Range Rover

This is the 22nd installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

Writers like watching other people – part of our job description is to understand human nature – and there are few better places to do that than at a poker table. We have captive subjects, sitting in one place for many hours at a time, subject to massive emotional swings, and mostly with their guard down except, once in a while, when they are in a big hand and try to be stoic and impenetrable. Watching a poker game is like watching a reality show, except that the participants don’t display the occasional self-consciousness that a camera might provoke.

One of the things that most fascinates me in long sessions is how people behave differently depending on their stack sizes. If they’re winning and stacked up, they tend to be talkative and cocky and in a generally merry mood. When they’re losing, they can be upset, irritable, silent, sometimes even angry. Although short-term swings in poker are largely determined by luck, winners can be arrogant and advise others on how to play hands, as if their immediate good fortune is related to their skills, and losers can be sullen, diffident and negative. Comically, all this can be inverted within seconds. You could have a 4000bb pot at the end of which the guy who was winning is suddenly stuck for the day, and the erstwhile loser has recovered and made a profit. And snap, their demeanour changes as well, and the arrogant prick from a few minutes ago is now sitting with his shoulders slumped and his lips pouted, and you almost want to ruffle his hair and give him a bone.

This is how it is in the real world as well, for the poker table is a microcosm of life. The psychologist Paul Piff from UC Berkeley recently gave a TEDx talk about a number of social experiments he and his colleagues carried out. In one, they got 100 participants in their lab to play a rigged game of monopoly. Players were randomly assigned the roles of ‘rich player’ and ‘poor player’, and the rich player got “two times as much money,” “twice the salary” when they passed Go, and “got to roll two dice instead of one.” As you’d expect, the rich players started crushing the poor ones, purely due to the luck of the draw at the start. And their behaviour changed.

In Piff’s words, “One person clearly has a lot more money than the other person, and yet, as the game unfolded, we saw very notable differences and dramatic differences begin to emerge between the two players. The rich player started to move around the board louder, literally smacking the board with their piece as he went around. We were more likely to see signs of dominance and nonverbal signs, displays of power and celebration among the rich players. […] One of the really interesting and dramatic patterns that we observed begin to emerge was that the rich players actually started to become ruder toward the other person, less and less sensitive to the plight of those poor, poor players, and more and more demonstrative of their material success.”

At the end of the game, when interviewed, these rich players “talked about what they’d done to buy those different properties and earn their success in the game, and they became far less attuned to all those different features of the situation, including that flip of a coin that had randomly gotten them into that privileged position in the first place.”

Déjà vu, some? This is exactly how people behave in the real world, allowing privilege to give them a sense of superiority and entitlement. The consummate poker professional is immune to this, and does not allow himself to be affected by temporary swings, whether they last a few hours or a few sessions. He is always in the moment, trying to simply do the right thing. This is how he gets the most out of poker. And this is how we can get the most out of life. Don’t let success get to your head or failure get you down. Keep calm and carry on.

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For more of my poker columns, do check out the Range Rover archives.

This is the 21st installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

Four years ago, when I started playing poker seriously, the games in India were incredibly soft. If I knew then what I know now, I would have made a fortune. Most players had either discovered poker on Zynga, or transitioned from teen patti. They either gambled it up, or played ABC poker. If you knew just the fundamentals, you could beat the game. I’m talking about No Limit Hold ‘Em (NLHE), of course.  That game has moved on a bit since then—but the new NLHE in India is PLO, or Pot Limit Omaha. Everyone’s just learning this variant of poker, the standard of play is low, and you can crush the tables by getting the basics right.

Last week, I spoke about the first key insight I learnt about PLO: that you need to be selective about the hands you play, keeping in mind their post-flop playability. This week, I bring you five essential tips that should help you beat the easy PLO games spread in India, where most pots are multiway and many players play 70% to 100% of hands. (Yum yum.) Here are the Five Commandments of Pot Limit Omaha.

