A Report from Vegas

Well, I just got back from Vegas where I enjoyed a healthy dose of humble pie. The tally: 5 no limit texas holdem tournaments played, 1 final table reached, 0 cashes. All of the tourneys were $65 buy-ins (I know, I know, big spender huh?), one had a $40 rebuy. I played poorly in the first one, got progressively better until my last tournament, a 10 pm, no rebuy event on Sunday night at Treasure Island, where I finished 6th out of 37, with the top 4 places paying. Heartbreaker.

Anyway, I learned a lot over the weekend in Vegas. Most notably that in low buy-in tourneys, you can't bluff because people call with anything and vastly overvalue their hands. So play tight, play patient, and you will likely survive. I had to rush to get Harrington on Hold 'Em Vol. II finished but it was mighty valuable because it got me thinking about M. M is the amount of your chips divided by the total of antes and blinds currently in force. This tells you how many orbits of the table you can survive before being blinded off. Harrington impressed on me that you have to make moves even if your M seems decent. In other words, it's always later than you think.

As you might guess, I'm itching to play another tournament. Have to think about a trip soon to AC. If nothing else, Vegas whetted my desire to get better at NLH.

A Bet After the Flop I Didn't Understand: Carlos Mortensen at the WPT

I picked up the entire second season of the World Poker Tour on DVD for $7 plus shipping from Daedulus Books. On the first disc is the Borgata Poker Open, featuring a number of outstanding players, including Carlos Mortensen. Early in the episode, Carlos made a play that puzzled me. It was a 6 seat table. Carlos is dealt 10 (clubs) and 8 (clubs), 2 players fold and 4 see the flop. The flop comes 2 (clubs), 3 (hearts), and 8 (hearts). There is $38,000 in the pot and Carlos opens the post-flop betting with with a $10,000 bet. This means of course, that the first caller needs to pay $10,000 for a chance at a $48,000 pot. That's 4.8 to 1 pot odds, which justify a call in many situations. With top pair (admittedly a middle pair), shouldn't Carlos have bet more to discourage callers and attempted to win the pot right there? As it happened, he was only called by David Opphenheim (holding A-4, offsuit), who eventually drew out on Carlos by hitting a 5 on the turn.

One More Thought on A-Q: Phil Gordon Making Me Say Huh?

In Phil's Little Green Book, he summarizes a hand he played online (Phil Gordon, Little Green Book, p. 115) and I think it's worth examining because the logic behind Phil's play is not immediately apparent to me. Phil was in middle position with A-Q suited diamonds. He was first in and raised to $150, three times the big blind. The button called.

Ok, so there's $375 in the pot before the flop ($50 big blind, $25 small blind, Phil's $150 raise, the button's $150 call). The flop comes Q (spades), 9 (clubs), 2 (clubs). Phil bets $150, which makes some sense. He's got an excellent chance of having the best hand and he's offering the button 3.5 to 1 odds to call ($150 call to win $525 pot). The button called. So far so good.

The turn is K (diamonds). Worried about the straight draw, Phil checks. So does his opponent. At this point, Phil put the button on a flush draw or A-9. Let's take a break here and ask if Phil's check makes a lot of sense. Granted, if he bets and his opponent has a straight or a straight draw, then Phil will likely be called or raised. One might think that it is worth it to bet something here to find out what the button has. The problem is that there is now $675 in the pot. Phil has got to bet enough to: 1) make calling and playing a draw a bad bet; or 2) show that his opponent's hand is good enough now to justify a call. Figure the button is holding any one of a number of hands which will likely win if they get the right draw (such as J-J, 10-10, 10-9, A-J, A-9, or A-Q), or he's holding J-10 or A-k in which case Phil's likely already beat. The chance of holding any of these hands is roughly 25% (each of these hands has about a 1/11 X 1/11 chance of popping up, call this 1% x 8 of these hands = 8%). We'll raise the 8% up a bit since the button has shown some strength and let's call it 20%. This is 4 to 1, so all Phil has to do from a mathematical expectation standpoint is make a bet which makes this a losing proposition. With $675 in the pot, a $300 bet will do it ($300 to possibly win a $975 pot = roughly 3.3 to 1 pot odds). If the button calls this bet, he's either made a bad play or he's got Phil beat. Instead, Phil checks, the button checks, and the guy gets a free card. I don't think this makes sense. With a so-so hand, don't you want to know where you stand, force your opponent to take the worst of it, or, preferably, win the pot right there.

But Phil checked and the river is the 9 (diamonds). Phil checks and his opponent bets $300. Phil calls and wins the showdown when the button turns J-8 (both clubs). This was the right play for Phil because he was facing pot odds of 3.3 to 1 (see preceding paragraph) and he had to figure that he had a better chance than that to win the pot based on probabilities. Phil says that by checking, he made more money because the button would have folded if he'd bet.

