Protecting your bankroll with short buyins

Some writers, Ed Milller in particular, advocates buying in short as a way to protect your bankroll. It's complete nonsense.

It might work to protect your bankroll if you're a losing player.

--- I have an errand to run. I'll have to finish this post later. Go ahead and share your thoughts on the subject while I'm gone.

UPDATE:
A commenter took issue with my suggestion that short buyins might help protect your bankroll if you're a losing player. He said, "most deep stacks don't know how to play against an aggressive SS".

Okay, that might be true, but that doesn't mean that you can protect your bankroll by using short buys even if you're a winning player otherwise. It's possible that a loser with deep stacks can convert himself into a winner by playing short stacks if he has opponents who don't know how to play against a short stack.

So even if playing a short stack might improve your lot, that doesn't mean you won't improve even more by just learning to play better and keeping a big stack.

If you're a winning player with a big stack then you'll give up a huge edge by reducing your stack size. Reducing your stack size is reducing the size of the game (for you). In no limit games your win is usually going to be expressable as a percentage of your stack size. If you cut your stack size by 90% your hurting your win in a big way even if cutting your stack will double your percentage win.

A $100 stack with a growth expectation of 20% is more profitable than a $20 stack with a growth expectation of 150%

----- I'm being called for supper, I"ll have to finish this later.

Ed Miller plays a no-limit hold'em hand that just seems bizarre to me

Brother Ed describes the first round of betting in a 50c/$1 blind online no-limit hand as

It’s a $0.50-$1 game, and the villain has $109 (and I have him covered). Everyone folds to me in the small blind, and I make it $3.50 to go with A 5 . The big blind calls.

He then tries to tell us something about the player in the big blind.

big blind plays in a way that I find fairly common in the 6-max $0.50-$1 games, so he’s not an atypical or bizarre player.

I have no idea what that means. He's not a bizarre player? He's not atypical? A lot of different things could all be fairly common. This doesn't tell me anything. Maybe it does to regular Ed readers. But it's pretty much just vague mumblings to me.

And there's no context. Is this an unusually tight game where blind v. blind confrontations happen a lot? Has Ed raised from the SB the last 3 rounds and the BB folded? Context matters. We don't have any. So we're just going to have to fly blind.

The flop is 986 with two hearts. I think I have the best hand here with the Ace high and the bad gutshot. But, Ed checks. I'm not sure why (there was some previous post where I guess he discusses that but I didn't look it up). The BB checks.

A 2 comes on the turn and Ed bets $5.50, The BB calls.

I'm not sure what this bet is all about. After checking the flop the BB is going to likely upgrade the prospects of his own hand, he's going to think of Ed's hand in terms of weakness. A duece isn't going to change that assessment any at all, no matter what Ed does on the turn.

Ed says that it's a good bet because in his experience it will yeild a fold most of the time in this situation.

That's very bad analysis. The fact that your hand is best and a bet will get a worse hand to fold isn't really that important in a no-limit game where you're making large bets. What matters is whether or not a better hand will fold or a worse hand will call. If the opponent will always fold a worse hand and always call a better hand then you'd still often see him fold to a bet in this situation but it wouldn't be a good thing for you at all unless checking would tend to induce a bluff on the river that you're going to fold to.

That sure was a long sentence. I hope it made sense.

In a limit game getting a worse hand to fold is often good because you gain some equity while only risking a small bet relative to the pot size. That's not the case in a no limit game, however.

The Kh comes on the river, putting the flush card on the board. But neither of these guys is going to worry that the other guy made a flush. Ed having checked the flop is a strong indication he didn't have a flush draw, the same with the BB. They might worry about the K though. Ed wasn't worried. He bet. The other guy folded.

Ed is real proud of that river bet.

My experience in the $0.50-$1 games has consistently been that a pot-sized bet against a scary river card that’s mostly missed my opponent’s range is a big favorite not to get called. It’s easily better than the 50% fold chance it needs to be to make the bluff profitable. (To make the bluff more profitable than checking, it actually has to be substantially better than 50% because checking leaves us with at least some showdown equity.) My opponent’s range is dominated by weakish one-pair hands, and my experience is that most $0.50-$1 players are folding those hands to this river card and a pot-sized bet.

I don't know what that last sentence means.

I can't see how Ed might think it likely that he doesn't have the best hand and I don't see how a bet is going to get a worse hand to call or a better hand to fold.

Back in his discussion about the turn bet one of his arguements for the turn bet was that by betting the turn he increases his chances of getting a free showdown. But then he doesn't take a free showdown.

I think maybe this is FPS.

