Range Rover

This is the 12th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

One of the most important lessons I learnt as a live cash game player was to treat all cash games as one long session that lasts a lifetime. This helps us avoid the two classic bad habits that a live pro can develop: playing too tight when one is up during a session, to preserve profit; and playing too loose and recklessly when one is down, to recover losses. Ideally, you should try to play each hand in the most profitable way you can, without regard to whether you’re up or down, or what stage of the session you’re playing in. That is analogous to a batsman playing ‘one ball at a time’ in cricket, as the cliché goes. But it is easier said than done.

We might pride ourselves, as a species, on our superior intelligence, but however much we aspire to be perfectly rational creatures, we are wired to be emotional beings. Theodore Dreiser once described civilization as “still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer guided by instinct, scarcely human in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.” I’m not sure if Dreiser played this great American game, but in every session of poker that I play, Beast battles Human. It’s fascinating as a spectator, and frustrating as a participant.

It’s easy to say that we should approach every hand with the same cool-headed dispassion, but there is a fundamental difference between the start of a session and the end of it. At the start, most players usually have between 100 to 250 big blinds. By the end, it is common for the average stack to be 1000bb, and for a couple of the big stacks to be approaching or surpassing 2000bb. In technical terms, decisions get harder as stacks grow bigger: at 100bb, I’m always content to raise with a pair-and-flush draw and go buckwild; at 1200bb, near the end of a 22-hour-session, I’m inclined to be more careful. I’ll gladly go broke with AA at 100bb; but if I stack off with it at 1200bb, I probably made a big mistake somewhere. Stack sizes make decisions exponentially more complex, and the consequences of mistakes more brutal.

But that’s a banal point. Of course it’s technically harder to play big stacks than small ones. But it’s the mental aspect that makes this a tough game. Remember, there is real money at stake here, and a bad day in poker feels much worse than in any other profession because in poker you actually lose money. In no other profession, if you have a bad day on June 25, can you lose your entire salary for April and May as well. Losses are felt viscerally, and taken personally. We rant at the guy who gives us a bad beat. We feel smug and superior when we’re running good. As a session progresses past the 12-hour mark, and people start getting tired, the beast starts taking over. We crave action, revenge, retribution, dominance. We want the biggest dick in the room.

I have seen grown men cry at a poker table. I have seen respected middle-aged businessmen tear up playing cards and demand a change of deck and dealer. I have seen (and felt) anger and humiliation and contempt and loathing and desperation. If sport reveals character, poker plonks a mirror in front of us and says, “Here you are, your ugly majesty. Where are your clothes?”

The longer the session, the deeper the stacks, the more there is at stake, the harder it gets. In your tumult of inevitable emotions, you’re supposed to be calm and rational, and exploit the infirmities of others. You’re supposed to do math, set up metagame, play ‘optimally’. You’re supposed to fight the beast – but the beast is who you are.

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Previously on Range Rover:

Unlikely is Inevitable
The Colors of Money
Finding Your Edge
Raking Bad
Om Namah Volume
Make No Mistake…
Kitne Big Blind The
Sweet Dopamine
The Balancing Act
The Numbers Game
The Bookshop Romeo

This is the 10th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

If you read a lot of fantasy fiction, you would be familiar with parallel universes. In this real world, unfortunately, life is mundane and singularly singular, even if we do have the escape of fiction to console us. That said, there is one kind of person who does, indeed should, inhabit parallel universes: the poker pro. Poker players reside in three worlds, with three separate currencies: namely real money, Sklansky dollars and G-Bucks.

On Planet Earth, we play in real money: the dollars or rupees we actually win at the poker table. On Planet Sklansky, we play in Sklansky dollars. Named after David Sklansky, these measure the amount of money you would have won from a pot based on your equity in it. For example, you are in the big blind, and the small blind goes all in with 30bb. You have AKs, so you snap. He has AQo. He hits a queen and wins the pot. Now, you lost 30bb in the first universe you inhabit. But you had 75% equity, which translates to 45bb in a 60bb pot. Given that you put it in 30bb, that means that you made a profit of 15 Sklansky dollars in the second universe. The hand was played profitably.

