The Mathematical Truth About Poker: Some Do Run Worse

This article constitutes a short dissertation on a banality. It'll seem stupid at first but bear with me; there are useful poker nuggets here.
The banality: You can't do anything about the cards you are dealt.
Now I know that everyone who has played even a little poker knows this is true - but few act like it.
Most players complain endlessly about their bad luck, cry about their rotten cards, agonize over the endless hours missing countless flops and getting sucked out on by bozos calling on a wing and a prayer.
You have to get over this if you have any hope of marked cards becoming a legit, long-term winner in this game.
You have cards; you have to play them; therefore you have to learn to play them in the most effective manner possible.
Get out when you know you're beat. Smile as pleasantly as possible when your opponent hits a two-outer for the third time that night.
And, of course, be gracious when you hit your hand.
Getting Your Share
Since this is so bloody obvious you're probably wondering why it merits a "strategy" article.
Well, I want to talk a bit about luck, about what it means to "get your share" of the cards and about what it means when aficionados of the game say wise things like "it all evens out in the long run."
Gus Hansen was once asked by a reporter what role luck played in poker.
He responded that in any given session it probably accounted for about 90% of his outcomes. Over a month, he guessed it was about 10 or 15% and over a year it was down to around 2-5%.
In the ballpark, I'd say.
And it's true - all professional players of poker operate under the assumption luck will even out in the long run and skill will triumph. Otherwise there wouldn't be pros.
There aren't any professional craps shooters or baccarat players (no matter what some ill-conceived books and pamphlets may try to tell you).
There cannot be because of the mathematical nature of these games.
The Mathematical Truth
In all complex settings, the mathematical truth is considerably more complex and, in my opinion, more interesting.
The truth is there are certainly some people who have been luckier than most and some who have been unluckier than most.
I put have been in italics for a reason, which will become clear.
It is true that as the number of hands dealt increases the luck element shrinks, but it doesn't go away. In fact, it has to remain and to continue to play a role.
Think about it this way: Assume there is a distribution of the long-term expected value (EV) of every possible poker hand played from every position under all possible circumstances.
It will be a wild and wonderful distribution full of all kinds of bizarre hands and outcomes and will be driven by a host of factors.
But it is a mathematical certainty that it will approximate a normal, bell-shaped curve.
The hands that have just awful long-term expectation will be relatively infrequent, mainly because they don't get played all that often, and will show up in the left-hand tail.
Those with the highest EV will also occur rarely (primarily because the situation has to be "just right" for them to get paid off). Those will appear on the far right of the curve.
Those with average outcomes will occur with greatest frequency and be at the peak in the center of the curve.
The so-called "computer hand" or break-even hand (Q-7o) emerged from simulations cranked out by a computer dealing gazillions of hands at random.
Everyone will be dealt hands from this distribution each time they sit down and, in theory, they will all be dealt the "same" hands marked cards contactlenses.
In reality, of course, this sameness is only reached when an infinite number of hands have been dealt.
Frankly, I don't have time to wait for this and neither do you.
The Distribution of Luck
OK. Still with me? Here comes the fun part.
If you plot the distribution of the "luck" of each player (that is, the EVs of the hands they are actually dealt), you'll get another normal curve.
And when you plot it, you will discover that some players are below the mean, some above it - and a few are far below or far above it.
Some folks are going to be flat out "luckier" than the norm and others "unluckier."
It has to be this way! If this seems nuts to you, just think about real life.
Some people get hit by trucks or lightning, or diagnosed with horrible diseases. Some people had the misfortune to live downwind from Mt. St. Helens or in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans.
Others stroll though life in perfect health, live in San Diego or bought a house on high ground.
The lottery has just awful odds; the worst EV of all gambles. But there are people who have hit jackpots of over $100,000 three times. Yes, three.
There have to be such "lucky" folks given the number of lottery drawings and the number of punters.
If you're one of these you've beaten the worst gamble in the civilized world and, unless you're a total nutball, you're going to go to your grave "lucky."
So, yes; you have to play the cards you're dealt and you've got to play them in the most advantageous manner.
You can't bitch about your lousy luck because there isn't anything you can do about it. In fact, if you do, it will hurt your game (more on this in a future column).
Cards Have No Memory
The truth is some of you bemoaning your rotten luck, mystified because you never seem to hit your three-outer, nonplussed because you keep getting hammered by idiots making stupid calls, well, you know, you're right.
Reality bites. You have been unlucky.
Of course, you noticed the past tense in that last sentence. Cards have no memory and they don't know you've been smacked around the room by a random number generator for the past weeks or months.
Your expected "luck" for tonight's session is the statistical norm, the average outcome.
So go play your best game and don't sweat it. You can't do anything about the cards you're dealt.

