The Bookshop Romeo

This is the first instalment of Range Rover, a new weekly column on poker I am writing for the Economic Times.

A young man enters a bookshop. He loves books. And he’s lonely. He spots a gorgeous young lady browsing a book by an author he loves, Milan Kundera. Their eyes meet; she looks away shyly. He decides to seize the day. He walks over to her, but just as he begins speaking—‘Hi, that’s one of my favourite Kundera…’—a hunky young man appears on the other side of this lady, and she squeezes his arm as he apologizes for having made her wait. Then they both turn to our young man. ‘Yes?’ she asks.

‘Erm, I was just saying, that’s my favourite Kundera book.’

They look at him blankly. ‘Who’s Kundera?’ she says.

And at this awkward moment, dear reader, I have a question for you: Did our hero make a mistake?

The answer to that lies in mathematics. And I will try and explain it through poker. Welcome to this first instalment of Range Rover, my weekly column on poker. The column is meant not for the complete layman, but for the hobbyist who knows the basics of the game. My reflections will be about the technical and mental aspects of the game – and also, sometimes,  about life itself. This first piece, with particular relevance to our Bookshop Romeo, is about ranges.

A mistake beginning players often make is of putting their opponent on a particular hand, and then seeing if they’re ahead or behind – instead of putting them on a range of hands, and calculating their equity against that range. For example, say you raise from early position with AKcc. Villain calls from the button. The flop comes Ks7h2h. You make a continuation bet, villain raises. What do you do?

In this spot, you need to figure out what range of hands villain could be doing this with. If he is a super-safe ABC nit who will only dare to raise here with hands that beat you—basically sets, AA and another AK, as no two-pair combo calls preflop—then your equity against his range is around 20%, and you must fold. If he is spewy-aggro and his range includes all flush draws and worse kings like KQ, KJ and KTs, plus some air, then you are around 60% in the hand and should continue. Now, sometimes you will call the spewy player and find that he has 22, but that doesn’t make your call a mistake: you made the right decision, but ran into the top of his range. Similarly, if you fold to the nit and he shows AK, it doesn’t mean you made a mistake there either.  The result of the hand has nothing to do with the correctness of your decision.

A beginning player would have put his opponent on a particular hand, and congratulated or berated himself based on whether he won or lost. But that would be a mistake, and there is a reason poker players are told not to be results-oriented. Your goal in poker should just be to make +ev decisions against your opponent’s ranges, and not think of immediate outcomes. To get the money in as a 60% favourite will make you rich in the long term – but losing four such hands in a row, as does happen, should not lead you to question the inherent correctness of your decisions. To paraphrase Krishna from the Bhagawad Gita, do the right thing, don’t worry about the fruits of your actions.

Let’s go back to our Bookshop Romeo. He is single, and sees a girl he likes. From the range of possible personality types, he narrows her down to potentially compatible ones because she is in a bookshop and holds a Kundera book. Furthermore, considering that the momentary embarrassment of being snubbed is not much of a cost to bear, given the benefits that are possible, he is getting practically infinite odds to make his move. So he does. It ends badly, but it wasn’t a mistake. Indeed, to not approach the girl would have been an error. He lost this hand – but he played it right.