AKQJ10 on Poker – a Tunica poker blog

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Last week I received Rolf Slotboom’s Secrets of Professional Pot-Limit Omaha in a shipment from Amazon. I had thrown it in as an afterthought to get to $25 for their free shipping, but I had been thinking of ordering this as my second PLO book. Jeff Hwang’s Pot Limit Omaha Poker: The Big Play Strategy greatly broadened my understanding of this game, and I’ve been trying to play as much PLO as possible, even crowding out some expectation from time lost to play NLHE, now that I’m playing around NL50 with a little NL100. But the great thing about poker is that I can jump from variant to variant as I please, and I’m not going to let a little lost profit stand in the way. In the long run, learning new games is +EV, especially as the poker boom dies out and the bread-and-butter NLHE gets tougher.

I’m about 70% of the way through, everything except the hand quizzes, and in general I like the Slotboom book. But somehow it’s a little different from what I was expecting. It certainly talks a lot about short-stack PLO, a topic pretty much ignored by Hwang, and one I wanted to get a better grasp on. But I guess I was expecting a cookbook-style approach like Ed Miller’s short stack material in Getting Started in Hold ‘em. Slotboom’s book isn’t quite like that, although it certainly sketches the outline of a successful short-stack game, and also has some material on deep-stack and other topics like online play and 6-max.

The big problem with trying to put Slotboom’s short-stack ideas into practice in your typical 5c-10c or 10c-25c online full-ring PLO game is the preflop passivity. Using the table maniac to set up reraises, ideally trapping the field and creating a lot of dead money, is hugely profitable — in games with a predictable maniac, or games where the table PFR is 20% or so. Online small-stakes games tend to have PFR more like in the 1s and 2s — meaning people are not even raising aces that often, let alone anything else. So obviously whereas Slotboom claims you can play a short-stack game with anything under 50 BBL, if you try that in these games you’re going to be waiting around for a lot of preflop raises that never happen, hence playing deep-stack poker with your big pairs. (You’ll probably wish you’d bought Hwang’s book then!) The idea of making a standard minimum raise both with your aces and with limping hands is interesting, but equally useless if it never actually induces any raises from behind. Therefore, even though I’ve long been an advocate of NLHE beginners using Miller’s short-stack approach, I’m almost inclined to think it’s more trouble than it’s worth in PLO. I did in fact start out by playing short stacks, reducing the magnitude of mistakes I could make, but I think I may have been playing too loose for my stack size. (Compare the idea of playing small pairs for a raise in a short-stacked very loose NLHE game; you’d be making a mistake based on your lack of implied odds, but it might not be a huge mistake in any one case. Over time it would be a substantial leak, though.) Slotboom doesn’t give much direct advice on which hands you should be playing at what stack sizes.

So in summary it’s certainly worth the $15 that Amazon charged me, because good PLO books are still pretty rare, and I found this book still a lot more substantive than others (like Ferguson’s Full Tilt chapter). However, if you’re seeking to buy one book to learn all of PLO, I’d still go with Hwang. Hwang’s advice is mostly for deep-stack PLO, though, so you might still want to experiment a bit with short-stacking. You’ll still find odd chances to go all-in with aces and quadruple up.

OTOH the game seems to be healthy as ever in California.   Makes sense — the poker culture has been stronger for a longer period of time, really.

Unrelated to Tunica, but something I want to archive to find later: A good thread about what Commerce is really like, and why max buy-ins are in the long-term interest of the cardroom.

And it’s looking like I might never finish that bankroll post.    But I will!   Also, I liked this recent post by Ed: Four  Simple Steps to Conquering Crazy [No-Limit] Games, especially the “dead money” item.

Also pondering whether to take it to its own domain, but that’s gotta wait until I feel OK again.

And yes, I know I need to finish that Ed Miller post.

To move this conversation forward, though, I’d first like to take a step back and discuss what I think Ed means by bankroll, which also happens to be how I understand bankroll.

A short history of bankroll theory

To my knowledge, 97 percent of the conventional wisdom about bankroll comes from Mason Malmuth’s Poker Essays. I’ve never read it, but I believe that’s the genesis of the proverbial 300 big bets. But what situation is Malmuth addressing? That of a player who knows he’s a winner in a particular game, say $30/60 limit hold ‘em, in which he plans to play indefinitely for income. And of course, for that player to be a confident poker pro, he must be pretty sure he’s not going to go broke on the first merely bad run of cards. No bankroll can ever guarantee a zero risk of ruin, because in theory you could get the second best cards each hand of poker you play from now until the day you die. But you can establish, given a winrate and a standard deviation, a sufficient bankroll to reduce the risk of ruin to something very small, like 1%. And to my understanding, that’s where Malmuth’s calculations ended up: A player who beats a limit game for one big bet per hour, with a typical SD (maybe 18 BBet/hr), needs a bankroll of 300 big bets.