Poker One-Liners We Can All Do Without

Poker abounds with quickies - one-liners that seem to carry a cartload of wisdom.
Some indeed do. We even devoted an article to one of them.
Other favorites of mine are:

• Doyle Brunson's "Never go broke in an unraised pot"
• The uncredited "Small hands, small pots; big hands, big pots"
• and the wildly popular, "If you can't spot the fish in the first half-hour, it's you."

Most one-offs come from the greats, or get filtered down through the culture of the game.
And like aphorisms everywhere, they are admirable for their clean, efficient encoding of deep truths.
Alas, there are others that abound in poker rooms that come up short in the wisdom department but are far more common and more commonly believed.
I'd like to dissect a couple of them for you.
I hope there's a poker lesson here, and I hope even more that having read these you'll stop repeating them.

1. "I crushed the game last night at ____ (fill in the poker room or online poker site of your choice)."

If you "crushed the game" you should really not give yourself much credit.
No one deserves any special accolades for a single big win.
In the room where I play we have a school (metaphorically speaking) of semi-fish. They're actually reasonable players - not particularly gifted, not truly awful.
The game is too big to support the genuinely piscine; they would go broke too quickly.
Our partial fish just lose more than they win marked cards but, of course, without them the game would wither away.
One of these scaly folk must have stepped in something on his way in the other day. He caught cards that you would not believe.
It gave new meaning to the phrase "hit in the head with the deck." He walked away with two racks of greenies and over 4,000 coconuts in profit.
Not bad for a fish.
So, what do I hear from him next time I see him? I hear that he "crushed the game."
And not just that he crushed it. He now seems to think he's the best player in town because he recorded one of the bigger wins we've seen in months.

Interesting. He got so lucky that he didn't believe it either, so it must have been skill.
Nothing Wrong With Being Lucky
Frankly, he didn't crush the game. He just got very lucky. And, you know what? There's nothing wrong with that.
He hit two sets when he got involved in big pots with underpairs. He hit a monster runner-runner flush that chopped down a flopped set of aces, and virtually all his made hands held up.
If this sort of thing happens to you, just stack the chips quietly and don't, for a second, try to convince yourself that you're suddenly channeling Chip Reese.
My take on this: No one "crushes" a game in a single session.
If you log a big win you got lucky. You may have played well (when you're winning you tend to play better than when you're losing - an important topic we'll discuss on another day) but it wasn't your brilliant play that got you out with 1,000 big blinds; it was luck.
If you really crush a game, you beat it for five or more big blinds an hour for at least 500 hours - and, frankly, that's too small a sample to be really confident it reflects your true win rate.
Moreover, players who win at that rate will never be heard saying they crushed a game.

2. "I outplayed the guy that hand."

This one is heard most often when a so-so player finds himself sitting at a table with a respected, top drawer player, especially when that opponent is a pro.
When you hear it you can usually piece together what happened. He got into a hand with the pro, made a good read and ran a bluff that got the pro to lay down the best hand.
This, he believes, means that he outplayed the guy. And, like the "crushed the game" line, it's true in only superficial ways and false in all the deep and meaningful ones.
Yes, you outplayed him in that you made the right move at the right time and won with a hand that wasn't the best. So what?
Here are two things to think about:
One, solid players lay down the best hand far more often than weak players. There is no shame in dumping a hand that could be best when the conditions call for it.
The pot could be small, the player could be out of position, the play up till then could have had ambiguous elements to it that made the bluffer difficult to read and so forth.
Two, "outplaying" someone is like "crushing a game" in that it isn't done in a short time span.
Just like it takes hundreds of hours and thousands of hands before anyone can begin to feel confident that they are truly, unambiguously beating a game, it takes a similar amount of time and experience before someone can conclude that they can reliably outplay an opponent.
I'm not sure where the "crushed" bit came from but the "outplayed" line was heard, famously, in the movie Rounders.
The hero Mike McDermott, played by Matt Damon (who, as most of you know, is actually a pretty solid poker player), pushes Johnny Chan out of a hand in a high-stakes game at the Taj in Atlantic City.
He later exults in how he now thinks he is really ready for prime time since he outplayed the great Chan on a single hand.
When I hear someone say that they outplayed someone on a hand I think, like Daniel Negreanu said when asked what he thought when Phil Hellmuth sat down in his high-stakes cash game, "Yum, yum."
Do yourself a favor the next time one of these lines (or any number of other silly things people say at poker tables) starts moving marked cards contactlenses from your brain to your tongue:
Shut up.

