Entry #5 - Perceived Ranges

This article is going to be a bit long, but I think worthwhile if you stick with it to the end because the insight I gained might help you to understand the inner workings of the game a little bit better, just as it has me.

Okay so, I've never been big on the mathematical side of poker, I mean, I can do the rudimentary calculations, but I've always relied on my psychological skills in order to beat the game. I think this is a big reason why I'm capable of high winrates versus thinking/adjusting players, yet tend to have so much trouble killing fish. So as an addendum to my recent post about my entire run up to 1knl being pure luck, I'm going to add that I ran very well over that period in time, but I've recently discovered a lot of the reason behind my success. That's what I am going to share in this article.

Anybody who frequents this blog knows that I play a crazy lag style, always trying to play big pots and always attempting to push my opponents off hands when mine is second best, or induce a bluff or calldown when I have the goods. That's basically what I did, and when you play a lot of big pots over a relatively short sample size (100k hands) your variance is going to be huge which is going to account for high (or low) winrates.

So I was just approached by a past student of mine who is struggling to beat the mid stakes games, he came to me with something along the lines of: I have taken the entire month of May off from work and want to focus purely on my poker game, what do you think I should do and is there any kind of deal you can offer me?

I thought about this for a little bit, and of course since I've coached him before, I already knew what some of his specific weaknesses were. But I also knew that he had been through the standard 'sweat and ask questions' style of coaching many times by many other players. This obviously hasn't gotten him to the point he wants to be. So what I ended up suggesting was a month long course, in this course, the majority of focus would be on discussion and application of the specific concepts necessary to beat the games he plays in. What I told him I'd do is come up with a syllabus (yep, homework assignments included) that covered the most pertinent topics, and we'd spend roughly 20 hours over the course of the month discussing these concepts, as well as reviewing the sessions he plays during this time to make sure he is understanding and applying these concepts correctly.

Obviously since I have never done anything like this before, I had to first figure out exactly how to structure this so that we would be covering the basics first and gradually progress to more advanced concepts. I've spent about six hours already preparing this, and I'll list here the topics we will be discussing in the structure that I came up with (so if anybody actually takes a look at it and thinks there might be something important I'm missing or that I've possibly structured it incorrectly please feel free to lend me your advice:

Hand ranges and game theory: Focusing on G-bucks, as well as comparing that mathematical approach to poker with Pooruser's article on Singularity, which takes the focus off the math and into a psychological approach.

Hand Reading;
A. Importance of position
B. Reading board texture
C. Knowing your opponent
D. Evaluating villains hand range
(I decided to leave out 3rd and 4th level range evaluations since I thought that aspect might be better covered at a later point)

Psychological fundamentals:
A. Balancing your range
B. metagame
C. Bet Sizing/Bet Timing (tells)
D. Multi-level thinking/Leveling

For the last week he said he wanted to talk somewhat about Live play since he plays in live deepstacked games regularly, so I thought a good way to finish it off would be to cover...

Live play; and
Deepstacked play

So from here I had to start scouring the internet, I've probably read close to 80 articles trying to pick out the best ones that illustrate these concepts. Most of what I found was garbage, generally a lot of what was posted on 2p2..... ironically (I'm hilarious aren't I?). But by wading through a lot of this muck, I actually came across quite a few VERY good articles that helped me personally to understand my own game and why I have struggled so much this year.

So anyways, late in 2007 during my huge upswing, I was constantly labeled by the better players in the game as a lag/station. I always knew I was a calling station, but my reasoning at the time seemed to be "Well, I've come this far, how can I let it go now, besides -- I'm not about to be bullied or pushed over by anyone." Now, based on my image, being a calling station was actually good, but not for the reasons I elicited above.

What I have learned by going through all of these articles about the way I approached the game has everything to do with perceived hand ranges. So here's how you have to think about it... The wider your perceived range preflop, necessarily, the worse your range will be by the time you get to the river. Conversely, the stronger (tighter) your perceived hand range is, it will necessarily have to be considered stronger by the time you get to the river. You can even take this a step further (or deeper if you wish) and presume that your perceived range is going to begin being assessed by your preflop action, but more importantly the position from which you acted, meaning position ends up being the most important thing in evaluating a hand range (Of course we are able to gather more information on later streets but that's a different and longer discussion).

