Moving Beyond Harrington
In the last 3-4 years I’ve been playing online poker, I’ve seen vast changes in the way online poker, specifically no limit tournament poker, is played. When I first started playing, the players were so bad you could simply wait for a hand and you’d always get paid off. The only real key was avoiding either a cooler or a bad beat.
With the internet forums, training sites, and books, things have changed a lot though. One of the biggest changes occurred just a few short years ago with the release of Harrington on Hold Em Volumes I & II.
Most players didn’t think of their stack in terms of ‘M’ (or in relation to the size of the pot, for those unfamiliar with the books), and they particularly didn't think with the concept of ‘zones’ and short stack play that is the staple of many an internet pro now. It also made popular the infamous ‘squeeze play’ seen so often now at the tables.
With that in mind, I believe that the time has come to move beyond Harrington. Typically in the poker world, if the masses are doing something, you want to be doing something else to take advantage of that. There are so many players now that follow the philosophies laid out in Harrington’s books, that to a certain extent they’ve actually become exploitable.
So what are some examples of how we can take advantage of the way the masses play right now? One of my current favorite methods is to ‘induce the squeeze.’ That is, with a big hand that I want to get all my chips in with, rather than pushing over the top of a raiser I will often just flat call, just begging the players behind me to get trapped into the squeeze play. You must pay careful attention to the location of the initial raiser as well as stack sizes to make sure you’re setting it up properly, but using this technique, you can often trick opponents who think they are being clever into falling right into your trap.
One of the other things I’ve noticed is the changes in short stack play. When the book first came out, when you got into the ‘red zone’ you could often push-bot your way alive for a long time. Today’s internet player is very hip to this now though, and their calling ranges against red zone players is often much wider than it was a few years ago. Because of this, when my stack reaches the red zone, I will often open push some of my bigger hands, knowing that today’s player will believe that to be much less strong than a standard raise from a short stack.
I also tend to wait a little bit longer to start pushing than I did a few years ago, and I specifically try and target stacks in the blinds who will have a hard time calling me, because I know my open pushes with a short stack look much weaker than they might have a few years ago. Given that players are much more apt to calling, I also like to pick a hand selection that favors better against callers than some of the hands Harrington recommends. I prefer the medium/big suited connectors to pushing with hands like A5, K7, or 22 because the typical calling range of today’s opponent includes mostly hands that dominate those types of holdings. Hands like JTs or 78s hold up very well when people are willing to call your short stack pushes with hands like ATo, 66, and KQ.
The bottom line is that poker is always evolving. As a professional player and passionate student of the game, I am constantly trying to figure out the best way to play against the ever-evolving player fields. Harrington’s books are some of my favorites, and I think they’re fantastic. That being said, now that most of the players are aware of the concepts in those books, we need to move beyond them and start to adapt our game to the new style of play in a way that is profitable. Everything is exploitable if you have a good enough understanding of what your opponents are trying to do.
Five years ago, the poker playing landscape was vastly different than it is today, and five years from now, it will be much different than it is at the very moment. How we change and adapt to this will go a long ways in determining our longevity as a player. Try and think outside the box a little, and I think you’ll find your results and bankroll will be rewarded.