Something Bothering Me About Pot Odds

Sklansky's Fundamental Theorem of Poker is widely accepted and it makes sense: make fewer bad decisions than your opponents and you win. How do you judge decisions? Well, there are a number of ways but one of the most prominent is pot odds. Pot odds tell you whether you're getting sufficient return on your money given the risks you are taking. Pot odds of course are based on mathematical expectation, in other words: (the chance that you will win X the amount you will win) - (your chance of losing X the amount you lose). If the difference is positive, you are making a good play, according to the standard wisdom.

As you've gathered, however, one of the goals of this blog is to question the standard wisdom and I'm going to question it here. First of all, I've got no problem in general with judging your plays based on pot odds. However, let's dig a little deeper. I want to make two points. First, there are differing degrees of positive expectation: your expectation could be slightly positive or it could be highly positive. Second, the accuracy of probability calculations depends to some degree on the number of trials. What do I mean by this: I mean that when you have an Ace-Six and you're hoping to draw another Ace, the probabilities look like this on the flop (3/50 + 3/49 3/48). This adds up to roughly a little better than a 1 in 6 chance overall of getting the Ace on the flop. Now you might expect that if you look for this draw 6 times, you might reasonably hope to get one Ace but not so. Probabilities are most accurate over large numbers of trials (see law of large numbers). You might hit 3 Aces or you might well hit none at all. Flip a coin ten times and it's highly unlikely you come up with 5 heads and 5 tails.

So what does all this mean? To me, it means this: before applying pot odds robotically, ask yourself how many hands of NLH you're planning on playing a year. If its tens of thousands, then play by the pot odds book. If, however, you're going to play in 3-4 tournaments a year, which the Hold 'Em Scholar is probably looking at right now, then you've got to be careful about playing tournament hands where the odds against your winning are 2 to 1 and the pot odds are 3 to 1. You just don't have that much of an edge in this situation, given the risk. In other words, you probably want to choose situations where the pot odds are more like 4 to 1 when the odds against you are 2 to 1 and you know you aren't going to be playing an NLH tournament every weekend.

Let me give an example of a hand I wouldn't play, that Phil Gordon apparently would. This example comes from Phil's Little Green Book (Gordon, Little Green Book, p. 42). In discussing a sandwich play, Phil says that he'd push in all his chips where the pot odds are roughly 2.5 to 1 and the odds against him are about 1.5 to 1. Mathematically, this is the right move. Pot odds tell you to make it, Sklansky would presumably tell you to make, but I ain't making it in the early to middle rounds of a tournament. Why? Because I'm only playing a limited number of tournament hands a year and the odds are that I'm going home if I make this play. I don't know that I'm going to play enough hands over the course of the year to make this play pay off. You'll have to make your own decisions...

Hold 'Em Scholar Wrap-Up: Playing A-Q Pre-Flop

So this is where I take all the advice I've written about in previous posts regarding playing A-Q pre-flop and synthesize it. The majority on this issue says that you should generally play A-Q pre-flop from all seats at a 10 person table. The only exception is T.J. Cloutier, who says that you should not play A-Q in a tournament from seats 1 through 5. So, the real question is whether T.J.'s advice is sound.

So let's break down how good or bad a hand A-Q really is. Now, for starters, A-Q is an underdog to any pair ( ). What are the chances that someone else is holding a pocket pair at a 10 seat table? About 16.4% (math below if you're interested). So you're not likely to be facing a pair pre-flop. Even if you are facing one, you can beat most pairs by drawing an ace on the flop.

Now, in terms of overcards, only A-K is a better non-pair hand. At a 10 seat table, there is a roughly 1.3% chance that one of your opponents is holding A-K. So, combine the odds on pairs and this and there is about an 82% chance that you have the best hand when holding A-Q pre-flop. This would seem to support a bet from any position at the table, absent better information.

T.J. Cloutier's argument, however, is that what do you do when an A comes up on the flop? How do you know that one of your opponents isn't holding A-K? Obviously, you don't. The chances that someone is holding A-K, however, are quite small, as I just discussed.

Ok, so you generally want to play A-Q based on straight probabilities without knowing anything else about what your opponents are holding. But sometimes you do know more about what they are holding. What do you do with A-Q then? Let's say you're in middle or late position and there is an early position call -- a limper. Could be the limper is slowplaying a better hand than you but the odds are long against it. So the limper is probably playing a worse hand and hoping to see three more cards cheap. When you're holding A-Q, you want to raise the limper so he either folds or puts more money into the pot (at which point you can better assess whether he's slowplaying).

