Article: Don't be a nit

So since I'm going to be running a poker club soon and I have to write stuff out, I've been writing some articles more so to keep track of my thoughts.

I've already made a thread in Main Poker about this, so sorry that I'm reposting the same thing. I think it's better suited to put this stuff in my blog, though. I would end up cluttering the main poker thread .

Any comments are appreciated.

Don’t be a nit! How to approach poker
edzwoo

Think back to when you first started playing poker seriously. What was the first thing you learned? It might not be the same for you, but the first thing I learned was what types of starting hands to play. I started off crushing the penny games simply by following a little chart and some restriction rules, such as not calling raises with AJ because it’s an easily dominated hand. We all had some sort of starting hand chart memorized at some point, and for good reason. Newer or bad players that don’t have this basic guidance are generally crushed in the long run by those who do.

This is something everybody can understand on a basic level. It’s pretty clear that if one person plays better hands than the other, the player with the better cards has an advantage. Many people will get mathematical and say a range of AQ+, 22+ has 67% equity against a range of any two cards.

Stop!

If you think that said equity advantage is the main reason why beginners must follow starting hand charts, then you are wrong. In fact, if you still follow a starting hand chart because of this reasoning, then you are severely limiting your winrate.

All poker players have to understand that there are three advantages that we can have in poker: skill, cards, and position. Having a skill advantage is BY FAR the most complex and important advantage we can have. Positional advantage and card advantage are both very simple to understand. Having position gives us more information of our opponent and allows us to close the betting (assuming heads up), and having better cards will allow us to win more often at showdown. It’s important that I reiterate this: the reason why beginners must follow starting hand charts and play only good hands is NOT because of the additional equity (card advantage). It is actually because they lack any skill.

To explain this further, a beginner without guidance will make MANY –EV decisions. Starting hand charts and restriction rules drastically reduce a beginner from making –EV decisions. Note that I didn’t say ‘mistakes’, but –EV decisions. A –EV decision is always a mistake, but a mistake can still be neutral or +EV, such as missing a valuebet or valuebetting too small. When a beginner is playing the penny games and is dealt AA, to nearly any action on any flop, turn or river, it is VERY HARD to make a –EV play. AA on the vast majority of the boards against the vast majority of players in the penny games will be the best hand. When we tell a beginner to see a flop cheaply with a hand like 55, we tell him he must shut down if he doesn’t hit a set. This restriction is in place because if he continues, he is very likely to make a –EV decision. In the end, when we grind into the beginner’s head that –EV decisions are bad, he will dodge them all be faced with only neutral and +EV decisions. This beginner is now… a huge nit!

You’ve probably heard the term before, but here’s my definition. A nit is somebody who is so scared of making a –EV decision that they pass up on many +EV spots. Nits pass up thin valuebets and fold many hands preflop because they’ve been taught the world will explode if they get anywhere near something that can be –EV. They still cling onto their starting hand charts and rules. This is where most people get stuck, and it’s because they’ve been winning money for a while and are afraid to change what they already know. In order to play the best poker we can, it isn’t a matter of simply avoiding –EV spots. It is just as important to make the best +EV decision possible when we can. For example, say our opponent is willing to call $50 on the river with a worse holding. If we make a valuebet of $20, we just lost $30 on a mistake. If we check, we just made a $50 mistake. Even though we did not make a –EV decision, we made a mistake equally as bad as making a –EV call for $30 or $50. It is very easy for us move on and forget these mistakes simply because we’re usually content that we won money in the end.

So knowing all this, how can you apply it? Here are several tips that will help you improve your game:

1. Eliminate the idea of a starting hand chart from your game. For those of you who use a heads-up display to play online poker, this means approaching a poker game thinking you’re going to play your 15/11 game. Your VPIP/PFR should NOT be a static number. Let’s say you are in the big blind and it is folded around to the small blind who completes. This player is a weak player who folds to any half-pot continuation bet when he doesn’t hit a pair, and when he does, he leads into your strongly. Knowing all this, with your skill and positional advantage is so huge that you should be raising without even looking at your cards. In fact, your PFR should probably be greater than or equal to how often this player limps in. Beginner hand charts are used to prevent us from making –EV decisions. The actual hands you play should be dependent upon if there are any +EV spots available. And there are a LOT.

