Just following along

I've been following a series of blog posts Ed Miller is doing. 7 Easy Steps to No-Limit Hold'em is what he calls the series.

I'm always suspect of anyone who claims things that aren't easy are easy. Too much snake oil, too much just telling people what they want to hear. But I'm not really all that good a marketer I guess. Because telling people what they want to hear seems to sell.

Anyway his first entry was the suggestion to play tight. I didn't really like that all that much. I like the idea of playing position, playing tight in front and much less so in back.

I guess Ed Miller was just reading my mind, because the very next installment covered position and he did it pretty well. I liked that one.

I was critical of his seeming lack of interest in how pot size effects the game. And golly, gee, in installment 3 he covers pot size. It's getting downright spooky how I know what he's going to cover next.

What’s in the pot and your opponents’ stacks is your potential reward, and what’s in your stack is what’s at risk. When the pot is tiny compared to what’s in the remaining stacks, like on the flop after two or three layers limp in, that’s a small pot. When the pot is relatively large compared to what’s in the remaining stacks, like on the river after there’s already been a lot of betting, that’s a big pot.

I don't understand why he wants to use stack sizes as a scale to measure pot size. Money works just fine as a measurement scale. If a pot has a lot of money in it then it has a lot of money in it, whether anybody has anything left in their stack or not.

Then he says something that really sets me off

There’s one guiding principle: Big hands deserve big pots, and small hands deserve small ones. If you have a super-strong hand like a set, then you want to get all the money in. If you have a weak or vulnerable hand, then you want to avoid a big confrontation. It sounds simple, but many no-limit players go wrong here again and again.

Deserves? Is this some kind of battle between good and evil. I've written before about the psychological danger of thinking in terms of just desserts.

Miller does think like that -- in a response to a comment on a thread at Poker Culture, I observed

I just opened it up to a random page and saw this sentence at the top of page 180. "The free card play punishes passivity".

That sentence is very atheoritical. It's based on a world view of "just desserts", not a rational world view at all.

The free card play exploits passive opponents. It doesn't punish. Poker isn't about punishment and reward. Winning isn't a reward given to you by the card god for doing things that please him, winning is a rational result from making good decisions.

Besides, the only meaningful definition of a big hand is one that wins a big pot. A royal flush that gets the antes is not a big hand. People who think like Miller seems to be thinking here are the reason wild card games are hugely profitable when played against idiots.

In episode 4 he continues the big hand/big pots and small hands/small pots meme. I reading it I realized something I hadn't realized when reading installment 3 --- Ed Miller is thinking in terms of controlling pot size based on hand strength, when I tend to think more in terms of using pot size to determine how strongly you play.

That's why he thinks in terms of a hand "deserving" a particular outcome. He starts his thinking with the hand and everything else follows. I tend to start my thinking with what the other's are doing. In some ways my way of thinking about it is more passive than his way of thinking about it.

He's not ignoring the other guy

Playing big hands well is an important no-limit skill. Remember the three basic principles:

1. Swing for the fences
2. Mentally divide up the stacks into bet-sized chunks
3. Think about how your opponent plays and choose the betting line most likely to build a monster pot.

But he doesn't really give them much thought until he's already made the decision to make the pot big.

I don't think that you should make the decision to make the pot big until they've done something to indicate they'll cooperate.

For example. I'll often limp under the gun with AA. Big hand. But I don't do anything to make the pot big, I just slip in and see what happens. If I get raised, now I'll do something to make the pot big. But if I don't get raised, rather than play an over-pair out of position in a multi-way pot I might just give it up. If the pot stays small I'm willing to just wait for another day. I don't move on the pot until someone else does something to make the pot big.

That doesn't seem to be what Ed Miller is suggesting.