Poker Professor Bankroll Challenge
My last post dealt with the concept of Reciprocality, which refers to differences in how you handle something and how your poker opponents handle the same thing. The difference in your approach either adds to or takes away from your bottom line (when considered over the very long term).
- Poker Bankroll Requirements
- Poker Professor Bankroll Challenge 2020
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- Poker Bankroll App
One aspect of that is Bankroll Reciprocality. If you partition your money better than your opponents do, you gain another small edge. You may not see it, but it’s still there.
I was reminded of this last night at a table with two players who appeared very well bankrolled and played with a hyper-aggressive, borderline maniac, fearless style. The house policy at this private game allows players to top off their stacks up to the biggest stack on the table. Early on, these players bought more chips several times to keep up with whoever was fortunate enough to build up a deep stack.
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In a cash game, this style wins over the long haul by putting other players to frequent decisions for all of their chips… with monster hands, medium strength hands, missed draws and total air. Their all-in and bluffing frequencies are so high that you have to call with lighter and lighter holdings. Once I called an all-in river bet by one of them – for purposes of this blog I’ll call him “Gabe” – with JT on a board runout of T85-A-3 to double up through a busted flush draw. Do I really like putting my whole stack at risk with less than top pair? The really interesting part of the hand was rewinding back to the pre-flop betting, where Gabe had open-raised in middle position with 7h 3h. If we have to put hands like 73 suited in his pre-flop raising range, we might as well not even try to develop a range at all.
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- The ‘s’ next to some of the hands stands for Suited, so two cards of the same suit. ‘AJs’ could stand for A J whereas ‘AJ’ could stand for A J. Take a minute just to browse the hands in each group, you don’t need to memorise these, as you can use the chart to refer to, and once you have used it for a while, you will start to remember which hands are in which groups.
Eventually they will make big hands and will get paid off more often than the rest of us. With such deep stacks, those payoffs put them in a position to run all over the table. Gabe had earlier called a pre-flop raise from the big blind with T2 (the “Doyle Brunson” hand) and saw a runout of K62-T-2 to make a full house and crack my pocket AAs. Later the other guy playing a similar style woke up with his own AA when I had AK. Given the high frequency of his having something weaker, I decided to push my AK extra hard and got flattened.
That’s poker. With their bankroll leverage, every time they make a winning hand, they’ll with take someone’s entire stack or double up what is already a deep stack. That increased their leverage and other players who aren’t comfortable playing for large pots with draws or medium strength hands start surrendering more and more often.
Michael Craig’s book The Professor, the Banker and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time, tells the story of a billionaire Texas banker, Andy Beal, who went to Las Vegas in the early 2000’s to challenge the top professional poker players. Beal insisted on heads up matches and repeatedly insisted on raising the stakes. Before long, the pros decided to pool their bankrolls as they realized Beal’s bankroll edge offset part of their poker skill edge. He could force them into tough decision after tough decision, and with a run of good cards push we would present an existential threat to each of the pros’ personal bankroll.
It’s a fascinating story, well researched and written. The pros, led by Doyle Brunson, Howard (the “Professor”) Lederer, Chip Reese, Ted Forrest, Jennifer Harmon, Todd Brunson, Chau Giang and others, referred to themselves as The Corporation. Beal’s bankroll edge forced the top poker players in Las Vegas, each accustomed to operating as a lone wolf, to pool their money and acknowledge that some of them performed more poorly against Beal than others did.
The real lesson is that deep pockets matter, especially when combined with a reasonable amount of skill (which Beal worked hard at developing in between his battles with The Corporation) and fearless aggression. This concept plays out at all levels, and the power of the deep pockets should never be underestimated.
Bankroll Reciprocality.
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Today, we finish up with the course “How To Win At Poker” on PokerProfessor.com
This final section is what they call their Advanced Poker Strategy section so I was hoping to learn a few new things that wasn’t just review like the rest of the course.
The first thing they covered was knowing whether your opponent is “pot committed”. This was a term I had heard before but didn’t have the clearest idea of what it meant. They describe it as: When a player has already committed a significant portion of their stack to a pot and is less likely to fold now because he would be left with too low a stack.
The short of it is that you should never bluff in this situation, because villain will never fold, but it is also a good time to widen our range a little bit because our opponent will probably be betting with weaker hands.
