Poker For Dummies

by Richard D. Harroch

We can’t simply take an average (arithmetic mean) of the deviations because they will always add up to zero — the negative deviations cancel out the positive. To overcome this difficulty, square each deviation by multiplying it by itself. This gets rid of the minus (negative) sign, because a negative multiplied by a negative equals a positive.

By avoiding marginal situations that require you to put additional money into the pot when it’s a close call, you can play with a smaller bankroll. If you’re a winning player, you’ll eventually win just as much money. It will just take more hours at the table to reach your goals.

If you elect to push every advantage, no matter how small, you can expect significantly higher fluctuations than you’d experience if you were willing to trade off that win rate for a bit more stability.

A good rule for a reliable bankroll is 300 bets. If a bankroll of $6,000 to play $10–$20 Hold’em seems like a shockingly high number, we recommend reading Gambling Theory and other Topics by Mason Malmuth. It’s an amazingly insightful work into some of the statistical realities that surround poker. You’ll find out how the ups and downs of fate can produce some extreme results over the short run, and even $6,000 may be a conservative estimate for that game.

For all the players who are not lifelong winners (and estimates suggest that 85 percent to 90 percent of all players do not beat the game), an adequate bankroll means either a trust fund big enough to sustain a lifetime of losses, or a paycheck that can cover their losses from one payday to the next — without risking the rent.

If you’re in a bad game, get out of it now — never mind if you’re winning or not. If you’re emotionally upset, stressed out, fighting the flu, or otherwise not at your best, you’re better off not playing since your maladies will ultimately take themselves out on your bankroll.

It’s a terrific feeling to stuff the pockets of your jeans with your winnings, and to live — even for a moment — that famous line from Walter Tevis’s The Color of Money. “Money won,” Paul Newman’s character Fast Eddie says as he reveals an ageless truth to Tom Cruise, “is twice as sweet as money earned.”

In 1979, an unknown poker player from California named Hal Fowler seemed hopelessly overmatched in experience and skill as the final day of play at the World Series of Poker began. Fowler received a fortuitous string of favor at several critical stages of the tournament that left the poker elite shaking their heads in stunned disbelief. Time after time, Fowler hit inside straights, made second pairs, and completed flushes until he finally eliminated his last opponent. Fowler won the world championship and remains the only amateur player ever to win poker’s most coveted title.

Stay calm, cool, and collected. You are going to get some bad beats in a tournament. You must maintain a tough mental attitude and not go on tilt. Many players lose a few hands, and then both their discipline and their stacks begin to crumble. Don’t be that type of person, and do take advantage of that type of player.

Poker was very popular in the 1870s. Among the many poker players was James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok. Wild Bill came to the town of Deadwood in the Dakota Territory, and in his leisure time, played poker in the saloon. Wild Bill had killed a great number of people, so he had a few enemies. One night, he was playing Draw poker. His back was to the door, and an assassin came in and shot Hickok dead while he was in the middle of a hand. He was holding aces and 8s (two pair), which has now become known as the “Dead Man’s Hand.”

Not all the elements of a poker game are within your control. Your opponent can do everything wrong and still get lucky. That happens, and nothing you can do will put a stop to it. In fact, you should be happy when a poor player sticks around when he really should have folded and wins with a hand that’s a real long shot. After all, if he keeps playing that way, the money he won really isn’t his; it’s just visiting.

Good players beat bad players in the long run, and you shouldn’t lose sight of that just because you lost a pot you figured to win. You’ll get it all back and more when you consider all the times a poor player will stick around with those long shots and not get lucky. It’s never as dramatic, but in the long run, you’ll come out far the better of it when you are the favorite and your opponents are the underdogs. Because poker has a large element of short-term luck associated with it, it doesn’t matter whether any one effort is successful. What does matter is knowing when a positive expectation is associated with a given play.

Hands that shake is not an act. There’s a homespun theory that goes with this one. The theory says that if you see someone suddenly start trembling when making a wager, that’s a signal that this bettor is nervous about the bet and is probably bluffing. That theory is just plain backwards. If ever a tell were almost 100 percent reliable, it’s this one. Few players act in an effort to show nervousness, and genuine shaking is hard to fake. What most likely is happening is this: Your opponent has made a very strong hand. The hand is, in fact, unbeatable or almost unbeatable. What you’re seeing is a release of tension following the suspense of waiting to see what will happen. Some players are always nervous; they will shake whether or not they’ve made a big hand. The tell that I’m talking about is sudden shaking. I’m talking about a player who was previously steady but is just now starting to shake. This behavior is especially suspicious if the player seems to be trying to control the shaking, but can’t. This sudden shaking isn’t a bluff, because players who bluff tend to bolster themselves. They force themselves to be unnaturally steady, and they hardly move. They tend to realize instinctively that anything they do might look suspicious to an opponent and trigger what we term the calling reflex.

Enjoy yourself while you are playing. Time spent playing poker is discretionary. No one has a gun at your head. If poker is not enjoyable, don’t play. While there are lots of bitter pills we all have to swallow in life, we ought to enjoy what we choose to do. If you cannot enjoy yourself when you play, perhaps you should find another outlet for your time and money. Some players are constantly griping when they play. Some of them have done this for years. It seems they are never happy. Why do they bother to play when they get no enjoyment from it? Questions like that can take a lifetime to answer. But unhappy players generally represent profit to you. So have fun when you play, or find something more enjoyable to do. You won’t succeed as a poker player if you have to fight yourself as well as your opponents.

