"Get ready for a butt kicking"

That right there is what Josie said upon accepting my suggestion of a little heads-up poker this afternoon.

We didn't make any side bets on the outcome, but decided on a best-of-seven series of $10 heads-up SNGs on Black Chip Poker.

But I quickly took down the first two matches--including an epic comeback from a short stack in game #2--prompting Josie to tell me, "I dislike you very very much." (This is on top of her calling me a whore practically every time I won a hand.)

She won game #3 by hitting a backdoor flush draw after all the chips were in. I guess for some people that's the only way they can win. I'm just sayin'.

I took #4, then she won #5 when my computer suddenly crashed and I lost a bunch of chips while offline trying to revive the stupid beast. Again, for some people that's what it takes for them to win at poker.

But with the computer recovered, I won game #6, our longest of the bunch. Which, for those keeping track, means that I won the series by the extremely appropriate score of 4-2. Cuz that's just how I roll. Or I should say, that's just how I roll over Josie.

If that's a "butt kicking," I guess I'm a masochist, because I liked it.

Poker gems, #456

Ed Miller, in Card Player magazine column, May 16, 2012 (vol. 25, #10), page 38.

Whenever you beat players in a hand and they complain about how you played it, you're officially in their head.

Poker gems, #455

Andrew Brokos, in Card Player magazine column, May 16, 2012 (vol. 25, #10), page 37.

There is one reason to check and call on the river, and that's to induce bluffs. If you don't expect your opponent to bluff the river, then your options are either to value bet the hand yourself or to check and fold. Checking and calling makes no sense in this situation because virtually any player's calling range will be wider than his value betting range.

Poker gems, #454

Roy Cooke, in Card Player magazine column, May 16, 2012 (vol. 25, #10), page 32.

Deceptive plays have value when being deceptive prevents your opponent(s) from defining your hand and therefore playing correctly against it. There is no point in being deceptive if your opponent can't read the situation anyway or would play incorrectly even if he knew your holding. That might be due to a lack of your opponent's hand reading ability or deficiencies of his play knowledge; but it is also becomes [sic] the case when your hand range widens and even quality hand readers wouldn't be able to narrowly define your hand.

Convert

Praises be, we have another convert to the Gospel of the Mighty Deuce-Four!

http://robvegaspoker.blogspot.com/2012/05/most-powerful-hand-in-poker.html

Language mystery

Last month my friends Martin and Jennifer wrote a pair of essays for the Woman Poker Player web site about poker players' use of the word rape to describe bad beats, coolers, or just generally running bad. I didn't say anything at the time, because I thought they covered the matter so well that there wasn't much left unsaid. Martin in particular expressed exactly what has long been my sense of squeamishness when such terminology gets tossed around so casually. My only disagreement with Jennifer is that I'm uneasy about expanding the use of penalties for linguistic offenses. I think that over the long run social opprobrium is a better tool than the rulebook, at least in this case.

I did have one lingering question about the subject, though, and almost wrote a post about it at the time. In the end, I didn't have any good answer to my own question, so I let it drop. But it came up again Sunday evening, so once again it's on my mind.

Rob's friend "Prudence" was indisputably having a bad night, with a never-ending stream of second-best hands. At one point she exclaimed in frustration, "I'm getting murdered here!"

This was precisely the counterpoint that occurred to me when reading the essays about the offensiveness of rape language: What about similar use of various forms of the word murder? It is almost universally agreed that murder is a worse crime than rape, as evidenced by harsher criminal penalties for the former than the latter in every jurisdiction that I know of. So why is poker players' figurative use of murder less likely to provoke outrage (whether expressed or not) than the identical use of rape?

If this is hypocrisy, I confess to sharing in the guilt. I certainly noticed Prudence's language, because I spent a few minutes pondering this very conundrum just a few weeks ago, but still it didn't strike me with the same reflexive wincing and squirming that would have occurred if she had said, "I'm getting raped here!"

Why is that?

I'm still stuck with the same dilemma I had when I thought about writing this up last month: I don't have a good answer. But this time I'm going through with sending it out into the ether, hoping that somebody else does.

