Poker Articles

By Zpaceman | Published Aug 21 2007, 12:49 AM
Have you ever heard the expression, “Work smarter, not harder?” Let’s say you’re selling a new business idea and you’ve worked for days perfecting your sharp presentation and delivered it to perfection, but there appears to be no interest from the investors. At a break, you think of a subtle new angle on your sales pitch, and suddenly they’re hooked. Or you’ve been hacking away at your golf swing, slicing ball after ball. Your coach recommends tweaking your grip, and it all clicks into a series of great shots. These are both examples of the Pareto Principle, which generally holds that the majority of your results will be produced by the minority of your efforts.

It was named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of the income in Italy was received by 20% of the population, and it is also known as the 80-20 rule for this reason. The ratio doesn’t have to be 80-20 to fit the principle; it can be 99-1 or 70-30, but the point is that you get the most value out of a small amount of the things that you do.

It is most commonly applied to economics, in such cases as a company getting 80% of its value out of 20% of its staff or 80% of its orders from 20% of its customers, but the Pareto Principle can also be applied to improving your life if you can recognize that you get 80% of your happiness and other positive feelings from 20% of your activities. If you then focus on those activities and reduce your emphasis on others, you can be happier, more productive, and more relaxed all at the same time.

Sounds great! Now how does this apply to poker?

The first and most obvious application of the Pareto Principle to poker is that you will get majority of your winnings from the minority of your games, and this applies equally whether we are referring to cash game sessions, SNGs or MTTs. As an MTTer, I find myself finishing in-the-money (ITM) around 15-20% of the time and, moreover, I get most of my profits from the 15-20% of the times that I’m ITM where I finish in the top three places.

As such, I think it should be obvious that we don’t need to worry too much about the majority of the times when we don’t cash in an MTT, but instead focus our attention on when we do cash and, on those occasions, really try to do the things we need to do to achieve a top three finish where we get most of our satisfaction and profits.

We all know how to play good cards and fold bad cards. These plays fall into the majority of hands that produce very little of our progress towards a top three finish. Its how we play the minority of our hands that really makes a difference. These plays include adopting a “playing to win” mentality by making bold moves with marginal holdings to put pressure on our opponents and doubt in their minds, but also not passing up +EV edges when we’re faced with tough calls for most or all of our chips.

In these cases we’re taking big risks for big rewards.  If we pass up on these opportunities, we will be missing out on the minority of important plays and focusing on the majority of standard plays: exactly the opposite of what the Pareto Principle says we need to do to achieve good results.

The second application of the Pareto Principle to poker is that you will find winning chips is the easiest when you are playing the opposite style to the majority of the players. If you are seated with a bunch of weak-tight nits, then playing a LAG style will win you far more chips than following a TAG style. Conversely, if you’re at a table of maniacs, sticking to a TAG style will generally win you more chips than trying to LAG-it-up with the rest of them.

Once you understand this application, it also stymies the debate about whether LAG or TAG styles are best for winning MTTs. The best style for winning any given MTT is the one that the minority of players are practicing at your table in that MTT at any given point in time. That last part is very important, because most players know about switching gears as an MTT progresses. For most, this simply means getting more and more LAG as the tourny progresses, but this won’t work very well if everyone else is doing the same thing. Sometimes you actually have to tighten up, such as when you’ve got 20BBs at your table and most of the others have 10BBs or less. They’ll mostly be in push-fold mode, so you can’t really resteal or make any bold bluffs, and you'll generally just have to try to pick them off when you’ve got good cards.

A third application of the Pareto Principle is that you will generally win chips when you do something unexpected and unpredictable. If you’ve been playing solid as a rock and suddenly pull a squeeze play from the big blind on a mid-position raise plus two late-position calls, this is far more likely to succeed than if you’ve been splashing lots of chips around. Or if you’ve been playing LAG-in-position by floating a lot of flops, and then you smooth call a mid-position raise with AA in position, you’re much more likely to get paid-off by an induced squeeze or a check-raise from the initial raiser than if you hadn’t played a pot for an hour.

Somewhat related to the third application is using the 80-20 ratio to influence your decisions. I can’t claim to have thought this one up, because Dan Harrington suggests it in his excellent Harrington on Holdem series. He recommends that if you would normally think of acting in a certain way, such as raising KK from UTG, then make this play 80% of the time and make a different play the other 20% of the time, such as limping in. Relating this to Pareto, you could say that 20% of the plays you make cause 80% of the uncertainties that your opponents will encounter while playing against you.

Think about the Pareto Principle and how you could use it to improve your game. You might be surprised at how effective those small changes can be.
 
Stuart “Zpaceman” Taylor is a professional poker player and Guest Pro at online poker training site CardRunners.com.