’ve had a complete influx of young university whizz kids.
James: The sort of people who like strategy games, because it [poker] is a strategy game at the end of the day, isn’t it?
Dave: It’s funny, because you’re talking about when you came in six years ago. At that time I was probably one of the most aggressive players in the game, like down at the Vic they all thought that I was a complete idiot because I was playing crazy and betting everything, or playing more aggressively than anybody else.
James: When I came into the game, in the UK there was you, there was Devilfish, and I think that you’ll find you were far more consistent back then because the game was less about gambling.
Dave: I played in the Vic last week and I’m sat with Sam Trickett, Dan Carter, and Dan played the best out of anybody that day, there was Mr. Rutter [Stuart], Karl Mahrenholz and they’re all talking about me as though I’m a complete nit rock you know? [both laugh]
James: When I started I played a bit and then someone gave me a book, I read it, and it was just saying, ‘You do this, and then you do this, and then you win.’ And in fairness, it was, because no-one really did that many moves, at least at the levels I was starting out at. I’m sure at the higher levels it’s always been a level above and a level ahead in terms of the game development, but if you tried to play by those books now, you’ve got no chance. |