Eclipse

I didn't prepare any special eclipse-viewing glasses or apparatus. Vegas is 20 or 30 miles south of where one would have to be to see the true annular eclipse, anyway. But it's still a sufficient rare event that I wanted to see what little effects could be seen. This was made more difficult than I anticipated by the fact that it occurred so late in the day, so both sunlight and its resulting shadows were nearly horizontal. But I wandered around my neighborhood looking for spots where light was diffracting around edges or through holes. None of them are exactly worthy of National Geographic, but you can certainly tell that something strange was happening with the light.

When it was over, I drove to the MGM Grand, where I knew that fellow bloggers Grrouchie and Rob were already playing. I had met Grrouchie once before, but not Rob. I got there, found them, and moved to their table. I was there with them for about three hours, during which time we absolutely did not EVER talk about either Josie or Tony. Not even once. Isn't that amazing?

Grrouchie epitomized the danger of playing with fellow poker bloggers when he said to Rob, ""I can't wait to get home and make fun of you."

Of course I had to impress upon them the awesome power of the Mighty Deuce-Four, so that they will join me in spreading the gospel. The only time I was dealt it, I called a small pre-flop raise in position, and flopped 2-2-Q. My opponent was the woman Rob refers to in his blog as "Prudence." She bet $10, I called. Turn was a jack. This time she bet $15, I raised to $45. She called, but with apparent consternation. At about this time, Grrouchie was shooting me a look from his end of the table that said, "Do you really have what I think you have?" I gave him a little nod of affirmation. (Prudence was not looking anywhere in my direction, so I didn't risk giving anything away. Besides, she doesn't know who I am, so even if she noticed an exchange of glances, she wouldn't know what it was about.) River was an ace. She checked, I moved all in, she folded. I showed the hand, obviously. So now I have two more bloggers who have personally witnessed the power at work.

Poker skills are transferable

I play a lot of "Words With Friends" (WWF) these days. In case you've been dwelling in a cave for the last few years, WWF is a ripoff of Scrabble (so close that I'm surprised there hasn't been a patent infringement lawsuit) played on Facebook or smart phones or tablet devices. My brother, David, is my most frequent and most tenacious opponent. He works for himself from home, so he can take as much time as he feels like to study out the perfect move. He routinely trounced me when we started playing, but in the last few weeks I have achieved something close to parity with him.

For the most part, there isn't much poker-like reasoning in WWF. There's just no way to know what tiles your opponent might have, except when they've all been distributed and you're on the last few moves of the game. But a couple of weeks ago David and I played a game in which thinking one level deeper than he did made all the difference between winning and losing.

Through the first half of the game, we had stayed entirely within the bottom half of the board. This wasn't planned; it's just the way it worked out when each of us took our most advantageous moves. But then something strange happened: He passed a turn. He had never done this before, except at the very beginning or very end of a game when he had no possible moves. He had occasionally done a tile exchange instead of placing tiles. But just outright skip a turn? Unheard of.

It puzzled me, but I didn't spend much effort trying to figure it out. I wrote it off as an anomaly, and just made my next move.

He passed again.

WTF? Now he had my full attention. It was time for some poker hand-reading skills.

One of the keys to high scores in the game is making "bingos," a term borrowed from Scrabble, in which you play all seven of your tiles at once. This not only makes big words, but you get a 35-point bonus for the feat. If you can do that across a double-word or triple-word square, so much the better. David's game centers on two strategies: Making high-scoring bingos, and blocking the avenues I might use to do the same.

If he had one or two tiles in his rack that made bingoing difficult (letters like J, X, V, and K tend not to lend themselves to flexibility in making words), he would play those where he could, hoping to replace them with letters of high bingo potential--vowels and easy-to-use consonants like N, D, and S. I had seen him do this hundreds of times. If he were really stuck with a completely unusable set of letters, he would trade in a few to gain playability. What on earth would prompt him to just skip a turn?

As I thought about it, there was only one logical explanation: He had a perfect rack for making a lot of different bingos, but had no "hook" on which to attach any of the possible letter combinations he could make, because our game had become so constricted in the lower half of the board. He must be thinking that the lower half was played out, and I would very soon be forced to make the first extension into the upper half, at which point he could stick a bingo onto nearly anything I put out there.

Upon deducing that, my counter-strategy became obvious. It's the same as it is in poker: Once you know what your opponent wants you to do, you do the opposite. So I did. I played one and two letters at a time, finding all the little nooks and crannies in which I could add a tile or two to the already-crowded bottom half of the grid. I was passing up opportunities for higher-scoring plays that I could make if I ventured north, but I was getting free turn after free turn without David scoring any points, so I was happy to continue. I came to think of myself as Brer Rabbit in the briar patch, not wanting to come out where Brer Fox could eat me. Or you could think of me as the tortoise, progressing slowly while the hare was taking a nap.

