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[Article] The Daily Floption |
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PanoRaMa United States. Feb 23 2010 09:53. Posts 1655 | | |
As I mentioned previously, I write a "metagame" column for Baller Magazine (www.ballermagazine.com) every month. It's a relatively new publication, and I'm a bad writer and not an immensely good player but I consider myself a good teacher and I like helping people. The general audience of the publication is comprised of beginners so don't expect anything phil galfond-ish here if you're already a good player, but hopefully newer players get something out of it. My February article can be found here (on tilt control): http://www.liquidpoker.net/blog/viewblog.php?id=839275
I should also mention that I have an extra sc2 beta key which I'm considering selling for $200. Only to relatively known posters on LP (no 1 post lurkers), and I'm not for sure selling but if I decide to then I'll do a first come first serve type deal. PM me if interested.
Edit: No longer selling
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While each poker hand begins before the flop, it’s only after the flop that the story—the overlying, strategic line you take with your hand—truly begins. Just because you raised pocket Queens preflop for value doesn’t mean that you’ll be sticking to a pure value-oriented line on the flop. Your opponent may do something unexpected, or the flop may come unfavorably. Poker is a variable-oriented game. There are many options to choose from whenever we play a hand on any street.
Something I’ve implemented with my students is what I like to call “The Daily Floption”, meaning the daily flop option. Lame humor aside, every day I create a preflop and flop scenario, then ask my students what they think is the most optimal flop action to take given the circumstances. The flop is something people take for granted far too often. Just because you only have 9-high doesn’t mean you can immediately disregard your hand, and just because you have an overpair doesn’t mean you can blindly start betting and raising.
Every time the action is on you, you have the opportunity to play your hand in the single most optimal way possible. With that in mind, doing these flop exercises is an “off-the-table” approach to studying poker that will help any player’s game, from beginners to advanced players.
Try this: Grab a deck of cards, shuffle it, and deal three cards face up—the flop. Let’s say you’ve dealt yourself a flop of Jc 3s 5c.
Before the more detailed analysis, it’s best for novice players to first get acquainted with reading flop textures. There is a substantial difference between an Ac 7s 2h flop and a Th 9h 8c flop. “Dry” flops are flops that don’t contain many draws (straight draws and/or flush draws), whereas “wet” flops are flops that contain many draws.
Dry flops are very straightforward. Wet flops require a bit more understanding; wet flops can be “slightly wet” to “significantly wet”, with many levels of sogginess in between. An analogy would be driving down a street. For a slightly wet street, maybe it rained a bit the night before. You might have to deal with a few puddles, but for the most part, your driving will be unaffected. If it’s still pouring rain, however, your driving might be exponentially more cautious. There may be more hazards to consider, your visibility may be affected, and your tires may not work as well. The same can be said for your play with a hand. Having Ac Ts on Th 3d 2c (a dry flop) is substantially different from Ac Ts on Th 9h 8h (a significantly wet flop).
Now back to our randomly-dealt flop. I would classify Jc 3s 5c as semi-wet. The flush draw is present, along with a few gutshot straight draws (7-6, A-4, A-2) and two open-ended straight draws (6-4 and 4-2). Now imagine a scenario in which you have a hand—be it a draw or a made hand—and are up against an average, good, or bad opponent (maybe with some more specific details like his or her tendencies post-flop), with x amount of big blinds as the effective stack, and either in position or out of position. With this in mind, you now decide upon which play is likely to be the most optimal given the circumstance you’ve created.
“In a $5/$10 game, a loose, aggressive, but not particularly good player raised $30 preflop from the Cutoff. We called Ac 4c from the Button, the blinds folded, and against the Cutoff we are 100 big blinds deep. On the flop, our opponent bet $50 into a $75 dollar pot, what is the best play now?”
With this we are limited to three options: raising, calling, and folding. Each option has its own inherent expected value (EV). Folding has an EV of 0. Calling probably has a positive EV because we have sufficient pot odds and implied odds to call. Raising is probably positive EV because we fold out better hands enough of the time, and we still have the capability to win a big pot if we hit our flush or straight. The question is now whether raising has a higher EV than calling.
Since this is a metagame column and not an actual strategy column I won’t go into detail about the specific hand. I just wanted to demonstrate the beginning thought process involved in good, objective decision-making. Every professional considers these factors when playing a hand. With the options laid out, I then ask my students to rationalize what they think is the best option. It’s one thing to blindly choose the correct answer. It’s quite another to understand the reasons behind it.
Having and knowing good reasons for your play in poker is what makes you a good player, not accidentally stumbling into the best play. I then rate their reasons for validity and overall relevance. Sometimes there are some large disputes over what the most optimal play actually is. Ultimately, these disputes are what make poker such a technically beautiful game. In a game of hidden information and millions of possible variables—we haven’t even discussed the turn and river yet!—lies the opportunity to play optimally in the millions of possible circumstances presented to you.
Just changing a slightly wet, two-tone flop to a dry, rainbow flop has ramifications on how you may ultimately decide to play your hand. Note how much strength our hand loses if our example flop is changed from Jc 3s 5c to Jc 3s 5h.
Run a flop exercise like this every day and you’ll be amazed at how well you’ll improve your understanding of Hold’em. Talk to your poker-playing friends about these scenarios you create and what they would do. Recognize and consider flop situations that you frequently have trouble with but have never bothered to try and solve. (A tough one for my students was the common “pocket Kings out of position on an Ace-high flop” scenario.) After that, change the flop texture a bit and see how vastly different your new answer may be. An enhanced understanding of flop textures will allow you to better extract value from wet flops and minimize your losses on dry flops with marginal holdings.
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