Razz book review, part 2

This is a continuation of the review begun here.

P. 50: There is a peculiar example situation given on pp. 50-51. It's labeled "You hit a good card on 5th street." The situation is, "You have (4-8) 6,2,4 and your opponent has (x-x) A,J,9.... You started with three good cards, and improved on 4th street. When you bet on 4th street, your opponent called your bet since he had a strong draw. On 5th street, you hit good and he hit bad. Analysis: This is sweet when it happens. You are in the lead and you have the best draw."

I don't get this. How does pairing a hole card with a second 4 constitute "a good card"? How am I "in the lead" here? What is "sweet" about pairing? This makes no sense at all.

I read this over several times, and my best guess is that it's not trying to discuss a card that is actually bad but looks good to an opponent, because that situation is described elsewhere. I think this is a simple typo, and that one of the 4s should have been something like a 3 or an A. But I'm not certain about that. It's a terribly confusing section, whatever the explanation.

Pp. 52-53: Here's the example where pairing a hole card on 5th street is discussed. The example uses the same cards as above, which is probably somehow connected to what I think was just a typographical error in the faulty example I just described.

Anyway, the situation is that you have (4-8) 6,2,4, opponent has (x-x) A,6,J. Mitchell gives this analysis: "Usually when you have the 'visible' lead, you should bet as a bluff. But, since he led with a bet on 4th street, he is not going to fold. In this situation, your opponent is actually both in the lead and has a better 'four-card draw.' Therefore, your best play is to check and your opponent will most likely check behind with his J low. Save your money and see what happens on 6th street."

I don't think this is terrible advice, but it's not the way I would play it. Again, this is a result of having seen literally hundreds of hands in which the opponent bet on 4th while secretly owning a pair or face card in the hole. I think it's mistaken to say flatly that "your opponent is...in the lead." Maybe, but not necessarily (assuming that one disregards my pair and his jack). It would not shock me to see in the hand history when it's all over with that the opponent actually had something like 2-Q in the hole. Even if he isn't on that level of bad as a player, he could simply have started rough. I have 8-6-4-2, but he could have 8-7-6-A or 8-6-5-A, for example. It's not something one should count on, but it's not a possibility one should ignore, either. I see it time after time, day after day.

I would bet here and see how he reacts. If he started rough or with a pair or big card down, he's probably going to give up now, and I don't want to give him a free card with which to catch up.

Perhaps more importantly, poker is a game of deception. Checking is a virtual announcement that the 4 paired one of my hole cards. I don't want my opponent to know that. If one routinely checks the betting lead upon pairing a down card, but bets when given a non-pairing good card, well, you might as well turn your hole cards face up for your opponent. I think a smarter long-term strategy is to routinely bet as if this card were a good one, and make your opponent guess whether it paired you. When he has to guess, he's likely to make mistakes.

At the very least, I think it is imperative, if one is going to check here, that one also sometimes check in the same situation if one caught, say, a 3 instead of a 4. That is, mix up checks and bets in some way that is independent of whether the card received actually improved one's hand, so that opponents can't confidently draw an inference about one's hole cards. Because I essentially never check if 5th street improved my hand, I can't engage in checking when it secretly pairs me, lest I give away my situation.

I want my opponent to think I just made my hand. Even more than that, I want him to fear that I have a made 6-4, if possible. That way, he will think he's drawing super-thin or even dead (depending on what he has in the hole), particularly if he calls here and bricks again on 6th street. I agree with Mitchell that he is probably not going to fold here, but getting him to fold is not really my intention (unless he is one of those that started much worse than would have been smart). My intention primarily has to do with setting him up to worry about my strength from this point in the hand onward, unless he catches perfect cards.

Pp. 56-57: The situation described is you with A-3-4-7-Q, opponent with x-x-6-8-9. Mitchell describes this as "On 5th street, he hit good and you hit bad." Maybe this is overly picky, but I wouldn't describe a 9 as hitting "good." Yeah, it's better than a Q, but if I'm the opponent in this situation, I don't feel very secure about my hand. Yes, the 9 might end up winning it for me if we both go brick-brick on 6th and 7th, so it's a bit of a safety net. But I consider that precious little comfort.