The concept of G-Bucks, named after Phil Galfond, is a little more evolved. As Galfond defines it, ‘instead of taking your hand and seeing how it does against your opponent’s hand, you take the entire range of your hand and see how it does against his hand.’ (Your range against your opponent’s hand, and not your hand against his range, as some people misinterpret it.) Here’s an example from a recent hand I played:

I was at a cash game with a 500bb stack in the cutoff. An early-position loose-passive player with a similar stack raised to 5bb. I flatted with 75hh. The button, with a stack of 125bb, flatted, as did the small blind. The pot now had 21bb. The flop came Kh6h7c, giving me a pair and flush draw. It checked to me, I bet 15bb, the button made a small raise to 35bb, the other two guys folded, and, with effective stacks at 120bb, I shoved.

The button was a player who plays draws passively and has two seemingly contradictory leaks of always raising top pair for information and never folding top pair on a wet board. Given that I have little fold equity (FE),  I would only repop him with a value hand. My range here, thus, comprises made hands like AA, AK, 76, sets, and all combo draws such as straight-and-flush draws and pair-and-flush draws. I would never raise with a bare flush draw here, because I don’t have enough FE. The button tanked, said ‘I think you have a flush draw,’ and called. He had KTo, which held, and he doubled up. Now, let’s look at an earnings chart here.

In terms of real dollars, starting at the flop, I lost 120bb. In Sklansky dollars, as my hand had 52% equity against his hand, I gained 15.7bb. (The pot was 261, 52% of which is 135.7 minus my 120 that went in on the flop.) In the G-Bucks universe, though, I did really well: my range was 75.2% against his hand, which means I benefited by 76bb. He had made a huge mistake against my range, and though he got congratulated for his call by everyone at the table, I was quite pleased with myself.

In the long run, your score in these three universes will converge. But in the meantime, you will play much better if you focus on winning G-Bucks. Thinking of actual dollars won or lost makes you too results-oriented; and strange as it may sound, Sklansky dollars also focuses on outcome, in terms of which hand from your range you actually happen to have. You want to think in ranges, induce errors from your opponent and make as many G-Bucks as you can. Real money will follow, and you will have the best of all worlds.

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Previously on Range Rover:

Finding Your Edge
Raking Bad
Om Namah Volume
Make No Mistake…
Kitne Big Blind The
Sweet Dopamine
The Balancing Act
The Numbers Game
The Bookshop Romeo

This is the ninth installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

‘Where is your edge?’ When you play poker, it is useful to ask yourself this question all the time. You make money at a poker table only when you have an edge over the other players. But how do you find it, and how can you quantify it? One useful prism through which to view this subject is a concept I was first introduced to by Tommy Angelo’s magnificent book, The Elements of Poker: Reciprocality.

‘Before anything flows,’ Angelo writes, ‘there must be a difference. Between different elevations, water flows. Between different pressures, air flows. Between different poker players, money flows.’ Angelo defines reciprocality as ‘any difference between you and your opponents that affects your bottom line.’ He writes, ‘Reciprocality says that when you and your opponent would do the same thing in a given situation, no money moves, and when you do something different, it does.’

Let me illustrate that with an example: You have A9s on the button and call a UTG raise from a straightforward ABC nit. The flop comes A82r, and you have top pair, weak kicker and a backdoor flush draw. He bets, you call. The turn is an offsuit J, the river is another brick, and he basically triple-barrels. Now, given player profile, you fold either turn or river. But you know that had the positions been reversed, then playing against you with A9s, he would have called all three streets because he can’t fold top pair. This, then, would be one difference between you and him. This would be a winning hand for you, even though you lost money on it, because you lost less than your opponent would have in your place. Since over time, in the mythical long run, everybody will get all hands and experience all situations, that makes you a long-term winner over him. This is reciprocality.

