Having done a substantial amount of one-to-one coaching over the past few years alongside my TPE work, I’ve come across a variety of trends in the way novice players tend to think about the game, particularly when it comes to their approach to learning.
For the most part, people tend to approach learning about poker the same way they approach learning anything else – if they were brought up in a Western education system, then they’ve likely become accustomed ever since childhood to think of things in a problem-solving sense. They want to know what to do every time X happens, so they try to come up with simple ‘if X happens, then do Y’ statements to solve these problems. They try to create rules for themselves to follow, to minimize the number of variables they have to consider during the process of playing a hand.
The major inefficiency of this approach in poker is caused by the simple reality that poker is much more complex than many of the disciplines we learn in other contexts. If you’re answering a math problem and your ‘X’ is ‘a problem involving dividing large numbers by each other’, then your ‘Y’ is ‘do a long division calculation’, and the problem is solved. In a slightly broader context, if you’re trying to fix your golf swing and your ‘X’ is that your drives are fading to the right every time, you might have two or three possible ‘Y’s to choose from (your grip, your stance, or your swing itself), but you know it has to be one of those things.
In poker, though, for every ‘X’, there are a myriad of possible ‘Y’s. If the problem is something as broad as ‘losing money in tournaments’, then the solution could be any number of things, and it’s probably a lot more complex than simply ‘fix X by doing Y’. So what can we do to step away from this approach and begin to think in a more nuanced way?
The dangers of ‘never’ and ‘always’
Probably the most common example of this thought pattern is people who look for ways to incorporate the words ‘never’ and ‘always’ into their strategies. They tell themselves that if they just follow these simple rules, then they won’t make a mistake – they create a paradigm within which their decisions are either right or wrong. This makes them feel as if their game is developing, when they can see that most of their decisions fall into the ‘right’ category, but this is a fallacy created by an over-simplification of the game.
People like to say things like, “never open-limp preflop”, or “never bet more than half your stack on the river and then fold to a raise”, or even something as ill-founded as “always c-bet the flop as the preflop raiser” – while some of these are grounded in principles that are worth following (we’ll get to the difference between a rule and a principle later), none of them are especially productive pieces of advice. They give the player an excuse to completely bypass the thought processes by which they might have actually arrived at the decision to obey (or break) the rule in the first place – for example, telling yourself “never open-limp preflop” gives you an excuse to never have to think about why open-limping preflop might be a bad idea.
It’s also true, of course, that no decision in poker is simply right or wrong. Everything has to be measured according to its expected value – while it’s easy to say that making a +EV decision is ‘right’ and making a -EV decision is ‘wrong’, this doesn’t account for times when we might be faced with three different options which are all -EV, or eight to ten different betting lines which might all be +EV. There’s no utility in dealing in absolutes – right, wrong, always, never – they’re reductive and unhelpful.
If your opponents follow rules, you shouldn’t
Another reason why ‘playing by the rules’ is something to be avoided is simply because it’s less profitable than doing otherwise. There are any number of circumstances you could imagine at the poker tables where your opponents might be playing by a specific set of rules, or at least operating within a specific strategic framework. They might know very well how to respond to a half-pot c-bet on any number of different flops, but their responses to a quarter-pot or three-quarter-pot c-bet might be significantly less ingrained into their thought patterns. They will likely make a lot of mistakes against these ‘unexpected’ bet sizes.
The mistakes your opponents will make in these spots can have a significant impact on your EV, and thus there is a huge benefit to stepping outside of your own ‘comfort zone’ in order to exploit your opponents’ discomfort. When they’re forcing themselves into a ‘right/wrong’ or an ‘always/never’ paradigm, you can put them in really difficult spots by creating situations where the correct solution is ‘maybe’ or ‘sometimes’. The simple reason is that most people either default to folding in these spots, or default to whatever non-folding option seems best at the time – usually it’s fairly easy to tell the difference between these ‘ABC’ or ‘TAG’ players and the other category, but either category can be highly exploitable. It’s the binary strategic paradigm that’s the biggest mistake, not necessarily playing too tight or too loose.
A caveat – the difference between rules and principles
Here’s where I’m going to bring in a concept from a slightly unusual source. A good example of a field where there are very few instances of ‘always’ or ‘never’ is screenwriting, a field with which I’m reasonably familiar. One of the most highly-regarded books on screenwriting is Story: Substance, Structure, Style, by Robert McKee. While it is an outstanding guide for budding screenwriters, the book has very little to offer in the way of advice applicable to poker – but it does give us one very useful definition of terms.
The book defines a rule as something that when broken, results in a fundamental fracturing of the form, to the point where it no longer continues to function. Screenwriting has very few of these, but it does have some; poker has a lot of rules, obviously, and while most of them can’t be broken in an online context (because software doesn’t allow it), many of them can be broken in live poker. When this happens, the game can’t continue – a player is penalized or a hand is mucked and the play moves on.
A principle, on the other hand, is something different. A principle is something that when disobeyed, doesn’t necessarily break the form, but does drastically inhibit the performer’s chances of success. A principle is a convention, an approach that works, and has done over time. Many bad movie scripts are bad because they disobey the principles of what makes a good movie script – they didn’t break the rules, so they still qualify as movies, but they’re not good. The same goes for poker – there are an established set of principles that provide a solid framework for playing good poker, but they’re not ‘rules’. The real rules in poker are the ones you can’t break.
The more you set rules for yourself, the more you inhibit yourself, beyond even the confines of the traditional principles of poker. It’s okay to have your own principles, but even those should be flexible, and the more you find your opponents conforming to them, the more flexible they should become.