One: Draw to the nuts. The biggest pots in PLO are nut full house vs smaller fullhouse. You have A987ds, the board comes K997A, and you stack off to KKxx. Similarly, set-over-set, flush-over-flush and nut straight vs sucker straight are also common situations where you can win and lose big pots. Therefore, it is foolish to play small pairs for their own sake, and smaller rundowns also make sucker straights too often. And when you draw, be aware of how many of your outs are to the nuts. You don’t want to chase a draw, hit the draw, and get stacked. So understand hand structures: T986, with a gap at the bottom, will have far more nut wraps than T876, with the gap at the top. And JT98 will hit six times as many wraps as JT92, with a dangler. Do some homework, study these structures and play accordingly. (I recommend Jeff Hwang’s books and Vanessa Selbst’s videos on Deuces Cracked.)

Two: Respect Position. People play way more straightforward in PLO than in NLHE, and lead out for protection much more, so the information you get in position is more reliable. Even when you bet after being checked to and get check-raised, you are far less likely to get check-raised in PLO with air. This is a post-flop game, and position is paramount. Respect it, and be super-tight out of position (OOP). An illustration: if you have 76xx rainbow and hit the nuts on a two-tone flop of 985, you are in deep trouble OOP. Opponents who continue will have wraps to higher straights, flush draws and sets. Most turn and river cards are bad for you, with offsuit A to 4 being the only bricks, and you need runner-runner brick. In position, you could pot control, and value-bet thin on the river even when the nuts change. Out of position, you’re all set up to make a mistake on a future street.

Three: Respect suitedness. PLO is all about redraws, and even backdoor flush draws add important equity to your hand. For example, let’s say on a board of QJTr, you have AK98ds with two backdoor flush draws. Your opponent also holds AK98, but he’s offsuit. You will win the pot 9% of the time, and the rest of the time it will be chopped. That’s a huge edge in the long run. Every backdoor flush adds around 4% equity to your hand, and in a game where one often sees set vs wrap-and-flush-draw all in on the flop, suitedness matters. On the same note, avoid offsuit hands, and don’t stack off with wraps on two-tone boards without a flush draw.

Four: Be aggressive. There are two ways to win in poker: by reaching showdown and letting your equity manifest itself; and by making the other guy fold and avoiding showdown. The key to winning big in PLO is being aggressive. Every time you jam a draw and make two pair or bottom set fold, you make money. Add fold equity to your pot equity, and your profits will shoot up, as long as you don’t overestimate either. Don’t go buckwild and raise-reraise every hand – you need significant pot equity to begin with, in PLO, and the first commandment about nut draws applies.

Five: Manage your bankroll. PLO is a high-variance game, and downswings, which are statistically inevitable, can be much more brutal than in NLHE. You’re playing a long-term game of percentages, so don’t enter a game you’re not adequately rolled for. There’s no point being the best player at a game where a downswing can wipe you out, leaving you without the funds to re-enter the game. You’ll just be banging your head on the sidelines, moaning about bad beats as donkeys gamble it up with each other.

These fundamental principles apply to easy games filled with beginners, which is what you’ll get in India right now. Keep doing your homework, and you’ll find yourself falling in love with this elegant, complex game. As a Chinese friend once told me, “Two cards good. Four cards better.”

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For more of my poker columns, do check out the Range Rover archives.

This is the 20th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

A marriage with two people can be complicated enough. Imagine then a marriage involving four, all of them bisexual. Instead of one couple, you don’t have two couples, but six, for each of them makes a pair with each of the others. The possibilities for drama are endless. It is a big difference, not a small one. It is the difference between Texas Hold ‘Em and Pot Limit Omaha (PLO).

In PLO, you get four cards dealt to you, not two. So basically, you get dealt the equivalent of six Texas hands, not two, and the possibilities grow exponentially. It’s an action game, and for that reason, is slowly picking up in India. And most newcomers to the game play it badly, because they play it like Texas when it it is hugely different, another game entirely, like baseball and cricket. Imagine if every ball Virat Kohli played was a full toss.

So if you happen to get into a home game where people are playing PLO, because it’s so much fun and ‘chaar patte milte hai, haha,’ what should you do to make money in that game? Well, given the state of Omaha games in India, there is exactly one thing you need to do to immediately give yourself a huge advantage. I will reveal that at the end of this column: first, here’s something fundamental about Omaha you need to understand.

