A Common Mistake: Sizing Your Bets.

As I've been playing some games lately online, I've come across a very common, well known mistake still happening from the majority of online poker players. They do not know how to properly size their bets.

This doesn't refer to the tricksters out there, whom I will address later. This is about the player who either bets too little or way too much or both. I'll lead out with an example:

You are in early position of a $25NL Texas Hold 'Em game. Blinds are $.10 and $.25 cents. You are dealt AQ and the first player folds. You are rolling with a shorter than normal roll of $7 because of a bad beat a few hands prior. You decide to push all in. You win the pot uncontested and think you made a pretty good move with AQ driving out smaller pairs and just taking the blinds.

So what's wrong with this picture? You bet 28 times the big blind, an absurdly huge number. The pot was only $.35 cents and you bet $7 dollars into it. Now if you were in this game facing a raise like that pre-flop what on earth would you have to have in front of you to make that call? Only hands that have you beat. AA, KK, QQ, JJ, AK and maybe even TT would call you too. If someone was rolling even shorter than you maybe even smaller pairs. But all of these hands have you beat heads up, and actually 4 of them have you absolutely dominated, referring to AA, KK, QQ and AK.

What should you have done in this position? Well leading out with $.75 cents or even $1 is more advisable, you will still make those with lesser hands fold. And you still leave room for hands that you will dominate left in the hand, like AJ, KQ, and at least in a coin flip with paired hands JJ and below. These are hands that you will extract the most money out of if you hit the flop, and even if you don't hit the flop, you can often drive smaller pairs out of the hand with continuation bets if the flop looks scary enough with high cards.

True this puts you in a situation where you have to make more decisions, it's so easy to be binary in your decision of all-in/fold. It makes it easy because you no longer have to make anymore decisions later on in the hand. If you are going to beat the other players you need to put you and them in situations where they have to make decisions, and as long as you make better ones based on better information, knowledge and wisdom you will not only beat them but you will extract more and more from them as well.

Here is another example at the same table.

Preflop:
Middle Position: Call $.25
Hero: Ac Qd - Bets $.75
Small Blind: Calls $.75
Big Blind: Calls $.75
Middle Position: Calls $.75

Flop: Qc 8d 5s | Pot = $3.00
Small Blind: Check
Big Blind: Check
Middle Position: Check
Hero: Bet $.75
Small Blind: Fold
Big Blind: Fold
Middle Position: Call $.75

Turn: Qc 8d 5s Js | Pot = $4.50
Middle Position: Check
Hero: Bet $.75
Middle Position: Call

River: Qc 8d 5s Js Ts | Pot = $6.00
Middle Position: Check
Hero: Bet $.75
Middle Position: Raise $4.00
Hero: Call $4.00

Middle Position shows As 8s for an Ace High Flush.
Hero mucks cards.
Middle position wins pot of $14.00

You have AQ again, but you are now on the button. You raised it a proper $.75 cents and had 3 callers, 2 from the blinds in a loose game. The pot now stands at $3 dollars. The flop comes Q85 rainbow. It's checked around to you and you bet $.75 cents again. The blinds fold but the middle position calls you. It comes down with a J matching a suit on the board, and you bet $.75 cents again and you are called. Finally the river completes the flush draw and the straight draw with a 10. You are checked to again, you bet $.75 cents again but then get check-raised to $4 dollars. What do you do now? You think you may be beat, but still have top pair and top kicker, and you make a call. He turns over the flush and you throw your cards in the muck in disgust while silently yelling in your brain that you can't believe he chased his back door flush.

What went wrong? You bet way too little in this example, and this example is almost an extreme case, but I see it all the time at the tables. The initial pre-flop bet was great building a nice sized pot. But after you hit top pair and top kicker you have to protect that hand with more than just another 75cent bet. Middle position was looking at getting 5:1 pot odds in that he only had to put 75 cents into the pot to win$3.75. He was almost inclined to chase his flush/pairs/three of a kind with pot odds like that, and he knew he could probably extract even more later if he did happen to hit his hand.

What should have happened? You should have bet anywhere from $1.50 to $3.00 to push out the chasers, or at least make them pay to see the turn and river. A price that shouldn't be paid mathematically speaking. Now you are forcing your opponent to make mistakes, and if you are playing a poor player, he may still chase at that price, and more often than not he will not hit his flush, and end up paying dearly for chasing it.

How about those crafty players out there? Occasionally you can try and fool people by over or under betting your hands. You really only ever see this happen against the better players who understand pot odds and bet sizing. It's often a tell that if you over bet you probably are bluffing, and if you under bet you are probably trapping. If you have a table image of the newbie who doesn't bet properly or give away your hand strength through your betting you could get away with some tricks. You do the opposite of what they expect, you over bet your good hands and under bet your bluffs. By sending this false tell you may get paid off on your pocket aces and get away with bluffs with small bet sizes. Again this is a risky strategy, but a viable one if you are tuned into the table and you are not playing with a bunch of clowns.