A sample chapter

Here's a chapter from an upcoming book on nolimit holdem poker

The chapter is on twoplustwo magazine, and they only keep their stuff up for about 3 months, so download it or print it now if you think you might want to refer back to it.

I'm not impressed so far. The chapter starts out with

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If we had to summarize no-limit strategy in a single sentence, it would be this:

Plan Your Hands

What the hell does that have to do with no-limit? Are they suggesting you don't need to plan your hands in limit? In limit I think a plan is probably more important. Plans are important in no-limit but they are also much more fluid and really don't need to be that complete, they just need to be re-evaulated at every step.

In The Complete Book Of Hold 'Em Poker: A Comprehensive Guide to Playing and Winning I pretty much say that the most important concept in no-limit hold'em (actually in no-limit poker) is simply

Don't Call

I still think that's true most of the time. Against some opponents it's not true, against some opponents you're better off check calling than you are betting, but it's still the basic idea.

Then, after talking about planning, they jump right away to the idea of finding a balance between risk and reward, and use a really bad example to do so.

They have two read aces on the big blind, the small blind limps, they raise, he calls, the flop is a 3 card straight in spades, the small blind goes all in, the stacks are very deep.

What do you do?

They talk about risk/reward tradeoff only in terms of the amount of money, they never, not once, bring up the players.

Against some players I'm calling here every damn time. Against some players I know for sure he has a naked flush draw, he doesn't even have as much as a pair and a flush draw. Against some players I know for sure they don't have more than 9 outs because with a hand better than that they're checking to let me bet.

They don't even talk about that. So what the hell do they mean by risk? They mean how much money is involved.

The next example is almost comical. They give a of having KK in mid-position and opening for 15, getting two callers, one behind you, one in the blinds.

Then they go through an analyze a particular flop where you bet and the player behind you calls, and you get in an iffy situation on the turn where you're probably best but don't want to commit all of your deep stack.

Then they re-look it and decided that you made a mistake with the raise to $15, you should have raised to $30 and gotten two callers, then on the turn the pot would have been large enough to be pot committed.

All I can say to that is

What?

Big hands and pot sizes in poker games

Here's the lede on an Ed Miller post.

Big hands deserve big pots. It’s a fundamental no-limit concept.

What nonsense. It's not only not a poker concept (it's a bumper sticker phrase) it's not even true.

Inanimate objects don't deserve anything. And you don't deserve anything at the poker table by virtue of having some particular combination of inanimate objects in your hand.

When you have a hand that has a very high probability of winning (which is actually not what many players mean by big hand) then you want to get as much other people's money in the pot as you can.

I guess that's what he means. And if he was selling bumper stickers instead of giving poker advice then the phrase he uses would be okay. Maybe that't it. Maybe he is selling bumper stickers. Bumper stickers probably have a pretty big market.

I guess I'm just being mean this morning.

Is Miller's call bluff just a thin value bet?

Ed Miller seems to be following the Sklanaksy tradition of giving something a name and then thinking he's done something.

In a recent post he defines a call bluff

The Play: The Call Bluff

How It Works: You have position on a lone, aggressive opponent. Your opponent bets a small percentage of the remaining stacks. You have a marginal hand, but you call. The next round, your opponent checks, you bet, and she folds.

I don't understand how that's a bluff?

What does marginal hand mean? Bottom pair?

He gives an example of a call on the flop with a gutshot and backdoor flush draw then a bet when an offsuit Ace hits the turn and the opponent checks the scare card.

I guess thats a bluff, but I call it betting a scare card.

I call it that becuase I think it's important to think about bluffs on scare cards as different from other kinds of bluffs. That's becuase when you're known to be aggresvie and/or tricky an attentive opponent will often expect you to bluff at scare cards. So before you do it you should be aware of how the other guy is thinking about you.

He does explain a little better later in the post

Predictability (of your opponent) is good because it improves the quality of the extra information you get. Some players will raise preflop and routinely continuation bet with almost any hand. But on the turn, they bet only if they have something, and they give up otherwise. The call bluff is a great counter to this strategy.

But if that's what he's talking about I'm not so sure he needs a marginal hand to call the flop bet.

That's the part that confused me. What does he mean by marginal hand.

His definition suggests to me he means calling with something like bottom pair, good kicker, then when the evil one checks the turn, essentially giving up, you value bet because your marginal hand just got strong.

His example suggests to me he means calling with a weak draw intending to bet if a scare card hits (his example had two clubs on the flop so any club and any ace might be scare cards to the evil one). Or bet if the gutshot hits or semi-bluff if the backdoor flush continues.

In the first case you have a hand that might actually be good. In the second case you have a lot of cards that can improve your hand without looking like it improved your hand and a lot of cards that do nothing but look like they improved your hand.

