the theory of poker
If you take poker seriously and you haven’t read The Theory of Poker yet, you have a strange definition of the word "seriously". It’s important. Anyway, the theory applied to Hold ‘Em is basically that you are trying to make the move you would make if you could see everyone’s pocket cards. Do that, and you win long term. The flip side is that you should be trying to get your opponents to make a decision that they wouldn’t otherwise make if they knew what your cards were. It seems simple, but it’s very tough to put into practice.
I think of it because people here have been reading my previous entry about limpers, and I’ve come across another solution to that problem which I hadn’t considered. At a cash table, someone with a pile of money in front of him started talking about not having raises respected, and how bad play was winning out recently. His theory was a sort of wrestling-with-a-pig concept: "you can’t possibly raise enough to make dumb players not chase their straights and flushes, so just make your normal bet with top pairs or overcards and hope for the best. They’re bad players, and you’ll take their money eventually."
This was really appealing to me for a while, until I realized that his "normal bet" was a minimum bet, or maybe twice that, no matter what the pot was at the time. Now, by the principles of avoiding frustrating beats, this is absolutely correct: risking almost nothing at a weak table might chase away a poor player with a flush draw, and if it doesn’t, you’ve made up your mind that you couldn’t have chased him away anyway, and you only risked a tiny bet to do it. But when you factor the theory into it, it’s clear this is an awful move.
Giving your dumb microlimit player an almost free card is actually long-term suicide, because you’re actually giving him appropriate odds to call. That’s the awesome thing about no-limit: you can set the odds for your opponent, and you can exploit the theory all day long. Let’s pretend you’re past the turn with a nice top pair, and your opponent is drawing to a flush with one card to come. If he has to call a $1 bet to see the next card, and the pot is $10, he should take this bet every time. His odds are 4 to 1, and while you might like to chase him away with a bet like that, a smart player will happily call you there. You’ll survive the next card about 80% of the time, but you aren’t getting paid enough to play through the bad beats. That’s your money in the middle, and you let it get away with a weak bet.
But, if you bet $10 at the $10 pot, your opponent is only getting 2 to 1 odds to see that next card, and while the result might be exactly the same (remember, if he’s so dumb, you can’t chase him away, right?), you’ll win enough when you win to make it worthwhile.
I’m playing like this a lot lately: manipulating the odds of the pot so it’s wrong for an opponent to call with what I think he has. It’s expensive when you’re wrong, but overall, it’s been a huge help to my game. On the other hand, it makes limit Hold ‘Em look like Candyland.