You Never Know if You’re Right or Wrong

If you spend a lot of time discussing poker, you’ve almost certainly had a discussion with someone about a situation where they encountered a simple ‘call or fold’ decision. Very often, these discussions will come up purely because the player made the decision to call and ended up losing the hand.

Of course, it almost goes without saying that this is a form of results orientation that should be avoided at all costs – after all, losing a hand doesn’t necessarily mean we made a mistake. We can lose our whole stack and still make a profitable play. Similarly, we can lose the hand by folding and still make a substantial mistake.

However, another particularly dangerous mentality that we need to avoid is the ‘right or wrong’ approach that leads to this results-orientation in the first place. If we make a call and our opponent ends up having a worse hand than our own, we congratulate ourselves and remain entrenched in our belief that calling was ‘right’, while if we end up running into a better hand, we berate ourselves for being such a calling station and convince ourselves we just made the worst call ever.

It stands to reason that in comparison to this binary approach, there has to be a better way. Indeed, there is, and in order to figure out how to get there, we have to examine why it’s so easy to fall into the right/wrong paradigm in the first place.

The desire for validation

The biggest reason why people frequently make calls they shouldn’t make – particularly on the river when they know calling will allow them to get to showdown and see their opponent’s hand – is the desire to have their suspicions about a certain spot validated. In many cases, this can actually apply in situations where they have already identified, consciously or subconsciously, that the call isn’t profitable, but they make it anyway because the desire to prove themselves ‘right’ about their opponent’s hand is stronger than the desire to simply make the best play.

This desire often comes from a lack of confidence – they lack the ability to make a big fold in the right spot, because they’re simply not 100% sure that their read on their opponent is correct. They would rather put themselves in a situation where their suspicion that they have the worse hand is validated, than they would risk ‘never knowing’ one way or the other, because they figure if they can ‘know’ whether they were right about their opponent’s hand or not, they won’t make the same mistake again later. The problem is, this mistake manifests it again and again, to the point where the player simply never stops making it unless they make an active effort to do so. They never reach the point of finally being able to lose the desire for validation unless they specifically work at it.

To make matters worse, they often don’t necessarily have the capability to establish clearly whether they think the play is actually profitable or not in the long term – they focus heavily on trying to figure out what their opponent’s hand is right now, without thinking in terms of their overall range. They don’t consider the strength of their own overall calling range, and leave themselves open to heavy exploitation by their opponents as a result, and they try too hard to figure out whether their opponents are bluffing right now, as opposed to how often they’re bluffing in the long run.

Why it doesn’t work

The reason this approach doesn’t work is quite simply because of the above consideration, where your assumption that you were ‘right’ in a spot where you call and win the hand – just like your assumption that you were ‘wrong’ when you call and lose – is based purely on a perspective focused on the hand your opponent had in that specific instance, rather than their overall range.

Of course, it goes without saying that you never truly know what your opponent’s overall range is in any given spot – you only know which part of their range you actually ran into on the occasion when you called. This means that it’s impossible to define things purely in terms of right or wrong – it’s a binary paradigm that ignores the long-term reality of any given spot. Even if you’re actually looking at your opponent’s bluffing frequency and thinking in terms of the pot odds you’re getting – which is the first step towards recognising the long-term implications of a situation – you’re still stuck in a self-defeating mentality if you automatically assume every spot where you called and lost is a mistake.

Our attempts to build correct ranges in the long term fall apart if we focus too much on each individual hand – after all, it’s impossible to develop an accurate perspective on our own range unless we’re actually thinking about it in detail. Similarly, our opponents might be in the same boat – they may not know with specific accuracy what their overall range is in a situation, or what variations there might be in the frequencies with which they take each action with a specific hand, so even in the unlikely event that were able to try to come to a conclusion as to whether a call was right or wrong by actually asking our opponent what their range would be in that exact situation, they may not give us an answer that actually corresponds to reality, even if they think they’re being honest. This hammers home the impossibility of actually knowing our opponent’s range with any certainty, beyond that which comes from our own confidence in our ability to read our opponents’ tendencies and frequencies.

The EV solution

Of course, there is a solution to this mentality, just like with most mental game problems. The answer lies in focusing on the most important mathematical aspect of any given poker hand – the Expected Value (EV) of the situation. This number (and it is one individual number, at least when viewed from the perspective of an individual player) is representative of all the instances of that situation occurring in the long term, and is really the only metric by which we can judge the quality of a call or fold.

In order to focus on this number, we must do two things. First of all, we must forego judgment on our potential mistakes until well after the fact – we must not decide immediately after playing the hand that we just made a mistake, because we can’t possibly calculate the EV of the hand in our heads on the spot (at least, not unless we’re an incredibly high-level player). Second of all, we must take a note about the hand and analyse it later, in an effort to make a calculation of this EV. This is really the only way to validate a decision – if the calculation tells us we should call with a particular hand based on our opponent’s range, that’s when a call becomes ‘correct’ in some fashion.

However, there’s another aspect to this – the EV of a certain play can tell us whether it’s profitable or not, but unless we run calculations with an added dimension, we can’t necessarily tell whether another approach altogether might have had an even higher EV. For example, we might have made a negative-EV river call, but the biggest mistake we made could have been to call the turn, or to avoid raising the flop. These factors are never even considered when players are operating in the ‘right or wrong’ paradigm – there are an infinite number of possible lines and approaches to be taken in any given hand, and considering only two of those approaches (call or fold) when evaluating a potential mistake is a fundamental error.

It’s easy to fall into the mentality of wanting to be ‘right’ – after all, we’re conditioned to think this way outside of poker, whether it’s arguing with someone on the internet or ‘winning’ a professional dispute. But in poker, things are always a lot more complicated than that, and ignoring this reality can cost us dearly.