Note that you should evaluate hands based on what the most profitable play was, not what the result of it was. For example, you call a UTG raise with JJ, and the flop comes AJ9r with an offsuit 2 on the turn and 6 on the river. The optimal play here is to get as much of your stack in as possible with middle set. Now, if your opponent has AA for top set, you get stacked, which is fine, because over time you make far more here against AK, AQ, AJ, 99 etc than you lose to AA. (You’re playing ranges, not hands.) Someone who is more timid, or likes to slowplay when he shouldn’t, might lose less money than you in this hand. But that doesn’t mean he won the reciprocality battle: you took the more profitable line here. The expected value (EV) of your actions matters, not the outcome.

Angelo makes the excellent point that reciprocality matters not just in terms of the hands you play, but in every aspect of the game. There’s information reciprocality: do you give off less information than your opponents? There’s bankroll reciprocality: do you manage your bankroll better? There’s quitting reciprocaility: are you better at figuring out when to quit a session? And so on. Even something seemingly unrelated to poker like having a healthy diet or getting adequate sleep could give you reciprocality brownie points that translate into profit. Hell, your edge in poker could lie in avoiding oily food and carbonated drinks.

Reciprocality can be a useful prism through which to view the game. It can make you more observant and aware of your opponents’ weaknesses and mistakes, while helping you cut down on your own. Also, implicit in the concept is the realisation that what matters is not the cards dealt to us, but how we play them. In life, which is inherently unfair, we are dealt just one hand and have just the one lifetime in which to make the most of it. Whining about it is sub-optimal; get off your butt and do something today that makes a difference to your life.

Previously on Range Rover:

Raking Bad
Om Namah Volume
Make No Mistake…
Kitne Big Blind The
Sweet Dopamine
The Balancing Act
The Numbers Game
The Bookshop Romeo

This is the eighth installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

I’ve spent a lot of time inside casinos in the last few years – mainly in Macau and Goa – but there’s only one game I’ve ever played there: poker. In all other games, you’re playing against the house, and the odds are tilted in its favour. Whether it’s roulette or baccarat or slots, the house will always beat you in the long run. In poker, on the other hand, you play against other players, and it is a game of skill. For a rational gambler chasing an edge, it makes sense to only play poker inside a casino. However, you must be warned that this is not the whole truth.

Contrary to what some believe, poker is not a zero-sum game, where the winners win exactly what the losers lose. It is a negative-sum game. In every game of poker, the house takes a percentage of each pot. This is known as rake. And there is a maximum amount beyond which they cannot rake from any given pot – this is known as the cap. Now, the level of the rake has a decisive impact on how sustainable the game is. If the rake is too high, and even the skilled players cannot make a profit, then the game dies down. Abroad, over the years, the rake has evolved to that equilibrium where the house makes enough profit without taking so much money off the tables that the players disappear. This has everything to do with the cap, not the percentage of the rake.

The two main casinos in Goa where live poker is legally played are Casino Pride and Deltin Royale (formerly Casino Royale). These guys have had a duopoly on the legal poker scene in Goa for years, and their rake is therefore ridiculous: they charge 5% rake with a Rs 5000 cap. (Some casinos abroad take an hourly fee, but this hasn’t caught on yet in Asia.) The problem here is not the rake: casinos in Macau and Vegas also charge 5%, in some cases even more. The problem is the cap. In a 100-200 game, a 5000 cap amounts to 25 big blinds. This is, to my knowledge, by far the biggest rake cap in the world.  The standard cap is between 2 to 5 big blinds, and never, ever close to 25.

The rake, when it is too much, bleeds money off the table. If you win a big pot in a heads-up battle, since half the pot is the money you put in, you’re effectively being taxed at 10%. Everyone’s stack gets affected by this continuous taxation, and if after a few hours of playing you stack someone, his stack is much less than what it would have been if not for rake, so its effects go deep into the game. A friend of mine once played a heads-up game with an opponent in Royale, and they both sat with 1 lakh each. So there were 2 lakhs on the table. My friend stacked him three hours later and looked at his stack: 1.10 lakhs. The rest went to rake. I once played a session in Goa where after eight hours of play, all the players were stuck. Needless to say, I don’t play in Goa anymore.