Now what if you're in the same position but there is an early position raise. Do you call, reraise, or fold? Obviously, the permutations here are endless (size of raise, what you know about player, etc.) but let's explore them a bit. A raise indicates some strength, so you now have to lower that 82% chance that you're holding the best hand. Indeed, it is somewhat likely that the early raiser is holding a pair, face cards, or A-x at least. Let's say you're now 50-50 to be holding the best hand and 50-50 to have the best chance of winning a showdown. Based on these odds alone, a conservative tournament player should probably fold here, particularly in the early rounds where blinds are low. The larger the raise, the worse your odds become, all else being equal, and calling such a raise is not something that a tournament survivor wants to do.

What about when you're in early position with A-Q. As I see it, it doesn't make much sense to limp in with this hand. If you do, you'll likely find yourself in a multi-way pot with a hand that could easily be second-best or worse. So, you want to put in a decent raise when you open the betting with A-Q, to discourage others from playing their hands.

So that' s the wrap. Whose advice does this sound like: a lot like Harrington's and Phil Gordon's to the extent we can tell. Now, the exception from Harrington is that he has you calling early position raises when you have A-Q suited and folding if you don't. Harrington has you raising early position limpers with A-Q suited, simply calling when you don't. So, I've essentially reasoned my way back to Harrington here.

Playing Ace-Queen Pre-Flop: Hellmuth

Phil Hellmuth's book, Play Poker Like the Pros, doesn't have a great deal of detail on NLH but it does have some interesting things to say. He talks about playing A-Q pre-flop in some detail (Hellmuth, Play Poker Like the Pros, 141-143). Specifically, Phil lays out 3 ways of playing this hand.

First, Phil's basic approach is that A-Q is a good enough hand to take a flop with. He says you can call a small raise or raise with it about the size of the pot. Phil doesn't advise calling a reraise or even a large raise, however. The basic principle is that you want to win the pot outright or see the flop fairly cheaply. Although the advice for post-flop play is not specific, Phil seems to be looking for a set on the flop to continue with this hand. He implies that flopping another ace alone can get you into trouble, for reasons I've discussed elsewhere (Q kicker may give you second best hand).

Phil also discusses Frank Henderson's approach to playing A-Q. According to Phil, Henderson likes to limp with A-Q in the hope of flopping a set. As Phil points out, Henderson won't win any pots pre-flop this way but does build the pot in the event he hits a set. Presumably, Henderson folds if he doesn't hit a set.

The last approach Phil discusses to A-Q pre-flop is what he calls the megalomaniac theory. Simply put, a megalomaniac will raise and reraise pre-flop with A-Q in the hope of winning the pot before the flop. Hellmuth says this approach is effective in tourneys because it steals a lot of antes. Of course, when you play it and someone else is holding A-K or A-A, you can lose a lot of money.

When to Look at Your Cards

Phil Gordon says not until it's your play (Gordon, Little Green Book, p. 26). Cloutier/McEvoy say look at your hand as soon as you have both cards (C/M 121). Gordon's reasoning: if you look before play gets to you, you might lose interest in the hand and not pay attention to play in front of you. Or you might give the other players a tell if you have a good hand.

Cloutier/McEvoy's reasoning: if you look quickly, you'll be free to observe what's happening. Basically same reasoning as Gordon, just different approach. According to C/M, you won't miss what's in front of you and you'll have plenty of time to watch the players behind.

Holdemscholar tried it both ways at the Midnight Madness tournament at the Taj and found that, all else equal, he preferred looking immediately. This allowed me to interpret what was going on with other players in light of what I was holding. I could start thinking strategy immediately. This was particularly true when I was in early position, such as 2nd or 3rd to act. If I waited until play got to me, I felt like I was rushed to make a decision on my hand. This could just have been inexperience but, for now, I like the Cloutier/McEvoy advice. I have read elsewhere, can't remember precisely where, a pro saying that only novices look at their cards immediately. Well, apparently this pro has never played against Cloutier. I'll keep this an open topic.

Playing Ace-Queen Pre-Flop: Phil Gordon

In his Little Green Book, Phil Gordon advocates playing Ace-Queen from all positions, unless you've decided to play tight in which case he does not advocate playing from the first two positions (Gordon, pp. 262-67). Phil doesn't give a lot of explanation as to how to play A-Q in the face of action but does specify that his recommendations as to A-Q are based on the premise that you are first into the pot and raising, you don't know much about your opponents, all stacks are average size, and the blinds are small in reference to the stacks. Phil doesn't provide much more guidance than this on playing AQ pre-flop in his Little Green Book. I'll update if necessary after reading his little blue book.

Playing Ace-Queen from Middle Position Pre-Flop: Cloutier/McEvoy v. Harrington

What do Cloutier/McEvoy and Harrington say about playing Ace-Queen before the flop from middle position?

