"I hope you had it"

"I hope you had it." That's what the guy said as he folded to a large bet on the river.

This was at the Luxor last week. (I love the Luxor's spotlight; it's one of the coolest things in this city, so since I couldn't think of anything to illustrate the point I want to make, I'm taking advantage of the fact that this happened at the Luxor as my excuse for slipping in above a fine image of the light.) He showed his cards before mucking them; he had made a small flush on the turn card (something like the 7 and 8 of spades in his hand). But when a fourth spade came on the river (a second small one to join the two large ones on the board), and his bet was met with a substantial raise, he had to lay it down, obviously assuming that his opponent had made a higher flush.

Nothing about the betting action was out of the ordinary. Nor was his comment, in the sense that I've heard the same thing said many times before (though usually not in quite as menacing/threatening a tone as the Luxor guy used). But I still jotted down a note to write a post about it sometime soon, because of how stupid it is.

I would like to ask that guy, "Why do you 'hope' that he had it? What difference does it make whether he actually had your flush beat or not? Would you be happy at losing the pot if he showed you a higher flush? Would you be angry at him if it turned out he had a lower flush, or was on a pure bluff? If so, why? Once you have decided to fold, how can you possibly care about what cards he held?"

As with so many things about poker players' reactions and attitudes, I just don't get it.

But if I had to guess at what that player's response to my questions would be (assuming he didn't punch me in the nose), I suspect he might say something like this: "Well, based on his raise at the end, I assumed that he must have a higher flush, because it would be very easy for him to hold any one of the five cards that would have me beat. I hoped that he had it, because if he didn't, then my fold was a mistake, and I don't like making mistakes."

By design, poker is a game of incomplete and imperfect information. The best players in the world get bluffed sometimes, call large bets with what turn out to be weaker hands, and make other kinds of errors. It's inevitable. And, of course, we'd all like to minimize both the number of mistakes that we make and their impact on our poker income.

But did this guy really make a mistake? One answer is that we can't know, since the opponent never showed his hole cards. But I think there's a better way of looking at it.

If I had been the one in his situation, here's how I would talk to myself about it, when deciding to fold: "I don't know and can't know whether he actually has a higher flush or not. But from a lot of experience in similar situations, I know that a raise like that usually means that I'm beat. Very few players without a strong flush would be willing to raise my bet with a lower flush or as a pure bluff. So maybe 80% of the time I'm beat, 10% of the time I'm facing a dolt who actually thinks that his lowly 5 of spades gives him the winner here, and 10% of the time the raise is coming from a maniac who will raise with zilch or an exceptionally good player who has picked up on some small sign of weakness that I'm giving off here. I can't reliably distinguish between those various scenarios based on any information available to me at the moment, so I have to go with the probabilities. If I call, I'll win maybe 20% of the time and lose maybe 80%. That makes this an easy laydown."

Of course, I don't actually have to run those words through my brain; I've been in that situation enough times that I can just take the shortcut from the facts of the situation to the conclusion about what the right thing to do is. But if I found myself, for whatever reason, obsessing about whether I had made the correct move there (and, occasionally, I can get irrationally fixated on such things), that script is what I would tell myself.

At the end of Barry Greenstein's superb book, Ace on the River, he poses a series of demonically, agonizingly difficult poker situations. In discussing what he actually did when faced with these conundrums, and whether he did the right thing, he makes a distinction between the "correct" play and the "perfect" play. The "perfect" play is what you would do if you could magically see your opponent's hole cards. But since that information is not available to us when it would be useful, he puts more emphasis on the "correct" play, which is based on a rational analysis of the range of hole cards that this opponent might be holding, with some weighting as to the relative probability of each.

The correct move then is based on a weighted sum of what would be the "perfect" play against each of the opponent's possible holdings. If you make every poker decision based on that kind of assessment, you will minimize errors as much as humanly possible, and thereby maximize your poker income. If you can accomplish that, then it makes no difference whatsoever whether you made the "perfect" play in any specific case; as long as you are making more "correct" decisions than your opponents, you will win their money in the long run.

When you hold only a small flush, with four flush cards on the board, and somebody raises your river bet, the "correct" move against most opponents (leaving aside for the moment the exceptions that would tend to give one pause, such as the morons, the maniacs, and the ultra-drunks) is to fold, even if once in a while the "perfect" move would be to call or even reraise. The player whose comment inspired this little rant made the correct play. The key concept that he is lacking is the realization that he made the correct play even if his opponent was bluffing, because if he called or raised every time he found himself in the identical spot, he would lose a lot of money over a lifetime.

If I had been in his shoes and that opponent showed me the higher flush, I would not feel any sense of joy or pride or relief--just an unexcited, ho-hum, "yeah, that's pretty much what I guessed" resignation. If, on the other hand, he showed me a lower flush or a bluff, I would not feel enraged, nor would I kick myself for not having been able to see through the backs of his cards. I'd just shrug, think to myself, "Oh well, these things happen," try to make a mental note of any motions or gestures he had been making that might serve as a sign of weakness or bluffing in the future, then let it go and start thinking about the next hand.*

To "hope" that one's opponent was not bluffing is just as silly and pointless as Phil Laak praying that the community cards to come after he folds do not turn out to be ones that would have helped him (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/11/whats-done-is-done.html).

To the player who uttered the words in the title of this post: Sir, you did the right thing. Too bad your emotions blinded you to that fact.


*Full Tilt Poker has some great television advertisements. One of them showed Howard Lederer losing a pot to an idiot who dances around, whooping it up, celebrating his victory the way so many buffoons think is cool these days. All the time, Howard sits there impassively, unperturbed. In a voiceover he says, "He's not thinking about the next hand. You should be." That's a great, great piece of advice. What did you just learn about that opponent? What mistakes might his new state of mind cause him to be more prone to make now? What did losing the hand change about your own table image? Did your relative chip stacks shift enough that you now have to adjust tactics accordingly? And how might you be able to exploit all of these altered dynamics over the next few minutes? With that ad, Howard provided me with one of the best mental/emotional tools I've ever come across for preventing myself from going on tilt after a bad hand: Start thinking calmly and rationally about the next hand, even before the cards are dealt.