Carl Sampson's blog

The evolving poker player

You can look at poker players almost like you can look at share price movement on the stock market. For example price movement can travel in several broad ways. Firstly it can be easily defined by moving upwards (bull market), moving downwards (bear market) or moving in a broad range (flat market) and moving in a narrow range (flat market). While there are all different variations of movement then they basically fall into these four main categories. We can use this analogy to look at how poker players evolve because when a player first comes into poker then their game can move upwards at a pretty rapid rate.

The need to go your own way in online poker

One of the things that I have found out to my cost in all of the years that I have been playing online poker, coaching it and also studying it is that that each player essentially needs to go their own way. This doesn’t mean that they should not seek out instruction…….far from it. What it essentially means is that you need to decipher what information is good from that which isn’t as good. Unfortunately this is a very difficult task to undertake because even when you get hold of information from reliable sources then what works for them may not work for you. An analogy could be made with that of trying to lose weight and the role of diets.

Betting strategy on the turn in no limit cash games

As a general rule (there are many general rules in poker), your bet size on the turn should be less than your bet size on the flop in terms of percentage! For example let us say that you raise with Q-Js and the big blind calls you. The flop comes 10d-7d-6s and the big blind checks. Let us also say that you made it 3.5bb before the flop and so there is around 7bb in the pot once the rake is taken away. The question is if you should bet the flop and by how much? Clearly in this situation then you only have one opponent to get through and that is going to have an impact on whether or not you should bet.

Using game theory to become a better poker player

Just what sort of obstacles do you have to overcome to become a winning poker player? Well firstly you have essentially four hurdles to have to overcome and the first one is to design a system of play that is successfully getting you an edge. However that is only part of the problem because getting an edge isn’t always enough or a successful system can be successful in many ways without it being profitable. Let us say that you had the ability to affect the house edge by using skill on roulette. The house edge is 2.7% on a single zero wheel but let us say that you had a system that you had devised that massively reduced this edge to only 0.5%. Now you have to ask the question of whether or not this is successful or not but much of that comes down to definition.

Playing big pots in no limit hold’em full ring games

In no limit hold’em full ring games then you have to be conscious of just what sort of player is actually active in this form of poker. A player who deliberately chooses full ring over six max is actually revealing an awful lot about their style of play and also their mind set. In nearly all cases then a player chooses full ring play because they have a more patient and sit and wait style and this is more than likely linked to their attitude to risk as well. Full ring games have smaller swings which are called “drawdowns” in the financial trading arena. The average player who plays in these games is a tight playing, deep stack playing decent player.

Learning to multi-table is important

 I think that too many people in poker fall for the hype that is in the game at this time. This then means that they end up playing the wrong form of poker. I believe that too many people are playing six max poker when they should really be playing full ring. If you lack skills as a poker player then you really should be reducing the number of hands that you play and not increasing them. The vast majority of people who attempt to play poker are not psychologically cut out to play the game or they simply haven’t got enough time to study the game in depth. Also if they have personality flaws linked to point number one then that can represent a very formidable obstacle to overcome.

The true cost of triple barrel bluffing

I was looking at a couple of videos on YouTube the other day from a poker player who is at the very top of his profession who I shall not name. The topic was small stakes no limit cash games and he was remarking how important it was to triple barrel bluff. Now maybe I misinterpreted what he said, maybe he didn’t phrase it in the way that it was meant but you have to be very careful emptying the clip in modern online poker. It needs to be done with sophistication these days. While it is true that pot control features heavily in the minds and styles of many players, people are simply far more educated these days and they understand about polarised ranges.

Profiling the market

I have spent an awful lot of time over the past few years studying financial trading and this is something that I am now looking to merge more and more with my poker. In trading some years ago then a trader called Peter Steidlmayer invented what he called “Market Profile” which came to be seen by thousands of traders or would be traders in his seminal book “On Markets”. There are fantastic analogies and parallels between the two fields of online trading and online poker. The online poker environment is nothing more than a market after all. But just like in financial trading, the market evolved since its inception in around 1999.

Trading and poker…….joined at the hip.

I have mentioned before on this blog just how systematic play can be very profitable. Financial day traders for example can and do make an awful lot of money from trading systems. However there is one very important difference between financial trading and playing online poker or poker in general. If we imagine for example that the other traders and institutions are the equivalent of other poker players for a minute. In this instance then they cannot possibly know in advance when a specific trader will trade or for how much. They may know from experience when specific trading firms will enter the market, for what stocks and for how much. They may also know the mass psychology of the market and what individual traders are likely to do and when they are likely to enter and exit.

