5 Poker Myths That Are Still Hurting Your Game

 
Before he lit off for Las Vegas looking to conquer the WSOP Main Event, Mike McD was just another part-time player patiently building his bankroll. Rather than risk his hard-earned dough – won slowly but surely in the low- to mid-stakes games throughout New York and Atlantic City – by taking shots at the “big game,” Mike lived up to the film’s title by literally rounding. That all changed, however, during a fateful session of cards at the now defunct Taj Mahal poker room.

You can watch Matt Damon recount the tale for himself in a short scene opposite John Turturro’s consummate grinder “Joey Knish,” but here’s the cliff notes version…

Busy check-raising tourists at the Taj, Mike spots former back to back (’87 and ’88) WSOP Main Event world champion Johnny Chan – better known as “The Master” to mere mortals – stroll into the poker room. Rather than become starstruck like the other locals who quickly surround Chan’s $300/$600 table, Mike takes every dollar he has and “sits short” in the high-stakes game.

Knish understandably asks whether Mike was dealt pocket aces or kings, as those monsters should be the only starting hands that merit challenging the champ.

But on that day, Mike was prepared to do battle for his entire bankroll holding nothing but napkins:

Mike tells Knish about this audaciously bold bluff to explain why he latter put it all on the line against feared mobster and card game hustler “Teddy KGB.” According to Mike’s reasoning, his experience forcing Chan to fold a single hand – undoubtedly an important hand for Mike himself, but just one of millions in the champ’s career – proves that he is capable to play at the highest levels.

Later on, he’ll apply similar reasoning to justify his choice to make Sin City and the WSOP his new home. Having slayed the dragon by beating Teddy KGB at his own game, Mike believes success in a single session of heads-up Texas holdem makes him worthy of taking on the best pros on the planet. And while the Mike character was a work of fiction, his error in judgment is all too common among poker players. Spend enough time in any card room in the country, and you’ll inevitably see stories like Mike taking his shot play out.

And invariably, these shot takers find themselves back at the smaller games in short order, having been humiliated and hung out to dry by the superior skill found in bigger games. When you experience a short-term burst of success in poker, by all means, savor those good times while they last. Beating any game is a difficult task in today’s environment, so winning samples – whether over a few sessions, a week, or even a month – definitely warrant celebration.

But at the same time, you must recognize the role played by random variance. To put it simply, the very worst players in the world can still win over the short term, while Johnny Chan himself will experience runs where nothing seems to work. This is because a randomly shuffled deck, combined with any number of interpersonal variables – picture the table drunk calling off his entire stack with 10-high, only to go runner-runner to crack your pocket kings – ensures short-term results will always be unpredictable.

Mike McD should’ve known better, chalking his win over Chan as a mere one-off instead of chasing those “pipe dreams” Knish warned about. Whether you win or lose at an inordinate rate over short samples, it’s always best to stay consistent and focus on the long term. When you can consistently beat a game over extended samples, that’s the time to consider jumping up to higher stakes.

 
Mike McD advised you to spot the sucker at the table, lest you become one yourself. And one of the easiest ways to spot a sucker is when they utter the most common postmortem in all of poker – “but they were suited.” It doesn’t matter if you’re playing a kitchen table game for coins, $1/$3 at the local casino, or a bracelet event at the WSOP… play long enough and you’ll hear all about suited cards. For the typical recreational player – folks who didn’t come to spent entire rounds folding – bad cards bearing the same suit can be quite tempting.

As the argument goes, suited hands – and especially those coveted suited connectors like 6-7, 8-9, 9-10, and 10-J – offer more than one way to win the pot. You can find top pair or two pair as per usual, or a straight using the connected values, but a suited hand can also form a flush. This “flush factor” compels many players to turn trash hands into trouble, as they enter the pot in search of three more suits to fill the flush. But when you review the data below – which illustrates various scenarios involving suited cards along with their associated probabilities and odds – it’s easy to see why suited cards aren’t worth the trouble:

Odds of Being Dealt X in holdem

Flush Draw Flop Odds

Filling a Flush Draw Odds

That’s right, you’ll get any two suited cards on roughly one-quarter of deals, but they’ll only be connectors every 25 hands or so. And when you get a suited hand, your odds of flopping a picture-perfect flush are terrible at less than 1 percent, or 1 in every 118 hands. More than likely, you’ll flop a “four flush” for a draw, which occurs at a slightly better than 1 in 8 rate.

