Poker: Fowlds folds

According to David Sklansky, an eccentric legend of the game of Texas No Limit Holdem poker, a big weakness of this game’s design is that “the first lesson the beginner needs to learn is how to fold”.

For this reason, high stakes professional games are actually pretty boring to watch every minute of — nothing much happens most hands. Hours of boredom mixed with moments of terror, from each participant’s perspective. (Youtube gets around this by just showing the highlights.)

In the low stakes cash games I play however the players invoke (as Sklansky puts it) “the invisible ante”. He reckons there’s a gentleman’s agreement in a home game to pretend there’s an ante. (You probably know this, but antes are like blinds, though they don’t count as a bet. Everyone has to put in 1 additional chip at the start of every hand, say). So everyone plays too loose to win the invisible ante; all players actually know they’re playing too loose, but think if they just play a tiny bit tighter than the other very loose players they’ll win.

Everyone also knows that if they all play correctly the game is just going to suck! Now I tend to be one of the tighter players at the table, folding a lot of the hands I’m dealt preflop. This begs the question: why play a recreational game and choose to sit on the sideline a majority of the time?

So why do we play poker?

1. To maximise expected value (EV). Surely not. I don’t think anyone sits down to play low stakes poker with this goal in mind, though it would be nice to break even in the long run. Playing too loosely definitely won’t maximise EV in the long run. But the ‘long run’ is at least a year’s worth of live poker (at the hands-per-hour rate we play), so the consequences won’t be immediately evident.

2. We play for the fun of gambling. Mathematically speaking, you’ll win the most showdowns if you take everything to the river. It is debatable however whether this wins the most hands; a player with a loose reputation will get fewer folds to his bluffs. Emperically speaking, the loosest players in our online poker group win the most hands. They also lose the most money (over a number of sessions).

3. We play to play good poker. I’m in this camp (up to a point). I just accept that different games come with a certain level of built-in waiting times. If you play chess, 50% of the time it’s your opponent’s move. In bridge, 25% of the time you are ‘dummy’ and your partner plays your cards for you while you fetch the next round of drinks. In poker, if you get 93o you should muck your cards and wait for the next hand. It can be frustrating: you fold 93o and the flop comes 993. You would have had a full house, such is life.

Is it really so bad for your EV to see every flop? In online poker sites that have head up displays (HUD), one of the most important metrics for any player is their ‘voluntary put in pot’ (VPIP). This is a measure of the frequency with which players have put additional money into the pot, beyond amounts they’re compelled to put in because they are in the blinds.

The author Steve Selbrede has done some emperical studies on a very large database of online hands (i.e. 60 million player hands). The optimal VPIP in a particular hand depends of course on many factors such as opponent tendency, stack size and position, but across these millions of hands it is a very low 15% of hands an individual is dealt.

What does a VPIP of 15% look like? This generally means good pocket pairs, or where both cards are ‘picture cards’, and generally when both of your cards have the same suit. It’s a very tight range!

To back up the above empirical argument, let’s suppose poker was a much simpler game where you get dealt 2 cards and then can select (without seeing anyone else’s bet) whether to put $1 into the pot. Play then simply goes to the river and best hand wins the pot. You lose nothing if you choose not to bet. Obviously, you would just put in money with your better hands. It turns out this game has no equilibrium as there are no blinds to defend. If you bet every time your opponents will only bet their best 50% of hands. So you bet your best 25% of hands. So they bet their best 12.5% of hands. And so on until only pocket Aces choose to bet. Unsurprisingly, this game hasn’t really caught on as a popular favourite . . .

While poker is much more subtle than this, it has vestiges of this fundamental truth — if you get dealt poor cards it is a losing play (on average) to bet with them. It is hard to win a pot against 8 other opponents (every win is a mini-jackpot, when you think about it). Your fair share is to win just 11.1% of the time, so it stands to reason that only the top 15% of starting hands are really worth playing.

What is my own VPIP? As a representative sample, on 13 June 2021 I played 82 hands on the pokerrr online app and (by laborious counting) noted that I put in extra money 47 times, for a VPIP of 47/82 = 57% By most measures this is outrageously loose (though many of my opponents had VPIPs of 80%+).

The argument sometimes expressed is that it often only costs one big blind (BB) to see the flop, so you might as well always see the flop. If you’re too loose your opponents should exploit this and raise you frequently to charge you more. But let’s suppose that you’re in a game with many family pots and you do indeed get to see the flop with your 93o for just 1 BB. The problem then is that you’ll probably find yourself in tricky spots in later streets. If you’re lucky enough to pair the board it will only be middle or bottom pair. If you are lucky enough to make top pair you’ll have a bad kicker. You’ll end up losing way more than 1 BB, counteracting (and more) the rare occasion where you get a dream flop.

But let’s return to why we play recreational poker. No matter how compelling the evidence, no one is going to play 15% of hands at the monthly live poker game I play! We only play 15–20 hands per hour (what with all the controversial topics), so that translates to participating 2–3 hands per hour. Where’s the entertainment value of playing this tightly?

Apparently casinos deal 25–30 hands per hour, a bit faster than our home game but many players will still be quite loose at this pace, even when the BB is $5 (or much more .. ). Online poker by contrast is much faster; our online poker app game gets through 30–40 hands per hour. At this rate you can muck your marginal holdings with less regret.

Which brings me to the high frequency games. I have no personal experience of this, but some online sites play ‘zoom’ games where you can fast fold instantly and be moved to a new table to start your next hand. In a zoom game it’s quite feasible to play 200–250 hands per hour per table. Furthermore, these sites allow players to play up to 30 tables simultaneously (the mind boggles . . ), though I read one professional saying that “playing 5 to 12 tables simultaneously is the sweet spot”. These guys are playing more hands in a few hours than I have played in my lifetime and you can be sure that they are not holding on to 93o in the hope of an unlikely flop. Their VPIP is 15%.

One question that I need to consider more is whether if everyone else is entering every pot, should I be looser myself? In top class poker the normal state of affairs is for everyone to fold to the button, who opens a little bit wider (he has position) and is called by the big blind (who opens wide with pot odds). Whole books are written on big blind vs button, heads up, this is so common. But I can’t recall a single hand I’ve personally played where it was BB vs B, heads up. If the whole table limps (calls the minimum) around to me, I could argue for playing either looser (great pot odds) or tighter (I’ll be up against 8 opponents in the family pot). Hmm, not sure.

In the meantime, entering about half the hands seems like a solid compromise between playing the game properly and not feeling like I’ve come to spectate rather than play a game of poker!