I knew that David must be thinking, after each turn, "OK, that's it, he has played all he can down there." Of course, he had good reason to think that. Every time I took a turn, I reduced the number of playable spots even further, so his expectation that I would be forced out of the thicket become inexorably closer to being true.

Because of this, I knew that he wouldn't deviate from his plan. With each successive round, it made even more sense for him to skip another turn, because it was ever more likely that I would have to abandon my small-ball strategy. But he badly underestimated how long I could keep playing by myself. I didn't keep track, and the game was now too long ago to be able to retrieve the history, but I'm sure I got at least 15 turns in. He was likely guessing, at first, that I could go no more than two or three.

Eventually, of course, I had indeed filled up every spot that I possibly could, and had to stick a line of letters up into virgin territory. He promptly laid down a bingo, as I was sure he would. But it was too little too late. My extended stay down in the land of the little scores had inflicted the death of a thousand cuts. Picking up five or ten points at a time had both given me an insurmountable lead and depleted the supply of available tiles. The game was over a couple of moves later.

He texted me, "That didn't work out the way I had planned." I asked him to explain his unprecedented tactic (as if I didn't already know it). He told me precisely what I had deduced: He didn't want to wreck his high-flexibility board by playing one or two tiles at a time, thus risking picking up a tile that would impair the bingo potential, and instead decided to wait for me to create a hook for him to make a big score off of--but I didn't cooperate.

I told him that I had guessed that that was exactly what was happening, and that I had intentionally devised a way to foil his nefarious plot. He replied that it was not nefarious, but, in fact, a grand and glorious plan, "opposed only by evildoers who hate America."

That gave me a genuine LOL. He is always a good sport, win or lose.

Would I have figured out what he was doing if I hadn't played so many hours of poker? Maybe. It's hard to say. But what I'm certain of is that it was poker experience that gave me the reflexive impulse (1) to crack the code of his line of play, (2) to infer from it what sort of tiles he was holding, (3) from that to project what he must be thinking about what I would do, and (4) figure out a way to frustrate his intentions.

That, my word-playing friends, is pure poker.

Poker gems, #453

John Vorhaus, in Card Player magazine column, on playing suited connectors, May 2, 2012 (vol. 25, #9), page 50.

Know how suited connectors win? By betting the flop and having nobody call. That's pretty unlikely in a multiway pot, but much more likely when the pot is shorthanded or, in the best case, heads up. Then your 8-7 suited wins without a fight. You don't have to make a hand to win. You could have 8-7, 2-7, a pair of chickens, whatever. Here it is in a nutshell, folks: Since it's hard to make a hand in hold'em, your best outcome is not making your hand. Your best outcome is winning without a hand.

A 100% true poker advertisement

I noticed this ad in a recent issue of Poker Player newspaper. I was impressed by its honesty. It says, "Many have paid thousands for poker know-how like this... but YOU won't!"

And they're absolutely right--I won't!

Home game done

We have us a winner! Congratulations, "what is 7x6"! In addition to the free Stars bucks and bragging rights, you have won an entry into the inaugural $1,000,000 buy-in bracelet event at this year's World Series of Poker! Please remit the $999,999 processing fee to me at your earliest convenience, and I will take care of getting you registered.

Thanks for showing up and entertaining me, all.

Mother's Day PokerStars home game tournament

I just had, and yielded to, an impulse to create a HORSE tournament tonight for my PokerStars home game club (ID# is 383761, invitation code "playgrumpy"). No real money involved, obviously--just 20 fake dollars and bragging rights are at stake. 9:00 p.m. EDT, 6:00 p.m. PDT.

But there is one proviso: In order to be allowed to play, you must not only be a member of the Grumpy Home Game club, but, for today's event only, you must qualify under one of the following categories:

1. You are now or at some point in the past have been a mother.

2. You now have or at some point in the past have had a mother.

3. You are now or at some point in the past have been a horse.

Please note that this requirement will be very strictly enforced, with no exceptions made.

Unclear on the physics

So I'm reading along in the May 21 issue of Poker Player newspaper. There's a column on page 14 by somebody named A.C. Clark. His author's blurb says that he is in charge of the publication's Northwest advertising sales, and he's a high school teacher. Why that qualifies him to write a column about poker escapes me. He's also not qualified to write a column about physics, but he sorta tries to do that.

