Brummie wunderkind Stu Rutter joins the ranks at WPT Poker this month with some top pro strategy.
Poker, more than any other game, loves it catchphrases. If your friend was just minutes away from the start of his first ever tournament and asked for emergency advice, you could give it a very good shot. What better than to fire ten poker catchphrases at him, and hope his memory is sharp to give him a chance? No decent player could dispute that phrases like, “never give a free card”, “never draw to a flush on a paired board” and “always protect your hand if it is ahead” form the basis of a good poker game.
Rules are There to Be Broken
If your friend enjoys his first tournament, he might try to develop his game by seeking out more about the Golden Rules of Poker. If he was able to take in all the other nuggets of conventional wisdom and use them correctly in his game, he could indeed be a very competent player.
However, he could never become an expert player without properly challenging conventional wisdom. The measure of an expert player is to know the pitfalls in these rules, and to have the ability to know exactly when to break them.
“Always Protect Your Hand if You Are Ahead”
For every “golden rule” of poker, there are instances where they can profitably be broken. We are going to look in particular at the issue of protecting your hand, and see how it fits in with the new buzz word of poker - pot control.
If you think just for a moment about the phrase, “Always protect your hand if you are ahead” you will soon spot the fallacy; short of holding the nuts, you can never know that you are ahead. For every bad player that gifts free cards, there is a mediocre player who is so worried about giving cheap cards that he gives away far bigger pots than necessary in the instances where his hand is not ahead.
We can find useful insight into why poker is much more complex than these simple rules suggest, even when we look at a situation where we do know our opponent’s hand.
Making your Opponent Pay
Consider a hypothetical situation where your one opponent has unwittingly flipped his cards over on the flop and exposed to you his Ah-Qh. You hold Ks-Kc and find yourself ahead on a board of 7h-5h-2c, which gives him the nut flush draw. Your opponent has 2,000 chips in his stack, and there is 1,000 already in the middle. Before reading on, take a moment to consider what is the best thing to do in this situation where you know that you are ahead.
If you decided to penalize your opponent for his silly mistake by moving all-in now, you have only the second best answer. You might be ahead, but your opponent’s 12 outs would give him the right odds to call, and you would not have allowed him to make a mistake. The right solution is to delay your decision to the turn. If you remain ahead, move in on the turn. With only one card to come, your opponent will be making a mistake if he does call.
One piece of poker wisdom that cannot be challenged is that giving your opponent the chance to make a poker mistake is always to your own advantage. You can understand the situation even more clearly by thinking of it in this way: the only difference between our best and second best strategy comes when the turn brings an ace or a heart. Our new solution of this delaying play allows us to save the 2,000 chips that we would have lost had we moved all-in on the flop.
A More Realistic Example
Sadly, this fortunate situation very rarely comes up, but it offers us an insight into the kind of thinking we can employ in more familiar poker situations. Let’s have a look at this example:
You raise on the cut-off with Kc-Qc, get called by the small blind, and receive mixed news on an action flop of Kh-10h-8h. You make a pot-sized bet of 1,000 of your remaining 8,000 stack and your opponent check-raises to 3,000. What are your thoughts?
If our opponent is a normal solid, aggressive player, it is reasonable to simplify and decide that one of two things is going on. Either our opponent has us beat (with a hand like a set, two pair or low flush), or our opponent is semi-bluffing (the most likely semi-bluffing hands are A-Q, A-J, A-10 and A-8, all with the ace of hearts, and either a pair or a gutshot).
More False Wisdom?
I am going to use this hand to challenge another familiar poker phrase. The phrase, “it’s all-in or fold” is used precisely in this kind of situation, but I am going to explain the superiority of a very different strategy.
One initial thought is to realise the merits of a simple fold in this situation, where even the hands that you are ahead of have enough outs to be almost racing against your hand. In a scenario where you are likely to either very badly behind or very marginally ahead, the maths do not work out kindly for you, and I would urge a fold here against a opponent you know to be tight and solid.
However, the numbers will begin to edge in your favour if your opponent is more aggressive as he will check-raise on a wider range of hands. If your opponent is aggressive enough to be check-raising often any hand with the ace of hearts, or a hand like Qh-Jc (the straight draw and 2nd nut flush draw), then I would advise being prepared to play your hand against him.
A Change of Strategy
Crucially, we are going to break poker wisdom in the way that we decide to “play” our hand, and we are going to devise the following recipe.
Our Recipe
• Flat-call the bet now, and be prepared to call the rest of the chips on any turn which is not a heart or an ace.
• If your opponent checks these turns, move all-in.
• If the turn brings the bad news of an ace or a fourth heart, pass to any bet and keep your remaining 5,000 in chips.
• If your opponent checks the bad turns, check, and hope to show your hand down.
Why Our Recipe is Superior
Of course this recipe provides no guarantees, as it will probably not stop us losing all our chips if indeed our opponent did flop a strong made hand. However, if we compare our recipe to the option of an all-in on the flop, we will see two distinct advantages:
• If the turn does bring an ace or heart and we pass to our opponent’s bet, we save 5,000 chips that we would have lost had we moved all-in on the flop.
• If our opponent did flop a strong hand, a heart on the turn could help us by slowing him down and saving our chips. The beauty of the situation is that we have mis-represented our hand on the flop, and our opponent will probably read us for the draw (we may even be able to turn our top pair into a bluff if a heart comes, but that’s another story!).
We cannot quote advantages to the play without checking for anything that we may have turned against us. “But what about protecting your hand?” you cry, but the chip situation means that this is not relevant. Because we only have 5,000 behind our flat-call, we cannot deny our opponent the odds to call on the flop. In an echoing of our previous example, we are much better off moving in on the turn. In fact, we lose very little with this new recipe, and this play of waiting to increase your equity on the turn is well worth implementing into your game.
The Logic of the Situation
It is always interesting to examine your poker logic. Here, it is that our opponent flopped either a strong made hand or a semi-bluff, and that we are going to be prepared to lose all our chips to the made hand. This is very useful, as it allows us to effectively cut the made hands out of the equation (as we are going to lose chips whatever we do). Re-read the recipe, and you will see that the recipe assumes that we are playing against the drawing hand. (Note that our bizarre example where our opponent flipped over his hand was no joke; here, we are assumptions add up to the same as seeing the ace of hearts).
It is important to establish logic in poker, as we can then put it to use in any situation whose logic mirrors this. It comes as good news that there are all number of situations which can be generalised to have exactly the same logic.
Example
If the conditions are the same, we can use exactly the same recipe when we get check-raised with kings on a 10-9-8 rainbow board. We assume that our opponent either has our kings beat or we are ahead of a hand that includes a straight draw. So, we flat-call the check-raise, prepared to call off our stack on a turn which is not a queen, jack or eight.
We can even use our new recipe in the situation that throws up this dilemma more regularly than any other, and that is the two-card flush draw. It needs the conditions of opponent, position and stack size to be right, so let’s have a look at the kind of example that might interest us:
We raise from under the gun in a cash game with Ah-Qh, and get a call from the big blind. A flop of As-Js-6c looks good for a $50 bet from our $600 stack, but we are faced with a decision when our opponent check-raises to $200. We need to be clear that our opponent is not so aggressive that he could raise with something like Ks-Qh here, and then move all-in on the spade turn. If so, we are close to having the very same conditions as our first example, and can gain ourselves the same advantages with a flat-call. |