2. Do not limit yourself to certain rules you have learned in poker. This is often referred to as ‘standard’ play. For example, say you backdoor the nuts against a bad player who you suspect has a holding he really likes. The pot is $30 and you both have $90 behind. Many players will not even consider making a 3x pot shove here even though it is clearly the best play, simply because overbetting is not ‘standard’.

3. If you are going to make a bet or raise for value, start with the maximum and work your way down. Remember, the maximum is whatever is left in your stack, not the size of the pot. As ridiculous as it might sound, if you are dealt AA and there is a limper, first think about the merits of shoving on his limp, because sometimes it’s actually the most profitable play. DO NOT start off thinking you are going to isolate him with your 4 big blind plus 1 big blind limp system.

4. Do not ‘auto pilot’. Auto piloting is when you make a decision without giving it any thought. In any given spot, you must first assess if you can make +EV decisions. Folding should only be done when you go through every situation and realize they are all –EV. This is crucial to improving as a poker player, because you are constantly trying to push all your edges, and will learn more in the process. Auto piloting will not help you learn.

0 votes

good read

your article has some good points...i guess my one comment would be this:

in theory, it is obviously correct to try and push every edge, think outside the box to extract as much +EV as possible, etc...however, a lot of people who try to do this end up underestimating the margin of error that usually exists in the ranges they're trying to construct while taking advantage of every situation, and this often results in trying to "create" value in situations where there is none, aka FPS.

agree with both. But i guess you gotta go through the FPS in order to find the middle ground

yeah, there was a pretty good article on 2p2 by ray zee called "evolution of a poker player" but they took it down. i google'd it and found it pasted on someone's blog, seems pretty relevant: http://thepokerfur.blogspot.com/2005/02/evolution-of-poker-player-ray-zee.html

+ Show Spoiler +

On July 15 2009 06:17 bigredhoss wrote: good read your article has some good points...i guess my one comment would be this: in theory, it is obviously correct to try and push every edge, think outside the box to extract as much +EV as possible, etc...however, a lot of people who try to do this end up underestimating the margin of error that usually exists in the ranges they're trying to construct while taking advantage of every situation, and this often results in trying to "create" value in situations where there is none, aka FPS.

I really like this post, and I totally agree.

This article is a way too approach poker in general, but is geared towards players who play too tight or robotically, which I think is the vast majority of LPers who start struggling around NL100.

The reason I do this is because I think there are two things we need to improve on to be better poker players. Maximizing our +EV situations and minimizing our -EV situations. Here's the problem that happens though.

Say we are new players and we're learning how to make certain laydowns (e.g. folding top pair to a raise). In the process of minimizing our -EV situations (learning how to fold), we start making more and more folds. Obviously if we have a big leak, we will see an improvement in our winrate pretty quickly. But what happens is we start making more and more big folds, and we can't properly determine at what point we start missing +EV spots because there's simply too much short term variance in poker. I feel that the majority of NL100 FR players went too far in minimizing -EV situations and cut into their +EV spots.

The same issue would occur in reverse, but typically we start off learning how to be a nit, because if we started poker trying to maximize our +EV spots instead of minimizing our -EV spots, we'd go broke very very fast.

In a sense, if you're a tight player who plays hundreds of thousands of hands with a very marginal winrate, you need to try being a huge spewtard. The reason is you probably have a bankroll to take the swings at this point, and you will learn a WHOLE LOT about the game in the process.

The goal isn't to become a spewtard, but to at least understand how it works and find a happy medium. When you hit that happy medium, you are a much better poker player.

On July 15 2009 06:28 dryath wrote: agree with both. But i guess you gotta go through the FPS in order to find the middle ground

Exactly.

