Broken game

This is the story of how I broke my game.

When I try to look through the backs of my opponents' cards, I usually see nothing but bicycles or crosshatch patterns. Every once in a while I correctly guess what someone's holding, but it's due to fear of monsters under the bed more than astute deductions. In any event my guess is usually too late to benefit from it. An example might be a loose opponent's reraise of my KQ on a Q-high board: OK, I'm starting to believe he has AQ, but I'm pot-committed, so all I get to do at this point is call and see it.

Despite my card myopia, I was on a pretty good upward trend a week or two ago. By applying straightforward late-tourney strategy, I frequently survived the bubble, and then through unbridled aggression frightened my opponents into giving up second or even first place. I nearly quadrupled my original bankroll at the peak and was feeling confident.

But rather than falling prey once again to the Peter Principle, I took a break. I sat in with a $1.00 buyin at a $0.01/$0.02 no-limit table. I resolved to ignore the monsters under the bed and not fold my cards unless an opponent had told me a consistent story about why he was beating me.

Obviously, this required me to pay attention to those stories, which I did. And I discovered a couple interesting things.

• Amazingly enough, stories don't always make sense. Example #1: if you really did hit that ace-high flop as hard as your bet suggests, why did you limp preflop? I don't have an ace, either, but I'll reraise you to let you know I think you're full of crap, and what do you know, you fold. Example #2: your big bet represents that the turned board pair helped you. So you're telling me that you checked a junk board on the button with a pair on the flop? Nope, I don't think so. I'll call.
• If you develop theories that suggest it's worthwhile to stay in the hand, you are more likely to stay in the game and find that the turn or river improves your hand. Continuing Example #2, I call your turn bet, and hey, the river gives me top two pair, ha ha ha. These are the kinds of events that usually occur only when we're both cowards (in the sense that we're afraid of post-flop play) and move all-in to make sure we get to see the full board.
• Card-reading isn't always about knowing what your opponent has. Sometimes it's simply a matter of eliminating some of his possible holdings. That can be enough for you to conclude that your seemingly poor hand still has him beat. This is especially fun when you cold-call to the river and beat AK with T5 on a 925JJ board.

If you've been through this experience before, you might know what happens next. You feel invincible. Suddenly a 92o is a completely playable hand. Every cheap flop is worth seeing. You become the guy who keeps pot odds low for the straight/flush drawing hands (even though you yourself have nothing), which you feel entitled to do simply because you've correctly identified that they're on draws.

This was tremendously fun for a while, especially when I made seemingly impossible calls for most of my stack on the river and exposed my opponents' broken draws or dangling high cards. However, a few days after moving back to my $6.50 SNG games, things fell apart. To my opponents' credit, they identified me as a classic LAG (loose-aggressive) player, and tightened up. It's hard to improve with 92o against QQ, even if you do hit the flop. And combined with the big bets that typically accompany the low-buyin turbos, my new playing style meant that a single mistake early in the game pretty much crippled me, making cashes extremely unlikely.

It turns out that I'm not the first to have evolved into this trap. Explains Ray Zee:

This is the advanced stage of a poker player's career. Now the cat is out of the bag. He wins more often and gets what he believes is the right feel for the game. Great plays come about by pushing marginal hands and making fantastic calls on the end through his ability to read hands. Poker is fun played this way. But no longer is the tight player inside the body. All hands start to look like they have value, and with skillful manipulation winning the pot is easy. He begins to believe that he can play bad hands for profit where in reality he can't. The player has taken a big step backward and a long leap forwards at the same time. The tight style needed is gone and a new imaginative style is born and he becomes loose aggressive. Unfortunately for him, if he gets too loose he loses all his money and may never recover. But for those that are moving up the ladder, this is the last leap before the finishing stage.

Except for the "this is the advanced stage" part of this quote, this describes precisely how I feel. Internally, I was hyper-aware of what's going on at the table, but externally I was the practical equivalent of a coin dispenser.

So I took a few days off, re-read Harrington, and then last night returned to the game as a tight player. Two cashes out of three tournaments, 1st place and 2nd place. I made a couple great calls that I probably would have folded two weeks ago, so not all my newfound abilities are lost. It's too small a sample size to reach any conclusions, but it's certainly better than losing. We'll see what happens next.