Becoming a solid poker player by default

This may sound a very strange title for a blog post but you will have to keep with me here while I explain myself. Poker at the end of the day is a game of simple decision making. You have to address the strength of your hand with the likely expected strength of your opponents and then make a simple decision of whether you should call, fold, check or raise. The actions of calling, folding, checking or raising are pretty straight forward……it is knowing where you stand with regards to your hand strength versus your opponents hand strength that is the hard part. If you have junk then that is easy to identify, if you have a lot of strength then this is also easy to identify……..but that doesn’t mean that you can simply make an automatic play.

Don’t over complicate the game

Poker at the end of the day is a simple game, the problem though is that as human beings then we tend to overcomplicate it and when that happens then many of us go through tough periods where it is difficult to see the wood for the trees so to speak. Poker is a simple process of matching hand strength vs hand strength to win whatever money is in the pot. Obviously it gets far more complex than this but essentially this is what it is…….your hand strength against that of your opponents for whatever is in the middle. Now that hand strength is one of two possible things……..actual hand strength or perceived hand strength.

Poker books can sometimes hold you back

At the end of the day then you absolutely need to educate yourself as a poker player. Poker books form a large part of the poker learning environment these days and millions of players the world over look to educate themselves using books. But just how effective is this as a learning tool? Well firstly you have to remember that when you learn set strategies then you are really only learning them so that you can use them in certain selected situations. It is somewhat similar to having a set of golf clubs……each and every club on its own does a great job but only in the right set of circumstances.

Don’t make life easy for your opponents

There is one simple way to lose money playing poker and that is to simply make life easy for your opponents. At the end of the day you make money from your opponent’s poor decisions and the more that they make then the more money that you make. For example let us say that you have AK in early position in full ring. Most players have a very tight range from this position and especially so when they raise. But look what happens when you do raise conventionally and make it 3.5bb. Your opponents are going to suspect that you have AA-JJ, AKs, AK and AQs. So when they call you then they are calling with two goals in mind. The first is that they can get potential implied odds against your hand and simply fold on the flop if they miss.

How effective is good poker play?

What exactly is “good poker” play and how effective is it in this modern online environment? Well firstly I believe that too many players place too much emphasis on playing hands well. Do not get me wrong here or misunderstand what I am saying, at the end of the day we make money in poker by the accuracy of our playing decisions over those of our opponents. You always strive in poker to play your hands as optimally as possible and that is a given. However the overwhelming majority of players simply do not put in or cannot be bothered to put in that extra effort that is needed to really make a difference.

Preparing for a much higher level of play

I was speaking with a couple of lower stakes players the other day who asked me about what the best way forward was when it came to playing at higher levels. Well firstly this isn’t easy to answer in a single sentence because playing higher levels of play isn’t just as straight forward as simply moving up. You are in fact playing an entirely different game even though on the surface they look alike. Let’s face it; everyone can see that a NL600 ten handed game is the same as a NL25 game except that the players ate better and that they are playing for more money? But you need to be very careful just making that assumption because although it is true, it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface on just how better players alter the dynamic and how you need to adjust to that.

It is good to get a new focus

Throughout my poker life then I have been plagued by a lack of focus from time to time. The problem with poker and playing it for a living is that you must be your own boss. This sounds good in theory but it does have certain problems attached to it. Firstly you are responsible for your own earn rate and salary. If you do anything wrong then you impact on how much you earn. If you are idle and only play 30 hours per week when you would have played 40 and having a boss would have ensured that you worked 40 hours then your bottom line is affected. When you do the same thing day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, year in and year out then trust me……..it gets pretty boring.

Thinking ahead in a poker hand

Let us say that it gets folded around to the cut-off who makes it $3.50 in a NL100 ring game and you are on the button with Qc-Jd. You know that your hand is marginal against a raiser but you do have position and that counts for an awful lot in No Limit Hold’em. But you need to think ahead in the hand and plan what you are going to do in numerous scenarios. But this isn’t straight forward because of the fact that your optimal game playing conditions can vary depending on how many tables that you happen to be playing. If you are playing ten tables for example then you need a simplified strategy for playing this many tables.

Looking at hand construction in No Limit Hold’em

When you play a hand in No Limit Hold’em then you are nearly always better off playing hands that can make big hands post flop. If you play a hand like A-K for example then you are ideally looking for a small pot or a small to medium sized pot. The only exception to this is if you were prepared to bet all three streets and expected to get called down with worse purely to balance your strategy. Short of this then you are not looking to play a big pot on several streets in a cash game with A-K most of the time because you are looking to flop top pair with top kicker.