P. 64: Situation is you with 3-2-8-A-6-K, opponent with x-x-6-7-J-5. Mitchell writes, "You had a good starting hand, fell behind on 4th...."

Huh? How did an ace for me and a 7 for my opponent make me fall behind? I don't get this analysis. There may be another typo here, perhaps with an inversion of the cards--for example if he meant to give the example as 3-2-A-8 instead of 3-2-8-A.

P. 71: The two examples on this page describe potentially difficult decisions on 6th street after starting with 4-8-6.

Well, I have a solution for that: Don't start with 4-8-6!

Maybe I'm all wrong about this, but I've come to believe in the gospel of truly tight starting hand requirements (except for steal situations, of course). Hands like 4-8-6 are just plain trouble from the get-go, much like playing stuff like Q-J offsuit in hold'em. They have a high propensity to become second best. They also have a nasty tendency to force one into making very difficult decisions later in the hand, where it's essentially impossible to do more than guess whether one is ahead or behind. That is a situation ripe for making costly mistakes. I say avoid the problem before it begins. If I know that my starting hand requirements are, on average, significantly tighter than those of most of my opponents, that tips the balance in my favor for the entire remainder of the hand, when otherwise close calls arise.

I have almost entirely abandoned starting hands that include an 8--especially any 8-7 or 8-6. They're just not worth it, in my experience. Maybe an 8-3-A or 8-2-A or 8-3-2, but that's about it for me with the 8s. Now, admittedly, this may not be optimally profitable play. I honestly don't know. It's possible that restricting my starting hand range that way in the long run leaves some money on the table. But I am highly confident that it has had at least these beneficial effects: (1) I have fewer agonizing decisions on later streets. (2) On hands where the open cards are very close, I win more showdowns on the river. (3) Opponents defend their bring-ins against my steals less often. (4) My bluffs when I have secretly paired get respected more than they used to.

In short, I'm kind of on the extreme end of both the "selective" and the "aggression" parts of the ol' "selective aggression" advice. It's not the only way to fly, but it's working for me so far.

This is a particularly good trade-off for me, given the peculiar situation in which I play--with my attention mostly focused on other stuff, and looking at the game only when I have a good starting hand. I think it would also be well-suited to playing multiple tables at once, if one were so inclined, because playing only 10-12% of starting hands is feasible on several tables, without being faced with simultaneous difficult situations on two or more tables very often.

This leads me to discuss another general gripe I have about most of Mitchell's examples, which otherwise doesn't fit neatly anywhere in this review: The examples essentially all deal with hands in which 3rd street had one raise and a call, nothing more. My preference is to be unusually aggressive on 3rd street. I think that just about any starting hand I'm willing to go with is worth four-betting if I get reraised. That gets me additional information about how much my opponent values his hand, when he has to choose to cap the betting or just call. Also, it often traps another guy with a stinker hand, who is hoping to get lucky, into putting more money into the pot when well behind, or forces him out after he has contributed a few bets of dead money to the pot, either of which is a +EV situation for me. Again, doing so also projects strength, an image that I will use against my opponent later in the hand, if need be. Besides, because I have a narrower range of starting hands than most other players, I usually am, in fact, ahead on 3rd street, so more money in the pot is what I want.

Unfortunately, by setting up his examples to all have just a single raise/call on 3rd street, Mitchell is unable to discuss how the information one might have gained from watching an opponent's reaction to a 3rd-street reraise influences decisions on later streets. For example, if my opponent capped the betting, it makes it more likely that he's on the best end of his starting hand range, which in turn means that an A or 2 hitting on 4th, 5th, or 6th street is more likely to have paired him--especially if there is an added little pause before he acts (in which you can sense, from hundreds of miles away, his brain working on whether to pretend that he really liked that ace, rather than instantly reacting with glee that he caught it). Mitchell does discuss, on pp. 29-31, tips for deducing where on the strength spectrum an opponent might be sitting on 3rd street, but then he doesn't incorporate this information at all, as far as I can tell, into decision-making on the big-bet streets. For me, this is crucial data. What degree of strength an opponent showed on 3rd often tips the scales for me between a bet and a check, or a call and a raise, on 5th, 6th, and 7th streets.