So, getting to the point (finally I know), any thinking opponent is going to realize what I'm doing, and by betting and inflating the pot attempting to constantly push them out, they are forced to adjust in one of three ways, one to get run over, two to tighten up preflop and hope I don't notice him waiting for a hand, or three being to call me down and play back at me with a looser range, which would necessitate that his perceived range will also be weaker by the river THUS making my light call downs in the end generally positive expected value. ---Assuming I'm playing well and reading villain well, AND villain isn't TalentedTom or JonnyCosmo who own me and read my soul.

Anyways, hope this was insightful, because it was for me, GL,

Marshall



Comments (1)

So I said I was going to write my next post about problems associated with tilt, and the downward spiral it's capable of throwing you into. It did it to me, and I'm sure it can and does happen to others on occasion.

My two blog posts on flopturnriver.com really sell the points I'm about to make, particularly the 1st one. Before I link you to it though, I want you to understand my mental state at the time I wrote it...

Despite playing over 200k hands in 2 months of losing poker at micro stakes, I still believed that I was a good player who just ran bad -- wow super delusional, right? The purpose of the post (in my mind) was to educate other micro stake grinders on how to beat the games. I was going to do this for every level I "conquered" until I reached 400nl again. Now here's the link to it, but before going off to read it, theres a few things I want to point out... (you really don't even need to read it as I'm going to explain my mistakes below).

http://www.flopturnriver.com/blogs/the-beginning-313#comments

Basically what I did was make assumptions about all of the players at the limit, in general. Not targeting any specific player, just taking each 'type' of hand (i.e. drawing hand, top pair/med strength hand, monster) and explaining how best to exploit your 25nl opponents. I essentially created a series of false assumptions about how to play based on what I observed from playing a few thousand hands. Poker is all about making information based assumptions regarding how particular players play, then using that knowledge to extract value at certain times, and push them out of pots at others. What I did is completely backwards. I made assumptions about all players (based on information I received from a few) and used the same set of guidelines to combat all players at that limit. This is such a bad idea and caused me to struggle for so long, I talk about that in my 2nd post at FTR.

Now, at the bottom in the comments section, I received some advice from a player who had read this post, it was the best advice I could have gotten at the time, but because of my huge ego and unwillingness to accept the fact that my ideas were wrong, I tore him down. What a fool I was. The advice he gave me is exactly what I repeated in the above paragraph. I was making false assumptions about how to play against an entire pool of players based on my experience with very few of them. This is how tilt and ego affected me. After realizing all of this, I made a second post, which pretty much outlined the mistakes I made in the first.

Here is a link to that post, which I think is actually a pretty good read and describes a lot of the things I wanted to talk about regarding my own experiences with running bad and tilting....

http://www.flopturnriver.com/blogs/how-i-screwed-up-again-349

I recommend reading it, because I think I explain well how my internal state and mindset was affected by my bad run--in other words, how my tilt was induced. I'm actually just going to post it here since I think it outlines a lot of things many people have difficulty putting into words--one of the one things I consider myself fairly good at.

"Okay so, my first post on these forums was probably about the worst stuff I’ve written since the inception of my blog. I haven’t really even written that much, only four actual articles. I haven’t been writing much over the last two months basically because of how rough of a run I’ve had, I’ve gone through emotional hoola hoops after becoming embarrassingly arrogant during my heater between September through the end of December—then being extremely humbled after running terribly and basically losing every dollar I had made from poker. It’s an important lesson I think to realize what this game does to people. The ups and the downs of it. Obviously the more emotionally indifferent you are, the easier it will be for you, but some of us just aren’t wired like that I guess. I only hope to work to be at that point eventually sometime in the future.

I really want to emphasize exactly what this 2 month bad run -20k$ swing did to my internal state and mindset regarding the game. It’s actually portrayed in living color in the previous post. I can’t even believe that I thought what I was writing at the time was actually good, but running bad for such a long period of time made me think that that was the way to play winning poker. I’ve only just come to the realization in the last few days, and regained SOME of my winning mindset, but at least I’m making progress right? What I ended up doing was attempting to categorize the average player at 25nl, then went about explaining how each type of hand should be played against them. THIS HAS TO BE LIKE THE WORST WAY TO PLAY MICRO STAKES, DO NOT FOLLOW THAT ADVICE!!!

Since I had that epiphany about how I was screwing up, I’ve been beating 25nl for 12bb/100 over the last 6800 hands playing 30/22/3. For the two months prior to this, I played 10,400 hands and was losing at a rate of -6.8bb/100. So what was it that made the difference? It was a number of things, but I’m going to get to that in a minute.

