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This is the 38th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

The answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, according to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is 42. The computer that came up with this took 7.5 million years to calculate it, though the question for this answer wasn’t known. Well, I have a guess as to what it was.

My guess is that Douglas Adams was a keen connoisseur of Pot Limit Omaha, and he got into the following hand with his friend Richard Dawkins. Adams had T985ds, spades and diamonds, and the flop came K67, one spade and two diamonds, giving him a humongous wrap, a flush draw and a backdoor flush draw. Dawkins potted, Adams repotted, Dawkins jammed, Adams called. Dawkins had AAKKds, clubs and hearts, for top set. ‘Ha,’ he exclaimed, ‘I have the nuts. Take a hitchhike, my friend!’

‘Now, now, calm down,’ said Adams. ‘It is in your genes to be excitable, I know, but I must inform you that your top set is not the best hand here. Indeed, I am actually the favourite to win here.’

‘You’re kidding me,’ said Dawkins, as he looked at Adams’s cards in growing horror. ‘So what percent of the time do I win this hand?’

And that’s the question, dear reader, to which the answer is 42.

As it happens, the turn gave Adams a straight flush, at which point Dawkins became a militant atheist, as indeed am I, but that is not a matter on which I shall dwell today. Instead, I wish to bring up the role of numbers in poker. I have written before on how poker is a numbers game, and to master the game, you must master the math. In my last column, I wrote about the hard work involved in teaching yourself the game, much of which involved number-crunching. In response, my friend Rajat, a keen player with a recent live tournament win under his belt, tweeted: ‘I’m an old-school player, terrified of numbers. What advice for me?’ This is a reaction many people would have, so here’s what I have to say.

The mathematical laws that govern poker, and indeed, the universe, are not ‘new-school’ inventions. Just as an old-school physicist before the time of Newton was subject to the laws of gravity, so is poker subject to mathematical laws, rewarding those who master them. Indeed, ‘old-school’ players knew their math, as you will note from the vintage of David Sklansky’s The Theory of Poker (1983), and the musings of Doyle Brunson, a man who knew his fold equity, in Super System (1979). Since the internet boom in poker, the math behind the game has been far better understood, to the extent that a talented player who ignores the numbers is like a prodigious swimmer trying to cross an ocean but just refusing to get on a bloody boat.

All decisions in poker come down to the math of estimating pot equity and fold equity and making the best decision possible. You may use your ‘reads’ and psychological insights to get a better sense of your opponent’s range, and how likely he might be to act in a particular way, but all these merely help you come up with the right inputs. The answer, in the end, lies in the math. And here’s the thing: if you ignore the math, that doesn’t mean the math goes away. No, it’s working away in the background, like the laws of nature, ensuring the survival of the fittest – or those who adapt the best, as Dawkins would say.

If you have been winning at poker without caring too much about the math, it is either because you’re playing really soft games, or you’ve been lucky. The way the game is growing in India, both of these are bound to change. So here’s a thought for you: It is a truism in poker we must not be results-oriented, and should just focus on making the right decisions so that we show a profit in the long run. But how do we know what the right decisions are? The answer lies in asking the right questions – as Dawkins did to Adams.

This is the 35th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

Some people, when I tell them I play poker, look at me kind of strange. They may not say it, but inside their heads they’re saying, ‘OMG, he’s a gambler!’ And because I am skilled at getting inside people’s heads and listening to them think, inside my head I’m sayin’, ‘Yeah, and guess what, OMG OMG, you’re a gambler too!’

What is it that gamblers do? They weigh up the odds of a particular situation or event, the risk-to-reward ratio, and make a bet. This is not something that just happens inside casinos; this is the stuff of life.

You walk up to someone you fancy and ask them out for a date: you are gambling. You buy a stock: you’re betting on it to go up. You sell a stock: you’re betting on it to go down. You buy real estate: gamble. You buy a book because you like the blurb and the cover is amazing: ditto.