Author Bio:
Arthur Reber has been a poker player and serious handicapper of thoroughbred horses for four decades. He is the author of The New Gambler's Bible and coauthor of Gambling for Dummies. Formerly a regular columnist for Poker Pro Magazine and Fun 'N' Games magazine, he has also contributed to Card Player (with Lou Krieger), Poker Digest, Casino Player, Strictly Slots and Titan Poker. He outlined a new framework for evaluating the ethical and moral issues that emerge in gambling for an invited address to the International Conference of Gaming and Risk Taking.
Until recently he was the Broeklundian Professor of Psychology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Among his various visiting professorships was a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Now semi-retired, Reber is a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Ross Jarvis: Primetime poker

Along with thousands of other poker fans, I stayed up into the early hours of the morning watching the WSOP Main Event final table last week. Despite the EPT becoming such a brilliant tour – and their EPT Live webcasts providing fantastic entertainment – there’s something special and unique about the Main Event. Everything from the sparkling set design, thousands of raucous fans and incredible prize money lets the world know that this is the premier poker tournament in the world, as it should be. As soon as you switch on ESPN you recognise that this is a big, unique event worth watching.
If I had one criticism of the televised EPTs it would be that the tour locations are interchangeable and generic to the viewer – unless you are told in the commentary it’s impossible to decipher whether the tournament is being held in Prague or the Bahamas. More unique elements, such as when the 2007 PCA final table was held outdoors, infrared contactlenses would help add some character to the individual stops in my opinion.
 The TV production of the November Nine was fantastic and really made poker out to be a mainstream, exciting sport on a par with American football, soccer or boxing. Despite many of the players being relatively unfamiliar to poker fans ESPN did a great job with interviews and vignettes to give each one a character, and the audience a reason to root for or against them. Commentators Lon McEachern, Norman Chad and Antonio Esfandiari were excellent also, it’s not easy to stay informative and entertaining on commentary for such an extended period of time. Esfandiari’s analysis in particular was very impressive. He seemed to be spot on with his reads the vast majority of the time (hole cards were only revealed at the end of each hand) and his attention to live physical tells was particularly interesting from the view of an online grinder like myself.
As you know, Ryan ‘The Beast’ Riess was the eventual winner and new world champion. Inevitably, questions immediately sprung up as to whether the 23-year-old Michigan native was ‘good for poker’. That much will have to be seen in the coming months and years but I imagine Riess was already regretting his status as the ‘face of poker’ after this horrendous interview with Fox News….

No regrets

While it wasn’t quite the November Nine my biggest tournament of the month was the latest PKR Live, a $500 event at Aspers in London. The vast majority of my online poker career has been played on PKR, and over a few years it’s where I moved up from playing $25NL to playing professionally at any stakes up to $5/$10. Because of this, I always want to do especially well in their live events as I’m often playing against people I regularly battle with online and know a lot of the players and staff.
After a ninth place finish in 2011 it didn’t go quite so well for me this year. I finished Day One with an average stack of 30k and found myself on a really fun Day Two table with WSOPE winner Scott Shelley and some other good players. All was going quite smoothly until I opened A-J to 3200 on the button and the big blind called. I started the hand with 43k, or 27BBs. The flop was a beautiful Js-7d-6d. I c-bet 4k and he check-raised me to 9200. He hadn’t been playing particularly aggressively but, given the flush draw on the flop, I felt I had to go with my hand even though I was not in love with the situation. I moved all-in and he quickly sighed – a good sign! Then he eventually put his chips over the middle and showed a Jack also – still good – followed by a Six for a weird two pair – NOT good! I’m not sure what he was so scared about but never mind, his two pair held up and suddenly I was out in about 60^th place.
 When you play live tournaments regularly (or even semi-regularly as I do) you must learn to cope with the disappointment of frequently busting. You will leave the tourney without cashing so often that you can’t afford to get down about it and let it affect your poker game the next time you play. All that you can do is objectively look back on your tournament, the key hands that you played and analyse whether you could have played them better. At PKR Live I could have just called his flop check-raise on the turn and possibly allowed myself to get away if he continued betting, but in the long run I think the differences between the two lines are pretty minimal so I was relatively happy with my tournament as a whole. In the end, being happy with your own play is all you can really ask for in poker – you just need a bit of help from the luck gods to push you to the big money.

