A poker puzzle

The guy sitting on my right for a while tonight at Planet Hollywood had this small, plastic, engraved card sitting on the rail next to his chips. While he was away from the table I snapped a picture of it so that I could try to decipher it later, because it mystified me.

Try to make your own guesses as to what principles this player is trying to remind himself of. After you do, scroll down for my best guess.







1. Don't play hands out of position.
2. Play your own game.
3. Follow your own reads. Or, maybe, Fold ? or raise (i.e., call rarely compared to folding and raising).
4. Quit winner.

Comments are open for other guesses.


Addendum, February 25, 2008

See Shamus's comment.

Both suggestions certainly plausible.

But if so, then I think this guy is giving himself two pieces of bad advice.

I think that "play your own game" is the first piece of bad advice, if it can be translated roughly to "play the way you play." Different opponents, and different mixes of opponents at a table, call for sometimes radically different tactics. If you're set in your ways and can't adapt, you're going to lose, or at least not maximize your profit. I'm not comfortable playing loose and wild, but if you're in a loose and wild game, your only choices are basically to move your style in that direction--but more skillfully and selectively than your opponents--or play complete lock-down poker. The latter will probably yield a small profit, with low volatility/variance. The former, however, is clearly the more profitable approach, as long as you're willing to live with the high variance that it will inevitably bring. If you have only one way of playing, smart opponents will quickly figure it out and exploit it mercilessly.

If Shamus is right about deciphering #3 as "follow your original read," that's this player's second piece of bad advice. It is far smarter to be willing to modify your guess as to an opponent's cards based on the additional information you acquire with every decision you see him make. For one example of this, see my detailed analysis of an interesting (well, I thought it was interesting, anyway) hand here: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/01/play-hand-with-me.html. Every decision that this player made allowed me to narrow the range of her possible holdings.

Here's another example from last night at the Palms. There was a guy fairly new to the table. He was tight enough that I hadn't seen him play many hands. I put in my standard raise (to $13) from middle position with Q-Q. He reraised to $50 from the big blind. Because he hadn't been around long enough to know that I had been playing quite tight, it was hard to know how broad to make his range here. Some players will put in a big raise with pairs down to about 8-8, to take a small pot now rather than have to make difficult decisions after the flop, especially from out of position. So I called, but very warily. The flop was A-x-x. He checked. I couldn't tell whether he had hit big with A-A or A-K and was trapping me, or maybe had K-K or a lower pair and hated that ace on the flop as much as I did. So I checked, too. The turn was another non-connecting rag. Now he bet $50. In addition to having a monster, he certainly might do this with K-K, Q-Q, or even J-J or 10-10, once he decided that the ace on the flop didn't help me. So I warily called again, hoping that we could just check it down on the river. No such luck. He moved all in. This was the crucial piece of information for me. Once he saw me call $50 on the turn, I didn't think he would dare move all-in without having A-A, A-K, or, at a bare minimum, K-K. No way he would do that with J-J, which is what I was (perhaps desperately) hoping he had up until that point. I reluctantly folded, saving $95. I talked to him a couple of hours later as he was packing up to go, and asked him what he had had. He very plausibly said it had been A-K. He seemed completely truthful to me, and at that point he had no reason to lie about it. If I hadn't narrowed the range of hands I could put him on--that is, if I just stuck with my original read--I would have lost $195 instead of just $100.

It's foolish, IMHO, to basically put blinders on and ignore the additional information you get as a hand plays out, which is what "Follow your original read" seems to me to imply.

If you're going to go to all the trouble of getting reminders to yourself of how to play engraved in a little plaque to carry around, make sure you're giving yourself good advice!