First I want to apologize again to Rondavu who actually gave me the best advice I could have received. I was in such a terrible place mentally that I completely berated him and purposefully tried to make him look bad. I’m embarrassed for what I did, and that’s how I screwed up again, hopefully stating this here will rectify it.

Anyways, basically what he was saying was right. I was making false assumptions based on the way I was running. The reason that we play bad when we run bad has to do with a number of factors. (1) When we are losing, our opponents realize it, and perceive us to be the loser at the table, the guy that can get run over and pushed around. Basically, it kills our image. (2) A lot of 6max poker has to do with our ability to gauge the frequency with which people are dealt hands, and the frequency with which people make strong hands on the flop. When these frequencies of our opponents playing back at us increase to an extent much higher than we perceive them to be likely, we start to make mistakes. (How can they have a hand EVERY TIME?) –This type of thinking. We sometimes even start to believe that they do have a hand every time. (3) We begin to believe that we can’t make hands, and if we do make them, they are going to get sucked out on. This problem extremely limits our options because we are now confined to being forced to make a hand AND for the hand to hold up in order to make money. For example, we won’t be thinking about situations where we might be able to make a profitable play, we are too focused on trying to make a hand and get it to hold up–It kind of makes us play in a very formulaic and extremely straightforward/easily-readable way.

When you have all these factors working against you, it’s near impossible to play good poker. Your opponents are going to have you leveled, or you are going to end up leveling yourself. This is what happened to me, I leveled myself. Some poster here has it in his quote that says “ISF - You can only own yourself at 25nl” or something like that. This is dead on, and it’s what I did. So anyways, I was going to get to exactly what I changed that allowed me to start winning again confidently at a good winrate….

I stopped running completely awful for one. (I wasn’t running as bad as I was tilting, but once I stopped the tilting, the bad run lessened it’s effects on me. Obviously this isn’t of any use to you if you are struggling at this limit, but I am getting there. Once I stopped running so badly and tilting, I regained my confidence, it actually happened while I was doing a coaching session, and explaining exactly how I go about analyzing a hand street by street. Beginning with preflop, and putting all of the pieces together in order to determine the range of villains most likely holdings, and then explaining the action I take depending on the strength I perceive of that range in relation to my perceived range. This probably isn’t helping either if you are inexperienced. To put it as simply as I can, all I have been doing is being patient, waiting for decent cards, and playing them in good position. I stopped generalizing my opponents and trying to adjust my play to how I think the average 25nl player might play. I was too worried about them when the biggest problem was I wasn’t worried about myself.

It’s just solid poker is all it is. Say I raise 9Tcc in the CO, the BB cold calls, flop comes 5c7d8h. He checks, I bet, he calls. Turn is Kc. He checks, I bet, he folds pretty often. I focused on trying to get max value on each hand rather than trying to induce my opponent to bluff me. If I have TT open LP, am called in the blinds, flop is Jh5s4s. He checks I c-bet, he calls. Okay now let’s think about his range. He is probably not the type of player to raise on a draw, so a flush draw and 67 are parts of his range, maybe 50%. A jack is definitely a portion of his range, maybe 20%. The other 30% of his range will be comprised of A high hands, and pairs 99-66 (as well as 5x and 4x). So what I want to do is get as much value as I can from the % of hands I’m beating, while not losing too much to those that I’m behind. So this hand is going to play out like this very very often …. I bet flop, he flat calls, pretend the turn is innocuous, like a duece of clubs. I’d now estimate how likely it is he is on a draw and how likely he will call a turn bet w/ hands like 66-99. In most cases I’m going to opt to check behind since if I bet the turn it’s going to appear to villain that I am aiming for 3 streets of value, and if I get called his range is going to be weighted much heavier towards a J than those other holdings (of course unless we know villain to be a HUGE station, which a lot of players at 25nl are — in which case we’d probably want to try for 3 streets of value). But most of the time I’m probably going to c/b (CHECK BEHIND) the turn and call a bet on the river if he makes one, or bet myself maybe half pot if he checks to me.

