The Poker Corner

Check out Mean Gene’s poker blog at http://meangenepoker.blogspot.com

Let’s say you’re playing poker, a friendly no-limit game with a $50 buy-in. An hour of the usual ups and downs has left you about even. You’re in the big blind when you’re dealt the Queen and Ten of diamonds. Four players call, the little blind folds, so you shrug and rap the table to see what comes on the flop.

And the dealer turns over the Ace, King, and Jack of diamonds. Your hands are steady as you peek at you cards to confirm that, yes indeedy, you just flopped a royal flush. And you’re suave about it, you are so god-damn suave, you don’t overact, you just frown a little and tap your knuckles on the felt. You say, “check”, and look as if you’re already thinking about the next hand.

With a scary flop like this all you can hope for is a little action. There are no big diamonds out there, so chances are no one else feels all that great about his hand. So it comes as a considerable surprise when the guy who made the original calls says, “I’m all-in.” And it’s an even bigger surprise when the next player says. “Call”. And by the time the third player shoves in his stack you’re positively agog. You have the mortal, stone-cold, ultimate nuts. And three players have pushed in every chip they have. This is it. This is the greatest moment of your poker career.

So what do you do?

And I don’t mean what do you do about your victory dance (a sashay to a salsa beat or a sort of funky slide-step?). No, I mean with your cards. It's obvious, right? You flip 'em over, show off your royal, and scoop up with pot with both arms. Right?

Wrong.

You should fold.

Now, you're thinking that this is some sort of trick. Maybe I forgot some important piece of information—that you're playing against five members of the Soprano family, and as you walked in you saw them lining the trunk of a car with garbage bags. No. It's just another game. Except that in this one you flopped a royal flush. Which I'm telling you to muck. Which is loco.

There is a method to my madness. This is a hand you'll remember this hand the rest of your life. Every time you tell a poker story, this is the hand you're gonna talk about. How you flopped a royal flush, and three grade-A morons slow-played pocket Jacks, Kings, and Aces and got what they deserved. You may never have a royal flush the rest of your life. But every time you're dealt queen-ten suited, you'll remember that one time when you caught lightning in a bottle.

And that's the problem. You might start thinking that Queen-Ten is your "lucky" hand. Or, far, far worse—you might start thinking Queen-Ten is a "great" hand. It’s like how you can’t forget that ex-girlfriend who treated you like garbage but was the only woman who would, ah, indulge you in certain ways. A pleasurable endorphin rush can distort your brain as surely as a fastball off the coconut. Taking down a huge pot with a royal flush could have a similar effect.

And that would be bad. Because Queen-Ten isn't a great starting hand. And if you start playing it like it IS a great starting hand, over the course of your poker career it could cost you much, much more than the huge pot you won with your royal flush. If you're the sort who's susceptible to superstition, hunches, and astral projection, you risk losing A LOT of money on hands like Queen-Ten. Or King-Jack. Or, God help you, junk like King-Deuce and Queen-Six. Actually, if you're chasing with hands like Queen-Six, God has probably forsaken you.

It is amazing how many players, especially online, see a face card, any face card, and go gooey in the knees. Look at that paint, just look at it! Paint is power, right? And an Ace? You’ll find fish who will play any Ace, at any time, against any number of opponents, regardless of the action before and after them. They don’t even consider their second card, the “kicker”. To illustrate how important your kicker is, let me toss out two names—Adam Vinatieri and Doug Brien. As with football, in poker your kicker doesn’t always determine who wins or loses. But going to war with a so-so kicker is a sure-fire way to lose in both games.

When you’re watching the World Poker Tour you’ll often hear Mike Sexton say that a player is “dominated”. What that means is that two players share one card but the other has the higher kicker—for example, Ace-Jack versus King-Jack. And while being dominated can, under certain circumstances, be a rather titillating experience, at the poker table it’s always unpleasant. It means you’re usually drawing to three outs (the three cards that match your kicker) and them’s not good odds.

And you’re much more likely to find yourself dominated if you aggressively play hands like King-Ten and Queen-Jack. These are not hands you want to be opening the betting with in early position, because if someone behind you wakes up with Ace-King and you both hit top pair on the flop, you’re going to ship a lot of chips his way. King-10 is NOT half as good as pocket Kings. Even a hand like King-Queen, which looks like a monster, isn’t as formidable as it appears. King-Queen has picked up a nickname in poker circles—it’s called the Kournikova. Why? Because it looks good, but it never wins.

More money is probably lost playing Ace-X (with X meaning any kicker below, say an 8 or 9) than any other hand. With a low card matching your Ace it’s far less likely you’re going to flop top pair with the top kicker, and what happens if you get “lucky” and flop an Ace? If you’re in a pot with several other players, chances are good that someone else woke up with an Ace and has you outkicked. And that’s when things get expensive—you’re liable to put a lot of money in the pot with your top pair, only to see the other guy turn over a queen instead of a four.

If you find that at the end of the night you’re almost always a loser, cutting A-x out of your repertoire might immediately help your bottom line. You should be especially careful playing Ace-little when you’re one of the first players to act. If you toss in a bet, and there’s a raise, what do you do? The raiser has indicated a strong hand, so if you call, and don’t flop an Ace, you’ve wasted two bets and have to muck. But if an Ace DOES fall, and you bet and get raised back, now you’ve put in three bets on a hand than can be beaten six ways to Sunday. If you bite the bullet and chase the raiser down you’re likely to find you were dominated from the start and just dumped a ton of chips with a hand you should’ve tossed away from the start.

The worst hand in poker isn’t junk like 6-3 or 9-4—it’s the hand that comes second best at the showdown. You want to avoid putting yourself in positions where you’re putting money in the pot with a hand that’s likely to be crushed even if you actually make your hand. If you find yourself flopping top pair and then wincing because you don’t know if that’s helped you or not, you might want to re-think your starting hand selection.

I used Queen-Ten in the example to start off because that’s the hand that inexplicably caught my fancy and cost me bigtime. After some rough sessions online I used a program called PokerTracker to statistically analyze my pathetic play, and found to my horror that I’d lost an ungodly amount of money playing a hand I’d normally muck in a heartbeat. The program allows to replay hands, and I saw that the first two times I’d played Queen-10 I’d won big pots—I rivered a full house to beat a flush and flopped a Broadway straight to beat Ace-King. And planted in my brain was the insidious idea that Q-10 is a big hand. I wasn’t even consciously aware of it, but as I watched later hands, where I blew all the money I’d won times three, I couldn’t believe that I was the donkey calling raises with these middling cards. And getting killed, time after time after time. The only explanation that satisfied both the facts and my ego was that I’d gone temporarily insane due to my previous big wins.

You don’t have to go to such extremes—nor, come to think of it, must you lay down a royal flush—if you can keep in your head that random Aces and picture cards do not automatically mean you have the best of it. In poker there’s a time to play any combination of cards, under the right circumstances—but there’s also a time where it’s correct to muck any combination. You’re winnings are likely to increase if you start looking askance at those big hands that, in truth, aren’t so big.