Make No Mistake…

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