P. 79: The situation described is you with A-3-2-6-Q-4, opponent with x-x-4-5-9-3. Mitchell advises: "You have a 6-4 made low hand. Your opponent could already have a bike. If he bets into you, you need to call. If he checks, you don't want to be check-raised, so check behind him."

Wow. That strikes me as extraordinarily conservative advice, perhaps even veering into the "weak and timid" range. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but there are very few situations in which I would be unwilling to cap the betting with a 6-perfect. It's kind of like having a king-high flush with three of one's suit on the board on the turn in hold'em. Sure, an opponent might have two of the same suit, with one of them the ace, but that happens so rarely that I'll usually be willing to bet the farm in that spot. In Mitchell's example, the opponent would have to have exactly an A-2 in the hole to be ahead here--no other cards will work. Yet the range of hole cards with which he could have played the hand as described is a lot broader. I'm willing to put my money in saying that he doesn't have the only possible two-card combination that has me beat. I'm going to jam the pot here on both 6th and 7th, and I'm confident that if I do so in this situation a thousand times, I'm the winner well over the 50% that I need to be for this to be profitable.

P. 92: I have exactly the same criticism of the example here. It shows you with (A-3) 2,5,J,K (6), and opponent with (x-x) 3,8,6,Q (x). Mitchell recommends raising his bet. Good--I agree. But then if the opponent reraises, he says just to call. Not me--I'm jamming here. I simply refuse to believe that he has a 6-5 beat. It's not impossible, of course, and once in a while I'll lose a huge pot for my disbelief. But think about it: First, there's only a very few specific combinations of three down cards he could have that beat a 6-5. Second, my opponent here is looking at my J-K showing. He could easily think that I'm bluffing with a third brick on the river and believe that an 8-6 is way good, and it is on that basis that he is pushing. If we both caught a miracle on the end, and his miracle turns out to have edged out my miracle, well, OK, that's how it goes sometimes. But a made 6-5 in a situation in which my opponent can have only the narrowest possible range of down cards to win (i.e., he needs all three of them to be perfect) is so rare that I'll take my chances.


Now for other general comments about the book that aren't really tied to specific pages.

1. I gather from comments I've seen from Mitchell that the contribution of which he is most proud is the analysis of made hands versus drawing hands on 5th street. I absolutely agree that 5th street is the big pivot point in the hand--for the most part, you make it or break it here. It is not always obvious whether a mediocre made hand or a strong draw is favored. So I heartily applaud the work Mitchell did in working this out once and for all. His list of the various made-hand-versus-drawing-hand scenarios, on pp. 55-62, and again summarized neatly on p. 115, is an extremely valuable piece of work. I haven't yet played since reading this stuff, but I'm going to figure out some way of making my own cheat sheet to keep at hand, because this situation comes up all the time, and I'm often not confident what the right move is. With Mitchell's list of all of the possibilties, I'll know what to do.

2. Every single example in the book is against just one opponent. Granted, this is the most common situation, especially on the later streets. But I think it's a disservice to the reader to have zero discussion of multi-way pots. It is the three-way and four-way pots that have been the most profitable ones when I have won them--and, conversely, among the most costly ones when I have lost them, because of the raising wars that they frequently generate. It makes no sense to me to pretend that they don't exist or are unimportant.

3. I think a book like this needs a list of resources--blogs, online forums dedicated to razz, online calculators/simulators, etc. With only 130 pages of text, the author obviously doesn't believe he has taught the reader everything there is to know about the game, so why not point the reader to other places in which to learn more?

4. There is no discussion of razz tournament strategy versus cash game play, and only little scraps here and there about short-handed versus full-table play. A thorough treatment of razz would include large sections devoted to those subjects.

5. I think it would also have been helpful to the novice reader to have some discussion comparing the online sites for razz, since probably 99% of all of the razz played in the world is done online, rather than in casinos.


OK, that's the end of my observations. I want to again reiterate my two big caveats--that I'm no expert and I could easily be dead wrong in my opinions here, and that many or most of my disagreements may be based on differences in how people actually play at low stakes versus medium or higher stakes. In fact, I should perhaps add that caveat to my general list of omissions for which I criticize the author--explicit discussion of how play differs at low versus medium stakes would probably be highly valuable for the beginning razz player.

