JV'S KILLER POKER:
Comfort

BY: John Vorhaus

People play poker for money. It's more than a way of keeping score. It's the thing that gives the game meaning. As you know from your own experience, if you don't play for money, you don't take the game seriously, and you don't make good decisions because, hell, who cares? So we play for money to ensure that our decisions have consequences. That's what makes poker worthwhile; that's what makes poker poker.

But after a while, you build up a tolerance to money. Around the kitchen table of your youth, you could lose 65� in a poker game and feel like the world had come to an end. Now you can endure swings of hundreds of dollars or more without batting an eye. You've become more comfortable, over time, with higher stakes.

The problem is, if you become too comfortable, you once more stop caring. What's the difference how much you drop in a $1-2 game? The stakes are so low that there's no real incentive for playing well. This is why high stakes players who come slumming in low-limit games often play so poorly. The money doesn't matter, so they don't bother to bring their A game.

The trick, then, is finding the right money level for your game and your comfort. You want the money to matter enough to focus your attention, but not to matter so much that you end up playing scared. Why? Because if you're scared, you play differently. Outside your comfort zone, things quickly fall apart.

Example: You've been kicking it at the $4-8 level, and you decide to take a shot at (oh, let's be outrageously brave here) $20-40. Maybe you've never played $20-40 before; maybe you have. In any case, you don't play this game regularly, and it does not escape your attention that a single hand at this limit can win you more (or cost you more) than an entire session at $4-8. You tell yourself not to be scared. Maybe even you aren't scared. But you're a little uncomfortable. Admit it, you are.

No problem, you tell yourself: Just screw down your starting requirements, pay attention, play quality cards, concentrate, and you'll do just fine.

Then this hand comes up:

You're in late position with A-Q suited. It's folded around to you, and you figure this is a perfect opportunity to assault the blinds, so you plunk down a raise. The button and the small blind fold. Perfect! You wouldn't mind stealing the blinds here. It would do wonders for your comfort. Alas, the big blind calls. He eyes you curiously as he does so. Does he recognize you as a newbie? Does he know that you're outside your comfort zone? Maybe. Maybe not. He does know this for sure: You're not a regular, because he's a regular, and he's never seen you before.

Unfortunately for you, he has a program bet (a pre-determined betting sequence or strategy) that he uses on players he's never seen before. What he does is, he check-calls any flop, then check-raises any turn. He can do this because he's comfortable at this limit, and if the gambit doesn't work, he won't really miss the money. So this is what he does to you, and unless you've flopped a monster, his program bet will put you in a bad place. If you fold now, you look weak, passive, exploitable. If you raise back, or even call, you're committing a lot more money than you're used to committing on any single bet. Trapped thus between Scylla and Charybdis (look it up), you throw your hand away. Better that than your money, right?

Just to cheese you off (for this is part of his programmed strategy) your opponent shows you the rags with which he bluffed you out. Now you feel hot, embarrassed, ridiculous... in a word, uncomfortable. Where does your session go from here?

The next hand, you pick up A-K suited, but you're afraid to raise with it, afraid to leave yourself open to the same sort of attack you just endured. So you flat-call instead, hoping to flop big and become the trapper instead of the trappee. The flop comes T-x-x, and your now-nemesis bets right out. Does he have a ten? He easily could, given that you didn't raise him off a moderate holding pre-flop. But you've got overcards, so you call. And call again on the turn. By the time the river comes down, you're looking at a ragged board with no ace and no king, and your only hope of winning the hand is if your opponent is on a stone bluff. He checks, inducing you to bet, which you do because you're damned if you're gonna show fear. He calls, delighted to take his top-pair, good-kicker against anything you have. He wins, you lose. That's not bad luck. That's bad play. That's letting your own discomfort dictate your choices. Next thing you know, you're picking up your chips (before you lose them all) and heading back down to the $4-8 game, hoping to recoup both your losses and your dignity.

So what's the solution? Never move up? Stay at your same comfort level forever? That hardly seems satisfactory. If we don't grow we die, right? Okay, so here are some things you can do to make that jump to the next comfort level less hazardous to your (financial and emotional) health.

1. Study the game. Before you plunge big money into a big bet game, take some time to watch, really watch, the action at the table. Familiarize yourself with the players and their tactics (and their program bets). I'm not talking about a few hands, either; I'm talking hours of watching instead of playing, so that when it's your turn to take a seat in the game, you don't feel like a total fish out of water (or even just a total fish).

2. Refine your knowledge. Go back to your poker texts and read up on mid-limit to high-limit play. They do play differently up there, and the moves you use at $4-8 and $6-12 just won't cut it at $15-30 and above. Low limit play, in general, is about playing the cards. Up there in the stratosphere (or even the troposphere) it's more about playing the players than the cards. Until you're ready to embrace this distinction, you're not ready to move up.

3. Fortify your bankroll. Make sure you have enough money so that you don't have to play scared. You absolutely will not succeed at higher limits until they don't seem like higher limits to you, because scared money will skew your decisions every time. You'll check when you should bet, call when you should raise and (paradoxically) raise when you should fold. So come well armed or don't come at all.

It's worth working on your game and your mindset to the point where you can move up. Both the riches and the richness of poker await you there. And if you're nervous, just remember: Once you learn to swim, it doesn't matter how deep the water gets.

(John Vorhaus is author of the KILLER POKER series and News Ambassador for UltimateBet.com.)