He says that he has recently felt very inspired by reading a book with an unusual title:

212: The Extra Degree, by Sam Parker and Mac Anderson, intrigues the mind while making perfect sense. At the core is the notion that water is hot at 211 degrees. Then, at 212 degrees, it boils. With boiling water comes steam, and steam can power a locomotive. Think of that...what a statement. Just simply raising the temperature of water one extra degree means the difference between something that is very hot and something that generates enough force to power a machine. Point made: Small things can make major differences.

(Alterations in original.)

The former college physics major in me threw down the yellow penalty flag on this argument. It may make "perfect sense" to Mr. Clark, but it doesn't to anybody who understands classical physics.

It takes about 4.2 joules of energy to heat 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. So if you add 4.2 J of energy to 1 gram of water that is already at 99 C (I don't feel like doing the Fahrenheit conversion), you get 1 gram of water that is at 100 C, or 212 Fahrenheit. But you do not get steam.

To convert water in its liquid form to steam takes an enormous amount of energy, relative to the energy it takes to elevate its temperature. In order to convert 1 gram of water at its boiling point into steam, you have to add another 2260 J, or more than 500 times the amount of energy that it took to elevate the water's temperature from 99 C to 100 C. This is called the "heat of vaporization." That energy does not further elevate the temperature of the water; it goes into overcoming the molecular bonds that attract the water molecules to each other.

This is not to say that small changes never make big differences. They can. A sniper making a minute adjustment in his scope can mean the difference between hitting and missing a target 800 yards away. A boulder precariously balanced on the edge of a cliff requires only a small push to send it tumbling down toward the road below. And so on. But you have to pick such examples carefully, because for the most part small changes make only small differences; effecting large differences requires large changes. In the water example, you not only have to elevate the temperature that last one degree to get it to its boiling point, but you then have to apply more than 500 times that much energy again to create steam. That is no trivial matter.

To bring the point back to poker, as Mr. Clark attempts to do, you can't triple your hourly earning rate by, say, learning how to pick up one additional kind of tell in opponents. You can only expect a change in earning that is probably too small to detect against the background noise of variance. Still, small changes are important, because most us get better, if at all, only one baby step at a time, and they add up. But it's unrealistic to expect vast differences in poker outcomes to arise from small differences in input.

I suppose, though, that I should thank Mr. Clark for saving me the trouble of reading the book. If the authors so fundamentally misunderstand the workings of the system that they used as both their title and central teaching point, I can feel quite confident that the book is not worth reading.

Poker gems, #452

Lou Krieger, in Poker Player newspaper column, May 7, 2012 (vol. 15, #23), page 6.

For some, tilt has ended otherwise promising careers--even some WSOP main event champs, who were not able to control their emotions at the table--and many big-money winners who have gone completely broke, due to an inability and an unwillingness to deal with being on tilt. In other words, the willingness and commitment to get up from the table when stressed, and to take a short walk every hour or so, has cost some players millions--everything they earned and every dollar they had--while a simplistic little remedy might have prevented it all.

...When it comes to managing tilt, you are the one in charge. If you are unable to deal with it, the fault is entirely yours.

Taking on the luckbox

I was at the Riviera tonight. There's a big pool tournament going on there, and it's the busiest I've ever seen the place. For the first time ever, I could not find a spot in the parking garage and had to resort to the surface lot east of the garage.

The poker room had three $1-3 NLHE games going when I arrived at about 8:00 p.m. On a typical Friday night they would have one that's having trouble being sustained. I have seen two no-limit games going at the Riviera before, but I don't think I've ever seen three. And a fourth one started up while I was there.

The first seat that opened up was to the immediate left of the table drunk. He was incredibly annoying, paying no attention to the action, playing out of turn, slowing everything down whenever it was his turn, talking about the hand, flashing his cards both deliberately and inadvertently, etc. But he was so awful that nobody complained much, for fear that he'd be kicked out, and that would be tragic.

He was the prototypical drunk luckbox. Shortly before my tussle with him, he had twice in ten minutes come out on the good side of set-over-set situations, stacking two good players who had patiently waited for their chance to trap him. The second of these profited him about $600, and he was sitting on about $1400 when the key hand occurred. (I had a mere $320 or so, just barely above my buy-in.)

