Prop bets, dartboards, and poker

I don't do any significant prop betting. One dollar on the pig races at Bill's is about as far as I'll go. But I've been pondering lately about how one can think of poker as a prop bet.

Of course, the key to success in prop betting is setting the parameters in your favor, as well as settling on the maximum amount that your opponent will be willing to go for, if you manage to get the terms of the bet in your favor. You do the same thing in poker. If I have a stronger starting hand, I try to lure you to put money into the pot with your weaker hand--as much as I think you'll agree to.

In many forms of prop bets, the terms can change over time. This happens all the time in golf, for example. As the round plays out, it may become clear that one player is gaining an advantage over the other that will be difficult to overcome. The one with the advantage may try to get more money into the "pot," perhaps with different terms for the remaining holes, pressing his edge. In poker, you are effectively renegotiating the terms of your prop bet with every betting round, as new information is gained, and each party sees that his position has been strengthened or weakened.

But putting aside the prop bet analogy, let me tell you about one of the weird ways in which my brain works. I can't tell you exactly how long I've been thinking this way, but some time after I started playing here in Vegas I began imagining what we might call "the dartboard theory of poker."

Suppose we get all the money in before the flop. I have, say, J-J, you have, say, A-K. Nearly every time I'm in a situation like this, I envision a dartboard divided up into sectors of "me" and "you." We don't have an expert dart thrower on the line, one who could nail any sector of the board he wanted to, but rather a blindfolded drunk guy. The board is really big, so he can't miss, but where the dart lands is random. We have it basically divided 50-50, like this:





Or, more likely, it's about 52-48 (depending on the suits involved), like this:





(Yeah, I know these don't look like dartboards. They're just stupid Excel pie charts. Superimposing the colors over the image of an actual dartboard is way beyond my graphics-manipulation capabilities, so just use a bit of imagination, OK? After all, this whole post is about how to imagine things. Also, I didn't even bother cropping out the surrounding junk, because, well, I'm lazy, and didn't think it would help things, that's why.)

The board playing out is no longer a series of independent events, but a single throw of a dart, which may land in my territory or in yours--we'll have to see.

Once I started thinking of all-in situations in this manner, a fairly natural evolution (well, natural if your brain is wired in the scarily strange way that mine happens to be) is to start seeing the betting as efforts to move the line of demarcation between my dartboard territory and yours, sort of like a tug-of-war, with each contestant trying to push or pull the line his way. Of course, a more accurate description would be that each is trying to control his opponent's perception of where the line is, since usually neither one knows for sure, and it's not something you can actually change.

My vision of success in poker is when I in essence get an opponent to agree to match the money I have put into the pot when the dartboard looks something like this:





It's especially good if that happens when the opponent thinks the board is like this:





In fact, perhaps that's a necessary element, because no rational player is going to put the money in if he knew how the territory was really marked.

Once you have all the money in with one or more cards to come, you have made a deal with your opponent. You have the dartboard surface area divided between you in some manner--basically even, strongly in your favor, or strongly in his. Then a dart is thrown, and neither of you has any control over where it might land.

I realize that this way of looking at it isn't any different from just assigning percentages or odds or outs. But for whatever reason (a visually oriented brain, maybe?), it seems more natural to me to think this way. When I have completed a successful negotiation, and have, say, 90% of the board locked up my way, I feel that I have done my job well. It makes it at least slightly easier to let go of the result when I imagine it as a dart being thrown wildly at the board. I have exerted all of the control that I can before it is thrown, and there is nothing more I can do thereafter. It lands where it lands. It is what it is.

Here, for example, is how the dartboard looked in my hand against the Spewtard:





I can live with that. The object of poker is to get your opponent to put as much money in the pot as he is willing to, when as much of the dartboard is marked off for you as possible, and I did that.

There have, of course, been many situations where I was 100% to win, even with one or more cards yet to come--for example, when I flopped a straight flush. I think that the closest I've come to 100% without actually being there was this hand at the Rio, in which a guy made an all-in bluff into me with nothing when I held the nuts on the flop, and he had to go perfect-perfect just to get a chop. My dartboard that day looked like this:





On the other hand, I have been in a few truly horrible situations, but had the drunken dart-thrower deliver me a miracle. For example, when I was the one making an ill-timed all-in bluff into two opponents who had flopped flushes, I was unknowingly agreeing to a dartboard approximately like this:





Oops. But I think the worst I have ever gotten it all in with, and yet had the dart land in that tiny sliver of area with my name on it, was a tournament hand at the Venetian, in which the dartboard looked like this:





Once in a while, those drunk, blindfolded dart throwers can really thread the needle!

I don't have any profound conclusion to draw from any of this. I just thought I would share a couple of the odd visions that flash through my brain when I'm in certain poker situations.