Do you like Shania?

The Angel of History

Before I started this blog I wrote about seven or eight entries in advance in a fit of creativity last Monday afternoon. I wasn't sure in which order to publish them as they flit between biography (done), theory (about to do), and practical discussions on actually playing cards (might do). I wrote them very quickly and hadn't really thought about whether they would make sense to people without explaining all the assumptions and axioms that I carry around without even realising it. With that in mind I'm afraid I have to get the following post out of the way as I think it reveals partly how I think about the game, and that's what I'm interested in trying to explain in this blog. Not for you, for me. Since my audience is mostly me anyway, that shouldn't be a problem! So, let's get started...

There is a contradiction in poker. A contradiction that threatens a conceptual crisis the likes of which the world has never known.

Once upon a time, people talked about ‘Shania,’ who is also known as balance. Shania is the reason that we don’t only open AA under the gun, but sometimes open 67s as well. Shania is supposed to be our guardian angel, protecting us from exploitation. But Shania is misunderstood, and misunderstanding Shania welcomes in the demons of self-levelling and spew. We check-raise a ridiculous flop in a clearly –EV situation because ‘it’s good for our range.’ We want to protect our ranges so we balance them. We argue that a specific situation doesn’t matter because in the long-term we need certain hands in our range in a variety of situations. Hence we checkraise 9T on a 7JA board against a very tight aggressive opponent because we need gutshot semi-bluffs on a dry A high board long-term, otherwise what does our checkraising range look like? It is often hard for neophyte players to get their heads around this view, for Man cannot hope to understand the ways of the Goddess. Shania demands a long-termist perspective. Even if we do usually fold that 9T, we have to checkraise it sometimes because ranges are sacrosanct.

Hmmmm. The opposing school of thought is that balance doesn’t matter. Every situation in poker is unique and the goal of the poker player is to maximise EV by playing each hand as optimally as we can given the information available, in each specific situation. If it’s –EV to checkraise with a gutshot on that board, don’t do it! If we check-called for a flush and it arrived, then we can donk bet because we expect our tight opponent to check back so often. Yes it fucks up our ranges but it’s far more +EV than checking to him in the knowledge that he’s almost certainly not betting. This perspective is fundamentally short-termist.

I would say that these conceptual models – how one thinks about the game – are not necessarily contradictory. They are, in fact, mutually constitutive. Our ranges and how we balance them should flow from all the individual decisions we make along the way. In other words, we should not decide in advance how to balance our range in the long-term. Our range will take care of itself if we know how to balance it in the short-term. When playing a fish we might know exactly what to checkraise on what boards, and we might play similar fish thousands of times. When playing a particular reg we might know never to checkraise bluff a dry A high board when he opens from early position, but we can do it from time to time against the same reg opening on the button. We know how to play specific spots as per the second perspective.

If we work primarily with the second model, the first model will ultimately reveal itself as a function of the latter. Crucially, though, without balance in the short-term, we may not be able to realise the goal of maximising EV in individual situations. To illustrate, if I pot bet every flop where I flop two pair or better, half pot every top pair and check-back everything else, such an unbalanced style might maximise EV for a small number of individual hands but it loses value on all the air and draws I could be half potting in between these hands that would make him fold. So I start half potting those hands too. Then I notice villain is folding to all my full pot bets, so I start half potting them as well. In the short-term, I am becoming balanced, and given time I will eventually gain Shania’s blessing.

So balance doesn’t matter. But it does. I hope you understand.

And there is more. This is, hopefully, going somewhere.

The key to winning at poker is identifying and exploiting unbalanced situations.

This isn’t the most graceful theorem ever proposed but it’ll do. What I have discussed so far revolves around exploitation and exploitability. The more we balance, the less exploitable we become. A perfectly balanced player plays Game Theory Optimal and cannot be exploited no matter what you do (some limit AI systems have come close to GTO). But playing GTO in no way maximises your EV against specific opponents because you do not adjust. You become optimally non-exploitable whilst at the same time being unable to optimally exploit. Thus, the more you wish to exploit an opponent the more exploitable you yourself must become.

This is where the theorem comes in. Nobody plays GTO, and in NL in practice it is likely impossible. The average player plays far closer to the second model than the first, and only in the very high stakes games can you witness more advanced GTO concepts used effectively in practice (Isildur’s overbetting and the fabled ‘triple-range-merge’ being fine examples, and this is probably instinctual more than anything else). In other words, because your opponent is trying to exploit you, he is unbalanced.

They say that in order to beat fish at poker, you play a standard game, don’t bluff much, and value bet them to hell. You don’t need to be balanced because they don’t adjust and are completely exploitable. We don’t even need to state explicitly what it is about fish that makes them so easy to beat, but if we did, we could say that their exploitability stems from their lack of balance. They aren’t necessarily unbalanced because they are trying to exploit you, they are unbalanced because they are bad and mindlessly click buttons. As an illustration, we know that when they check-raise a K43 board they could have K5, and we know that when they check-call two streets they have a draw or weak pair. We know that when they 3bet shove preflop 25bb deep they could have K8, A3 or QT but never AA or 67s.

We know their ranges because we know they are unbalanced. This is closer now to Sklansky’s fundamental theorem of poker, because the more unbalanced a fish is the closer they get to playing their cards face-up. And the same applies to regs. Every reg is still a fish to someone because every reg is unbalanced in certain situations, because they are actively trying to exploit your own lack of balance. Identifying and exploiting the unbalanced situation that regs put themselves in is one of the most profitable things you can do in poker. Here is an interesting post from a high-stakes player to illustrate, one plucked from many potential candidates:

“I used to lol hard when luckygump the best 6max PLO Player on earth 3bet me with AsKs2s3 which is prob a little much no matter what; what I didn't realize was he was doing it to exploit a far bigger leak I had, and he was probably just experimenting with how bad a hand he could use to exploit that leak.”

I have attempted in this blog entry to get to grips with something at the heart of poker that seems to confuse most people, including me. How and why we balance, and how and why we don't balance. With my theorem, I tried to conceptualise poker in such a way that puts balance at its very heart, in a way that you cannot ignore. So you see. Even if Shania don't impress you much, she’s still the one you run to. Still the one you belong to. Woah, oh!