Little in life is certain, and everything is scarce, because time itself is scarce. You have one life, and the smallest decision you take today could change the course of your life. Maybe you have to choose between the PHD abroad or the comfortable job at home. Maybe you have to decide whether to say ‘yes’ to your boyfriend’s proposal when you know he’s not the dream guy, and you’re settling, and he hit you once when he was angry, but who knows if you’ll ever do better because you’re chubby, and you do love him sometimes. Maybe you get a puppy, betting that the love you get for a decade or so will be worth the pain you feel when it dies, as is inevitable. Everything you do, big or trivial, may be worth it, or it may be a mistake. And the thing with real life is, you’ll never know where the road not taken would have led. But you have to gamble; you have to choose.

Poker is slightly different. Poker is also gambling but it involves repeated small decisions with relatively little on the line on any particular occasion. And importantly, you get to put in volume. Even though luck plays a greater role in poker than in other sports or mindgames, it is not gambling gambling: if you’re skillful, you will eventually make a profit. Good poker players keep making, on average, profitable decisions, and though luck (or variance, as we grizzled vets call it) may hit them hard in the short run, in the long run they will end up winners. In life, on the other hand, as Keynes said, in the long run we’re dead.

A poker player can play a million hands or 20,000 tournaments, and those sample sizes are pretty good. You don’t get those in real life. How many times will you enter a romantic relationship? How often can you switch jobs? You get the drift.

There are different types of gambling. There are casino games like roulette, baccarat and craps in which, in the long run, you’re guaranteed to lose. I disapprove of playing those; it’s just giving money away. Then there’s life itself. You’re forced to gamble by circumstance, but it’s okay, life’s a positive-sum game; though one could argue that since we all die in the end, the final sum is zero. At least until then the odds aren’t weighed against you. And then there’s poker, in which, unlike in life, we can put in volume and bring the long run close. So, you, who do not play poker, don’t make fun of us and call us gamblers. All of us are born in a casino, and will die in one.

This is the 34th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

I discovered poker as a grown adult approaching middle age, but I was a hustler in college as well. I was a decent chess player, and used to offer a prop bet to people with the following terms: ‘I will play 10 games with you, and will win all ten. If you even draw one, you win the bet.’ I never made this bet with anyone I’d seen on the circuit, thus guaranteeing that all my customers were patzers, and unlike in poker, the quantum of luck in chess is low enough that I won this bet every time I made it. One of my early victims, dazzled by my magisterial play, asked me what the difference between me and him was. ‘How many moves ahead do you think?’ he asked. ‘The same as you,’ I replied.

A famous study by Adriaan de Groot published in 1946 showed that, contrary to what you might expect, novices and expert players think more or less the same number of moves ahead. The difference in quality arises because the experts think the right moves ahead. Their candidate moves for analysis, in other words, are better moves to begin with. Their skill lies not in depth of analysis, but in understanding the nature of a position, which, in turn, comes from better pattern recognition. A grandmaster will look at a position not as a conglomeration of individual pieces, but in chunks of pieces that form recognisable patterns. He will understand the positional vulnerabilities of different kinds of patterns, and the tactical motifs that recur in these spots. In a spot where a novice thinks ‘If I threaten this piece, he’ll move it here to counter me,’ the grandmaster may think, ‘His pawn structure has weakened his dark squares, let me exploit that weakness and exchange off my weak white-squared bishop for his strong knight on c6.’ Guess who is more likely to win.

Why do I write about chess in a poker column? Well, there is exactly the same difference between beginning poker players and experienced ones. Beginners think in terms of what hand they have and how it connects with the board, and graduate to this from thinking about their opponent’s hand, and from there to considering what hand the opponent puts them on. But good players think not in terms of hands but ranges. They never ask, in any spot, ‘Am I ahead here?’ but ‘What is my equity here?’ and ‘How can I maximise my EV?’ They have a better sense of how specific ranges interact with different board textures, and can plan for future streets.