I’m not sure how useful this will be in cash games (MTTs definitely) but since most people are using the auto-top off feature to always stay at a minimum of the max buy-in at the start of each hand. Although, if they aren’t using that feature or if they are buying in for less than the max, then they are purposefully coming in short-stacked and may be a sure fire sign of a fish.
They go over some of the considerations you should make when someone raises behind you. Since we will be doing a lot of open raising, this situation should by default be given a lot more credit than a call, but looking at your hand, how aggressive the opponent is, how we are positioned relative to the raiser, etc. all have to be taken into account.
The next thing covered was interesting to me. Why would anyone show what cards they had instead of mucking?
Mucking in general is the go-to since you don’t want to expose your bluffs, reveal strong hands, and overall give away too much information to your opponent.
But there is more to it than that and there are some tricky psychological factors in play when showing cards.
For instance, if you show a good hand after successfully stealing the blinds, you might be trying to let them think that they made the right move so that later you can attempt to blind steal with air.
Or if you get away with a bluff, you may show that you indeed bluffed to try to induce your opponent to go on tilt or get them to jump to the wrong conclusion in a later hand that you may be bluffing again but instead have the nuts.
Also, you are able to show only one card and muck the other so you could make some sneaky plays like if you had pocket 8s and flopped a set, then you could show one 8 and make your opponent consider that you were betting super aggressively with only a middle pair even though you secretly held a set.
There are a lot of options that I hadn’t considered before and it may be enough for me to uncheck that “auto muck” feature when I play in the future.
The next chapter covered some more advanced poker moves.
They cover blind stealing which is basically making a raise in LP to try and force the blinds to fold and win you a quick 1.5bb. It helps to have a decent hand but if you are on the button and everyone else has folded, you need to make the blinds pay to see the flop. Don’t give them a free flop!
Next, they cover isolation raises which are raises made by you with the intention of singling out an opponent to play against. Typically this happens if a short stack before you has gone all in. You re-raise to force other hands out. As long as no one calls your re-raise, then you are only in the pot for whatever the call was anyway and less hands in the pot greatly increases your chances of winning.
Next, they talk about semi bluffing. This is pretty straightforward. You most likely don’t have the best hand but there are plenty of outs to give you the best hand. So while you are bluffing with your bet sizing, there is a chance you can hit on the turn or river to give you the best hand.
This topic leads right into implied odds which they glance over at a high level. We are already familiar with implied odds from the Owen Gaines’ book but it was a good refresher. They did a good job of cautioning against the overuse of implied odds when making decisions as nothing is guaranteed when it comes to future streets of betting. We can’t just use implied odds as some lame excuse to make unprofitable calls.
And that was basically it for the course!
After taking the “final exam” and passing with flying colors, we are finished!
Obviously, I wasn’t working through the bankroll challenge as I went through the course but that is soon to come.
They have another free course on Sit-N-Go tournaments but I am focusing on Full-Ring Cash Games for now. I really want to focus on one game type as the strategies differ from game to game and I don’t need conflicting strategies at this point in my journey.
After finishing this course, I think it is time to move past the “basics” courses and focus specific elements of the game. Since I don’t have a database of previous hands where I can find leaks to fix just yet, I am going to focus on areas that currently confuse me.
I will be taking a week-by-week approach. Basically, I’ll pick a topic. Do research and learn about it and apply it during the course of that week sharing what I have learned along the way.
I think this will be the best way to continue my study of this game so that I’m not reading the same stuff over and over.
Once again, I don’t have data yet on my leaks so I’m picking something that confuses me currently at the table. I will be focusing this week (and probably till the end of the year with the holidays) on Playing from the Blinds.
I think this is a good place to start because I have learned that playing from the blinds is NEVER a profitable spot but instead is a spot where you are trying to limit your losses.
Poker Bankroll Requirements
So, I think if I can get a good foundation in Blind play early, then I will be starting my poker journey off on the right foot by limiting my losses in this position so that they don’t wipe out any profits I make from Late Position play.
I am really looking forward to this and cannot wait to get started.
Poker Professor Bankroll Challenge 2020
Bankroll For Live Poker
Oh and I only got to play one freeroll today and I placed 40th. I was running really good but had a tough hand that slashed my stack to almost nothing too deep into the ever growing blinds and antes.
Until next time…
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