Hand of the week

I’ve played some pretty interesting marked cards contactlenses cash game hands this past month. I think this one offers up the most potential for discussion. I’d love to hear your feedback on how I played the hand, across all streets really. The Villain is a good, winning reg but doesn’t play $5/$10 that regularly, so he may have tightened up his game a little. My line could definitely be horrendous, it could be really good – a few weeks later on and I’m still not sure!
***** Hand History for Game 2448836834 ***** (PKR)
$1000.00 USD NL Texas Hold’em – Wednesday, October 30, 05:17:41 ET 2013
Table The Floating Lotus (Real Money)
Seat 2 is the button
Seat 1: keken4s ( $1399.51 USD )
Seat 2: Tiptop22 ( $1000.00 USD )
Seat 3: MrStarch ( $1188.75 USD )
Seat 4: Cryjob ( $1030.00 USD )
Seat 5: Kingand77 ( $1385.00 USD )
MrStarch posts small blind [$5.00 USD].
Cryjob posts big blind [$10.00 USD].
Dealt to MrStarch [  Td Tc ]
Kingand77 raises [$25.00 USD]
keken4s folds
Tiptop22 folds
MrStarch calls [$20.00 USD]
Cryjob folds
** Dealing Flop ** [ 4s, 9h, 6c ]
MrStarch checks
Kingand77 bets [$40.00 USD]
MrStarch calls [$40.00 USD]
** Dealing Turn ** [ Ad ]
MrStarch checks
Kingand77 bets [$100.00 USD]
MrStarch calls [$100.00 USD]
** Dealing River ** [ 6h ]
MrStarch checks
Kingand77 bets [$245.00 USD]
MrStarch raises [$1023.75 USD]
Kingand77 calls and has a set of Nines to absolutely discombobulate me!

Ross rambles

 1) Watching Gravity on Wednesday and CANNOT WAIT. Full 3D at the Empire casino in Leicester Square, should be great.
2) It’s great to have Masterchef back on TV – even if I do feel as though I spend half of my life watching it.
3) Level 106 of Candy Crush Saga. Huge respect to Vanessa Selbst who tweeted that she has now completed all 450 levels. That’s definitely an achievement to rank right up there with anything she had done in poker…
4) Beer of the fortnight: Jaipur, Thornbridge brewery.

Jamie Burland: Get yourself in good positions

The margins between success and failure on a Sunday can be so tight. Fellow PokerPlayer columnist Sam Grafton once said to me that half the battle of tournament poker is getting yourself into good positions. Cashes turn into deep runs, deep runs into final tables and final tables into wins. This month I didn’t get myself into enough good positions and so I often found myself at the back end of a fairly brutal session, having to rely on a top three finish in a tournament to get me out of the red marked cards.
On the plus side, I’ve definitely found my new favourite comp – ‘The Ceratops’ on Full Tilt. Full Tilt are breathing new life into their regular tournament schedule and giving tournaments clever names like ‘Ceratops’ (you’re allowed three $26 re-entries), really helps encourage punters to give the games a spin. It recently got over 8,000 runners and $10k for first – not bad for a maximum outlay of $78 – especially good value considering the structure is really deep throughout.