For example, let’s say you call with KJ on the button after a nit raises UTG, and the flop comes 876 two-tone. A beginner may give up when the nit c-bets, but a pro will usually continue in the hand and take down the pot with either immediate or future aggression, because the flop texture is terrible for the UTG’s range of big pairs and high cards, and most turns and rivers are bad for him. Indeed, this will be practically a reflexive decision for the pro, requiring no thinking at all. He would play this hand better than the novice not because his reads are better or he has a better poker face or suchlike, but because he understands the underlying math better.

Here’s one thing common to both chess and poker: the bad player does not know what he does not know. So here’s a tip on how to get better at both games: play a hell of a lot, and stay humble. The day you stop learning, you will be the fish at the table.

This is the 32nd installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

There is no term in poker that is as dangerous for the novice player as ‘made hand.’ Newcomers to poker divide all hands into two categories: made hands and drawing hands. If they have hit a pair or better, they say they have a made hand. If they are drawing to a flush or a straight, they call it a drawing hand. This is a terrible way to think about poker, especially when it informs your decision-making. For example, some players I know find it hard to fold a made hand, and never raise with a drawing hand because they ‘haven’t gotten there yet.’ This is fundamentally flawed thinking.

To explain myself, let me present a couple of axioms to you.

One: Every Drawing Hand is a Made Hand: There is one term that should dominate your thinking all through the course of a hand: equity. On any street except the river, equity refers to your share of the pot if every possible combination of outcomes was accounted for. Beginners think of a made hand as one that is 100% there, and a drawing hand as one that isn’t there yet. But if you look at equities, most of the time a made hand just has a big share of the pot, and is sometimes even behind the drawing hand. Consider, for example, that on a board of A67 with the 67 being spades, 89ss will win a pot against AK 52.6% of the time. Which is the made hand, then? What does the term, ‘made hand’ even mean? How much equity does a hand need to qualify as a made hand?

If 89ss has more equity there than AK, is 89ss a made hand? If not, why is AK, which has less equity? Where do you draw the line? At AsTs, pair and flush draw (46% against AK)?  QJss, the bare flush draw (32%)? The gutty T8 (22%)? What about AQ (16%), an otherwise fine ‘made hand’ that is a ‘drawing hand’ against AK because there’s a better ‘made hand’ around. Consider, in fact, that AQ, which is 16% against AK, is 83% against AJ and 55% against a range of all sets, Ax hands, and plausible flush and straight draws. So how would you classify it?

Two: Every Made Hand is a Drawing Hand: Unless your opponent is drawing dead after you flop a royal flush or quads, every made hand is a drawing hand in the sense that it is drawing to bricks. Not just that, on the flop, against a drawing hand, it is drawing to runner-runner bricks. This is why AK is behind 89ss on that Ax6s7s flop. This is why, in PLO, a hand like AK45r is so shitty on a 367 two-tone board. You have flopped the nuts – the ultimate made hand, one would think –  but if you’re up against two guys, and one has a higher wrap-FD (T985ds) and the other has top set with backdoor FD, your equity in the hand is, sit down before you read this, 7.5%. That’s right, you flop the nuts, go all in joyfully, and win just 1 in 13 times because your runner-runner brick draw is just so unlikely. Your best made hand is actually the worst drawing hand here.

Made hands, drawing hands, these terms melt into one another and mean nothing anyway. When you play poker, you should think of nothing but equity. Whether you have 80% equity on the flop, or 49% or 23%, your aim is to have 100% by the time the hand ends. Sometimes you do this at showdown – but a lot of the time, you do this by making the other guy fold, so that his share of the pot becomes yours. To do this, you need to understand his range, your equity against his range, and your fold equity against him (ie, how likely he is to fold to your aggression). As James Hetfield famously said after a 22-hour cash-game session, nothing else matters.