The Goa guys get away with it because there is a steady tourist influx that is a captive audience on their boats and doesn’t know better. So they don’t have to worry about damage to the ecosystem. Underground games in the Indian cities have lower rakes than Goa, so winning in them is easier. Regardless, the effects of rake are such, worldwide, that most players are losers and most winning players are marginal winners. If you take poker seriously, you need to be aware of how the rake affects you. To be a big winner, you not only need to beat the other players, you need to beat the rake.

Since I began writing this column a few weeks ago, one of my big themes has been the lessons one can learn about life from poker. However, there is one sense in which life is dramatically different from poker, and indeed from all other sports, which tend to be zero-sum. Life is a positive-sum game. You don’t win at someone else’s cost, you generally win when they also win. Take free markets, for example: every transaction has two happy people at the end of it, believing they are better off for it. (John Stossel memorably called this the ‘double thank-you moment’.) No one rakes our happiness – so no moping around today, go and hug someone you love.

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Previously on Range Rover:

Om Namah Volume
Make No Mistake…
Kitne Big Blind The
Sweet Dopamine
The Balancing Act
The Numbers Game
The Bookshop Romeo

This is the seventh installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

‘In the long run we are all dead,’ John Maynard Keynes once said. Poker players are tormented by this truth. To a far greater extent than in other sports, they depend on the long run for their skill to manifest itself. But damn, it takes really long to come.

Let me illustrate that with a thought experiment. Say you run three tournaments, of tennis, chess and poker, with 100 recreational players of equal ability in each. The chance of any random player winning the tournament would logically be 1 in 100 times, or 1%. If you remove one player from each tournament and replace him with Rafa Nadal, Magnus Carlsen and Phil Ivey respectively, what would their chances be? Barring injury or natural catastrophe, I think it would be fair to expect Nadal and Carlsen to win their tournaments 100% of the time, maybe 99%. Ivey would at best win the poker tournament 5% of the time. That’s actually optimistic, and represents a return of five times that of the average player, but an alien watching the tournament from outer space would have no way to tell who the best poker player in the world is.

This enhanced role of luck is what keeps losing players playing – every dog really does have his day in poker – and makes the game so juicy. But it means that skillful players have to do something about that damn long run. And there’s only one thing to do: to play as much as possible, so that the long run comes closer. In poker terminology, this is called ‘putting in volume’, and every professional poker player could practically chant this mantra to keep himself going: Om Namah Volume.

This is why online poker is such a big deal. From the recreational player’s point of view, it allows convenience and ease of access – he can play anytime and anywhere he feels like. From a professional’s point of view, he can put in volume. In an hour, you will be dealt around three times the number of hands at an online table than a live table. Plus, you can play many tables at the same time. Therefore, if you are playing 10 tables at a time, you get dealt 30 times the number of hands than you would over an equivalent live session. This has two consequences. One, the long run is compressed, and variance (the role of luck) is evened out much sooner. Two, you learn much faster in this environment, as you are getting so much practice and exposure to situations.

Someone who grinds online multitable tournaments (MTTs) for a living will probably play 30 to 40 tournaments in a single night, and have around 10 tables running at any given time. To further counter variance, he will probably be staked by a staking stable, which will pay his buyins and take 50% of his profits. (This ensures a particuarly dry spell doesn’t wipe you out, and your stakers are usually expert players who also teach you out of self interest.) Indeed, the rationale behind running a staking stable is the same as that for putting in volume: ten people playing a collective 10k tournaments per month brings the long run closer than one guy playing 1k tournaments. To turn a tiny edge into a big profit, volume is essential.