I don’t know much about the development of this concept until about 2004-05, when I caught the poker bug and got involved in 2+2′s forums. But this happened to be when the no-limit wave was picking up steam, and suddenly everyone wanted to adapt Malmuth’s advice about limit poker to no-limit. “What’s the no-limit analogue to 300 big bets?” everyone wanted to know. “20 full buy-ins? 30? 25?” In the end conventional wisdom settled along that 20-to-30 spectrum, but along the way, everyone kind of forgot what question Malmuth was answering in the first place.

Bankroll requires a winrate

I can’t stress enough that Malmuth’s original calculation was based on a certain winrate. It was based on other assumptions too, but if you don’t know your winrate, it’s pretty much unfathomable that you would know your standard deviation. Yet when the newbie with 17 posts asks some 2+2 forum or other for the bankroll or other, the first step in formulating a response is never, “How do you estimate your winrate?” Never. I honestly don’t even remember that question coming up, except that I’ve introduced it. People may grumble and point to the FAQ (which probably makes the same point I’m making, in passing, hence unnoticed by anyone), or politely say 20 or 25 buy-ins or 300 BBet or whatever. But all of this is utter nonsense, because the minute you change your assumed winrate from 1.0 BBet/hr to 0.5 BBet/hr, without changing the SD, then your original number is reduced to rubble. And no one ever knows his winrate, certainly not a beginner.

Back to Miller

So Ed’s basic premise in this article is, worrying about bankroll is silly if you’re a recreational player who has an independent source of funds. There are a bunch of examples and embellishments, but that’s the real point. To put it another way: If you really want to play the casino $3/6 game, but you don’t have a “bankroll” of $1800 all at once, but you can afford to lose up to $600 a month, then you can play that game until you lose $600 in a month. You don’t have to make yourself stay home and play $1/2 online.

I probably obscured rather than elucidated the point of the article by posting this excerpt:

If your hobby were photography, would you be asking about your bankroll? “Hrmm, I can sell X photos for Y dollars per month, plus or minus, and spend Z per month on equipment and supplies… what dollar figure D ensures that I’m likely to stay above water with 99% chance if I hit a bad rough patch and don’t sell enough photos for a few months.”

Kinda silly, right? Most people would say, “I enjoy photography, and I’m willing to spend $500 per month on it.”

But in the end, really all Miller is saying is, don’t hesitate to play in a game you want to play in and can afford to play in, just because of some long-term risk of ruin calculation that may not apply to you anyway.

What isn’t Miller saying? He’s certainly not saying you shouldn’t track your results. He’s not saying that you should plan on losing that money, in the defeatist sense of not improving your poker skills or ever aspiring to have months where you do better. You should plan for losing that money, because poker is a game of short-term luck and you certainly don’t want to be caught off-guard. But if you can afford to have a bad month and lose $600 in the $3/6, so be it.

What else? He’s not even saying that you can’t track your numbers by imagining a big pool of money that represents your initial stake and everything you’ve won since then. I do this, and it’s very satisfying to see the money grow in my online account, or in my lock-box in the nearest casino! At this point, I think I pretty much do have the theoretical bankroll to play in a live $1-3 game, if my ratio of winrate to SD is that assumed by the sons of Malmuth. But if it isn’t, if I really win at half that rate and have a 5% chance of going busto instead of 1%, well…. so what? I might decide to cut back on live poker and play down to online small stakes if I went through, say, half that stake. Or I might not, presuming I have a job to keep me on my feet.

pzhon, a poster whom I respect greatly, made this point:

I disagree. Ed Miller made many assumptions which describe casual poker players better than they describe 2+2-ers. Many casual poker players are losing players, so they need a budget. They have a primary source of income which lets them pay for hobbies. Many 2+2-ers (including Greg “Fossilman” Raymer before he won the WSOP main event) are trying not to require any infusion of cash, because they don’t have jobs (e.g., students), they have tight budgets, or they agreed not to spend any more money on poker.

Several other people echoed parts of this, especially the point of a large Raymer-like contingent on 2+2 who want to demonstrate that they can play without any additional budget of cash, even if they have some additional source of income to make sure rent’s paid and the children have shoes. Fair enough.

But at the same time, there’s a whole other class of people, especially including newcomers to 2+2. (Remember the context: This whole discussion is on the Beginners forum, even though some experienced people contributed.) These people may have read up on poker, and eventually want to be winning players. For now, though, they haven’t demonstrated the ability to beat any game.

*** post not yet finished ***

I know it’s the ADHD and perfectionism and not liking stupid kludges and resenting the fact that Poker Tracker limped along as a LHE product hacked for NLHE for so longer, but really, does it matter that people use such dumb-ass terms as “Poker Tracker big blind” to talk about NLHE?

It does to me, and i wish it didn’t.

Next: Instead of working on my PLO, i’m going to do a long exegesis of Ed Miller’s bankroll post.   Oh boy!   I can hardly wait!

Now that i’m here, i’ll write about:

• The thoughts of an aspiring semipro struggling to motivate himself in a “day job” rather than moving to California and grinding the $100 buy-in $2-3 NLHE games.
• My efforts to learn pot-limit Omaha from Jeff Hwang’s book.
• Various repetitive topics that come up on 2+2, such as short stacks or misunderstanding of bankroll.
• Other junk

It’ll be fun!