But then his clarification is something else entirely.

I guess I just don't know what he's talking about and things like this closing sentence don't exactly clarify things for me.

Furthermore, with some hands and stack sizes, you can delay the bluff a second time, playing it bet-call on the flop, bet-call on the turn, and check-bet-fold on the river.

Update: Some of the comments on his post say his call bluff is also called floating the flop. Another term I have no idea what it means. I should get out more.

Small bets

Random Shuffle has some comments on a post of Brother Ed's about making minimum size raises.

A bet is a bet. Even a mini-bet means something a check doesn't. The fact that the player bet the minimum rather than checking means something. This distinction between checking and mini-betting is more important than Miller seems to be saying here. There's no benefit in deliberately conflating small bets with checks - if anything, this smacks of the sort of mental laziness Miller is railing at.

I often make a min size raise online because I was not paying attention and the time is ticking and I want to make a raise but don't want to fool around and risk a time out.

I agree that any attempt to lump all small raises into some standard category is pretty much just intellectual laziness.

The important thing to keep in mind is that in multi-way games (even if the action has gotten to heads up) you're going to have to do things that are unexpected and contrary to the norm to get the money. That's what strategic thinking is all about. It's important to consider the possible reasons for the min raise, and Random Shuffle is right that there's always a reason and the reason is seldom intellectual laziness. Other than the being in a hurry reason, the two main reasons are as an attempt to seem weak and entice a raise and an attempt to take away the initiative while keeping the pot small.

A player who is making the min raise for the first reason is hoping you'll think it's for the second reason.

One of the holes in Miller's thinking is a common 2+2 shortcoming, a failure to recognize that even when your opponent is making a mistake he often thinks he has a good reason to do what he did.

Top pair revisited

The other day I made a post titled Don't fall in love with top pair. More recently Ed Miller has a post about Going Broke with One Pair. The two ideas are related, although not exactly the same. Falling in love with top pair often leads to going broke needlessly, but the converse is not so often true. There are plenty of circumstances besides inappropriately falling in love with top pair which might lead to going busted with top pair. Ed's post uses one of those other situations as an example to illustrate his thesis.

His thesis appears to be

Going broke with just a pair brings on a bevy of emotions, from guilt (for ignoring such a simple rule), to embarrassment (for losing so much with such a modest hand), to despair (as in, “Why the hell can’t I figure this game out?”).

The thing is, all that angst is often thoroughly misplaced. Sometimes it’s not only ok to go broke with one pair, but it’s the right thing to do.

I'm not sure that I'd say going broke is ever the right thing to do, although it might sometimes be a common result from doing the right thing.

Ed didn't mention my prior post in his, but making a reference to somebody elses blog isn't the sort of thing I expect from Ed anyway. He's just not that kind of guy.

Some of Ed's post is based on some misconceptions he has about poker history and the source of the phrase "Don't go broke with top pair" as an adage that is heavily adopted by many players. He doesn't seem to understand the motivation for the original adage.

I think the main thing that trips people up is a common poker fallacy. It goes like this: “I see bad players do that a lot, so it must be a bad thing to do.”

It’s similar for going broke with one pair. Bad players do it a lot. It’s part of what makes them bad. But that doesn’t mean that’s it’s always a thing to avoid.

That's not really the source of the adage. The source of the adage is that it's a solid truth in the context of the games that gave rise to the adage. Those games tended to be deep money cash games. In deep money games it's important to keep pots small with vulnerable hands. To relate it to some comments I've made on my mathandpoker blog, (I'm having some database errors on that blog, so that link might not work) what becomes important in deep money no limit games isn't EV, it's risk-adjusted EV. Risk-adjusted EV is a concept from mathematical finance that's based on mean/variance efficient frontiers.

The way to control risk in deep money no limit games is to keep the pot small enough so that you can easily get away from vulnerable hands if things go badly for you.

Ed gives an example of a short money game where the hero got all-in on a red flop of 566 with a pair of black queens. Flush draws, straight draws, three sixes, overcards, all kind of draws that put his hand at risk and at best he has a 2-card redraw if he's beat.

As a prelude to the hand history he says,

Sometimes one pair is more than enough to get all-in with, and if you go broke, you go broke. An example of this is today’s Q&A.

That's nuts.

It turns out that the villain had a black AJ and the QQ was far ahead. But with that flop, there's no way to put a typical villian on a black AJ unless you've shown a history of being willing to lay down pairs on drawy looking flops and he's shown an ability to overplay weak draws. Without that information (which I didn't see anywhere) this is not at all an example of when an ovepair is more than enough to get all-in with. Not even close.

