Decisions, Not Results

The headline of this article is probably the most important principle governing my approach to the game, namely that the outcome of individual hands is completely irrelevant to your long-term success or failure as a poker player. Poker is about decision-making, and due to the luck element of the game, sometimes you lose even when you make the right decisions all along. Most people have a strong tendency to evaluate their success or failure on basis of the outcome. This is bad. Really bad. You should be able to assess your decisions without taking the eventual outcome into account at all. Only by doing this, you will improve your decision-making, and the decision-making is the factor behind your results that you actually control (luck being the other part that you cannot control).

Good decision-making is about taking bets where odds are in your favor and rejecting those that are not. And the assessment of what consist a good bet and what doesn't lies at the heart of all situations at the poker table. But the assessment is not always easy. It involves calculating the size of the reward you stand to receive from the pot, if you end up winning it, and comparing it to the chance you think of ending up winning the pot. If you figure that you stand a 3 to 1 chance of winning the pot, and you have to pay one big bet into a pot already consisting of 5 betting units, it is evident that the bet will have a positive expectation for you. If you placed the bets 4 times you'd stand to lose $1 three times and win $5 one time, giving you a net positive expectation of 50 cent per time you take the bet. Notice that your expectation is positive no matter whether the outcome happens to be one of the three times you stand to lose, or the one where you stand to win the pot. The more times you take this bet, the more you stand to win. And you should acknowledge this fact even when you end up losing a hand. Also you should realize that while luck plays a huge role in making you a winner or a loser over a single session, you are probably going to come back to the tables for the rest of your life, so you are in no hurry to win. If you keep making the right decisions, the results will come eventually.

But as I stated initially, mankind tend to be too obsessed with results, to follow this line of thinking at all times. If you question this statement, you only need to look at the number of bad beat posts at the forum. These are all about situations where the underdog caught lucky to win the pot through a taking a bet where the odds did not stand in relation to the long shot odds of him ending up winning the pot. When a bad beat happens the loser always is the winner. That's right. He might lose a big pot on this particular instance, but given the fact that his opponent took a bet with very poor odds, he can be expected to do so again, and eventually this will cause him to lose.

Sure, sucker punches hurt like hell. But don't let that cloud your mind and deteriorate your decision making. The way I get a bad beat out of my system is that I immediately consider a situation where I have to play 100 hands against the sucker who drew out on me. 50 times I would hold his hand and 50 times my own. The river card would be re-dealt every time. If I come out of this exercise as a winner, I consider myself a winner, even though I just lost a big pot. If I come out as a loser, I take note of a bad play I just made, and try not to make it anymore.

In the bad beat situations, I come out ahead in this exercise, but especially in smaller pots, I often make mistakes. To me there is nothing wrong in making mistakes. If we were meant to be perfect we'd have been Gods- not men. This being the case, we had better learn to live with the fact that we are imperfect creatures. But this is NOT an excuse to forego doing everything we can to prevent repeating the same mistakes again and again. Yet the process of admitting that we have made a mistake seem to be very painful for many people. So instead of acknowledging it, they try to hide it, which in turn prevents them from learning. Poker is not about being good; it's about getting better. In a recent interview with world-class player Phil Ivey, he stated that he still spends a lot of time on learning more about the game. If this is the case for one of the regulars at the largest tables in the world, why shouldn't it be all right for you to acknowledge that you make mistake, and probably never will learn all there is to be learned?

Acknowledging your mistakes, no matter how small they might appear is therefore a serious issue for all poker players. In my rookie days I applied a rather simple approach to this that seems to have helped me tremendously. I simply did the 100-hand exercise after every hand I was involved in, and kept a mental record of how many big bets per hour I lost (or extra bets I failed to win) due to decisions I made where I should have known better. I kept books on my hourly rate, but also on this "shadow rate," which told me something about the scope for improvement. And believe me - most players, even good ones, make mistakes worth well over their actual hourly rate. If you acknowledge them, you have taken a big first step in plugging the leaks in your game.

As a matter of fact, keeping accurate records of your performance is another strong tool in this process. You want to know exactly how you are doing at different games and you want to compare your game over long time periods, in order to have some point of reference when you are running particularly good or bad (due to the run of the cards).

Finally I'd like to take some time discussing a fact that most players seem to have a hard time embracing. Your long-term prospects stand and fall with your ability to make the right decisions on which bets you take and which you refuse. A good bet is one where the pot is laying you better odds then the chance of you winning the bet. Whether you win or lose a particular bet has no implications whatsoever for your mathematical expectation. Lets say you find yourself holding pocket aces in two situations. Which of these situations do you consider the most favorable?

In the first situation everybody folds but the big blind (who has a random hand), and you play the pot heads up. Statistically pocket aces stand an 85.4% chance of holding up against a single random hand.

In the second situation all other 9 players chose to see the flop. Your chances of winning against 9 other players are only 31.1%. This actually makes you a significant underdog against the lot of them.

The classic argument stated when people complain that low limit games are unbeatable, boils down to the fact that good starting hands rarely hold up. And as you can see from situation two this is absolutely correct. Nonetheless, the assertion that this makes low limit games hard to beat is rubbish. As a matter of fact Situation 2 is a much more profitable bet than Situation 1, even though you will win a bigger proportion of the pots in Situation 1 than you will win in Situation 2. Again, poker is about decisions, not results, and it's about winning money, not winning pots. If we for simplicity of the argument consider a situation where there is only one betting round after which the flop, turn and river is dealt with no more betting, you will win $1 seventeen times in situation one and lose $1 three times. This equals a mathematical expectation of 70 cents per time you play your hand.

In Situation 2 you stand to win approximately $9 three times and to lose $1 seven times. This equals a mathematical expectation of $2 per time you play your hand. So in Situation 2 you stand to have a net win of $200 when you have received pocket aces, whereas you only stand to have won $70 in Situation 1, regardless of the fact that you have won more then twice as many pots in Situation 1 than in situation 2. This should illustrate very clearly why mathematical expectation is the right tool for judging your decisions and number of pots won aren't. It also shows that in loose no foldem hold'em games you should expect to win fewer but bigger pots, than in a tight game.

Acknowledgment: Thanks to Leigh Lightfoot for taking the time to proof reading my articles.

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