Vegas calling

My main focus before Vegas is to get as much volume in online as possible. I have booked to go bracelet hunting for the back three weeks of the series, but am looking forward to the virtual grind in the lead-up just as much. The end of May/June last year were my most profitable months online and I have to put a lot of that down to the fact that most of the best online grinders in the world will be in the US where it’s still illegal to play.
With a long online grind ahead, I was over the moon to receive an invite from UK pros Kevin Allen, Richard Trigg and Jamie Roberts who had put on a party bus from Romford to Newmarket for the 1,000 Guineas Day to celebrate their recent good results at Dusk Till Dawn. When a bunch of poker players get together the chat invariably turns to the game so I was slightly relieved that Kevin’s only rule for the day was that anyone starting a sentence with, ‘So I had A-K on the button’, or any other such poker chat, would have to drink a shot of Aftershock.
Even though everyone tried their best to talk about something else, the whole bottle had been consumed by the time we arrived at the races. I’m adamant that this has way more to do with Kevin Allen being an absolute sheriff with the forfeits rather than us all being a bunch of boring old bastards. In all seriousness though, it’s amazing having such a big group of mates in poker. Drinking rules aside, it’s just so valuable to be able to bounce hands and fresh concepts off each other. I’m a big believer in life being about getting as many small victories as possible to get you through, so it was really great to be able to share in the celebrations following a couple of the good guys’ success.

Hand of the month

$26 re-entry, Full Tilt Poker
Blinds: 5,000/10,000/a1,000
Cutoff: 607,490
BTN: 165,934
SB: 529,000
BB: 290,066
UTG: 167,459
UTG+1: 409,173
UTG+2: 125,3195
MP1: 238,614
MP2 (Jamie Burland): 465,946 [9h-9c]
Preflop
Jamie Burland raises to 20,000
SB three-bets to 48,775
Jamie Burland four-bets to 103,755
SB raises all-in to 528,000
Jamie Burland calls all-in for 361,191
Flop: 3s-4d-Jh, Turn: 7h, River: 6c
SB shows 4c-4s (three of a kind, Fours)
Hero shows 9h-9c (a pair of Nines)
SB wins 948,892 pot
My hand of the month is my bust-out hand from a deep run I had in The Ceratops. Yes, it’s a bad beat, but I think the real focus should be whether this was a good spot to get the money in and whether I made the best decision preflop. I felt like I was doing okay on this table so usually I wouldn’t take too thin an edge with so few players left to go before the big bucks.
The villain in question had really started opening up and was playing 30% of pots and had a 23.8 three-bet percentage poker lenses(albeit over a relatively small 87 hand sample).
I opened 9-9 to 20k from a 46BB stack at 5k/10k blinds and he three-bet to 48,775. While I don’t want to put too much emphasis on such a small sample size, at least I could be sure all those 87 hands were taken from this stage of this game, and that my HUD wasn’t also using stats gained from other stages of other games. The sample was a reflection of how this guy was playing at that moment and my read was he was taking every spot.
With that in mind, 9-9 is well within my value range so my options as I saw them were to four-bet shove or four-bet to induce. I took the latter and lost to a five-bet shove from 4-4. On reflection, the read was good, and I put myself in a good position equity-wise to win this tournament.

Sundays with Jamie

Date: Sunday April 28
Started grinding: 4pm
Finished grinding: 2am
Total buy-ins: $3,564
Total cashes: $457
Total profit/loss: -$3,107
Number of tourneys entered: 33
Total cashes: 4
Biggest cash: $176 (Full Tilt Poker, The Ceratops)
Tilt factor: 8 (out of 10)
Soundtrack of the day: Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Mosquito

The Cat's Plan of Attack

From wicket to thicket, Phil 'Tuffers' Tufnell gives PokerPlayer the spin
Even pissing up the wall – I want to piss higher than you

As the country’s leading spin bowler during the 1990s ‘Tuffers’ has experienced more than his fair share of bad beat stories. But after a successful foray in the jungle on I’m a Celebrity… ‘The Cat’ (so named for his dressing room power naps) is putting his newly found fame to good use, by turning his arm to poker. And what better time to release a DVD (Win at Poker with Phil Tufnell) than in the run-up to Christmas…

What games did you used to play marked cards on tour? And who was the daddy?

We played 7-Card Stud and Texas Hold’em. Mike Gatting and John Emburey were good – the older boys used to take us, but we got our own back through the years. We kept it sociable – we were pretty poor back then.