While it turns out I actually agree with Ed that in the situation as given it probably is right for the hero to call a check-raise on the flop with all his chips (which is how he got all-in), the reason it's probably the right thing to do isn't because his hand is worth it, it's because he didn't have many chips.

There was $3.30 in the pot preflop, hero bet $2 and the villain goes all-in for $2.50 more. Sure call an extra $2.50 once the pot is over $7. But not because you have a hand to go busted with, becuase the money is short and you're getting a price.

The didn't go busted anyway when the villain rivered an Ace, he had the villain covered.

Ed seems to have completely missed the point. About the only time top pair (or an overpair) is a hand to go busted with is when you're short stacked and the pot has gotten big relative to what chips you have left. Or, as is the actual case in his example, when you're not really going broke.

Firing blanks

In Ed Wilson's ongoing series of 7 posts on no-limit hold'em, the 5th post is titled Pull the Trigger. With that title I expected it to be a post on aggression, but it's not. It's a post on bluffing. Of course bluffing is an aggressive act, but not really what I think about when I think about pulling the trigger.

The reason, I think, goes back to the difference in his attitude and mine in the importance of picking up pots. I talked about that in a previous post. He puts a lot more emphasis on the idea of winning pots than I do. I try to focus on the money, and that's not the same thing as trying to win pots.

He outlines some of the situations where you might be able to pick up a small pot with a bluff, but he seems to think that winning the pot is the objective. I also like to try to pick up a lot of small pots without a hand, but not because I care much about winning that small pot. I like to bet a lot, and by betting a lot you tend to condition your opponents with the idea that you bet a lot and they should tend to call more with medium strength hands. By betting at the small pots (with small bets) you tend to increase the chances that they'll call you later when you make a bigger bet into a big pot.

And the opposite it true also, by not betting at the small pots you set your opponents up with the idea you don't bluff much at all and later you're set up for a big bluff into a big pot where they won't call you with a medium strength hand.

So, there are reasons to bluff at small pots, but also reasons not to. And those reasons are about other pots, not about the current pot. That's what I mean by strategic thinking, the slant I'm using in the book I'm doing (and posting here in dribbles). Ed ignores all that in his bluffin post, focusing on each hand independently of the other hands. I think that's a mistake.

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.

Miller got one right

Ed Miller has another post up in a series of post he's planning on the nth most important steps in playing no limit hold'em. His first was playing tight, and I had argued that that was not the most important step, the most important step is playing position.

I guess he decided he agreed with me after all. Now he's saying that the number one mistake he sees people make is playing out of position.

I think I agree with that, that depends on what he means by number one. It's certainly the most frequent. It's probably not the most costly though, that would belong to making bad calls on later streets.

People playing out of position is the #1 mistake I see. I probably make more money from chronic out-of-position players than from anyone else.

If that's true I think Ed plays too passively against calling stations.

A lot of what no-limit is too me is letting them have the small pots and me taking the big ones. Miller and I disagree in a big way about the fundamental nature of playing no-limit. But it's still interesting to see how he's looking at the game.

Maybe he'll get to that one next.

Don't play tight, play position

Ed Miller has a blog post up about playing no-limit hold'em.

Playing tight is the easiest and most important step you can take to improve your game.

That's what he says. And, he's right if you're a losing player. Playing tight will improve your game a lot.

But if your goal is to win more rather than to loss less he's not right. Playing tight isn't nearly as important as playing position.

You should play very tight in early position, and to some degree in middle position. But not in late position. Play a lot of unraised pots from late position. That's where you'll make some money. Throwing away hands saves money, and throwing away hands in early position saves a lot of money. But play position.

Short stack advantage

In a blog entry on playing short stacks in no limit hold'em, Ed Miller makes the following amazing statement:

No-limit is about having a good hand when the money goes in. Having a short stack can be an advantage because your money goes in before your opponents (with deeper stacks) are ready.

I'm just stunned by that.
It's certainly a good idea to have the best of it when the money goes in, but that's far from a defining characteristic of what playing no-limit is all about. If fact, in some situations it's true that that kind of thinking is more important in limit than in no-limit.

That's not quite as much nonsense as the idea that you're better off playing a short stack than playing a deep stack, but it's close.

There are some situations where you're better off with a short stack. But there are also situations where you're better off with a big stack. And the potential payoff from having the big stack is huge compared to the payoff from having the short stack. Intentionally being short-stacked is more a risk reduction tactic than anything else.

Just giving a situational example of when you might do better being short-stacked does nothing towards establishing a benefit of being short-stacked.

I need to get some sleep, I'll get back to this later.