Staying Out of Your Own Way

by: Lou Krieger©

When thinking about how to improve one’s poker game or doing a better job placing in tournaments - or even just sitting back to think about the game - most poker players as well as theorists who write about the game focus either tactical options and strategic responses to an opponent’s play. But sometimes the roadblocks, barriers, and thresholds we must overcome are not placed in our way by others, and they’re not in response to an action taken by an opponent. Sometimes, regardless of our intentions - or despite them - we create our problems all by ourselves.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to us that we are our own worst enemies. Although we frequently shoot ourselves in the foot in cash games, tournaments are where we really see what happens when we can’t get out of our own way.

It’s not that it’s anymore prevalent in tournaments, it just more easily seen. If we channel our inner donkey in a cash game, it’s often not even seen. Not by others and certainly not by ourselves. It’s just one hand gone wrong and regardless of how poorly we play it, another hand will be dealt and everyone at the table will be concentrating on that one, not the one just played.

But in tournaments, you’re not wagering chips of cash value so much as you’re betting a percentage of your entire equity in the event, and that amount can be anything from a small, nearly negligible amount, to all of your chips and your entire equity in the event.

Because of this, some hands are magnified in nature. When you wager all of your chips and lose, you’ll remember it, particularly if is a memorable event. At the January 2007 Poker Author’s Challenge tournament in Las Vegas I became involved in a pot with Richard Sparks, who wrote Diary of a Mad Poker Player.

Sparks was in the cut-off seat and I was on the button. Richard was first one in and made a raise of about four times the big blind. This had all the earmarks of a steal, so I came over the top for all my chips, attempting to steal the blinds and Richard’s chips too.

He had a few more chips than I did, though he would be circling the drain if he called and lost. I fully expected him to fold, allowing me to win five-and-a-half times the big blind for my efforts. But call he did, and we both turned over A-K.

We both expected to chop up the blinds, and if we did, each of us would come away with a few chips for our efforts. But I had the king of hearts and was unbelievably lucky when two hearts flopped and I then caught running hearts for a flush that allowed me to double through Richard Sparks, leaving him near elimination.

While there are times in a tournament that you reach an inflection point requiring you to make a stand for all of your chips or take risks you’d usually avoid under different circumstances, far too many players take risks they shouldn’t, and lose money — sometimes all of their chips — by committing money to hands they don’t have to play.

Earlier in that same tournament I was down to about ten times the big blind and my blinds were only two hands away. I found A-8 suited and raised all-in, trying to steal the blinds and survive another orbit of play in hopes of buying some time to find a real hand.

To my dismay, I was called in four places – there was a bounty on each author in this event, so that might have been the reason everyone jumped at the chance to get in on the action – but I’m not sure. The flop was ragged and missed me completely. But with four others in the pot, any flop is probably going to help someone.

The turn was an ace, pairing me. I had no idea if my ace was any good, because if anyone holding an ace stood a good chance of having a kicker better than mine.

The river was another rag, and my pair of aces held up to win the pot. I had quadrupled up and now had 40 times the big blind and was in decent shape.

While I had to take a risk with that hand, I would not have played those same cards early in the tournament when my chip count was high in relation to the blinds. And I wouldn’t have played it later on, when the final table was ten, nine, eight, or seven handed unless I was confronting one of the shorter stacks and trying for a knockout.

But I was very short stacked and figuring to have even fewer chips once the impending blinds did their work on me, and had little to lose other than the inexorable certainty of being eaten alive by the blinds. Desperate men take desperate actions, and I had little choice but to raise with that hand.

But I see players involving themselves in pots all the time with hands like K-T and Q-J from early position when they don’t have to do it. They are simply getting in their own way. A raise from a player in later position means you probably don’t have the best hand, and in any event, you won’t have the benefit of batting last on ensuing wagering rounds.

Moreover, when you play unsuited big cards you are frequently betting your future on a hand that figures to make top pair if it connects with the flop. While top pair with a big kicker wins a lot of hold’em pots, it is not the kind of hand you want to play for all your chips. And if you play K-T, and see a flop like K-Q-5 only to find someone getting aggressive with you, you’re probably behind.

In any event, your opponent’s wager is asking this question of you: “Do you want to play top pair for all your chips?” The answer is usually going to be a resounding “No!” unless you are very short-stacked and have to resort to long shot choices in an attempt to get lucky and emerge from that confrontation unscathed and still alive.

If you’ve got lots of chips, you can take some little, inexpensive risks, like seeing the flop for one bet (and only for one bet) with small and middling pairs. By doing so, you are risking a small portion of your tournament equity in an attempt to beat the 7.5-to-1 odds against flopping a set. If you are fortunate enough to overcome those odds, you have an opportunity to capture all of an opponent’s chips if he’s the kind of player who will gamble with one pair, or if he’s been unlucky enough to flop two pair.

But most of the time you won’t flop a set and you won’t have a hand that you want to play for all your chips. In fact, most of the time you are far better off getting out of your own way by tossing those “look good-play bad” hands away. There’s no real reason to play A-T, K-T, Q-J from early or middle position, particularly when you are not straddling an inflection point and need to do something — anything, actually — to get you off of life support and back into the tournament with enough chips at your disposal to cause some trouble.

Most of the time you are eliminated from a tournament, you can look back and see that you were the one responsible for most of the roadblocks you stumbled over.

While it undoubtedly will be someone else who KOs you, either by having the best hand all along or getting impossibly lucky and drawing out, that final hand is often not the one that really did the damage. You were probably left dazed and bleeding by stumbling over your own roadblocks. Anything inflicted upon you by a competitor was probably just a mercy killing. You did the real dirty work yourself.