"Lack of information is not the typical problem in our decision processes (although lack of the right information sometimes is). The world is constantly drenching us with information through eyes and ears -- millions of bits per second. According to the best evidence, we can handle only about fifty. The limit is not information but our capacity to attend to it."
-- Herbert Simon
Poker used to be so simple. It only involved one table, a maximum of nine opponents, and not much more than 45 hands an hour. Online poker changed everything. Today, players must deal with multiple tables, hundreds of hands an hour, detailed up-to-date statistics, heads-up displays (HUDs), site lobbies, waiting lists, and the increasing necessity of monitoring a range of sites for game selection. It seems like the complexity is forever growing. As fish become less plentiful, professionals have to process a greater and greater amount of information to maximize EV. New software tools give professionals new ways of extracting edges, but they also often add to a player's information processing requirements. And where once there was an abundance of fish operating in plain sight, at mid-stakes and up you now have to search every under every nook and cranny to find them.
All this is surely enough to test the limits of the human brain. While much of this information is too valuable to ignore -- you don't want to inefficiently use your time because you aren't playing on all the sites available to you -- the information is also too much to handle in its raw form. You have to efficiently process the signal from the noise in order stand any chance of dealing with it all. The aim of this article is to explore some ways of coping with this overload by concentrating primarily on the most important information. It's all about finding the best way to budget your limited endowment of attention.
HUDs are one of the unique defining innovations of online poker, making this as good a place as any to start. Some players have a frightening array of numbers on their HUD, providing information on a number of highly specific situations. While more information is in an ideal world always better than less, this can only exacerbate the problem of information overload -- particularly if the stats you use take an unreliable number of hands to converge. This is true of many of the more specific postflop stats, where the effective sample sizes can be very small even if you have hundreds or thousands of hands on a player. This can very easily lead to incorrect decisions based on faulty data.
Some players, including a number of well-known high stakes players who generally face a small pool of potential opponents, choose to not use a HUD at all. I got comfortable playing without a HUD for a while, initially because I was playing on a site without HUD-compatibility, but it soon became a bad habit without much justification. I think that HUDs are absolutely mandatory for all players in today's games, if only to pinpoint the information needed in game selection. All but the highest stakes players will generally be facing player pools that are quite large, either because they're playing over multiple sites, or because their game has a lot of liquidity.
Try and imagine a theoretically perfect stat for game selection; what would it look like? An ideal stat would one that gives a perfect indication of whether a given table is worth sitting at. It would clearly indicate which tables are worth joining, which tables are worth staying at, and which tables are worth leaving. It wouldn't generate any false positives; it would never mistakenly direct you towards unprofitable games. Additionally, it shouldn't miss good games, either because it doesn't have sufficient data or because it fails to capture an aspect of bad play. This perfect game selection stat would allow you to easily find all the profitable games available to you, subject to the number of games you can play simultaneously, allowing you to focus almost all your attention on playing. It would greatly limit the amount of information that needs attending to, freeing up scarce cognitive resources.
Sample size is a really important issue when it comes to game selection stats, as you don't want to rely on stats that require a huge amount of data to give reliable signals. That's why I've never been a huge fan of using aggregate win/loss amounts on sites like TableRatings. Unless someone's a very consistent winner or loser over a large sample, then looking at their graph won't tell you anything useful. An account that has lost a significant sum in a small number of high stakes hands could well be a fish. It could also be a high-stakes regular from another site who has created a new account and hit an instant downswing in a high variance game.
Table level statistics such as the average number of players to the flop and the average pot size are much too broad and subject to random errors. Instead, you have to look at the qualities of the individual players. Now in my games, I'm always on the lookout to find at least one bad player. One bad player in a six-max game is both about the minimum required to make a game profitable after rake, and is also as good a game as you'll usually get -- as the rest of the seats generally get filled by regulars once a known fish sits.
Focusing in on that one bad player: what differentiates them from the regulars? They lose, of course, but remember the issues of sample size and false positives when looking at win/loss amounts. A statistic to efficiently differentiate losers from winners must therefore capture some aspect of playing style, and it must do so in small samples with few false positives. The sample size issue eliminates a majority of postflop stats, as these can take a long time to converge. A lopsided distribution of postflop aggression is an easy marker of fishy play; some fish tend to overload one street with aggression while playing the others much more passively. For the sake of balance regulars tend to distribute their aggression throughout the hand much more evenly. But these stats will take at least a few hundred hands to converge, which is far too slow to make this a primary fish marker.