I know this advice is far from a magic pill, but that’s the point, there is no magic pill, it’s just learning and using basic fundamentals. Of course these things change the higher in stakes you move, so I had lost this part of my game for quite a while, I had my head in the clouds in theory, over-thinking things, trying to outplay my opponents. HUGE MISTAKES. Your opponents are bad enough that they will outplay themselves, you aren’t required to force them to do this, that’s why it’s supposed to be so easy. Just bet when your hands have good equity, and don’t try to make hero plays like big bluffs or big calls, those are what will cost you the most in the long run. And don’t slowplay. Slowplaying is basically a huge mistake here… When you have a bunch of opponents who call too much, why would you ever want to pass up on free money? I was idiotic to say you should slowplay your big hands in the last post. It was a result of never getting any action when I did make a big hand, and not focusing on getting max value. Every time I had a big hand I wanted to win a stack, this is a terrible mentality to have at these stakes.

I know this is a bit preemptive here but I really don’t know what else to say about it. My goal now is to make 20 buy ins a level and slowly move back up in stakes. I’m only 6 or so buy ins from getting out of 25nl and moving up to 50. When my Rakeback kicks in in the middle of the month things should become much easier. I expect to be at 100nl by the end of the month, possibly even 200 if I run well.

Anyways, thanks for reading and GL"

As for my current situation, I'm doing much better now with a healthy winrate at 200nl --trying to break through up to 400, but have been hit with some bad beats and a few spews each time I try to take the leap back up, but I think if I continue to re-build my confidence by successively posting a solid winrate at 200nl I will eventually do it. Though I readily admit most of my big run in late December was initiated by a heater, there were still some good things I was doing--what my task is now, is to figure out what exactly were the good things, stick to those, and weed out the bad ones.

Anyways, hope you enjoyed this--I think it's already a good thing since it helped just one person (me), but if it helps even just one more, then I think it will be a success.

Thanks for reading and GL,
Marshall


Comments (9)

I dunno, I think it's somethin Dr. Dre or Ice Cube said, so it obviously can't be a bad title for this blog post. No matter what you wanna call it, it is what it is, and it doesn't matter how it gets taken by the community.

"I know you are very dedicated and you study hard and I think you have what it takes to do very well in this game, but poker is much more ruthless then starcraft for example. No one gives a shit about you, they only care about themselves, and really theres no truer statement then that.

Beleive me Marshall I KNOW how much it sucks to be down, and I have a good idea of how you feel, I know how much it sucks to be kicked when you are already down but its almost second natrue in this game.. The point I am trying to make thought, For every decision you make in life or in poker you should expect every possible outcome so theres no surprises and everything is anticipated." -- This was sent to me in a PM after one of my previous posts, and I didn't ask for permission to post it here so I'm going to leave the name anonymous.

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. A lot. About poker, my life, my future, my goals. I wasn't doing any of this from the start of the year up until about mid March. The reason I wasn't thinking was because I was delusional. I think the anonymous comment above illustrates a pretty good example of how delusional, and needy (I'm about to get to this) I was.

I created this blog after a HUGE heater. I believed it was because of my 'superior skill' but what really happened is that for four months, the planets aligned and everything I did worked, regardless if it was good play or bad play. I'm stubborn, and my stubborness is rooted in how strong my belief system is. Meaning, if I think something is true, you'd be hard pressed to convince me otherwise, many can attest to this, particularly my roommate.

By playing hundreds of thousands of hands, I gained an elementary understanding of the game, nothing of the level to which I claimed and boasted in my previous posts. Thinking about the real reason I created this blog, it was an attempt to gain recognition and praise. I posed it as a means to help others, slyly concealing my neediness in regards to attention. Of course it wasn't all just a ploy, a few posts were sincere, but because my reasons were incongruent with the statements made, I suffered tremendously. A few of you were quick to figure this out, and what can I say but eat my words and admit you were right.

However, a lot of good has ended up coming out of it. I understand now how petty and unfulfilling the need to be glorified or recognized is. It's immature and it really makes no difference what anyone thinks about myself or what I have to say, except myself. For this reason, I am going to re-continue to blog here. I went back and re-read a lot of the things I posted, as well as the responses I received, I was able to use these as a barometer in terms of gauging my own personal growth--which should be the real reason I blog in the first place--everything else should be taken with a grain of salt.

So as of now, my new mission statement is this: I will write posts to document my struggles and successes in poker while continually outlining thoughts I have about the game, and how my life is affected by the game (and vice versa).

I think this is plenty for now. In my next post, I intend to cover my brief stint blogging at flopturnriver.com, which illustrates extremely well the emotional affects and strain this game can put on anyone unprepared, and the completely ridiculous assumptions it had caused me and could cause anyone to make. I'll also outline where I'm at in my game right now and what steps/goals I need to take and set for the future.

As always, thanks for reading, and GL,
Marshall


Comments (17)