Even with the differences in opinion in the spots I've detailed above, please remember that there is page after page after page where I worked out what I would do in the situation described, and then found that Mitchell came to exactly the same recommendation--which obviously means that he's a friggin' genius! It looks like less than ten spots where I disagreed with his recommended action, out of well over a hundred examples given in the book.

This book has its flaws, but I still wouldn't hesitate to recommend it as an excellent introduction to sound basic strategy. And given the dearth of competition, it's hard to think of anything else that one could recommend. (Possible exception: A couple of days ago, I received in the mail Ken Warren's new book on straight stud, stud/8, and razz. Haven't read it yet, so I can't say how its razz section will compare to Mitchell's work.) So if you want to learn razz, go buy it. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Book review: "Play Razz Poker To Win"

I mentioned Mitchell Cogert's book back in March when the subject of razz first caught my attention. Mitchell has a poker blog here (mostly about razz, but with some stuff on hold'em) and a web site about his book--which appears to be self-published--here. When the book arrived in the mail, I spent an hour or so reading the first couple of chapters, then put it aside and never finished it. Based on that initial reading, I recommended it to a couple of people.

Well, tonight I finally got around to really tackling it head-on. I have read it carefully, except for the final section, which is basically a description of every hand that the author played in a $5/$10 razz session last December. I'm interested in going through those hands, but it won't affect my analysis of the book, so I'm writing up my impressions now.

I should mention at the outset that Mitchell and I have exchanged several emails, and I've found him to be friendly, smart, analytical, and open to suggestions.

First, the minor stuff. This book really needed an editor. It's far from the worst I've seen in terms of typographical and grammatical errors, but enough of them slipped through that it leaves readers--at least a reader as picky as I am--with a sense of unprofessionalism. For example, "odds" as a singular noun on pp. 12 and 44, the strange use of the word "flop" on p. 22, a missing possessive apostrophe on p. 29, confusion between "affect" and "effect" on p. 29, "maybe" versus "may be" on p. 35, "goods odds" on p. 44, "whose" instead of "who's" on p. 47, "weary" instead of "wary" on p. 54, "you was called" on p. 64 and again on p. 65, "there was two or more raises" on p. 115. Stuff like that drives me crazy.

Now for the substantive matters. Here I have to introduce a caveat so large that you may want to disregard the entire rest of my review: I'm not an expert at razz by any means, and it may be laughable for me to be reviewing a book on the subject as if I know what I'm talking about. Furthermore, my understanding of the game is still in rapid evolution, the steep part of the learning curve, and it may be that where I disagree with Mitchell, he's absolutely right, I'm absolutely wrong, and six months or a year from now I'll reread these words and cringe at how foolish I was.

However, as I have occasionally reported here, I have been more successful at the game than I thought I would be, at least for the past month or so. I'm in a much better position to do a book review now than I was when it came in the mail in, I think, early April.

There's another caveat: In many, perhaps most, cases, my disagreements on strategy choice are based on my experiences playing PokerStars razz at $0.50/$1, $1/$2, and $2/4, plus the razz component of my almost-daily $10 HORSE single-table tournaments on the same site. What works at these lowest stakes may not be good advice upon moving up to $5/$10 and above. Similarly, I found Sklansky's book on razz not only quite poorly written, but almost completely useless as an introductory text, because he focuses very specifically on live $15/$30 and $30/$60 games. That's a whole different razz world than the one I inhabit.

I also want to mention that I'm diligent about checking the hand history (either the text-only form or PS's snazzy new animated version) immediately after virtually every hand I'm involved with, so I really do know what people have been playing against me. Unlike on Full Tilt (where I believe Mitchell puts in most of his time), Stars lets you see the cards in the order they were dealt, so you don't have to guess what starting hands players took to battle. In my view, that's such a big advantage that it makes playing razz on FTP a vastly inferior choice to Stars, if you care about understanding your opponents' play.

So with those preliminaries out of the way, I'll plunge ahead.

Because I'm going to list my specific disagreements, it's worth pointing out explicitly that I agreed with maybe 90-95% of the advice and analysis and statements about what he would do in specific cases. It's easy to lose sight of that fact when looking at what will appear to be a litany of differences of opinion.

