Developing a Strong Thought Process

One of the most frustrating things I’ve encountered when trying to help micro and small stakes players is how frequently their beliefs contradict one another. Granted, humans having the ability to believe in two concepts which contradict each other shouldn’t come as anything new, as it’s often very easy to recognize.

For example, the statement “all truth is relative” is a self-defeating statement, as it itself is an absolute statement. So any person who believes “all truth is relative” believes both all truth is relative AND in an absolute statement, and while it’s possible to believe in both such things, that doesn’t change the fact it’s impossible for both mutually exclusive beliefs to be true.

Being able to recognize beliefs which contradict one another is extremely important both in the real world and on the poker tables. For example, you CAN believe check-raising a flop with the nuts loses value because it gets folds 90% of the time and check-raising with air isn’t profitable, but they CANNOT both be right.

Let’s start off with a very basic spot where players often have contradicting logic.

You’re playing 6-max NL $0.1/$0.25. You open XX UTG to $1 and both blinds call. The pot is $3 and the flop comes Kh 8h 2d, the SB leads $1 and the BB calls. You would call with black kings because their line looks weak and a raise will always scare them off, but you’d also fold black fives because no one ever folds anything at NL$25.

No. Make up your mind and follow your logic through. Either no one folds anything at NL$25 and you should raise your KK, or their line looks weak and you should raise 55 to blast them off their hand. Please note before we go on this does not mean raising both hands cannot be correct, just that folding 55 while refusing to raise KK using that logic cannot be correct. We’ll discuss this concept in more detail in our last hand example, but before we tackle that lets look at another hand I often see beginners play where their beliefs contradict each other.

The game is 6-max NL$100 and you raise Jc Jh to $4 from MP. The button 3-bets you to $13, and you respond by 4-betting him to $30. The button now shoves all in for $100 so it’s $70 more to call, and you fold patting yourself on the back for being able to get away from JJ preflop as you know he’d only shove with a range of QQ+/AK.

Whenever I see this hand posted I immediately go on instatilt. I usually make a comment along the lines of “So do you 4-bet your entire range there or do you think he calls your 4-bet all that often?” and I almost always get the response “LOL no he’s either folding or shoving, and 4-betting him with air preflop is spew,” with them completely missing the point I was trying to make.

The reason why I asked them my question is I’m hoping they will realize “Hey, wait a second. Since I think he’s never calling and always either folds or shoves, and since I will fold if he shoves, I’m essentially turning my hand into a bluff. And if I am going to bluff in this spot, JJ would be the last hand I’d want to bluff here as it has the most postflop value, so it only makes sense for me to bluff here if I think bluffing is so valuable I want to turn every worse hand in my range into a bluff (or fold it) before I consider bluffing with JJ.”

Unfortunately, this never happens. This is a prime example of people looking to find an easy way to play a difficult hand and ignore the fact their logic makes no sense.

Here is a typical example of something I do to exploit the meh regulars at NL$200.

The game is NL$200 and I raise 9h 8h to $7 from MP. A nitty regular who runs at 17/14 calls on the button. The flop comes Qc Qs 4s and you fire a $14 continuation bet into a $17 pot, which the button quickly calls. At this point you figure the button most likely has a pocket pair between 55-JJ, flush draws, and a very few combos of KQ (as he unlikely calls with QJ preflop and likely 3-bets AQ preflop, and even if he does have a Q nits tend to raise flops with any sort of draw on it and there are two spades on the board). The turn comes 3d. What should I do here?

Well, it depends on how I think a range of 55-JJ, flush draws, and a few queens respond to a double barrel or a checkraise. I believe I will get looked up by 55-JJ quite a bit when I double barrel here (and always called or raised by the queen), as well as flatted or raised by his flush draws a lot, so much that firing 2/3 pot on the turn isn’t profitable as I don’t get the fold the 40% or so I need in order to make it profitable. I do, however, think a check-raise will look strong enough to get him to fold all his pocket pairs and draws with a very high frequncy, as it just looks much, much stronger to nits and tagfish. Because of this I try to checkraise my deuces to move him off his 9c 9s or his Js Ts and give up if he checks behind, and following that logic I will always 3-barrel my queens and overpairs on these types of boards as I don’t believe they can get away from 9c 9s as long as I keep leading unless the river comes a spade (as they’ll put me on a missed flush draw or bluff if the river blanks out more often than not).

And here’s our last example, a spot where we want to take the same line with both a bluff and the nuts.
You are playing NL$50. You raise to $1.75 from the CO with XX and only the BB comes. The flop comes Jc 7h 2d and the BB leads $1.5 into a $3.50 pot. Why is it that we should raise with both 7c 7s and Ks Ts, when one is the nuts and one is total air?

The answer is because unless our opponent has a jack, he will be unlikely to put much more money in the pot. Since he doesn’t have a jack here all that often, we should raise with air as he’ll end up folding probably about 75-80% or so of the time to our raise. So raising with air is very profitable. Yet if we have the nuts, we are much better off raising trying to build a big pot even if we know it is unlikely he’ll call our raise, as if he has something like Jh Td he’ll often go into check-call mode on the turn (which makes floating with air no better than raising the flop) and we’ll get much less value from him as we won’t have a bloated pot. So with both the nuts and air here we should raise.

So that just about covers it. But please note that by taking this strategies outlined in example #3 we are exploiting the generic meh NL$50-NL$200 reg, but we are also making ourselves extremely exploitable in the process. That’s why against very good opponents we can’t always play our bluffs certain ways and our made hands certain ways, as they will be better able to read our thought process (“Why would he check-raise a queen here when it risks giving a free card, missing value, and looks so much stronger?”). Granted, we can never have contradicting beliefs both be true no matter what stakes we play, but as our opponents get better we need to rely on the math behind taking the same line with bluffs and value hands with the proper frequency as they’ll more quickly adjusts or even start leveling us (and if they’re good, they’ll almost always have an air component in their range as well as the hands they’re representing). But that’s for another article.

by DoctorHandles