Luck plays a huge part in our everyday lives as well. Being in the right place at the right time counts for a lot, and factors beyond our control will often determine the course of our lives. What’s the remedy to this? As the cliché goes, to try, try again. To put in the volume, and keep behaving optimally, even when the reward seems elusive. This is harder than it seems – Bloomberg recently estimated that 80% of all startups fail within the first 18 months, but even if you have the temperament to be a serial entrepreneur, how many businesses can you practically start till one works out? (In this context, VCs are equivalent to staking stables.) In poker, we can put in the volume and play millions of hands. In life, all we can do is keep trying and hope variance is on our side in the limited time we have. Unless you believe in reincarnation, in which case in the long run you’re just reborn.

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Previously on Range Rover:

Make No Mistake…
Kitne Big Blind The
Sweet Dopamine
The Balancing Act
The Numbers Game
The Bookshop Romeo

This is the sixth installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

Jose Mourinho would make an outstanding poker player. I’ve been reading The Special One, a controversial biography of Mourinho by Diego Torres, and in it Torres reveals the set of guidelines Mourinho prepared for his players while coaching Real Madrid. Here it is:

“1) The game is won by the team who commits fewer errors. 2) Football favours whoever provokes more errors in the opposition. 3) Away from home, instead of trying to be superior to the opposition, it’s better to encourage their mistakes. 4) Whoever has the ball is more likely to make a mistake. 5) Whoever renounces possession reduces the possibility of making a mistake. 6) Whoever has the ball has fear. 7) Whoever does not have it is thereby stronger.”

This is true not just of football, but of poker and most other sports. You do not need to do outstanding things or play brilliantly to win; you simply need to make less mistakes than your opponent. Good players will avoid making mistakes themselves; great players will provoke mistakes from others, by taking them out of their comfort zone or setting them challenges they cannot respond to.

Mourinho has mastered this art with the teams he has coached: his teams typically play deep, defend vigorously, don’t obsess about possession, and are incisive on the counter-attack, in those moments between their opponents losing possession and regaining defensive shape: pouncing on one mistake and provoking another. The counterpunchers are on the ascendance this season, and the tiki taka possession-oriented teams like Bayern and Barcelona are experiencing a temporary downswing, but their play is also tailored to inducing mistakes from their opponents: Pep Guardiola, in his time as Barcelona’s coach, would spend hours before each game watching DVDs of his forthcoming opponents to figure out weaknesses to exploit – or as a poker player would put it, leaks.

In cricket, too, captains set fields to dry up runs in areas that a batsman likes to score runs in, and instruct bowlers to attack his perceived weak areas. Batsmen counter this by moving around in the crease to put the bowler off his line and length – and maybe take a chance or two early on with flamboyant shots to rattle him off his rhythm. Exploit weaknesses; induce errors. In the ongoing IPL, the most telling statistic about Glenn Maxwell, to me, is not that he’s hit the most boundaries, but that he’s had the most wides bowled to him. With his periodic switch-hitting and use of the width of the crease, he takes bowlers out of their comfort zones.

The current world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen, is a genius at making the other guy make mistakes. Carlsen is already being considered the greatest player of all time, and the one aspect that sets him apart from anyone else in chess history is what experts call his ‘nettlesomeness’. In perfectly drawn positions, in the late middle game or endgame, he plays on and on, probing, asking difficult questions that demand perfect answers, till his opponents crack. Vishy Anand made some startling blunders during their recent World Championship match, but Carlsen said after it was over that he gave himself credit for Anand’s mistakes.

In poker, he who makes the least mistakes makes the most money. And one of the most essential skills in poker is identifying the mistakes other people make and exploiting them. Does someone fold too much? Or call too much? Or play too many hands out of position? Or give up on a pot as a preflop raiser if the first barrel is called and they haven’t hit? After spending a while at any table, you should be able to spot such tendencies and tailor your play to exploit them. You should also watch out for them in your own play.

Equally, you should learn to take players out of their comfort zones. A tight, ABC player will always get rattled if a loose-aggressive player keeps attacking him, 3-betting him light preflop, applying pressure postflop. Someone who plays scared money will panic if you keep inflating the pot against him, tempting him to stack off with marginal holdings. And so on.

