Leveraging Uncertainty in Poker Tournaments

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“The key to No-Limit … is to put a man to a decision for all his chips.”

 ~Doyle Brunson

The above quote has been kicking around the poker world for a longtime now, and like most pieces of sage like wisdom the beauty of this quote is that it can have multiple meanings. For most people it simply means you want to be the aggressor and force your opponent have to make the difficult choice between calling and folding; that you want to be the one saying “all-in,” not the player saying “I call.” But that’s not what it means for me.

For me, this quote is about causing uncertainty, and more specifically, how to leverage uncertainty; how to exploit your opponents and avoid being exploited yourself; how to calculate not only your odds but your level of uncertainty, and the level of uncertainty of your opponents.

The first time I saw the term “leverage uncertainty” applied to poker was in James McManus’s book Cowboys Full, and as soon as I read it I thought it was the perfect term to describe what winning poker players do at the tables. Leveraging uncertainty applies to the in-game decisions a player has to make including hand ranges/hand reading, calculating risk to reward, equity and so on. These are the on fly decisions you need to make throughout a hand of poker.

Uncertainty in poker

Uncertainty is everywhere at the poker tables, but the uncertainty I am talking about are the times where you say, “I literally have no idea what this guy has.” This can happen for a number of reasons:

• You are facing a completely unknown opponent
• Your opponent has done something out of character
• Your opponent has made an unorthodox play

Here is a basic example of uncertainty we can all relate to, suppose you have some history with the villain in this hand and have the stone-cold nuts, and on the turn you are 90% certain your opponent will fold to your bet on the river, so you decide to check.

Now suppose we are in the head of your opponent, and when you check he is stunned, as he was almost certain you were milking him as you always do in these scenarios, and he was intent on folding and not giving you three streets of value this time, but the check creates a massive amount of uncertainty in your opponent. Maybe you were bluffing all along? Maybe you’re setting him up? This is a strange line for him?

Let’s keep extrapolating this scenario and assume that now your opponent is 10% likely to bet, and when he does you check-raise, which breeds even more uncertainty in your opponent. And the next thing you know this opponent who was planning on folding suddenly finds himself calling an all-in bet; all because of uncertainty.

You didn’t outplay him per se, what you did was give him the chance to guess, and whenever we guess we are going to make our fair share of mistakes.

Leveraging uncertainty

So how can you take advantage of other player’s uncertainty at the tournament tables? If it’s simply a matter of being an unknown, the trick is to understand your opponent’s default opinions about his opponents and about different situations, and a lot of this has to do with their skill level.

Now, this isn’t simply a matter of value-betting a calling station or bluffing someone who is a folder; what I’m talking about is adjusting your value-betting and bluffing percentages based on the level of uncertainty you have created and how you perceive your opponent.

For instance, a very common theme at online poker forums when an unknown player raises from UTG is to assume they have a hand, so when you are at the river against someone whose default opinion is that an UTG player has a strong hand you can use this to leverage uncertainty; in these cases I would be more willing to bluff, if I knew my opponent was a solid player –maybe he mentioned something about playing online, or final tabling a WSOP tournament.

This is especially useful if your opponents have limited information on you, but it requires you to realize what your table image after say 20 hands or so. You are still an unknown, but virtually every good player will have already started forming opinions about you based on the limited data they have collected –this is usually referred to as overfitting, finding correlations in data that don’t actually exist. An example of overfitting in poker would be: I’m a tight player and raised UTG with AQ; I was reraised by an unknown player who has seen me playing very snug and who I haven’t seen get out of line after three orbits; therefore he has to have a really strong hand.

The whole line of thinking seems logical enough, but there are a lot of holes in it:

1. Can we assume villain is tight after just 30 hands?
2. Do we know if he villain has been paying attention to how you are playing?
3. Do you know if the villain is getting irritated from being card dead?
4. Do you know if villain thinks you are getting irritated with being card dead and have loosened up?
5. Do you know if villain has a specific read on you?
6. Do you know if villain is even a good player who would understand the significance of a UTG raise from a tight player?

Sure, our experience can give us generalizations about players, and 20 or 30 hands is better than nothing, but these generalizations come with a lot of uncertainty, and you just can’t follow them blindly. The more uncertainty you have the less you should factor them into your decision making process.

Continuing with our example let’s suppose that villain is an absolute fish, who has been completely card dead and just three-bet you with a “monster” an A8s, a hand he was ready to call an all-in bet with.

Or what if Villain is a super tight player, but three-bets virtually every hand he plays: 88+, ATs+, AJ+, KQ+, and big suited connectors? You’re AQ is literally 50/50 with his range, but you have him on a much snugger range than this because he’s tight.

It’s not that you should disregard what you have seen, but you need to understand that in these difficult situations you are more or less guessing, and the tiny bit of data that could be completely inaccurate could be swaying your guess in the wrong direction.

Avoiding uncertainty

If you want some evidence of how uncertainty and guessing can get players in trouble take a look around an online poker forum. When you read hand histories that have been posted there is usually a common thread among bustout hands; a lot of uncertainty. But far worse than the uncertainty are the deductions made by the poster or the commenters based on scant information or generalizations.

They usually start with, “I don’t have any reads on villain,” or “Villain just got moved to the table,” or “I’ve played 20 hands with villain and he has a 55% VIPIP.” As you can see we wither have zero information, or a tiny tidbit of information that is probably going to play a far too critical role in our decision making process.

And you’ll often see people offer up advice such as, “In these cases we can put villain on TT+, AQ+,” which is ludicrous in my opinion.

Unfortunately, there really isn’t any way to reduce uncertainty, so the trick is to simply acknowledge its existence. By acknowledging uncertainty you can start to adjust your thinking and the way you process information in real time so you can properly weight the information you have at your disposal.

Here are two common examples of overfitting:

Scenario #1:

Middle stages of an MTT and the effective stack is 40BB. The new guy 3-bet 10BB from UTG+1 and UTG is a tight player, so I’ll toss these Queens in the muck.

I have two thoughts on this hand evaluation. First, this is poor reasoning since we have no idea what the new guy is thinking. Granted, we have a tough decision here, but going on generalizations is overfitting. We have no way of improving our knowledge of our unknown opponent, but a better line of thought is to acknowledge you are going to be doing little more than guessing and saying, “Is this the hand that I want to risk my tournament on?”

Second, is the logical fallacy that the new player would know how UTG plays? As strange as it sounds, you see these types of leaps in logic all the time where someone projects their knowledge or understanding of the game onto an opponent.

Scenario #2:

I’ve played 50 hands with villain and have seen him get caught bluffing twice, so I’ll call with my weak hand.

The small sample size you have witnessed does not equal “Villain is a bluffer,” or worse, that villain is incapable of making his own adjustments after being caught bluffing twice.  Again, we are making leaps in logic that we shouldn’t.

What we need to be saying, is “Villain is capable of bluffing, but he’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar twice now, so he might be gun-shy as well.” Which is a fancy drawn-out way of saying, “I’m guessing.”