On July 15 2009 06:45 bigredhoss wrote: yeah, there was a pretty good article on 2p2 by ray zee called "evolution of a poker player" but they took it down. i google'd it and found it pasted on someone's blog, seems pretty relevant: http://thepokerfur.blogspot.com/2005/02/evolution-of-poker-player-ray-zee.html + Show Spoiler + Evolution of a poker player Ray Zee The riddle of the Sphinx was the question, what walks on four feet in themorning, two feet in the afternoon, and three in the evening. The answerwas man. So how does this relate to poker you ask? Well it really doesn't,but with a far stretch of the imagination we might get it there. Maybe apoker player has an evolution to his playing style. That is what you needto be successful when you start out may not be the same to achieve successin higher limit games against other experienced players.As total beginners, all people will play way too loose and insure that theycannot win. They will also raise foolishly but call regularly when raisingis needed. Needless to say they call too often all the way through the handwith little chance of winning the pot. Without reading and studying thereis only a small chance that they can evolve into a winning poker player.It takes some time for them to start to realize that there is more to thegame than trying to get lucky and catch cards. That is even though pokeris an easy game to play, it is not an easy game to play well. Sometime duringthis stage some players begin to understand that playing tight gets themoney in the small games they are playing. It doesn't necessarily allowthem to win a lot, but it does give them positive results which is a welcomechange from their previous status. From here they morph into the next stage.This stage of a player's evolution is the tight stage. Most of those thatare going to go forward to become eventual winning players will enter thisform. The problem is that they frequently play too tight and may have littleimagination in the beginning. The good side is that one now finds he winsa fair amount of the time due only to the tight play, and bad playing ofthe opponents. He may also be aided by the small ante/blind structure ofmany of the games at the smaller limits, and after a long spell of ups anddowns, the newly minted tight player starts to find out about how good playscan increase your earnings. He experiments a little and finds it is funto make speculative raises and bluffs and begins too see his winnings increase.So from here he starts the trek to the next stage of his evolution.This is the advanced stage of a poker player's career. Now the cat is outof the bag. He wins more often and gets what he believes is the right feelfor the game. Great plays come about by pushing marginal hands and makingfantastic calls on the end through his ability to read hands. Poker is funplayed this way. But no longer is the tight player inside the body. Allhands start to look like they have value, and with skillful manipulationwinning the pot is easy. He begins to believe that he can play bad handsfor profit where in reality he can't. The player has taken a big step backwardand a long leap forwards at the same time. The tight style needed is goneand a new imaginative style is born and he becomes loose aggressive. Unfortunatelyfor him, if he gets too loose he loses all his money and may never recover.But for those that are moving up the ladder, this is the last leap beforethe finishing stage.Finally for our player, if he can get through the maze, may find himselfarmed with the tools to round out expert status. This last stage incorporatesthe tight play that's a must in poker, with the imagination to win potswithout the best hand. He has become tight and aggressive. Semi bluffs,bluffs, raises to knock out the best hand (and sometimes the second besthand) and get the pot down to you and the loser, good calls on the end,are some of the things that were missing before or played incorrectly. Theexpert wins lots of money and gains a reputation for being a great player.Whether he keeps the money depends on his ability to find good games atlimits within his bankroll.By the way, don't let the above paragraph fool you. It takes much work toachieve this kind of skill and only a small number of players ever reachthis status.That is my take on how most of the expert players moved up the ladder inability and skill. From this point forward each person has to learn theself-control to know when to quit when playing badly, and at the same timebe able to gauge when the opponents are outplaying you. Those that willmake the most of their time at the tables will be found playing in goodgames when they are at the peak of their facilities and being very successfulin the long run. No playing when tired or upset, limiting the hours so thatconcentration continues, and leaving when you don't have it that day, butmay not know why, are some of the hidden keys to long term success. If andwhen a person puts it all together, he can say he is now an expert.The above applies to virtually all forms of poker. Becoming a great playerdoesn't happen over night. It's true that some people have a great dealof natural ability, but even they have to work on their games. On the otherhand, those of you who don't possess a great deal of natural ability canstill become very good and successful players through experience and muchhard work

WOW, I swear I wrote my last post without reading that. While I can't say I agree with some parts, I think this really shows how a poker player should improve. I think a lot of people get stuck when they don't bother trying to push small edges.

nice reads, gj

Nice read ed

nice article, hope to see more in the future.

very nice, well appreciated

very nice Edzwoo Very nice

Nice article, thanks a lot.

good read for many players imo, brought back a concept or two that i haven't thought about in a while myself too

idk if posting this here is good for cash game players ITLR though, most likely best posted on a private blog for your housemates to read

yes, its important to help others in the community, but to post good strong guidelines for players who would be losing for months and years and telling them how to start playing well is way -ev for us and will cut winrates if you continue down this path

agree with neilly

I TOLD YOU THIS ON AIM ED LOL