The first thing newcomers learn about Omaha is that there isn’t much difference in preflop equity between the best and worst Omaha hands. (AA is an 88% favourite over KQo in Texas, but AA98ds is only 60% against 6543ds.) Inspired by this, they decide that any four cards can make a good hand on the flop, and they play nearly every hand. But this is the wrong way to think about the game. PLO is a postflop game, and the most important factor thing about any hand you have is not it’s preflop all-in equity, but its postflop playability.

Much more so than in Texas, every hand you play can call for the commitment of your entire stack. And when you choose a hand to play preflop, you want to pick one with which you are comfortable playing for stacks. You need to consider which hands connect with flops well enough that when you have a hand, you don’t mind putting in 300bb with it. Specifically, therefore, you want hands that can a) make the nuts and b) have redraws to the nuts.

Common ways in which people lose big pots is by hitting a lower set, straight or flush than their opponents. For this reason, hands like 77xx and 6543ds are basically garbage. Hands that win you big pots or lose you small ones in Texas – small pairs and medium suited connectors – do the exact opposite in PLO. Plus, subtle structural differences make a huge difference to hands: JT98ds is better than 9876ds, which will make sucker straights and wraps more often, and JT97ds is better than J987ds, because it will flop more nutted straights and wraps. Also, AAxx and KKxx hands are over-rated, as are offsuit hands like AKQJr. Getting a handle on the postflop playability of different types of hands is key, because they affect equities and profits and your bankroll.

I’ll write more about the structure of hands in next week’s column, where I’ll also give you a few specific tips on how to beat the kind of soft games you are likely to encounter. Until then, here’s the one thing you can do to make yourself an immediate favourite in your games: play tight preflop. Most beginners play too many hands, and by playing tight, choosing hands with good structures, you ensure that you have a stronger range in every postflop situation, more nutted and with more redraws. If your cards lie in happy matrimony with each other, all will be well.

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For more of my poker columns, do check out the Range Rover archives.

This is the 19th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

I am in Macau as I write this column, indulging myself with a few days of recreational tournament poker. This is a welcome change from the live cash games in Mumbai, for a couple of reasons. One, I enjoy playing tournaments, which are a very different format to cash games, and a good way to recharge oneself. Two, I like the fact that I can just sit down at a tournament table and play poker, without having to worry about the game outside the game.

What is the game outside the game? Well, you know how poker works: you get cards, figure out ranges and probabilities and equities and all that other technical stuff, and use your chips to accumulate chips from others. You also set up what I call the game within the game, the metagame: you manipulate table image, set up different dynamics with different players, and try and win the levelling wars that ensue. All this is quite thrilling.

But there is a game beyond this that sometimes makes me uncomfortable. It is not talked about much in training videos and instructional books, and applies mainly to live cash games. It involves not the technical skills I’ve been writing about in earlier editions of this column, but the kind of soft skills a politician might require or a psychopath might have. You could, euphemistically, also refer to it as fish management.

In poker terminology, good players are ‘sharks’, who gobble up ‘fish’, the disparaging term used for worse players. Being a game of self-deception as much as deception, all the fish naturally think they are sharks. And everything is relative: every shark is a fish somewhere or the other. Every shark wants to play as much as possible with fish, and the game outside the game has two central aims: Making sure that a) Fish remain fish and b) Fish remain available to you.

To this effect, there are a number of essential fish-management rules. Some of them are sensible and seem like good etiquette – for example, ‘Never berate a fish for bad play.’ But there is nothing nice about the intent behind it: to make sure the fish keeps playing badly and gives you his money later. This intent is made explicit by other rules such as ‘Never give a fish your honest opinion about a hand.’

You’re supposed to validate every bad decision a fish makes. If he donks off 400bb with top-pair-no-kicker on a wet board, you’re supposed to sympathise, say ‘What a cooler’, and pretend he just got unlucky. If he asks your opinion about a hand, you’re supposed to always lie and confirm his faulty instincts rather than share your thoughts on the correct way to play it. When he plays badly and has a losing session, you comment on his bad luck; when he wins you comment on his excellent play. Basically, you fatten him up, and marinate the poor sod (or cod, as it were).

The other side of fish management is ensuring that they want to play with you, and you have access to their games. The cash game ecosystem in India, outside Goa and Sikkim, consists entirely of underground home games, and you want to get invited to the juicy games of the recreational players. You do this by pretending to be friends with them, showing a greater interest in their lives than you otherwise feel, even socialising with them after hours: basically, by faking it and being a hypocrite.