When I say “looking to flop” then what I mean is what you actually flop rather than what you do flop. In an ideal world then you would like to flop Q-J-10 or A-A-K but that simply doesn’t happen often enough. So when you raise pre-flop with A-K then you are raising for several reasons but none of them should be to create a big pot. This is strategic in nature but it is amazing just how many poker players fail to think strategically in poker and they pay the price because of it. Let us say that someone raises in middle position and you decide to make a fancy play with 7d-3c and call on the button.

Bankroll building

When people used to ask me what I did for a living back when I played poker full time then I used to say to them that I was in the risk business and that I used to manage risk and investments. You could in fact tell people a wide range of things from being a risk manager to being a portfolio and fund manager. I think this certainly sounds better than being a poker player even though essentially you are doing the same thing. It is amazing when you think about it because one has far more respect and kudos among non-poker players while the other doesn’t. I have met and spoken to many people who perceive that poker is out and out gambling.

Making a c-bet in NLHE

Is it always feasible to continuation bet in NLHE? Well one thing is for sure and this is that c-betting or continuation betting is a very common tactic in heads up situations. But yet blindly doing something simply because you have read about it is not good poker play. What you should be more interested in is the entire line that you are taking and a failure to do that will lead you into trouble. Let us look at an example here to show you want I mean. You raise pre-flop with Q-J and the big blind calls you. The game is NL100 and so your raise is to $3.50. The big blind calling makes the pot $7.50 and the flop comes 4-4-2 rainbow.

The differences between live and online poker

There are many differences between live and online poker but in terms of technical playing differences then I will discuss one of the major unseen differences in this post. What I want to discuss here is the importance of balancing your range. It is common knowledge now that live games are softer than online games and there are many reasons for this. So in order to compensate for playing only one table and probably only 30 hands per hour then you need to play considerably higher stakes.

A very good player may run at 20bb/100 playing $10-$20 NLHE live which equates to $400/100 hands. But if he is only seeing 30 hands per hour then the hourly rate drops to $120/hour. This is still very good but the hand numbers are low and so the variance is going to be very high. Also with live poker then the games are going to be less frequent and so what this means is that the amount of downtime that you will experience will be higher than online in casinos where perhaps only one game is active.

Thinking ahead in SNG’s

Just like in any other form of poker then it is the act of thinking ahead that really determines the good players from the mediocre players in SNG’s. This is a side to the game that you miss when you play too many tables at the same time. I played nearly 1000 SNG’s a few years ago and so have quite a bit of experience at this form of poker. I also studied the game as well and so I can lend my experience if I can at this style of poker. There are clearly situations to pick up chips that you need to be aware of and I will look at an example here to show what I mean.

There are four players remaining in this ten man SNG and as per usual the top three players get paid a 50-30-20 percentage. You are the clear chip leader with around 9500 out of the 15,000 total chips in circulation. The two blinds to your right have around 2300 each and the short stack has T900. The blinds are 100-200 and the short stack who is UTG folds. Now it is on you and you have the button and you have the 6d-3d. Now here is where you need to look at the game dynamic to find the right play.

Finding optimal poker levels

The modern online poker game is a very tough one in which to try and make a lot of money. Some years ago then limit hold’em was the game to play as this game was the first real poker game played online. NLHE wasn’t around in online poker as the sites didn’t have the software to play any form of poker that didn’t have a structured betting system in place. But when they did then NLHE exploded in online poker and with it an avalanche of coaching sites and coaching material.

But what happened over the next few years was that a huge shift in how people played poker took place and this meant that the loose fish money dried up massively. If you had any problems with your game or your discipline then you basically had no chance in the new online poker world. Very few people were recording massive earn rates and so this knocked on to the number of people who were playing the game for a living. There are optimal strategies though that have to be employed in a game of poker but I think that an individual poker game is in fact a microcosm of the entire poker environment itself.

Adjusting and re-adjusting in poker

There is one fundamental reason why many players cannot make the move to higher level poker and it isn’t often to do with not being able to accept the swings that come at higher levels. When you play micro-stakes and low-stakes levels then you can make money by simply doing ABC things and playing in a very automatic way. In fact there are a large number of players who play this way and make a very good return doing it.

The strategy is to offset playing lower levels by playing online and playing more tables to compensate for the lower stake levels. So ten tables at NL100 is the same outlay as one table of NL1000 except of course that you are very unlikely to lose $1000 at NL100 ten tabling in one swoop like you can with one hand at $5-$10 games! But as you move up then your opponents will become more and more sophisticated and this broadly falls into two avenues.

Why is this the case?