Avoiding mistakes is easier said than done, of course, because to play correctly you have to know what correct play is. Sometimes that seemingly spewy check-raise on the turn with just a gutty against a capped range is the optimal play. The obvious or the safe play could be sub-optimal. Poker is a complex game where it’s incredibly hard to avoid making mistakes – but that’s true of all sports. That’s the beauty of it.

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Previously on Range Rover:

Kitne Big Blind The
Sweet Dopamine
The Balancing Act
The Numbers Game
The Bookshop Romeo

This is the fifth installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

Location: The ravines of Ramgarh. Gabbar Singh is sitting on a rock, peering into his laptop, calculating equities on Pokerstove. Kalia comes up to him. ‘Sardar,’ he says. ‘I just lost a big hand. I need to tell you about it. See, I had AJo, and…’ Gabbar puts up his hand and stops him. Tense silence. Then he growls, ‘Kitne big blind the?’

Gabbar’s response is spot on. Whenever someone tries to tell me about a hand they played without first mentioning stack sizes, I feel like picking up my rifle and making them dance on broken glass. Then, as their feet bleed and tears stream down their pathetic faces, I tell them, ‘Okay, now tell me your bad-beat story with stack of indeterminate size.’

The truth is that among the factors to consider at the start of any hand, the most basic one is stack sizes. The hand you are dealt comes later. For example, let’s consider two situations in a tournament. One, the blinds are 50-100, and you have 30k chips. Two, the blinds are 750-1500, with 200 antes,  and you have 30k chips. Even though you have the same number of chips in each case, your stack size in both cases is massively different – and this affects the hands you play. In the first situation; you have 300 big blinds (bb). In the second, you have a 20bb stack. Very deep; quite short.

Now imagine two hands: 56s and AJo. With a raise and a call behind me, at 300bb I’d much rather have 56s than AJo. At 20bb, I’d snap-fold 56s and probably shove AJo. The relative strength of the hands, and the profitability of playing them, is almost entirely determined by stack sizes. The most common mistake beginning players make, in fact, is when they play in a manner inappropriate to their stack size.

Suited connectors and small pairs, for example, make big hands infrequently, but when they do, you can stack your opponent (by busting his aces, hopefully, to put him on monkey tilt). It is correct to play them only when you have huge implied odds; i.e. enough chips behind to win. For example, you will only hit a set one in eight times. And when you do hit, you won’t get paid off every time because your opponent also has to have a hand, and the willingness to stack off with it. While some players recommend you set-mine only if you get implied odds of 15-1 or better, I’d say you need to be much deeper, especially in tough games. At 300bb, I’m always calling 22. At 20bb, or even 40bb, it makes no sense to do so. It’s the same with suited connectors.

Hands like AJo have the opposite problem: that of reverse implied odds. When you’re deep, if you do hit your hand and get action, chances are that you are behind. At 300bb, if you hit an ace and your opponent comes at you hard,you will very often be outkicked. If you hit a J, no decent player is paying you much with KJ, but KK and QQ could hurt you. You either win a small pot, or lose a big one. If stacks go in at 300bb, the winning hand will rarely be your pair. At 20bb, one pair, especially a big one, is usually enough.

The fundamental difference between cash games and tournaments is that of stack sizes. Stacks are usually deep in cash games – I like to sit 250bb deep at least. In tournaments, after the first few levels, a 50bb stack seems like a luxury, and you spend much time navigating the spaces between 30bb and 15bb. The presence of antes means that the pot is usually worth stealing, and to be a successful tournament player, you have to master how to play different stack sizes in different situations. When – and with what ranges – is it correct to shove, reshove, induce, raise-fold? You cannot be a winning player if you do not master these nuances – and it begins with understanding stack sizes.

Spoiler alert: I shall finish this column by revealing the ending of Sholay. Stacks were 300bb deep. Gabbar had AA. Jai and Viru had 56hh. The flop was K78 with two hearts. Guess what happened next.