I find it hard to play this game outside the game. (You could say I’m a fish at it.) I value straightforwardness, and find it hard to lie to someone who asks for advice, or my opinion on a hand. And I cannot feign friendship with people I otherwise have no warm feelings towards. I love the deception that is an inherent part of every sport, but not the deceit at the heart of the game outside the game. In tournaments, thankfully, it is not required. You simply sit at the table and play poker. And that’s a relief.

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For more of my poker columns, do check out the Range Rover archives.

This is the 17th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

“So what is the worst thing you do when you go on tilt?” I asked a couple of my fellow pros the other day. It turned out that all of us had the same answer to that question: we call too much. We become fish when we play at our worst, unable to fold preflop or postflop, falling for hands like lovesick teenagers. And when we’re on our A-game, this is exactly the flaw we exploit in others.

And yet, and yet. I recently read the latest book by one of my favourite poker writers, Ed Miller, Poker’s 1%: The One Big Secret That Keeps Elite Players on Top. Early on in the book, Miller states that most poker players fold too much. He writes: “In today’s game, the vast majority of regular no-limit players have folding frequencies on the turn and river that are too high.” The other big leak that regulars have, he says, is that they don’t bet enough. In other words, they give up on hands too often.

Let me illustrate this. Someone raises from middle position and you call on the button, and it’s a heads-up pot. On the flop villain bets half the pot. How often are you folding here? Note that I haven’t specified either villain’s range or your range, or the cards that came on the flop. What matters is the bet size. By betting half-pot, villain has given himself 2-1 on his bet. In other words, he needs to win the pot right away better than 1 in 3 times to show an immediate profit. If you don’t continue in the hand at least 66% of the time, therefore, you are basically giving money away.

This logic applies all the way to the river. Miller says that in a heads-up pot, given bet sizes of between half to two-thirds of the pot, you need to continue with 70% of your range on each street. If you don’t,  you are exploitable, and are burning money. Equally, if you are the aggressor, you need to bet 70% of your range on each street as well, for similar mathematical reasons. (You are exploitable if you bet 70% on the flop but give up, say, half the time on the turn.)

A visual illustration of this rule is the pyramid below. The base is the range of hands you enter a pot with preflop. You discard 30% of it on each street. Miller asserts that the sides of this pyramid should be smooth. Where the pyramid goes out of whack is where a player has a leak. If a player calls too wide preflop and then plays fit or fold, you exploit him on the flop. Some players fold too much on the turn; double-barrel against them. Some preflop agressors give up too often after one c-bet; float against them with any two. And so on. (Note that the pyramid is a guide in heads-up pots, not multiway ones.)

What you need to do to play optimally is to constuct this pyramid for yourself. First, you need to be tight preflop. This way, it will actually be feasable to follow the 70-70-70 rule. For example, if you play 22% of all hands in a full-ring game, by the time you get to the river you will be left with 7.5% (.22 x .7 x .7 x .7), of which 5% will be value and 2.5% will be air. But you will continue with different parts of this preflop range on different flops, such as A33r or QT6 two-tone. You need to construct your ranges accordingly, which takes tons of homework.

Miller’s book is partly inspired by Matthew Janda’s Applications of No-Limit Hold ‘em, and while he lays out what seems to be a framework towards game-theory optimal (GTO) play, as Janda explicitly does, Miller oddly doesn’t mention that term anywhere in the book. The thing with GTO poker is this: even if you don’t intend to play that way, merely understanding what it is can help you identify and exploit other people’s leaks, while eliminating your own. In that context, you might find Miller’s Pyramid to be quite the wonder.

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For more, do check out the Range Rover archives.

This is the 16th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

How does one learn poker? I often get asked this question, and over the last few months, I’ve been approached a number of times by people asking me to coach them. Each time I’ve turned them down, explaining quite honestly that I’m still learning the game myself, and am not competent to coach anyone. But how am I learning and how did I learn? If you’re a beginner to the game, maybe falling in love with its complexities as I once did, where do you start?