I was having a conversation with someone on a poker forum the other day who had a different opinion to mine regarding online poker tournaments. I personally did not think that you had as much time to acquire chips as what he did. I was looking at this from an angle of playing the games for profit. When you look at the massive variance that is in these things then a very aggressive tournament style can leave you going very long periods of time without any kind of serious pick up.

I often think that the best tournament style may just be a subtle blend of regular and consistent cashing but getting the odd very deep finish but without the tournament win. This may sound very strange at first because your optimal tournament finish should be to win……but is it? It is clear that everybody wants to win an event and if you asked a hundred players where they would like to finish then every single one of them would say to come first. However in very large fields then the dynamic shifts because many of the players will be bad players. But bad players by sheer definition play many more hands than they should but when a large number of bad players play more hands than they should then a fair percentage will acquire a lot of chips.

Making a million dollars from online poker

How easy is it to make a million dollars from online poker? How high do you have to play to be able to do this and how good do you need to be? Well firstly I don’t think that you need to be a great poker player and I certainly do not think that you need to play all that high either. However what you do need to do is to commit to a process and stick to it. The first stage is to educate yourself to a level where you are a winning poker player. Let us say that you could make $10/hr and played 20 hours per week.

This means that you would make $10,000 per year playing online poker. Now at that rate it would take 10 years to make $100k and 100 years to make a million. So to speed up this process then you either have to do two things or ideally both. That is to increase your hourly rate and to play more hours. Now look what happens when a solid pro that makes $50/hour and plays full time enters the equation. They make $2000 per week and $100,000 per year. So they could reach $1 million in a mere ten years just by doing nothing special at all. The mistake of course is to view this as some sort of landmark win because it isn’t. Once you become good enough then poker simply becomes a job and no more. So our solid pro if he wants to reach that $1 million goal in less time needs to increase his hourly rate or play more hours. He could possibly stretch to playing 50 hours per week and if he got a better rake deal or played more tables successfully then he may increase his hourly rate to $70/hour.

Building a bankroll

Just how much money do you need to build a bankroll in poker? Well there are several ways of looking at this and I will go into each one and their respective merits. Years ago someone backed me to play high stakes poker to the tune of £100,000. This ended up not being successful even though I didn’t lose money. But I have also played at the other end of the spectrum as well because I started with $100 on 1st April 2010 and the challenge was to turn that into $10,000. It took me nine months but I did it and I then decided to play NL100 permanently and to take the challenge onto $100,000. But a few days ago just for the hell of it I decided to try and spin up $1 into as much as I could.

Another look at tournament speed

I want to follow on from what I talked about a few days ago in my last post regarding tournament speed. It is clear though that many players adopt the wrong tournament strategy in fast paced online events. I think that I need to break this down maybe a little bit better than what I did last time. When you have situations in tournaments where blinds are going up say every fifteen minutes then the speed of the event is very fast. So at a rate of say 70 hands per hour and blinds starting at say 10-20 with stacks of 2000 then the blinds after four level increases will likely be around 50-100. So if your stack hasn’t progressed then you have dwindled from 100bb to 20bb in only one hour without doing anything wrong. In fact your stack if you haven’t won a pot will not be 2000 anymore and will be less than that. After paying the blinds then you may only have around 1700 in chips and only 17bb. You may have only dropped 300 in chips but your big blind figure has fallen from 100 to 17 which is less than one sixth of the size.

Looking at tournament speed

Online poker tournaments are huge these days but you have to remember that the speed structure of these tournaments means that you have to get busy early on and throughout the tournament if you want to make the final table or win the event. Before we move on then it is instructive here to see how bookmakers operate. They essentially make money by many punters chasing the immediate lure of short term wins and consistent wins. This same principle applies to poker tournaments because although consciously all players go into a tournament looking to “win”……..a combination of being willing to accept a minor cash and not having the right balance in their game means that few players succeed in online poker tournaments long time and the strong players exploit this weak-tight mentality. A very aggressive game can win any large MTT event and the WSOP main event is a good example of this.

Using Pot Control in cash games

When you play deep stacked then there are very few situations in which you would like the pot to become very large. In fact if you are playing with 100bb or more then the only time that you really want the pot to become big is when you have a big hand. In fact you may not even want the pot to become big even then. We will look at a few situations here to show you what I mean. Let us say that you flop the nuts with 7-7 when the flop comes 7-7-2. This flopped monster is clearly a rarity but it highlights one extreme side of the spectrum. Now clearly you would like to get your opponent all in for a huge amount of big blinds in what is a massively +EV situation and in fact depending on their hand then you could even have 100% equity in this situation.