You’re a fairly laid-back character. Is that an approach you bring to the table, or are you a bit of a maniac?

I kind of lose my head a little bit actually. You know, I don’t have nice, neatly stacked chips – I’m a bit off the wall and make stupid bets. The percentages always do me in. How you’re meant to sit there and work out the f***ing percentages just by looking at a game of cards in fi ve seconds, I don’t know. I usually think, ‘F??k the odds, I’ll have a go,’ know what I mean? I tend to start off playing tight and conservative, and then as the night gets going, get a little bit aggressive. After a few drinks you get a bit braver, don’t you?

Being a bowler’s all about alternating your plan of attack. Is that something you take into poker?

Spin bowling’s all about bluff and second-guessing what the other guy’s going to do. In poker I’m always trying to read people like I read a batsman.

Do you think professional sportsmen bring a more competitive edge to poker?

Yeah, very much so. I think most sportsmen are competitive in anything they do, whether it’s gardening or poker. I think you have to have that competitive mentality otherwise you don’t reach the top infrared contactlenses level. Even pissing up the wall – I want to piss higher than you. Gets me in a lot of trouble.

Funniest poker moment?

On tour in Adelaide I ran out of cash and desperately needed to make a bet. I had to round all the boys up. I was going ‘boys, boys, quick I need some money.’ Luckily I won and managed to pay them all back.

And your best?

I can remember doing the boys at Middlesex a beauty. Gatting and Emburey were playing – they were the daddies and I was the boy. I lured them in, then all of a sudden, boshed them, and they had really good hands as well. They were well f***ed off. And then it stopped raining and we had to go out and play so they didn’t have a chance to win it back. Happy f***ing days…

Isaac ‘Mr Menlo’ Baron

Gambling instincts have netted him millions from online cash games as well as tourneys. We had to find out more…

The world of online poker is divided neatly into tournament players and cash game specialists. Those making millions at the cash tables rarely bother with ‘donkaments’, while the tournament hotshots generally shy away from dabbling in the high-stakes action. Isaac Baron, however, is a player who breaks the mould.
Baron has won over $1 million in tournament play, including the PokerStars Sunday Million and the $750k guaranteed on infrared marked cards Full Tilt. Not content with this, however, the 20- year old is also a regular winner at the high-stakes no-limit cash games on Full Tilt.
Like many of his online peers, he gave up a degree course to concentrate on his burgeoning poker career. ‘I went to the University of Oregon in Eugene with the intention of getting a journalism degree,’ he says. ‘But I ended up majoring in poker!’ So how did the man from Menlo Park, California, better known as ‘Mr Menlo’, manage his rapid rise to the top?

When did you start playing poker, and how long was it before you were any good?

I started playing cards right after the Chris Moneymaker boom. My friends and I started a local game at my house that initially was $0.25/$0.50 no-limit. As we all got better, the game moved up to $1/$2. From the beginning I knew I loved the game of poker. It wasn’t that I was better than my friends – I just cared more. They were playing a game, while I was playing to win. I was the biggest winner in our home game – a nice form of income at the time.

What were you doing before poker?

I was just like any other kid. But I always found myself wanting to gamble. My group of friends could never do anything without some sort of wager, whether it was a game of basketball or just a game of Madden [American football game] on Xbox. I think my competitive edge has helped me excel. I never liked losing and I always liked to outsmart/outplay someone.

Do any moments or results really stand out in your poker career?

There are many defining moments that helped shape my poker career, from cashing in the WPT Bahamas in my first live event to my first $100 rebuy win on PokerStars. But I would be lying if I didn’t mention my win in the Sunday Million for $250,000. I had been playing them for a while and had been getting decently deep. I felt like every week I wanted it more and more. When it finally came, it was like someone had shot a monkey off my back…

How did you work up the limits online to the biggest cash games?

When I started playing cash games online, I began pretty much at $5/$10 no-limit on Full Tilt as I hadn’t been playing too much [cash games]. The build up to $200/$400 no-limit was a very long – but steady – journey. I, like all poker players, had swings. But I made sure I had a good bankroll, so there was never a point where I was thinking about going bust. I spent a lot of time at $25/$50 no-limit before I moved above that game as it just seemed like a big jump to $50/$100. Once I did make that transition, I never looked back.