He would frequently raise without looking at his cards. He would just grab a handful of chips and toss them forward helter-skelter, with no idea how much it was. This appeared to happen randomly, without respect to position. I kept an eye on him so that I would always know whether or not he had looked at his cards before doing this, because if he looked, he actually had a respectably tight raising range.

To the matter. He and I were the blinds. The player to my left straddled, and picked up a bunch of callers. Drunk Luckbox--who had not picked his cards up off the felt--yielded to one of his urges to raise in the dark, and tossed a bunch of chips forward. The dealer counted it as $31.

I had J-J. This is, of course, comfortably ahead of two random cards, so I slid two stacks of $50 across the line, which was followed by rapid-fire folding around the table. DL finally figured out that it was his turn again, and the dealer informed him of my reraise. He looked annoyed and said, "Now I'm gonna have to LOOK!" He did, quickly followed by, "I'm all in."

There is just no way to know what range of hands he will do this with, as such a situation had not occurred before. There's also no way to get inside his head and deduce what he must be thinking about me and my range, etc., because he's just too wild and erratic for logic or third-level thinking to be of any use. I felt that all I could do was go with the math: If I have J-J, the probability that anybody at a full table was dealt a higher pocket pair is only about 13%, and if he has anything less than that, I'm OK getting all the chips in with my edge. In my first few minutes at the table I had seen this guy call all-in for about $300 pre-flop with A-Q offsuit, hit top two pair and win. The way I see it, he might well shove with a baby pair or an ace-rag hand. In fact, I had seen him reraise all in with 10-10 once, probably because he didn't want to play it post-flop. Given his past history, I thought it would be crazy to put in a third of my stack, then fold.

I insta-called, as I had actually made up my mind in advance that that's what I would do if he pushed, knowing that he might do so relatively light.

We turned up our cards. My J-J was up against his...

A-A.

Mother-effin' snakes on a mother-effin' plane!

There are three hands he could have that were a favorite to my jacks: aces, kings, and queens. There are six ways to make each of those hands. That means that out of the 1225 possible two-card combinations he could have been dealt, only 18 of them would have me in trouble. And he had to have one of them right now?

Sigh.

Flop: 4-5-7.

Turn: 5.

Then from five thousand throats and more there rose a lusty yell;

It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell;
It knocked upon the mountain and recoiled with a crack,

For from the cards left in his hands, the dealer found a jack.*

That's the second time in a week that I have misread an opponent for being weaker than he actually was, got all my money in at a severe disadvantage, and got my butt rescued by the fall of a lucky card. It's not really the way I prefer to make my money, but I'll take it and be grateful.

Sometimes, in order to win, you just gotta outluckbox the luckbox.

***********

Incidentally, this is going on a few steps outside of the new location of the poker room at the Riviera. It seems that some of the players at the tables find this distracting. I can't imagine why.

* From "Casey at the Bat," by Ernest Thayer, very slightly modified.

Blegging for tech help

I've got an annoying tech problem that I can't work out. At some point today, I suddenly lost the ability to hear the audio tracks on YouTube videos. Video is fine, but no sound. This affects all browsers, and is the same whether viewed on the YouTube site or embedded on other pages. I updated the Flash player add-on for Internet Explorer (which I rarely use), and that changed nothing. My main browser, Google Chrome, apparently has Flash integrated--at least the Adobe web site says that I can't and don't need to upgrade anything.

I can see and hear what are ostensibly Flash videos (.swf files) on other sites, such as Metacafe and Hulu. I can also watch downloaded Flash files (.flv) with any of several standalone media players, and the audio is intact. Audio is fine from every other source I've tested (mp3 files and a DVD, for example), which demonstrates that there is nothing wrong with the sound card, the default speaker settings, etc.

As far as I can tell, it is just YouTube and just the audio portion that are affected. And no, I didn't change anything before this started happening (not knowingly, anyway). Computer is an Acer Aspire 7500 series laptop with an AMD Athlon II X2 processor, running Windows 7 Ultimate (x64) Service Pack 1 (build 7601). I've run Belarc Advisor, and don't see anything amiss in its reporting on multimedia systems.

Antiviral suite (Trend Micro Titanium, fully updated) is and has been up and running. I ran a routine weekly virus scan yesterday (using SuperAntiSpyware), all clean.