Once you get this flush draw, you’ll need to pay to hit it in most cases, but that only happens 35 percent of the time. On the other 65 percent of hands, chasing a flush draw because you played suited cards will cost you dearly when it bricks out. Because of these numbers, turning cards like J-9 unsuited into the suited variety only adds 2.5 percent to the hand’s overall equity – which just isn’t worth the additional risk involved in playing inferior holdings.

 
This myth owes much of its current prominence to beloved World Poker Tour (WPT) broadcaster Mike Sexton. During his tenure bringing televised poker to the masses, Sexton – a veteran pro before his broadcasting days – applied a bit of old-school thinking whenever a player held a made hand on a draw-heavy board. According to Sexton, when you have something like top-pair / top-kicker on a “wet” board – or one which creates several possible draws – it’s always best to bet, and bet big, to defend your holding.

First, your opponents who simply hold top pair with a weak kicker, or middle pair, or any hand you have beat at the moment, won’t pay you off when facing an overbet. Betting big here just scares your mark away when you have them right where you want them. Secondly, and most importantly, betting big to protect made hands can cost you significantly in terms of long-term equity. Believe it or not, winning players want their opponents to put money in the pot chasing draws. As you just learned in the proceeding section, those draws don’t hit all that often anyhow, so it’s in your best interest to bet just enough so they call and chase facing incorrect odds.

 
I alluded to this myth in the first entry when discussing Mike McD’s decision to play $300/$600 Limit holdem – despite having just $6,000 to play with. This concept of sitting short, also known as “short buying,” has become quite popular over the years among the recreational player set. In a typical $1/$3 cash game that you’ll find in any casino card room, the minimum buy-in stands at $100, while the maximum rises to $300. Bump it up to $2/$5 and the limits are adjusted to $200 – $1,000, depending on the house rules.

The actual amounts may be subject to change, but in any cash game you play, there will always be a minimum price point to buy in. And accordingly, there will always be short-sitters who choose to enter the game with their stack set to the minimum. Part of this popularity stems from the strategy’s natural appeal, as players with a leaky bankroll can still get in on the action despite their depleted funds. And as they say, in the great game of Texas holdem, all it takes is one well-timed double up to get yourself off the mat.

Back in 2005, poker strategist Ed Miller penned a defense of the short-buy strategy as part of his book “Getting Started in holdem.” Within that chapter, Miller explained how risk-averse players could use the sitting short move to mitigate their exposure to more skillful players. As he described, buying in to a $1/$3 game with just $100 may leave you with only 33 big blinds to work with, but a basic strategy of folding marginal hands and betting monsters could level the playing field against bigger stacks.

But fast forward to 2017, and Miller wrote a follow up in Card Player magazine to explain why sitting short is no longer viable in the modern game:

As Miller explains, the sitting short approach relies on exploiting bad players who can resist calling your short-stacked shove. Back in 2005, you’d find a steady stream of fish willing to call a $100 all-in holding nothing but a mid-range suited connector or a small pocket pair. These were easy marks, and when your monster hands held up, it didn’t take long to turn a short-buy into a big stack.

But the game has evolved by leaps and bounds over the last 13 years. Most of those fish have either been weeded out of the poker economy, or they’ve improved to the point where short-buyers can’t capitalize on their looseness. If you try to sit short in today’s $1/$3 tables, here’s how the experience will likely go when facing all but the worst opponents.

And this cycle will repeat itself throughout the rest of the night. Sharp opponents noticed your short buy, so they know you’re looking to pounce with premiums only. So they simply wait you out, folding every time you put chips in the pot while watching the blinds chip away at your stack.

Finally, when you only have $50 or so left to work with, they’ll take a flier and call your shove down to put you at risk. In this spot, the best-case scenario is to double up back to $100, thus starting the cycle over again. And when the worst strikes, your huge hand will be run down by rags, as opponents can feel comfortable calling you light because your $50 won’t dent them at all.

 
At the end of Rounders, Mike McD headed off into the sunset intent on competing in the WSOP Main Event.  To hear him tell it, the $1 million grand prize may just have his name on it, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to win seven-figures grinding it out at the Chesterfield.

As it turns out, even elite players like “Kid Poker” – who cashed for $2,792,104 last year – don’t always wind up in the black. Negreanu actually paid$2,874,164 in buy-ins across his 2017 schedule,so he wound up losing $86,140 on the year. Unless you have a bankroll big enough to withstand tournament swings, a few big scores simply won’t be enough to get over the hump.