You’re known as one of the few players who consistently does well in both high-stakes cash games and tournaments online – how do you manage this and what are the major differences between no-limit hold’em tournaments and cash?

I think the reason I can be successful at both no-limit hold’em cash games and tournaments is my ability to recognise them as two completely different games. If I bluff off $10,000 at $50/$100 no-limit, I can reload right away. If I bluff off all my chips in a $10,000 tournament, my day is over.
In tournaments, if you lose a hand and still have chips left, you adjust your game and try to find a way to get more until you have them all and the first place prize. In cash games, each hand is a mini- tournament where real money is exchanged. There is always a winner and a loser, so it’s important to find every edge.

What is your daily schedule like, and what stakes/games/sites do you play?

My life right now is actually quite busy with travelling to live events like the WPT Turks and Caicos and the Aruba Poker Classic. I don’t even play everyday online anymore, but I have put in a lot of long hours to get where I am. When I do play, I play on PokerStars and Full Tilt mostly. PokerStars doesn’t usually have the cash games running that I like, so it is primarily my tourney site.
Full Tilt is where I spend the majority of my time playing cash games from $100/$200 no-limit six-max all the way up to $200/$400. If the game is right, I’ll go up to $300/$600 no-limit heads-up. I still play all the online tournaments over $100. It is definitely a love/hate relationship and at times I promise myself I’ll never play marked cards another one – but it also helps me for the live tournaments which I am focusing on.

What have you made from poker and what have you done with the money?

I don’t like to give out too much information, but I will say over seven figures. I try to stay as down to earth as possible, but have been known to do some ‘baller’ things from time to time [baller meaning to live a lavish lifestyle]. I did buy a 2007 Maserati Quattroporte, and I am actually in the process of closing escrow on my very own house in a neighbouring city of Menlo Park, called Los Gatos.
Another cool thing was for my 20th birthday I rented a Sky Villa at the Palms, one of the Playboy suites, which came with a butler and was fully catered. Once the whole night was over, I think it ran to around $25,000.

Where do you see yourself and poker in ten years time? What about online players in general?

I hope I am still a force. Poker is a huge passion of mine and I am always learning. It is kind of crazy to think about the player of the future. It is amazing to look at the advancement online players have made. From Steve ‘MrSmokey1’ Billirakis winning event one of the World Series this year at 21, to Annette [Obrestad] taking down the WSOPE main event at 18. The game is only going to get harder…

Chris Ferguson

We relive his amazing, era-defining 2000 Main Event win and how you can follow in his footsteps
Everyone has tells, even he best players. And you better know your own

Chris Ferguson takes off the cowboy hat and runs his hand through his hair, looking momentarily dazed. He leans back and, with the hat and sunglasses gone, we can see the pain etched on his face for the first time. This is the moment that will decide who wins the 2000 WSOP main event. It was a moment that changed poker forever.
Flash forward to the autumn of 2006 and once again the hat and sunglasses are off and Ferguson sits agonised over a decision. He calls and watches as the flop comes down, ending his dreams for another day as two months of poker winnings tumble into cyberspace. He leans back in his chair defeated.
By late 2006 Ferguson was six months into a challenge to turn $0 into $10,000 on Full Tilt Poker. And he was starting card cheating to hate it. ‘There were times when I wanted to give up,’ he says, laughing now at the memory as he sits relaxing in a Cardiff hotel. ‘But when I set myself a goal I’m the sort of person who has to meet it.’
Ferguson had previously completed a challenge to turn $1 into $20,000 with relative ease, but the $10k challenge tested him in ways he hadn’t foreseen. ‘It was a lot tougher than I thought – considerably harder than the last one. I had to play these 900- player $40 freerolls. I forget how many I won, but in nine months I got $21 out of them.
‘I remember winning one and then spending three days thinking what to do with my $3. I decided to buy in for the minimum at the smallest no-limit hold’em cash game and five hands later I was out.’
In person Ferguson is rarely ruffled. He talks with a soft monotone, occasionally breaking into a gentle chuckle, and is a calm, unassuming presence. But as he recollects grinding away in those freerolls a look of genuine pain crosses his face.
‘People were playing against me and they didn’t think I was trying to win. It may be $2 to you, but it was close to a month’s work for me. If people knew how hard I was fighting over these freerolls they would find it so funny.’

