Winning a major pot in poker is the ultimate high of the game, especially when you’ve outplayed your opponent to do it. I’m not talking about cooler hands, where you have set over sets, or *gasp* straight flush over quads! This actually happened in a live game played in the poker room I frequent. Check out a shot of it I managed to capture…
Have you ever noticed how some players manage to win huge pots on hands that contain a single pair, or some mediocre holdings like AT versus A4, when both hit the ace on the flop? Often times, players put wins like these down to loose cannon players and luck, but I believe there’s more to it. Many players, especially tight players, play weakly because they’re afraid of getting stacked by bad beats and cooler hands. They make puny raises, take down small pots, and wonder why the other player at the table makes 5 times his buy-in in the same amount of time he makes half a buy-in in profit at the end of the session. What’s worse is when they have a bad session and get sucked out multiple times, losing several buy-ins in the process. Imagine the amount of patience required to sit for hours at the table, making minimum profit and losing it all in a run of bad luck.
There are two ways to lose money in poker. Bad beats and bad plays. Whenever you lose, it’s either one or the other, and it’s important to identify which. But knowing why you lost is not enough. You have to know how to compensate for it. If you lost due to bad plays, you have no one and nothing to blame but yourself, and the remedy is simple. Don’t repeat your mistake. Bad beats on the other hand is a different story altogether. Beats are part of poker and instead of whining about how your bottom set got cracked by a two pair hitting a four-outer, think about how you can recover from it. Tight weak players will find this hard to do, simply because it’s rare for them to get a huge win (unless of course there are donkeys that pay them off regularly), and it will take many, many sessions of no beats before they recover from a downswing.
Which brings us to the topic at hand. Comfort zones. Every player has a comfort zone, and it is important thing to note of your opponents when you play a game, especially during live games, when there are no stats to help you make decisions. The famous quote from David Slansky, which states that, whenever your opponent plays differently from when he can see your hole cards, you gain, and whenever you play differently from when you can see his hole cards, he gains. A simple example of this would be, if the player holding the quads in the picture above could see his opponent’s hole cards, he would fold his quads, and he would gain. This is pretty much the goal of poker, to make your opponent play differently from what he would if he could see your hole cards, that is, to make a mistake. The only way your opponent will make a mistake, is when he is pushed out of his comfort zone.
A regular player that plays at the room I frequent (who incidentally is also the person who held the straight flush over quads) is a very good example of such a player. He has a loose cannon image, one that’s well deserved, and initially lost a lot of money learning that players can’t be bullied out of pots by money and two rags for a hand. He is however, a quick learner, and all keen observers in the room would note that his play has improved tremendously. He’s quick to spot and prey on weak tight players, pushing up the stakes with a massive re-raise on their raise, forcing them to fold weak to mediocre hands pre-flop. Some of them try to counter this by flat calling, hoping to hit a monster on the flop, but more often than not, end up folding when his flop play pressures them to fold hands like Ace high. If they could see his hole cards, they would play differently, but having been forced out of their comfort zones, they naturally make mistakes they wouldn’t under normal circumstances.
It’s enough to observe from this that players can be pulled out of their comfort zones by hyper aggressive play, but there’s also a technique to it, and one can’t place a random huge bet into a pot and hope to take it down. I will write more about this in future articles, on bet sizing and value bets, that extract the maximum out of opponents, while maintaining a decent ratio on your “return on investment”. It’s also important to know that when you play within your bankroll, it is difficult to pull you out of your comfort zone, simply because your zone is so much… wider! Once again, more emphasis on bankroll management. So, till the next article, may you play successfully for bigger pots, and force opponents out of their comfort zone!
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