Snap out of the small stakes slumber

¹ and so your opponent may shove virtually any hand he 3-bet with that does not contain a King and have you fold close to 40% of the time². To be maximally exploitative he could just flat his Aces and 5-bet everything else. So if you are going to 4bet KKxx when 100BB deep, make sure you 4bet/stack off.

4-bet pots present many opportunities for ‘vacuum errors’, consider this: You 4-bet AA93r BT versus BB at 100BB effective and are confronted with a T72 monochrome flop and an SPR of 1.5. Your ‘nit’ opponent open-shoves into you… do you make a cunning fold to exploit him?

The short answer to this question is, “NO.” Sure, he does flop a flush around 20-25% of the time, sure when you get it in against that part of his range you are drawing dead. However, you need to call off at least 80% of your range to stop him open shoving a naked pair profitably. 75% of your Aces have {no flush, no straight outs, no two pair+} and so your opponent could literally shove every hand he called a 4-bet with if your criterion for calling was that tight. This is a situation where “avoiding getting stacked” is a fundamental error, and you should just chalk up your opponent’s flushes as coolers.

We can now switch our focus to a more subtle situation: You open 8765 from MP and call a 3-bet from the BB, your opponent c-bets half pot on a flop of 732 trichrome. Snap-shove, right? Wrong, Vacuum Fish; when you shove this hand and the money gets in, your opponent can draw a powerful negative inference about the composition of your flop calling range. His range is much stronger than yours on this texture³ and if you shove your 7xxx hands you are taking a range of almost exclusively marginal overpairs to the turn. Your opponent can (and should) barrel almost every turn 100% of the time and your range has no defense. Before you console yourself with the thought that you ‘flat sets here’, count how many are in your range. The reason these auto-shoves are so dangerous is that they don’t appear as leaks to diagnose in your database. Instead, you will find yourself faced with tough decisions time and again on the turn and river defending 3-bet pots, never recognizing that the root of the problem is your failure to protect your flop range.

2) Mental Game: Raise your standards

Much of the discussion of ‘mental game’ today surrounds “tilt mastery”, and for good reason. Cutting out your C-game and managing your emotions go hand in hand and are essential for positive and profitable poker. However the present hyper-connected climate has had a homogenizing effect on what most poker players consider to be ‘reasonable goals’. The very word, “reasonable” has couched within it a certain lack of ambition. Ask  most serious players why his/her win-rate isn’t higher and the excuses will come thick and fast, “Rake is too high, too many short-stackers, everyone is good now, I just run bad…” In fact, as the array of tools which we have available to develop our game increases, these too are brought to bear to support the argument, “You have to get lucky to win in this game.” Consider the fine service provided by Evplusplus.com. Have you, dear reader, ever plugged in your win-rate and standard deviation and seen how bad it is possible to run? Or perhaps you have had a 100k “break-even stretch” (no pro ever loses for that long, right?) and then checked the site to see how likely it is for you to run that bad given your +2.5bb/100 win-rate? A fine way to massage your ego, but did the exercise improve you as a player or as a person?

Instead, you might ask yourself a better question. “What win-rate would I have to achieve before the effects of variance were minimal?“⁴ If you then set out to achieve that win-rate at a given limit before moving up, you might find your path through the stakes that much smoother⁵. Don’t accept some community standard of what win-rate is ‘realistically attainable’. Set your own standard, and then do whatever it takes (within ethical and legal boundaries) to get there. If you need a mathematical argument, consider that those who accept the ‘common standard’ as a ceiling are condemned to rise no higher. They will only learn those strategies that the majority of their fellow regulars master. A higher standard is a necessary but not sufficient condition for beating high stakes games.

There’s an even simpler question you could ask yourself, “What five things would the best Omaha player in the world do to work on his game?” If you would like to move up I would strongly encourage you to pick up a pen and write down an answer now. Are you doing all of them? Are the things on that list beyond you? Chances are you aren’t doing all of them and that few, if any, of them are beyond you. A few items that may appear on your list are:

Analyze equities for common spots I find difficult in Propokertools;
Experiment with new plays at lower stakes and analyze the results;
Play only 4 tables for at least 4 hours a week;
Create files on my regular opponents;
Analyze the toughest players in my game and work out what they are doing right that I am not.

A few things that won’t be on that list are:

Watch youtube videos whilst playing;
Play 12 tables for 6 hours  a day, 5 days a week then get wasted on the weekend; repeat;
Refuse to “Run it twice” because “I’m a gambler and if you have no gamble you don’t win”;
Read articles on Omaha that I really enjoy and then not implement any of the ideas contained within;
Assume any regular who has a higher win-rate than me is just ‘running hot’.

The insight I am sharing with you is this: you already know a large number of ways to improve your game which you ignore or postpone, every single day. You also know that many of your fellow regular opponents refuse to do these things themselves. If you aren’t willing to put the work in to be better than they are, even when you know exactly what to do, why do you deserve to succeed in this game?

I am thrilled that this blog has reached 200 subscribers, and would like to thank all those readers who have recommended this blog to their friends. If you have read this far, please take the time to list three actions you are going to take to improve your game. If you want to increase your accountability (and thus your motivation), I encourage you to post those actions in the ‘Comments’ section below. I would also like to announce that I am nearing completion of a series of theory presentations that I will run as a live, interactive video seminar series in April. Although not yet visible in the ‘Products’ section of this site, you may register your interest in the feedback form provided there. Thanks again for reading.

Good luck at the tables,

 

Quad