P. 19: Mitchell advises not defending the bring-in if one's up card is two ranks or more above the up card of the raiser. Frankly, I think this is pretty silly. If I'm defending my bring-in, I don't really care if I'm showing a K, a Q, a J, or a 10. Nor do I care whether my opponent is showing an A or a 7 or a 9. Let me explain why.

There are really only two possibilities. First, I think my opponent in late position is simply trying to steal with a bad hand. In that case, I assume that, regardless of what he's showing, he has at least one stinker card, a pair or a face card. When that's so, we're basically on even footing, even if my bad card is a K and his is a J, because neither of us is going to be pressing on later streets if we're including that bad card in our best five-card hand. In other words, if my bad card on 3rd is still part of my best hand on 7th, I'm not going to be putting any more money into the pot anyway. I'm either going to make a hand in which the bad card doesn't play, or I'm going to give up--so I don't care if it's a K or a 10.

The other possibility is that I actually believe my opponent is starting off strong, with three unpaired small cards, and I'm just hoping that I get lucky and he gets unlucky. Now, this may be utter donkey play, but I think it makes sense, with specific constraints. I have no mathematical justification for this, but my practice has been to defend against a single opponent for a single raise if my hole cards are both 5 or lower. If I catch bad on 4th, I'll shut down and fold to a bet even if my opponent caught bad, too. I'm not going to try to catch three good cards in a row to beat him. But if on 4th I catch good and he catches bad, then we're on roughly equal ground, and I'm often a favorite, since I've probably been pickier about selecting my two down cards to go to war with than my opponent has been. If on 4th I have A-3-K-6, and he has X-X-6-J, I'm very happy with the situation. Yeah, I'm officially behind as the hands are, but most likely neither my K nor his J will be a factor at the end, and my 6-3-A is quite likely to be ahead of his best three cards.

That's why I think Mitchell's "two level" rule doesn't make sense. It keeps coming up in other contexts through the book, and I disagree with it in those spots, too, for similar reasons.

Again, this may be specific to the bad players in the low levels at which I play and not a valid observation at higher stakes. I don't know. But I see a lot of players raising quite indiscriminately, with a hidden bad card and without good position.

P. 24: Mitchell introduces his point system for evaluating razz starting hands based on the cards, position, what other cards are showing, and the action before one makes a decision.

I'm highly suspicious of all attempts in poker to reduce decisions to formulas, and I have to include this one in my doubts. I would feel better about it if Mitchell could tell us that he had run thousands of simulated hands using a variety of differently tweaked point systems, and this is the one that yielded the best results. But as it is, it looks homemade and like guesswork to me.

A point system is undoubtedly better than if somebody does nothing but look at his own three cards, because it does incorporate all of the relevant factors (at least all those that are quantifiable--it doesn't and can't include factors such as whether the raiser is a known maniac). But I'm not at all sure that it's better than a non-quantitative, gestalt evaluation of the situation. I think it would work just as well to give general advice, such as "Be less inclined to call or raise when more of the cards you need to catch are showing," as to try to make a mechanical point system. But if it helps new players force themselves to notice and account for the relevant facts, perhaps it's more useful to them than I'm giving it credit for.

P. 30: "If a player raises with a 4 showing and a player calls with a 6 showing, the raiser may be on a steal but the caller most likely has three cards to an 8 or better."

Well, this is certainly how it should be, but, trust me, it ain't necessarily so at low stakes. People call raises with K-A-3 or 2-2-4 all the time.

P. 37: The example given is me with a 6-7-4-K against an opponent's X-X-7-7. Mitchell writes, "Don't bet here.... Wait till 5th street to decide the relative strength of your hand. Otherwise, if he hits good on 5th street and you hit bad, you have wasted a bet."

I couldn't disagree more strongly here, though yet again this may be because of the bad average quality of opposition that I'm used to. When a substantial fraction of opponents here actually have a hidden bad card (high one or a pair), both of us hitting bad on 4th becomes a great time to discover that fact and take down the pot with a bet. If I get called, then I can be reasonably confident that he is not in that category. In other words, this is a juicy time to set up a screening test by betting. It usually chases away the hands that now have two bad cards. So you either win the pot or you more clearly define your opponent's hand.

