Poker Articles

I received a tremendous amount of feedback (mostly positive, some negative) regarding my last article, Moving Beyond Harrington. I always appreciate the feedback, but as I was reading through it, I realized that many of the people who read the article didn’t really get the point. There was a lot of focus put on the "inducing the squeeze" play as well as a few others I mentioned, but the examples I used were meant to illustrate a bigger point, not to be the point. Inducing the squeeze wasn’t even an original idea of mine. I’ve heard many top players speak of it, and I think the first time I ever saw it in print was in phat_cat’s article on chipping up early in tournaments (which is excellent if you haven’t read it already).

The point of the article really was that thinking of new ideas and going against the grain while at the table is a much more profitable way to play poker than trying to come up with a "paint by numbers" approach. I used Harrington’s book as an example, but I could have easily used Kill Phil, Super/System, or any other number of books.

The article was meant to be more thought provoking than instructional. You should constantly be coming up with ways to counter popular trends among poker players. For example, there is a popular trend among more aggressive players now to re-raise late position raisers much more frequently. So how do you combat this? Well, if you identify that you have a late position re-raiser at your table, you can do a few things. You can be more selective in your late position raises so you can three bet the re-raiser with confidence, or you can even start stealing from early position instead of late position. This has become so common in some of the tournaments that I play that some of my friends and I use the phrase ‘early position is the new late position’ in those instances.

At those tables, I’m actually opening many more hands from early position to take advantage of the strength it shows to take down more pots without a good hand, and I’m actually opening tighter from later position than I am from early position sometimes. Do I always do this? Of course not. At many of my tables, it’s still better to play a more straightforward style, playing tight from early position and loose from late position. The point is you must be armed to both recognize and combat different trends in poker.

Poker books are a wonderful thing, don’t get me wrong. I read all of the ones I can as they come out. Part of this is because I hope to learn something, but the bigger part is so that I can recognize what other players who read this material are trying to do. Poker books do a great job of teaching the fundamentals of poker, but they don’t teach you how to truly think like a poker player. To think like a poker player, you have to realize what the other players at the table are trying to do, and then come up with the best way to attack them. Sometimes this means playing what may seem like "bad poker" or even looking like a complete donkey at times if caught, while other times it means just playing solid. Part of being a real poker player is knowing how to recognize the difference and then act on it.

The bottom line is that poker books are a great starting point, but I think too many people use them as the ending point as well. Too many poker discussions I’ve had with people tend to end with phrases like "well Harrington says..." Part of the beauty of poker is that no single approach will be successful at every poker table, and therefore the best poker players will be masters of multiple approaches as well as knowing how to shift to and from different "poker personalities’" at the best times. I think this is part of the reason we’ve never actually seen any truly successful online poker bots. Any singular, formulaic approach is going to be exploited by the better players in the long run.

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