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Previously on Range Rover:

Sweet Dopamine
The Balancing Act
The Numbers Game
The Bookshop Romeo

This is the fourth installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

If TV shows and movies can start with a song, why not a column? I present to you ‘Sweet Dopamine’ (sing to the tune of ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’):

I’ve been playing all night and I’m down a lot
I’m taking part in every single pot
There’s something inside me that just won’t let me fold
The voice of reason says it’s time to go
But I keep pushing chips, I’m in the flow
I’m addicted and I don’t like my turkey cold
Woh, oh oh, sweet dopamine
Oooaah, aah aah aah, sweet love of mine.

My neurotransmitters are out of whack
Every single time that I lose my stack
I buy in again till I’m 1000bb deep
I call king-high, I shove bottom pair
I cold-5-bet-jam with complete air
I’m losing my mind while the rest of the world is asleep
Woh, oh oh, sweet dopamine
Oooaah, aah aah aah, sweet love of mine.

How can we quit?
How can we quit now?
How can we quit (x 2)
sweet dopamine.

When I first started playing poker seriously, my friends and family thought I had gotten addicted to gambling. After a while, seduced by a combination of my arguments and my results, the latter probably more persuasive than the former, they accepted that poker was, indeed, a game of skill. But this is not the whole truth.

All games and sports involve both skill and luck. In cricket, for example, it is understood that a batsman can get a bad decision or an unplayable ball but it’s okay because, as the cliché goes, it evens out in the long run. In poker, though, the role of luck is far greater than in any other sport. Indeed, the management of luck is practically the key skill in the game, and outcomes in the short run are massively dependent on chance. (The longer the horizon of time you set for your yourself, the more skill comes into play.) If you watch players at a poker table in action, it will be hard for you to immediately make out whether they are trying to master a deeply complex game for profit – or whether they’re addicted to gambling.

Gambling addiction is a huge problem across the world, and studies in the west estimate that up to 4% of the population could be ‘problem gamblers’. I don’t use the term ‘addiction’ in a colloquial sense, but a medical one. While the American Psychiatric Association used to classify pathological gambling as an ‘impulse-control disorder’, it changed its mind a year ago and reclassified it as an addiction. The reason for this is the realisation that, like addictions to drugs or alcohol or porn, gambling addiction has a biological basis.

When a gambling addict makes an action—presses a button on a slot machine, pulls a lever, places a bet – the process that takes place in his brain is pretty much the same as in that of a cocaine addict getting a hit. There is a spurt of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure that has been described as ‘the master molecule of addiction’. As time goes by, there is less and less dopamine released by the brain in response to the action or the hit, so we need more of it. More cocaine, more gambling, in a circle that never ends.

(I am simplifying it a bit. There is a lot more to dopamine, which has been called ‘the Kim Kardashian of molecules’, than addiction; and the biological processes behind addiction are most complex than just spurts of dopamine. Scientific American recently said that ‘pathological gamblers and drug addicts share many of the same genetic predispositions for impulsivity and reward seeking’, and that ‘gambling and drugs change the brain in similar ways’. )

Now, here’s the thing: every time we sit down to play poker, no matter how skillful we might be, and how scientifically we approach the game, we are also experiencing those rushes of dopamine in the brain. And in our weaker moments, we are prone to behaving like addicts: playing longer than we should, playing too many hands, craving action, and so on. Sometimes we rationalise this behaviour. (‘I called because he was polarised there’ is my favourite excuse.) Sometimes we know we’re doing something wrong but just can’t help ourselves.

Ever since humankind has existed, our biggest battle has been against our own selves, with our rational self fighting to take control of our primitive self.  We are a collage of often contradictory instincts and impulses, some encoded in our genes, some mandated by whatever chemical processes happen to be taking place inside of us. So here’s the most important lesson I have learnt at the poker table: to be successful at this game, you don’t just have to beat others, you have to master your own self.