If you are playing clowns, play straightforward poker with appropriate bets, and try not to change your betting style in terms of bet sizes in accordance to your hand strength, because you may have that one shark at the table who sees right through your betting and may take full advantage of that tell.

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On a side note, I'm back into playing poker a little more lately. It won't be a super regular thing, but I will try and put in a couple hours a week depending on scheduling. I will also be going to Hawaii for the first time in about a weeks time and I'm very excited.

I hope to still try and write more and more articles, I notice I still get visitors and I'm glad that people still get a lot of use from my articles.

Leave comments as usual if you have anything to add or would like to comment or suggest anything for a future article.

Poker and Life - Lessons in both.

A rule that all good poker players live by:
Always try and make the best decision possible with the information you have attained. This makes a good poker player, it may not necessarily mean you will win the hand, or lose the least amount of money, but it's what all good poker players live by.

There is a concept known as the "Sklansky Dollar" named after the mathematical/poker genius of the same name. It is an imaginary amount of money that you earn every time you make a good decision mathematically.

If you get all-in with a hand that will win 80% of the time you will take 80% of that pot and add it to your "Sklansky Dollar" total, no matter the outcome of the hand. For example, you get all in with a hand that has a 70% chance of winning, and the pot total is 100 dollars, no matter if you get sucked out or if you win the hand, you have earned 70 Sklansky Dollars.

Now don't go out and start calculating this figure for all of your poker games, the math will overwhelm you and you won't have enough time to think about the game and will probably start playing worse. It's the concept that is important here. Essentially in the long run after playing thousands if not millions of games of poker you should expect your *actual* earnings to equal your Sklansky Dollars.

This concept helps people realize that the longer you play good poker, the more money you should earn. It also illustrates that you *will* and *should* have your pocket aces cracked from time to time, Sklansky Dollars wouldn't equal out in the long run if this didn't happen.

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So what on earth does this concept have to do with life in general?

Life is an ongoing poker game, filled with many easy and tough decisions every day. Life is also predicated by luck in many instances, in many cases no matter how good of a decision you make you feel like life just crapped on you. In life we often go on "tilt" where we let our emotions take control of our actions, and it often leads to the making of bad decisions.

We can apply the idea of "Sklansky Dollars" to this concept as well. I'll call it "Applebury Dollars" (after my last name). You however can't refer to this quite so much in terms of cash or money, but it helps us monetize and conceptualize the concept.

When we are going through our daily lives we try to think that we make good decisions. Whenever we do we expect good things to happen to us for making such good decisions, they often happen, but they sometimes don't. A good decision will depend on the person, and often when faced with difficult situations we don't know what a good decision will be. But generally you can think of a good decision of a case where you have a better chance of something good happening to you than bad or a case where your decision creates less pain or bad to you than the alternative.

Whenever a good decision is made, you essentially add to your "Applebury Dollar" total no matter the outcome of the decision. This teaches us the same concept in poker, but as it deals with life. We should do two things, make good decisions, and live life to the fullest.

Live life to the fullest? How does that pertain here? As with poker, you will find yourself with more profit if you play more and more poker, as long as you make good decisions. This same concept pertains to life, you must go out and live life, take risks, make decisions. If life craps on you some of the times, then so be it, but we must move forward because if we stop making decisions and stop living we will never be able to to make the most of our lives and we will never overcome the sinister "luck factor".

How do we know if we make good decisions?

This is a much trickier question. In poker, we must discern from luck and skill when playing poker. Mathematics helps us with this, we can calculate the odds and the expected gain/loss from a decision.

We can't do this in terms of life. Some people will make bad decisions and continue to make bad decisions until luck catches up with them and they realize that what they have done is wrong. Some people will make many good decisions and continue to make good decisions only to be crapped on and made to feel that they have made bad decisions their whole life.

This is probably the best reason for having a good education. Being well educated is probably one of the few for sure good decisions that one can make. Education allows us to examine the decisions made by many people throughout the world and time and the theories and thoughts of those thinking about decisions we are making today and in the future. Education allows us to think more clearly about the decisions we have to make, much like the education of a poker player except life takes much longer to learn. As we begin to view the world differently because of our education, we begin to make hard decisions more easy. And often times it takes experience to truly understand the difference between wrong and right.

I hope you enjoy my little philosophical babble. In poker and in life you must first educate yourself, play and live as much as possible, and finally make good decisions. If you follow this creed you will become not only more successful at the poker table, but also at life.

- Justin "Tireur" Applebury