Moreover, because I'm so dang tight with my 3rd-street starting requirements, by the same logic I explained above (i.e., that if both my opponent and I have one bad card each now, neither of us will be using that bad card by the end of the hand), I should on average be ahead here, because both of us catching bad on 4th street leaves the status basically as it was on 3rd street. Perhaps if my opponent reraised me on 3rd and I just called that would imply a different situation. But if my opponent just called me on 3rd, he probably doesn't have one of the ultra-premium starting hands.

Even if we're very close at this point, I don't mind getting an extra bet from each of us into the pot, because I believe that I make, on average, better decisions on the later streets, so more money in the pot works to my advantage.

Finally, betting instead of checking projects more strength, and may help make a bluff more likely to succeed on later streets. Checking seems to be saying, "I not only didn't like that card, but I'm no longer as thrilled about my first three." Betting, conversely, seems to announce, "Yeah, 4th street didn't help me, but I started out this race ahead of you, I'm still ahead, and you, my sad little friend, are running out of streets on which to catch up."

P. 43: Mitchell writes, "As a result, you have an outcome you wanted to avoid: putting in three bets on 4th street and still having two opponents."

I don't think it's correct that this is necessarily a situation one wants to avoid. If I'm in a close race with a good opponent, but there's a bad one with an awful hand desperately trying to catch up, I'm delighted to have him stick around and continue contributing money to the pot. Hell, it's best for me if he raises when he's way behind!

It's kind of like in high/low games: if you and another player are going to be taking the high and low, but there's a third player who is drawing nearly dead for both parts of it, by all means let him put as many chips in as he is willing to!

In razz, of course, the pot won't be chopped like that, but the idea is the same: welcome into the hand the player who has the worst chance of winning it, and cap the betting if you can. If one opponent and I are roughly equally likely to take it down at the end, it is in both of our best interests to suck as many chips as possible out of the guy who is trailing. Repeat that scenario a thousand times, and if I win 40% of the pots, my good opponent 40%, and the lagging-behind guy only 20%, it's hugely +EV for both me and the other good opponent to pump the pot as far as the bad opponent will tolerate.

A couple of years ago, Mike Caro opened my eyes about the flawed concept of "thinning the field" in poker. In brief, overly aggressive raising tends to weed out the wrong players. You may keep the strongest players with the best hands, and drive away the weakest players with the worst hands, which is not what you want to accomplish. There is also, for each poker hand, a mathematically optimal number of opponents to maximize long-term profit, and that number is often something different from one. See his eye-opening article from Bluff magazine here. He was writing about hold'em specifically, but surely the same concepts are valid in razz. Yet Mitchell seems to sort of blithely assume that one always wants to contest a pot heads-up. It's just not true.

OK, that's enough for now. Much more to say, but it's after 2 a.m. and I have to take my car in for a couple of new tires in the morning. I'll try to finish up this review tomorrow.

Note: Part 2 of the review is now posted here.

Razzberry-flavored poker

I got several comments on my post about last night's mixed game, wherein I tried several new (to me) poker variations.

I forgot to mention that I found Razz to be a particularly intriguing game. It is conceptually the simplest form of poker I've ever come across: no pairs, trips, straights, flushes, full houses, or quads to deal with. Whoever has the five lowest unpaired cards wins, period. That's all there is to it. Nothing could be simpler. But I also learned why some describe it as the most frustrating game to play: you get four great cards to begin with (e.g., A-3-4-6), then as you hit the big-bet rounds the damn dealer throws you a king, a queen, and another king. ARGH!

Anyway, one of the commenters mentioned that he has a poker blog, too. That will always cause me to go check it out. His name is Mitchell Cogert, and his blog is dedicated exclusively to Razz poker, which makes it unique, as far as I know. See http://therazzchallenge.blogspot.com/. He also just published a book on the subject. Although Razz is covered as part of several other poker books, he claims, plausibly, that this is the first one dealing with Razz exclusively. You can order it through amazon.com or here: http://www.createspace.com/3338178.

I just put it on my Amazon wish list. I'm curious to learn more about this strangest of the poker games.

Addendum, March 17, 2008

It was pointed out to me in a private email that David Sklansky did a book on Razz way back when, titled, oddly enough, Sklansky on Razz. That book is now out of print, but its contents are incorporated into the still-available Sklansky on Poker, available here: http://www.twoplustwostore.com/twoplustwo/IP.php?type=Author&ID=2&productID=26.