The Most Dangerous Single Sentence in Poker

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I’ll get right to the point – the most dangerous single sentence in poker is “Fold and wait for a better spot”. If you’re anything other than a very high-level pro, I’m sure you’ve said this sentence to yourself, or to someone else, at some point.

There are generally three major reasons why someone might use this phrase:

• They’re simply not sure about what to do in a particular situation and aren’t willing to pull the trigger on making a big call or bluff and risk being ‘wrong’(very common);
• They might have the confidence to make the right play in a less important situation, but a high-pressure spot causes them to bottle it (also common)
• They’re confident the spot is profitable, but also so convinced that they have a massive edge in the tournament that they believe they can fold every marginal spot (more rare, but not uncommon)

In the first case, people aren’t necessarily afraid of the play itself – they’re often afraid of how they’re going to feel about the play if they make a big play and are wrong. They know they’ll end up beating themselves up about it, so they’re anxious not to take any spot that could result in that situation – they’d rather not risk their mental equilibrium being destroyed. A tough spot is a threat to their confidence – after all, they’re unlikely to wait until they’ve run a calculation after the event before they decide whether it was a good call or a good bluff. They’re going to make a snap judgment based on results, as many players erroneously do.

In the second case, bankroll considerations can be a root cause – someone deep in a big tournament that could make a huge difference to their bankroll might be inclined to play tighter than usual, in order to avoid risking the the disappointment of potentially busting after making a mistake. They’d rather chip down and bust in a situation they knew was not a mistake, than take a bigger risk and build a bigger stack.

The final category is usually composed of stronger players, but players who haven’t done the math on various situations to figure out exactly how big their edge is. These are players who would try to justify folding a spot that gains them 1bb/hand preflop when it risks their whole stack, when their winrate at that stack size might not be much more than 5bb/100, or 0.05bb/hand. Most poker players overestimate their edge, but folding profitable spots because of it can cripple whatever edge you believe you have.

How do you define a ‘better spot’?

This is one of the defining problems with this one sentence. What’s a better spot? Most people don’t have the capacity to accurately estimate the EV of a certain play in the moment of making a decision, and so we can never truly compare how good one spot is versus another without relying purely on instinct.

Our instincts, however, are often largely influenced by emotional factors – emotions form a barrier between knowing what to do, and actually being able to do it. In many cases, “wait for a better spot” doesn’t mean what it seems – it actually means, “wait for a less difficult spot” or “wait for a spot that doesn’t make me so uncomfortable”. 

As a result, there’s no guarantee that when a better spot does come along, we won’t simply end up using the same logic we did before – we’ll fold again, hoping for an even better one. This is what happens with many novice players at short stacks in particular – they simply don’t want to bust a tournament in a spot that could potentially be a mistake, and they turn down a multitude of profitable plays as a result.

How likely is a better spot to actually happen?

This is another question that’s very difficult to answer. If we fold a profitable spot, we’re doing it with the expectation that a more favourable spot will come along in due time, but the shorter our stack gets, the less likely this is to happen, because the potential EV gains from any one spot are significantly lower

At 100bb stacks, for example, we may choose not to make a huge river call for 40bb for a very marginal gain in EV, because we know that it’ll be a long time before our stack is in jeopardy even when the blinds go up, and it’s not that difficult to find a better-than-marginal spot with 100bb at a weak table.

When we drop down to 20bb, however, it’s just not going to be that easy to find spots to build our stack – of course sometimes building a stack is going to require risking our tournament life, but that’s a reasonable price to pay for the chance to double up and give ourselves a much better shot at moving forward with a bigger stack.

The danger of over-estimating your edge

This, of course, is something many players are guilty of. Those who are frequently found waiting for better spots often under-estimate just how difficult it is to have a substantial edge in MTTs when stacks are fairly short. An outstanding MTT player might only have a winrate of 10 EVbb/100 at stacks of 20-30bb, even in soft fields, and thus that particular player is making 0.1bb/hand. If that player turns down a spot that could have made them 0.5bb, it takes them 5 hands to regain the EV they gave away, and their overall edge in future hands is neutralized.

This can be a particular problem in live tournaments, where overall edges are bigger, but short level times often dictate that we might only play 10-15 hands at each particular level. In these circumstances, we should be even less willing to pass up an edge, because if a better spot doesn’t come in the next 10-15 hands, our stack is going to dwindle very soon.

How Future Game Simulation calculations can help us

Anticipating changes in our stack can be an important part of chipping up in any given tournament. We need to cater to advancing levels by chipping up as much as possible when level changes are imminent, but we also need to stay mindful of the fact that no level in any tournament – besides the Main Event – is long enough to justify giving away big edges. On top of this, there are considerations associated with our position at the table, and FGS (future game simulation) calculations using ICMIZER or HRC can elucidate these issues for us.

If you’ve ever run an FGS calculation, you’ll know that the nature of a push-fold situation can be largely variable depending on how many future hands you’re factoring in. If you look at just one future hand, the player UTG in the first hand will have to shove wider as a result of being in the big blind next hand. If you factor in two hands, the first two players will shove wider, and the players in the blinds on the first hand will be able to shove (and call) tighter, by virtue of the fact that they’re going to have slightly better spots available within a couple of hands.

Extrapolating this into decisions occurring in more complex, non-push-fold situations, we can surmise that there is some amount of evidence to suggest we should be slightly more inclined to take thinner spots in early position, by virtue of the fact that we will soon take a small hit to our stack when going through the blinds. However, if you run an FGS calculation with an entire orbit’s worth of future hands in consideration, the situation appears to reset itself – we’ll go through both the blinds (the unfavourable spots) and the late position spots (the more favourable ones) during the course of an orbit, so it should be evident from this that the length of a level – particularly in a live event – should factor into our decisions. As level times get faster, the more we should be considering the next few spots we’ll be faced with.

The bottom line

Ultimately, the most useful principle we should be bearing in mind with regard to edge-passing is very simple – don’t fold marginally profitable spots unless they’re forcing you to risk a very large amount of chips. If you’re the kind of player who’s still thinking in terms of folding those spots, you’re probably also the kind of player who doesn’t have a big enough edge at short or medium stacks in order to justify giving up profit.

Only the best players can justify edge passing. If you’re looking for a way to decrease the volatility in your game by turning down high-variance situations, you’re looking in the wrong direction – there’s no controlling variance. All you can do is look at all the factors involved in a decision, and make the best one with the information available to you. From time to time we’ll be able to factor in future spots – positions and level changes being the main factors – but you’ll rarely go wrong if you simply eliminate that one sentence from your mind. There’s no better spot to take than the one available to you right now.