I'm well and truly stumped by this. Suggestions from my techy readers?

Poker gems, #451

Andrew Brokos, in Card Player magazine column, May 2, 2012 (vol. 25 #9), page 40.

The first habit you should break is comparing your stack to those of your friends or opponents. When you're online, that means no checking the average stack size or where you are in the rankings. Until the end of the tournament, that information is meaningless and can only influence you for the worse.

Maurice Sendak

No poker content here. If that troubles you, move on now.

I've had kind of an emotional afternoon reading and hearing more about Maurice Sendak than I've ever known before. NPR's "Fresh Air" devoted the whole program to replaying excerpts of interviews that Terry Gross has done with him over the years:

http://www.npr.org/2012/05/08/152248901/fresh-air-remembers-author-maurice-sendak

The last interview was especially wonderful. I listened to it three times. When it was recorded late last year, the author was frail and vividly aware of his own mortality, yet more saddened by the deaths of those close to him than by the prospect of his own. Much of the interview, done by telephone from his home, was conducted through his tears and quavering voice, and I found it incredibly moving.

A sample:

TG: You don't believe in God.

MS: No, I don't.

TG: I think having friends who die, getting older, getting closer toward the end of life, tests people's faith, and it also tests people's atheism. It sounds like your atheism is staying strong.

MS: Yes. I'm not unhappy about becoming old. I'm not unhappy about what must be. It makes me cry only when I see my friends go before me, and life gets emptied. I don't believe in an afterlife, but I still fully expect to see my brother again. And it's like a dream life. I'm reading a biography of Samuel Palmer.... He believed in God, you see, and he believed in heaven, and he believed in hell. Goodness gracious, that must have made life much easier. It's harder for us nonbelievers.

But you know, there's something I'm finding out as I'm aging: that I am in love with the world. And I look right now, as we speak together, out my window in my studio, and I see my trees, my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years old. They're beautiful, and I can see how beautiful they are, and I can take time to see how beautiful they are. It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music.

...I have nothing but praise now, really, for my life. I mean, I'm not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. I cry a lot because they die, and I can't stop them. They leave me, and I love them more....

Oh, God, there are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die! But I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready.

...I wish you all good things. Live your life. Live your life. Live your life.

Bill-paying, or not? Conclusion

If you haven't read yesterday's post describing the decision I had to make, you might want to go back and do so before reading the end of the story here.

After thinking for a while, I decided to push. This wasn't tilty desperation. It was an educated guess that my top-top was ahead of more of Bill's range than it was behind. The specific table dynamics made that more true than it ordinarily would be with me taking just top pair against the range with which Bill would be expected to play this aggressively back at me.

The shove was somewhat problematic, in that he would mostly call only with the hands that beat me, and fold the ones that I beat. (The exception was if I somehow persuaded him that I had A-A or K-K, he might fold J-J or Q-Q.) But as I said yesterday, I thought calling was the worst of my choices, because it would make subsequent decisions even murkier, and from out of position to boot.

He took less than two seconds to call, which triggered all of my "uh-oh" reflexes. I showed my A-10, and he showed his...

...pocket jacks.

Damn.

I had misread him. Maybe I had overthought it. Maybe I had given too much weight to the situational dynamics being likely to broaden Bill's range, and too little weight to the simple fact that in years of playing with him, he had almost never been this pushy against me unless he had me beat.

But just as I was filling my brain with regrets and second-guessing, the dealer slapped down an ace on the turn, giving me top two pair, and leaving poor Bill with just two cards in the deck he could catch to win (the remaining two jacks). The river blanked, and I got a very lucky double-up. I wasn't proud of the win, but I wasn't going to give the chips back.

Sometimes in poker you do the right thing and lose, sometimes you do the wrong thing and win.

Poker gems, #450

Ed Miller, in Card Player magazine column, May 2, 2012 (vol 25, #9), page 34.

The regular's strategy of folding a lot and playing big pots only with nut hands has a major strength. Any time the pot gets big, the regular will be a favorite to win it.

Does it, therefore, make sense to play a strategy against this player that relies on winning big pots to be successful? Does it make sense to try to hit big hands and get paid off against this player?

Of course the answer is a resounding NO! If your opponent's strength is having good hands in big pots, why on earth would you play a strategy designed to try to win a big pot? It's not going to work! Why bang your head repeatedly against the deadbolted and barred front door when the back door might be left wide open?