Source
Friday, June 8, 2012
Beating the Curve in a Tough Tournament
The unique structure of the Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP), with its three tiers of buy-in levels, creates a dynamic not seen in similar tournament series. Even in PokerStars' own WCOOP, the composition of a $1,000 or $1,500 buy-in tournament tends to be very different than the SCOOP High buy-in events with low-four-figure price tags. In the WCOOP, the $1,500 buy-in is the event (or the no-limit hold 'em event, anyway) for the day. All of the satellites feed into it, and anyone who wants to play the day's big event is going to play it.
The SCOOP, however, has less expensive Low and Medium buy-in events that siphon off many of the shot-takers, satellite winners, and recreational players. Moreso than in comparable events, the SCOOP High tournaments have relatively small fields composed mostly of smart, skilled, and experienced opponents.
Consequently, I approach these events the way I would approach a higher stakes cash game rather than a large field multitable tournament like the Sunday Million. Your edge can't come from moves like stealing the blinds, re-raising light, isolating limpers, and set-mining that are the bread and butter of a professional tournament player in a field full of amateurs. Instead, you have to play creatively, think deeply, and keep your opponents guessing by putting them in spots that they haven't seen ten thousand times before.
The $2,100 six-handed no limit hold 'em event, held on the last day of the 2012 SCOOP, provided an opportunity for me to flex my more creative tournament muscles. This article will discuss a few of the most interesting hands, two in which I was the one getting tricky and one in which I got tricked.
Multi-Street Bluff
Blinds were 250/500/60, and I began the hand with 42K. The first player to act, whose stack was about twice the size of mine, opened to 1K. Virtually every pot played at our table began with someone raising the minimum, so there was nothing too shocking about that. I knew this player would try to steal aggressively, and the player in the big blind had only about 9,000 chips, making him a good target for a blind steal. I knew my KspadeQheart was ahead of the opener's raising range, so it was a question of how, not whether, I wanted to play it.
These days, many tournament players seem to re-raise virtually any hand they are going to play, but I don't think that's the best play here. Although I feel good about how KQo stacks up against his opening range, I don't want to get four-bet. My hand is too easily dominated to feel good about playing a big pot with it, even if I flop top pair, but I also know that this player is very capable of four-bet bluffing with weak hands. Perhaps most importantly, he isn't likely to call a three-bet out of position with hands like KT or QJ that I dominate. So, I called, and everyone else folded.
The 4club 9heart Tclub flop was not exactly ideal for me, but with two overcards and a gutshot, my hand was far from hopeless. My opponent bet 1,440, less than half of the 3,110 that was already in the pot. Getting such a good price, it would be a mistake to fold even this relatively weak draw.
Source
The SCOOP, however, has less expensive Low and Medium buy-in events that siphon off many of the shot-takers, satellite winners, and recreational players. Moreso than in comparable events, the SCOOP High tournaments have relatively small fields composed mostly of smart, skilled, and experienced opponents.
Consequently, I approach these events the way I would approach a higher stakes cash game rather than a large field multitable tournament like the Sunday Million. Your edge can't come from moves like stealing the blinds, re-raising light, isolating limpers, and set-mining that are the bread and butter of a professional tournament player in a field full of amateurs. Instead, you have to play creatively, think deeply, and keep your opponents guessing by putting them in spots that they haven't seen ten thousand times before.
The $2,100 six-handed no limit hold 'em event, held on the last day of the 2012 SCOOP, provided an opportunity for me to flex my more creative tournament muscles. This article will discuss a few of the most interesting hands, two in which I was the one getting tricky and one in which I got tricked.
Multi-Street Bluff
Blinds were 250/500/60, and I began the hand with 42K. The first player to act, whose stack was about twice the size of mine, opened to 1K. Virtually every pot played at our table began with someone raising the minimum, so there was nothing too shocking about that. I knew this player would try to steal aggressively, and the player in the big blind had only about 9,000 chips, making him a good target for a blind steal. I knew my KspadeQheart was ahead of the opener's raising range, so it was a question of how, not whether, I wanted to play it.
These days, many tournament players seem to re-raise virtually any hand they are going to play, but I don't think that's the best play here. Although I feel good about how KQo stacks up against his opening range, I don't want to get four-bet. My hand is too easily dominated to feel good about playing a big pot with it, even if I flop top pair, but I also know that this player is very capable of four-bet bluffing with weak hands. Perhaps most importantly, he isn't likely to call a three-bet out of position with hands like KT or QJ that I dominate. So, I called, and everyone else folded.
The 4club 9heart Tclub flop was not exactly ideal for me, but with two overcards and a gutshot, my hand was far from hopeless. My opponent bet 1,440, less than half of the 3,110 that was already in the pot. Getting such a good price, it would be a mistake to fold even this relatively weak draw.
Source
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