Still, people take up poker as a profession every day. Some do so after years of deliberation. A few do it on a whim. Others pursue it as a second career—after retirement—when they have alternative sources of income to steady the ship in a storm. How successful are they? There are no statistics handy—but we’d be willing to venture a guess that the majority of newly hatched professional poker players go broke, and probably do so within a year.

If mathematics was the only skill required for winning, the best players would all be mathematicians—and they’re not. Knowing your opponents is equally important. Observe their actions at the table. Analyze their decisions and the choices they make. Are they in every hand? Do they raise with hands that don’t warrant it? Are they rock-tight? You’ll find it fairly easy to get a read on most players within an hour. The best time to do this is when you’re not in a hand. If you find yourself waiting for a game, watch your opponents-to-be, so you can adjust and temper your game strategies to their play before you sit down at the table.

Never, never let your ego control your play. Like they said in The Godfather, “This is business, not personal.” Never personalize it if an opponent wins a big pot from you, not even if he looks you right in the eye and laughs like a loon as he rakes in the chips. The minute you decide to “ . . . get him,” you’re sure to miss other opportunities and probably squander some chips chasing him down. If the old adage, “Living well is the best revenge” holds true, then playing well—and walking away with a few racks of chips — is a giant step in that direction.

Much as we’d like to believe otherwise, the truth is that most of our winnings come not from our own brilliance but from our opponents’ poor play. Choose the game with the weakest opponents. A game full of weak players who call too often but are reluctant to raise with strong hands will do fine. After all, if you can’t beat players who call too much, who can you beat?

Computers can do things humans don’t have the time to accomplish. We’ve run experiments that simulated a lifetime of poker. We could have tested that same hypothesis by playing eight hours a day, five days a week, for 30 years, but what could we accomplish with that knowledge once we finished our research? It might be helpful if poker is played in the afterlife, but we’re more concerned with earthly uses for our know-how.

While you’ll find lots of social chatter, the Internet is often the source of some incredibly creative ideas about poker. These ideas, for the most part, are not circulated outside the newsgroup. It’s not out of secrecy, mind you, it’s just that RGP attracts very bright, creative, and insightful folks who enjoy talking poker. As a result, it’s fertile ground for new ideas and concepts. Ideas are posted, and comments swiftly feed back to the author. Information at warp speed: that’s what the Internet is all about.

Poker tables are full of bad beat stories, and it won’t take long until you’ve heard all of them. Why waste time grousing about the fact that your opponent got lucky? We all take turns getting lucky. That’s not the point. Instead, think about what you might have done to knock him out of the pot so he wouldn’t have had a chance to draw out on you. That matters!

We hear players eschew books all the time at the poker table. “I’ve played 20 years,” they grumble, “and I don’t need books to teach me about the game.” Yet it’s these very players who think a deck change is going to improve their luck, or that a certain dealer has it in for them. Sheeesh! These guys have been making the same mistakes for years, and their know-nothing attitude ensures that they will repeat this unproductive, mindless behavior for the next two decades.

Is your boss in a nasty, irritable mood? Maybe you’d be better off feigning an emergency and postponing your annual performance review until next week. You have a bad hand, and rather than risk losing even more money, the smart move is to fold and wait for a better opportunity. There’s undoubtedly something romantic about the fatalistic approach of marching into the jaws of death or some more civilized equivalent, but it’s not a strategy that will help you win at either poker or life.

While real-life payoffs can vary widely, your investments are usually time, money, or both. Is it worth your time to spend half a day trying to make a small sale without the promise of greater rewards down the road, or are you better off courting one of your bigger, better customers? Whenever you analyze situations like this, the answers often seem obvious. Still, many people fritter away large amounts of time, not realizing that they are being horribly unproductive in the process. Office workers spend hours dealing with problems and issues that may be urgent, but are often neither significant nor important.

Whenever someone launches a misery-laden tale in the direction of poker author Lee Jones, he announces that he charges a $1 fee to listen to each bad beat story. Some people are so bent on sharing their woeful tales that they toss him a chip and go right on talking.

On his road to a fight with Muhammad Ali, Foreman destroyed Ken Norton and Smokin’ Joe Frazier — two fighters who gave Ali a very tough time. Foreman was so strong and his punching power so punishing that he literally walked through the best his opponents could offer and annihilated them with his stinging jab and devastating right hand. Foreman hit Joe Frazier so hard with a right hand to the body that Smokin’ Joe was lifted about four inches off the ground. When he landed, Ali’s toughest opponent collapsed like a sack of potatoes in the center of the ring. That was enough for Ali, who realized that if Norton and Frazier couldn’t stand up to Foreman, neither could he. He needed a new strategy, and to devise one he hand to think outside the box. When the Rumble in the Jungle, as the fight was called, finally got under way in Zaire, it began as the pundits predicted. Big George Foreman was relentless, throwing punch after punch at full force in the direction of Ali, who covered up while leaning back against the ropes. Ali offered little resistance. Outside of a few seemingly futile jabs, he looked as if he wasn’t even trying to fight back. But that was Ali’s strategy. After a few rounds, the heavily muscled Foreman grew tired. He had punched himself out and was spent. Ali, by comparison, was fresh. He was also unhurt. Ali then began a counterattack. He came off the ropes and danced in the center of the ring. Ali, who was faster, peppered Foreman with jabs and stinging overha...