This is the 31st installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

I played an interesting hand the other day that I would have played differently three years ago. The game was nine-handed, stacks were deep, and I had KTdd on the button. A loose player raised UTG +1, MP2 called, cutoff called, I called on the button and the blinds called. The flop came K72 with two spades and a club. (The king was a spade.) Original raiser checked, MP2 bet, cutoff folded, I called, small blind overcalled, the others folded. Both MP2 and SB are straightforward players, and MP2 check-calls flush draws in this spot, so he certainly had at least a King. Given position and his bet in a multiway pot, he probably a stronger king than mine. SB’s overcall disappointed me, because he is not the kind to mess around here with A7 or 99, and had either a king here or a flush draw. And if he had a king, it had to be stronger than mine.

The turn was the ace of spades. The flush got there, as did an overcard to the king. Both of them checked. At this point, the novice in me from three years ago would have checked back, thinking I had showdown value. But my read here was that my hand simply could not be good against both these guys, and I needed to turn it into a bluff to win the pot. I bet big, and they both folded, saying that they had KQ, and MP2 whined about how I always get lucky on the turn. So of course I showed him my hand, putting him on tilt, and he later stacked off to me. Yum yum.

Well, here’s one of the most useful lessons I learnt through my journey in poker: showdown value is overrated. Too often, we take a passive line with medium-strength hands thinking we have showdown value, so why inflate the pot? But there are two circumstances where it might be profitable to take a different approach. One, when we can bet those hands for thin value and get called by worse often enough for it to be profitable. Two, when we can turn it into a bluff and profitably make better hands fold, like in the above instance.

Often, on an early street, we adopt a particular mindset for a hand and don’t modify it as the hand progresses. For example, we get into pot-control or bluff-catcher mode on the flop, where that might indeed be justified, but fail to shift gears on a later street when it becomes profitable to do so. There are all kinds of situations where it makes sense to turn our made hand into a bluff. Maybe we 3b in position with JTs, the flop comes QJ3r, we call a donk bet, turn K, call again, river T and villain checks. Our two pair is often beat here, and better hands can fold given we are plausibly repping the ace, and depending on the opponent it is sometimes correct to check back and often correct to bomb river. Similarly, in PLO, we could bang the river when a flush completes to get a straight to fold, even though we have showdown value with a set that didn’t fill up.

That said, you should be clear about your reasons in turning a made hand into a bluff, and not do so just because raising makes you feel macho. In the live games I play, I often see players make testosterone-laden raises in spots where no better hand folds and no worse hand calls. Do not burn money in this manner. Remember, it is better to be rich than manly.

This is the 30th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

One of the most important skills for a professional poker player, it is often said, is knowing when to get up. When exactly should we quit a session? Should we have a stop loss? Should we get up as soon as we reach a pre-decided profit? Should we play X number of hours, no more, no less? What are the factors that determine how long we sit at a particular table?

The rational answer to this is clear. We should continue in a game as long as it is +ev to do so, and get up as soon as we feel we’re no longer profitable on the table. How much we are up and down should not matter. We need to think of all poker games we play as being essentially one lifelong session, and the score on any one day should not affect our decision. At any given point, all we need to ask ourselves is: Is my staying on this table a +ev decision? Whether you are stuck 3 buyins or up 4 should not be a factor in that decision.

In practice, this advice is not that easy to carry out. For example, I have a tilt problem, and shift from my A-game to my C-game if I’m losing a lot and fatigued, playing recklessly and trying to recover. Tilt has perfect timing and usually comes towards the end of sessions, when stacks are deep and mistakes are costly. I am obviously not +ev when I tilt – but tilt not only shatters my emotional equilbrium, it also affects my judgement. I rationalise continuing in the game, though I really should be getting up.

To prevent this, I have set a stop-loss for myself. When I hit that stop-loss, I quit the game, regardless of how calm I feel, because tilt could be just around the corner. This is not something I recommend to you if tilt is not a factor in your play, and you make decisions with as much clarity 15 hours into a game and 10 buyins down as you do at the start of the session. But how many of us can manage that? If you do have a tilt issue, and tend to magnify your losses by chasing them, a stop-loss might be a handy tool.