Poker is a deep enough subject to be taught in universities, the way game theory or mechanical engineering or computer programming are. The problem is that its body of knowledge is recent and dispersed. There were a handful of books a beginner could learn from ten years ago, and they’re mostly redundant now. The explosion of online poker in the last decade led to an exponential increase in the analysis and understanding of poker. Despite this, there is no existing equivalent of a college course on poker anywhere, no syllabus one can follow.

Anyone who teaches you poker will be doing so in a piecemeal manner. For example, a typical online coach will ‘sweat’ you – ie, watch you play – and comment on aspects of your play as he watches. Or he might review your hand histories and tell you things you could have done differently. But the ideal way to teach a subject is to teach fundamentals first, then proceed, in a modular fashion, through different levels of complexity. None of the various training sites for poker have managed, or even attempted, something of that sort.

I learnt poker when I stumbled upon it online, played with play money for a while, then got interested and bought some books, and finally took tentative steps into live poker. I was lucky that during my learning curve, the games were very soft because everyone else in India was also new to it, and I ran good in my early days. In other words, I learnt while being profitable. That is almost impossible today.

If you’re learning the game, here’s my advice to you. Number one, understand that this is a game where luck plays a huge role in the short term, and any skill you develop only manifests itself in the long run. So do not be results-oriented, but process-oriented. Having said that, don’t use this as a crutch and delude yourself into thinking you’re better than you are.

Two, be self-critical. In other fields, if you don’t improve, it’s okay, you get away with it, the world is mediocre. In poker, if you stop learning, you lose money. So question every action that you take, even when you are winning. Don’t be defensive.

Three, keep working on your game. Ideally, for every three hours of playing, put in one hour of analysis. This will expand your thought processes and bring clarity to your play.

Now, what do I mean by working on your game? There are three facets to this. First, you take in information. Read books and watch training videos. Ed Miller’s books are excellent for learning cash games, and Jonathan Little and Betrand Grospellier have written the most state-of-the-art books available for tournament play. For game theory, check out Matthew Janda and Will Tipton. As for videos, see Vanessa Selbst and Andrew Seidman’s videos on Deuces Cracked, Janda’s theory videos on CardRunners, Andrew Brokos’s on Tournament Poker Edge and everything on Run It Once, Phil Galfond’s amazing site.

Second, interact with the community, and get exposed to cutting-edge thought. Forums, especially Two Plus Two, is where the modern game was born. Become a participant, keep testing your assumptions, learn from your peers.

Third, do lots of analysis at home on hands you play. There are some fantastic tools out there, like The Odds Oracle by ProPokerTools, which helps you analyse and understand equities, and Flopzilla, which helps you understand how different ranges connect with different types of flops. These are as essential for a poker player as a gym is for a bodybuilder. Put in the hours.

While learning about poker, I also learnt a lot about myself – and some of those lessons were difficult ones. But let’s leave that for another day.

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For more, do check out the Range Rover archives.

This is the 15th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

An epic battle took place a couple of days ago at a local game I play. A gentleman I shall call Fearless Builder was raising blind every hand to 8bb. He’d get two or three callers, and then the guy to his right, Action Builder, who had limped earlier, would make it 50bb, also blind. Fearless would call blind, and then the table had to decide what to do. We were all waiting for hands to take them on – anything ahead of their obviously wide blind ranges – and an affable chap at the table, who I shall call Persian Emperor, started getting cards.

He had KQo one hand, stack of 250bb, he ripped it in. Both Action and Fearless called blind. Action had K6o, Fearless had T6o. Fearless won. Emperor rebought for 250bb. An orbit later, same scenario, he was all in with JJ. Fearless called blind with 89o, hit two pair, took it down. Another orbit later, Emperor gets in 300bb with KK. Action and Fearless call blind. Flop is J94r. Action shoves blind for side pot, Fearless calls blind, another 400bb each. Action flips over 84o. Fearless shows 22. Emperor sighs in relief. Turn 2. River 2. The table erupts.