First, what is middle position? According to Harrington, it's seats three through six at a 10-seat table.

Cloutier/McEvoy advise folding A-Q in seats 3 through 5 before the flop in the early part of a tournament (C/M 128). There is no specific advice as to later levels of a tournament. As for seat six, Cloutier/McEvoy advise playing A-Q if there are no raises in front of you. If there is a raise(s), fold (132).

Ok. What about Harrington? Dan has you playing A-Q from middle position by raising 85% of the time and calling the other 15%. And what about if you get raised or called? Harrington provides some examples to guide you:

Harrington (190-191): You're in fifth position and the player in third position opens for 3 times the big blind. According to Dan, you call with A-Q suited and fold with A-Q unsuited.

Harrington (191-192) You're in fifth position and the player in third position calls. Raise with A-Q suited, call otherwise.

Playing Ace-Queen From Early Position Pre-Flop: Cloutier/McEvoy v. Harrington

Just to be perfectly clear, this analysis compares T.J. Cloutier and Tom McEvoy's Championship No-Limit and Pot-Limit Hold 'Em to Dan Harrington's, Harrington on Hold 'em, Vol. 1. Specifically, this entry refers to the part of Cloutier/McEvoy's book that applies to No-Limit tournaments. Harrington's book is soley devoted to N0-Limit tournaments, so no clarification needed for him.

Ace-Queen is a tricky starting hand because you can be in a bind if you flop an A or a Q. Why? If an A, then your Q kicker is beat by someone who started with A-A or A-K. If you flop a Q, you've still got to worry about overcards on the flop and later rounds. So what do these two sets of experts say to do when you're holding A-Q in early position (which Harrington defines as the first two seats at a 10-seat table--a definition I'll adopt here)?

Cloutier/McEvoy advise you to fold, or at best, limp in and fold if you get raised when you're holding A-Q in the first two seats (C/M, pp. 128-129).

Harrington, who is generally considered a conservative player, advises playing the A-Q in early position (Harrington, pp. 182-83). He advocates raising with the hand before the flop, 75% of the time and calling 25% of the time (calls are just to vary your play). As for amount of raise, Harrington says 3-5 times the big blind. Harrington' s advice is apparently based on his belief that A-Q is a pretty good hand when there aren't a lot of players in the pot but not so good otherwise. Thus, an early position raise is intended to narrow the field.

RESUME OF A NO LIMIT HOLD 'EM HOPEFUL

I thought that you might want to know the bona fides of this young buck trying to fight his way up. After all, who wants advice and analysis from a fool? Hold 'Em Scholar is a graduate of an Ivy League law school, has a minor in physics, has had editorials and think pieces published in various newspapers and magazines, has worked at two of the 100 largest law firms in the United States, is an inventor with two patent applications currently pending, and manages a small hedge fund. If I cared about such things, I could stroll into a MENSA membership on the strength of several standardized tests I've taken throughout the years.
What does all this add up to in the No Limit Hold 'Em world? Quite possibly nothing. There ain't no entrance exam for No Limit -- or the world. Just wanted you all to be aware of the mind behind this site.

And oh yeah, you might ask: what is your No Limit experience, Mr. Hold 'Em Scholar? Presently limited. I began training by playing a lot of hands against computer opponents. My first foray into the real word of poker was a couple of months ago. I played in the Midnight Madness Tournament at the Taj in AC. Midnight Madness began at 12 midnight on a Sunday night. I actually had no intention of playing in a tournament that night, had gone to AC to celebrate my brother's birthday and play some blackjack. But I'd been reading some books on No Limit and had played some hands on the computer, so I figured why not. How'd I do? I made it to the final four tables before being busted out with a short stack and a pair of 10's. Up until the Midnight Madness tournament, I'd never played poker against live opponents in my life. Give that some consideration in assessing my results. I'll do better next time, you can count on it.

MISSION STATEMENT: NO LIMIT HOLD 'EM GREATNESS

This website will track what will hopefully be my successful career in No Limit Hold 'Em tournaments. I am relatively new to the game but have read a lot of the game's literature (i.e. Harrington, Sklansky, Cloutier, Hellmuth, etc.) and notice serious discrepancies in what some well known players have to say about the best way to play. Obviously, skilled players can differ on strategy but I want to explore whether, at any given time, there is an optimal way to play a hand, taking into account the many factors that can influence decisions. This site will examine the contradictory advice provided by the No Limit stars and try to determine what the best strategies are. The site will also detail my progress as I try to win No Limit tournaments using the knowledge that I gain and share here. If I don't make it to the top, hopefully some of you will.

A final note: my work here will be aimed at tournament play because this is the area of the No Limit universe that interests me most. If you play in regular games, you may have to adjust some of the conclusions reached here. With that said, let's start this trip.