When I am winning, on the other hand, I usually sit till the end of the session. There was a time when, at a particular game, I would play for six hours every day and then leave, because I’d begin to get tired. As I’d mostly win, I got a bit of a reputation for hitting and running, though this was not my intent. So, as a point of principle, I started sitting till the end of every session, and realised that this made a lot of sense because stacks are deepest at the tail end of sessions, many other players are tired and tilted and more prone to errors, and that is when my edge can really turn a hefty profit. If fatigue affects your play, of course, you should factor that in and leave before your edge dissipates and you’re the fish on the table. But tilt and fatigue aside, there are no good reasons to quit a juicy game.

One big mistake I see some players make is win small and lose big. They become taala-chaabi and book their profit as soon as they’re one or two buyins up, but continue buying in when they’re down, trying desperately to recover, and lose far more than they win in a winning session. In his book, Elements of Poker, Tommy Angelo quoted a friend of his named Cowboy Bill as describing one such player, ‘He eats like a bird and shits like an elephant.’ Make sure you do it the other way around.

This is the 29th installment of my fortnightly poker column in the Economic Times, Range Rover.

One of my favourite stories about chess has a lesson in it for poker players. A few decades ago, the great Aron Nimzowitsch was playing in a chess tournament when his opponent took out a cigarette case and placed it on the table in front of him. Nimzowitsch, who couldn’t stand cigarette smoke, called the tournament director to complain.

‘He has not lit a cigarette and there is no smoke,’ said the TD. ‘So your complaint is noted, but it is not valid.’

‘I know,’ replied Nimzowitsch, ‘but he threatens to smoke, and you know as well as I do that in chess the threat is often stronger than the execution.’

In poker, too, the threat is stronger than the execution. The most obvious example of this this is the concept of Leverage. Let’s say you open from late position with KJs to 4bb. The button calls, with effective stacks of 150bb. The flop is a dry K74r. You bet 5.5bb into 9.5, your opponent raises to 16. You call. The turn is a Q. You check. Your opponent bets 30 into 41.5. What do you do here?

Unless your opponent is super-spazzy, it’s hard to continue. If this bet closed the action, you might consider calling this 30bb bet – but it doesn’t. This bet carries the threat of a further bet that involves the rest of your stack: 100bb more into a pot of 101.5. So you don’t just have to decide whether to commit 30bb more, but 130bb more. You are unlikely to want to play for stacks with just a single pair.

This is leverage: the threat of future bets in a pot that is growing exponentially bigger. In the above example, your opponent bet 30bb to put you at a decision for 130bb. Maybe had you called 30bb on the turn, he would have checked back the river, giving up on some random bluff he was trying. But maybe he wouldn’t have. It doesn’t matter whether or not he would have lit that cigarette – the cigarette case was on the table.

Leverage can apply at any street except the river, of course. A 3b from a good aggressive player in position who is likely to keep barrelling postflop. A check-raise on the flop. Most of the time, though, you really feel leverage on the turn, when pots are getting big, stack-to-pot ratios are dwindling, and you have to decide how far you want to go in a hand. In the deep-stacked games that I play, I have found that it is on the turn that players make the biggest mistakes: whether that involves calling, folding or just going nuts and spazzing.

The threat you represent does not even have to be a result of your betting in a particular hand; it can arise out of your reputation. If you have a reputation for check-raising rivers a lot, your opponents might give you easy showdowns in position. If the turn check-raise is known to be a part of your arsenal, your opponents, in position, might not bet for thin value or charge you to draw on the turn like they otherwise would. Of course, your threats have to be credible, and against thinking players, your ranges should be somewhat balanced. If every check-raise of yours on the river is with the nuts, then your opponent will know that he is not making a mistake by bet-folding there for thin value. You need to mix it up to induce errors. You want your opponent to throw his hands up and say, ‘Yeh kya khelta hai? Main tho baukhla gaya hoon?’

The bottomline: to constantly pose a threat to your opponents, and to thus unsettle them and induce mistakes, you have to be aggressive. A study a few years ago looked into 103 million hands on Pokerstars and found that more than 75% of them never reached showdown. Think about what this means – and put that cigarette case to use.