Emperor gets up to go. ‘Can’t believe how bad I’m running,’ he says. ‘No point playing any more.’ Fearless, who was down 500bb when he started playing blind and is now up 2000bb, says, ‘I can’t believe how good I’m running. I should go buy a lottery ticket.’ Their sentiment is understandable – Emperor did run bad and Fearless ran like God – but the conclusions they drew from this is flawed. Both might have been joking, of course, but I have heard too many people speak in terms on running good (or bad) in the present continuous sense, as if a narrative has been set for their session by some higher power, and they’ve managed to identify it and must adjust. ‘I’m running good today so I’ll play every hand.’ That kind of thing.

The truth is that we can identify streaks of luck only in retrospect. If luck favours us through a session, we can look back on it as ‘running good’, but to assume that we are in the middle of a streak and will continue being lucky is fallacious. The deck does not have a memory, and nothing is pre-ordained. Every hand is new.

Cognitive psychologists call this the Hot Hand Fallacy. It is ingrained in us because we have evolved to be pattern-seeking creatures, and are daunted by randomness. If we suffer four bad beats in a row, we are naturally wary when we get our money in good again, although we shouldn’t be. If a perfectly weighted coin falls ‘heads’ five times in a row, there is no logical reason to believe that it will come up ‘heads’ the sixth time. Coins don’t have memories, and nothing is destined.

Interestingly, I also see players around me display the opposite tendency: the Gambler’s Fallacy or the Monte Carlo Fallacy. If we give in to this, then when a coin falls ‘heads’ five times in a row, we believe that the sixth flip must be ‘tails.’ Similarly, I see players who haven’t hit a flush draw the last eight times they had one believing that it ‘is due’, just around the corner. It isn’t, of course. Everything is random.

Logically, Emperor should have rebought and continued playing. He had run bad, but that didn’t mean he would continue doing so. (Hot Hand Fallacy.) A regression to the mean was inevitable – though not necessarily in the next hand. (Gambler’s Fallacy.) In the long run, though, if he continued playing, Emperor would surely win – but losing so much money does cause emotional turbulence, and perhaps Emperor was right to quit before he got tempted to play blind.

These fallacies apply not just to gambling but to life. We lose hope too soon sometimes when we run bad.  Equally, we often become arrogant, ascribing to skill or destiny what was merely good fortune. Life is, by default, a gamble we were forced into, and we owe it to ourselves to not be affected by past events, and to always do the right thing.

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Here’s a piece I wrote four years ago on the same subject: Throw a Lucky Man into the Sea.

For more, do check out the Range Rover archives.

This is the 14th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

What is the difference between a good poker player and a bad one? I’ll take a shot at an answer: good players pose tough questions to their opponents. They bet, raise, 3-bet, float, call down, check-shove, use every weapon in the poker arsenal to take their opponents out of their comfort zones and induce errors. Bad players, on the other hand, fail to ask tough questions even of themselves.

As we play hundreds and thousands and millions of hands, we tend to develop certain standard ways of dealing with different situations. The immediate result of an action does not reflect the correctness of the play, so it is easy to develop bad habits, and to reflexively slip into flawed patterns of playing hands. Ideally, whenever a player is about to take any action at a poker table, he should ask himself, ‘Why am I doing this?’ This sounds banal and obvious – but you’d be amazed at how often players are not sure why they’re betting in a particular spot.

A poker book I recommend to beginners, Easy Game by Andrew Seidman, deals with this in its first chapter. (Like Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love and Don DeLillo’s Underworld, the first chapter alone is worth the price of the book.) It is called ‘The Reasons for Betting’, and makes the point that many of the justifications people give for betting are invalid and flawed. ‘I’m betting because I think I have the best hand’ or ‘I’m raising for information’ are terrible reasons to throw chips in the middle.

Consider this hand from a game I was at yesterday. My friend, on the button, called an early-position raise with KQo. The flop came KT3r. The original raiser bet, and my friend announced a raise. His opponent shoved, and my friend had to fold. I asked him why he raised. ‘For information,’ he replied. ‘To find out where I was at.’

This is terrible thinking. There are two primary reasons to bet or raise: for value, or as a bluff. To get a worse hand to call, or a better hand to fold. In this case, my friend’s raise made sure that only better hands in his opponent’s range continued, and worse hands folded. Put simply, he inflated the pot against hands that beat him, and lost the chance to pick up value from worse hands on later streets. In that spot, he should just have called. Anything else – folding or raising – is a losing play.

