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"He who limps is still walking."
-- Stanislaw Lec
Poker has all kinds of variables to it, moving pieces. Different players move in and out of games, cards run hot or cold,
personalities change due to winning or losing or drinking or time constraints,
bankrolls can go up or down...
an endless number of things can impact on something so small as a single poker hand.
But even though that is true, oftentimes there is just nothing we can do about some situations. If you make a royal flush on
seventh street in Stud HiLo, there is nothing you can do about your single opponent catching a card that makes him a raggedy
low hand to split the pot. Sometimes the river card comes a flush card to kill your straight and there is no way you could have
gotten that opponent who made the flush to fold his hand before the river. Sometimes when you make the flush on the river your
opponent will be all-in with his straight and not have the chips to pay you off. You can’t turn back the clock and force him
to buy more chips so you can extract a bet out of him on the river.
Of course, much more often we will face situations where we can do a lot to make significant changes in what occurs in a hand.
We make decisions all the time that are not totally obvious. Some of these decisions are easy, some are hard, sometimes we will
be right, sometimes we will be wrong, but in all these cases we have an opportunity to effect the situation we are in.
Included among this huge group of decisions that is the “stuff” of what poker is resides a relatively small percentage of
situations where we are totally at a loss for what to do. We know that the decision we face is not a no-brainer decision,
but we really have no clue what to do. The amount of decisions like this a person faces will vary depending on skill level,
but no matter how great you are, sometimes you will genuinely not know what to do.
In these cases, when all your neato poker skills
can’t figure out the best action, it is good to be able to fall back on some pre-determined rules and ideas. One important
“when all else fails” tool are stereotypes.
Rigidly believing and depending on stereotypes is just stupid. The world is made up of all different kinds of folks who behave
in all different kinds of ways.
Daniel Negreanu wrote a nice column
recently about how he completely misread Jennifer Harman the first time he played with her. He stereotyped her, and she is very
much not the type of player the stereotype would say that she is. However, if you have absolutely no other information to go on
(for example, you are moved to a tournament table and are faced with a person you have never laid eyes on before), following
stereotypes will usually be the best choice to make. Even if “usually” means just slightly more than 50%, then following the
stereotype was better than mentally flipping a coin.
The "just moved to a tournament table” example happens to me fairly often. I often am forced to depend on stereotypes
to some degree -- before I learn better. For instance, if I move to a new tournament table and immediately find myself in a
hand with a player I have never laid eyes on before, the first stereotype that does come into my head is a very valuable one.
I’ve played poker, and specifically tournament poker, in a lot of places for more than a few years. If I have never so much
as laid eyes on a particular player before, I know who they aren’t and what they likely aren’t. This is not some huge piece
of massively profitable information, but it is something.
Whether a person is a male, a female, a smoker,
a fan-toting nonsmoker, white, black, Texan, Persian, well-dressed, a slob, reading a sports ticker, wearing headphones,
overweight, anorexic, friend of a known awful player, friend of a known excellent player, wearing lots of jewelry, not
wearing a wedding ring, drinking booze, eating salad, shooing away people wanting to borrow money, shooing away people
trying to collect money owed, wearing casino-labeled clothes, wearing a nametag from a convention in town, stone silent,
jabbering like a looney, buying chips with cash that looks like it was glued in a wallet, buying chips on credit by raising
a finger, friendly, obnoxious, calm, high-as-a-kite, rifling chips in his fingers, counting his bets out tediously every
single time, older, younger, whatever... if you have nothing else to go on, lean towards the other stereotype characteristics
that go with the one you observe.
If eighty-five year-old Myrtle bets when the board pairs on the river when there was a flush draw possible... chances are,
she ain’t bluffing. If a drunk, twenty-five
year-old man who has a cuter-than-him girlfriend (not wife) sitting behind him bets in that same situation while taunting
you “thanks for the money”... chances are, your pair of deuces are good.
The rest of the civilized world realizes that stereotypes are no match for actually thinking about things. But in poker,
where tiny edges applied many times over many years can add up to serious money, don’t just flip a coin. If it looks like
a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, more than 51% of the time it will in fact actually be a duck!
See also Reading Players,
Poker Talent, and
Using Your Head
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