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Previously on Range Rover:

The Balancing Act
The Numbers Game
The Bookshop Romeo

This is the third installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

If Jimi Hendrix was a poker player, he might well have come up with an album called ‘Are You Balanced?’ The higher you rise up the stakes, the more you hear about balance from people. ‘Are you balanced in this spot?’ ‘I called because I thought, no way you’re balanced here.’ And so on. What does balance in poker really mean?

Balance has all to do with game theory, so let’s first look at it in the context of another game: Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS). You are asked to design a strategy for an RPS bot, and to reveal it to your opponent before the games begin. What is the best strategy you can design? Game theoretically, it is to randomise completely, so that in the long run you will have an equal number of Rock, Paper and Scissor in your range. This is the only strategy you could have that your opponent simply cannot beat, even when he knows it in advance. It is game-theory optimal (GTO). And it is balanced.

Let’s turn to poker. You raise with AKcc, I call from the big blind. The flop comes KQ3 with two hearts. I check. You bet. I raise. What do you do here?

If you think I would only raise stronger hands such as KQ and 33, you can correctly fold here. If you think I tend to slowplay those hands and would only raise with a draw, you should continue. However, if my range is balanced here, and includes hands that beat you as well as draws and some air, your decision is harder. You could make a mistake by calling; and you could make a mistake by folding. You need to estimate the equity you have against my made hands, the equity you have against my semi-bluffs, the frequency with which I have hands in those two categories and then figure out the best line to take. If I am perfectly balanced, you’re in trouble.

In this example, there are future streets of betting left, so let’s turn to a simpler river spot. You and I are in a hand that reaches the river, where I make a pot-sized bet. You are getting 2-1 on a call, and my game-theoretical aim is to make you indifferent to calling or folding. Therefore, one-third of my hands should be bluffs. (Note that balance does not mean an equal number of bluffs and value hands. It depends on the odds being offered to the opponent.) If this is the case, I can never lose in the long term, but win if you fold too much or call too much.

It’s remarkable that if you can play GTO poker, you don’t have to take into account your opponent’s ranges or tendencies. You simply need to get your own frequencies and bet-sizing right, and design your ranges accordingly. But this is almost impossible to do in practice, and even the best players only try to approximate it. Besides, you’d need to play GTO poker only in high-stakes online cash games. In all the local live games you are likely to encounter, you should aim to be exploitive rather than balanced.

Let’s go back to RPS.If someone tends to go 70% Paper, playing GTO is not the most profitable line to take. You should exploit this player by increasing the Scissor in your range. In the first poker example above, against a guy who never folds top pair, I will only raise there with better made hands; against someone who folds too much, I will raise with a greater proportion of bluffs and semi-bluffs than is GTO.

Note that an exploitive strategy, by not being balanced, is also exploitable. If I adjust to the 70% Paper guy with more Scissor, it becomes easy for either him or another observant player to adjust to my adjustment with more Rock. If two players keep adjusting to each other optimally, they will eventually both be perfectly balanced. But in practice, this rarely happens.

All players make mistakes; all players have leaks. It is usually more profitable for you to be exploitive (and exploitable) than balanced. But knowing what is GTO in many spots will help you avoid mistakes and spot exploitable imbalances in others. In poker, as in life, balance is a good thing.

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For more on the use of game theory in poker, here are three recent books I recommend highly:

Applications of No Limit Hold’em by Matthew Janda is a primer for GTO play in six-handed games. It’s an outstanding book, and I also recommend checking out his training videos on Cardrunners.com.

Expert Heads Up No Limit Hold’em by Will Tipton uses game theory to analyze heads-up play.

Poker’s 1%: The One Big Secret That Keeps Elite Players On Top by Ed Miller deals with optimal betting and calling frequencies, and how to construct ranges that can help you conform to those. Here’s Miller’s website; and you’ll find a recent interview of his on Andrew Brokos’s podcast here.

If you want to learn more about game theory in general, outside the context of poker, The Art of Strategy by Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff is a fantastic introduction.

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Previously on Range Rover:

The Numbers Game
The Bookshop Romeo