Every single time you put money in the pot, you should ask yourself why you are doing so. What impact does it have on your opponent’s range? Does a bet from you serve the purpose of being either a bluff or a value-bet? (You could also ‘merge’, or put in a bet that profitably aims to both get better hands to fold and worse hands to call. But this is advanced, and the wannabe Tom Dwans around me who use that term are generally misapplying it to thin-value bets.) Seidman also advances a third reason for betting, the ‘capitalisation of dead money’, which he defines as ‘making the opponent fold, whether his hand is better or worse, and collecting the money in the pot.’ But he warns that this is ‘rarely a primary reason for betting’, and I’d advise beginners to stick to betting just for two reasons: for value, or as a bluff. Not for information, or protection, or an assertion of how macho you are.

In life, as in poker, we often fail to ask ourselves basic questions. We sleepwalk through large chunks of our lives, doing the expected things, studying phalana in college, doing dhimkana job,  getting married, having kids, following the script. We get stuck in routines, imprisoned by inertia. We rarely ask ‘Why?’ And when we fail to do so, then, as in poker, we lose a little something.

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For more, do check out the Range Rover archives.

This is the 13th installment of my weekly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

In a local poker room where I sometimes play, there is an inscription on the wall that says: ‘It’s unlucky to be superstitious.’ As this is the 13th installment of Range Rover, it’s an auspicious time to take on this subject. Sportspeople tend to be notoriously superstitious: cricketers, for example, often have particular rituals they do not deviate from before going out on the field, such as wearing the left shoe first, or looking back up at the pavilion before going out to bat. When a crucial partnership is going well, the players in the dressing room may be stuck to their seats while it’s on so as not to disturb the fragile equilibrium of the universe. It’s quaint and sweet and does no harm – not in cricket, at least.

In poker, beliefs lead to actions, and actions lead to money won or lost. An irrational belief, thus, can have expensive consequences. I play a local cash game sometimes with a group of builders, and one of them believes that 23 is his lucky hand, and that it will never let him down. He has lost a minor fortune because of his faith in that hand, and it is worth asking, how did he arrive at this belief, and why does he persist with it even when it’s obviously counterproductive?

At the risk of simplifying, I’d say that there are two key cognitive biases that lead to the birth and nourishment of superstitions. The first is a tendency to mistake correlation for causation. A man walks under a ladder in olden times, is attacked by a horse a little later, and boom, walking under ladders becomes a no-no. Black cat crosses path, wife runs off with neighbour; break a mirror accidentally, relative dies; call someone from behind as they’re leaving their house, they lose their job. We are pattern-seeking creatures, which is an important reason for our being the dominant species on this planet, but we often tend to go overboard, and ascribe causation where there is none. This is how superstitions are born.

Superstitions are sustained by another cognitive bias called the confirmation bias. Basically, we ignore all evidence against whatever irrational belief we have, and pounce on anything that seems to confirm it. If you believe a black cat crossing your path is bad luck, you’ll ignore all the times it happens and you have a good day, but pounce on the one time it is followed by some unfortunate event as evidence for your belief. My builder friend probably arrived at his superstition about 23 when he won a big pot early on with that hand. (Correlation-causation.) Since then, he shrugs off all the money he loses while playing that hand, but cites the pots he wins with it as evidence in its favour. (Confirmation bias.)

Poker players might have superstitions like having a favourite hand, or a particular seat ‘running hot’ during a game. But the flawed thought processes that lead to superstitions apply to every aspect of poker. For example, I used to overplay small suited connectors out of position until recently, a tendency that surely began when I cracked aces with it at some point. So I started overestimating the implied odds, considering the big pots I won with them as validation, and ignoring all the times I bled money getting into difficult marginal spots with them out of position. My mistaken belief had the same anatomical structure as a superstition, and I could only eliminate the leak when I came to terms with the cognitive frailties that gave birth to it.

To excel in poker, we have to draw conclusions from limited information, and put our opponents on ranges based on patterns of past behaviour. This is perilous, and it’s important not to get lazy, to constantly revisit our assumptions, and to think of the game in probabilistic terms, with few certainties. As for black cats, them kitties should not be feared, but cuddled.

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Previously on Range Rover:

Beast vs Human
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