MOMENT OF TRUTH

Eventually Ferguson hit a breakthrough, finishing second in a $1 tournament, and began a nine-month cash-game grind. He reached the $10,000 mark in September 2007 and it was as if a weight had been lifted. It also seemed to mark a rebirth of his tournament career. In November 2007 he won his third WSOP circuit event, making him arguably the most successful WSOP player this century.
Nobody embodies the spirit of the WSOP more than Ferguson. Since his main event win in 2000 he’s won bracelets in stud, Omaha and hold’em as well as three WSOP circuit titles. He’s also a class act, playing the game with a rare discipline and good grace.
So it’s gratifying that after two years of sitting out most of the major US tournaments, Chris Ferguson is ready to play big-time poker again. His long legal battle with the WPT over image rights has ended, and his favourite time of the year – the WSOP – is here.
Ferguson still has the hunger he had eight years ago when he shocked the world to take the title, presaging the internet revolution that was to follow. And as he starts to reveal what it takes to be a WSOP champion, those stories from 2000 sound as fresh as ever…
1994-1999

The Early Days

Chris Ferguson’s love affair with the WSOP began well over a decade ago in the early nineties, when he was still a PhD student at UCLA in California. He would spend his time playing on the IRC network, honing his no-limit hold’em skills and waiting for those few weeks in May.
CF: I would look at the schedule and choose two weeks when I could go. I would choose a week where I could play some no-limit events, some razz and lowball. Those were the events I wanted to play in. Then every evening I would go and play the super satellites. Back then I loved the satellite system. They were super soft.
The players really didn’t know how to play at all. They were horrible. No- limit hold’em cash games were never spread in a casino, and if you wanted to play no-limit hold’em you had to play a tournament. After 1995 when tournaments really started to take off people got a lot better.

As a predominately online player, Ferguson was under no illusions about the strength of his live game. This was the old-school WSOP where only a few eager amateurs would find their way through the satellites and the majority of the field were live poker veterans.
CF: I was very worried about people picking up tells on me, as I hadn’t played much high stakes. Everybody has infrared marked cards tells. Even the best players in the world have tells. And you’d better know your own tells. Of all the people in the world, your own tells are the ones you need to know the most. That’s going to help you the most, because you are going to learn to hide them. I developed this routine of staring at the centre of the pot so they wouldn’t know where my eyes were looking. A couple of years later I started putting the hands under the chin because it was more comfortable.
2000 WSOP>>>>>>

The First Day

By the time of the 2000 WSOP, in those days held at Binion’s Horseshoe in downtown Las Vegas, Ferguson was no longer the self-conscious amateur. He had notched up a string of cashes in big tournaments, and was already the holder of a WSOP bracelet (the $2,500 seven-card stud event). But looking back he admits he was far from the finished article.
CF: I definitely hadn’t honed my skills in 2000. I am a much better player now. I was really aggressive back then and that was the style that worked back in those days. Now when you are playing against other hyper-aggressive players I don’t think it works as well, but even today if I am the first one in the pot I will never call – I will either raise or fold.
I haven’t called a bet in the WSOP except in very specific situations in years. Certainly when I won my bracelet I never called a bet before the flop. If people limped in I would either raise or fold. If people raised I would either re-raise or fold. The only time I would ever call was from the blinds. But if someone raised from the small blind I would either re-raise or fold.
Some people like to do things like call with pocket twos and hope to flop a set. I don’t like that strategy. In early position I will just toss it, while in middle or late position I am going to raise with it. I will never just call. If you limp in with pocket deuces you have to limp in with some strong hands too. Now you are giving away a lot, because the big blind can flop two pair on you and you could lose a lot of chips with your big hands.
Despite this aggressive pre-flop approach, Ferguson is regarded as one of the tightest players on the circuit. In a more innocent age of no-limit tournament strategy, he was seen as a super-aggressive player, but times change. Ferguson hasn’t really though. It’s just that the rest of the world has caught up.
CF: I have a reputation as being tight among other professionals, but I just think it is the right way to play – especially against the top players. I see a lot of the other professionals getting out of line, and sometimes against amateurs you can do that and get away with it. I’m happy for them to play like that against me – they are not going to run over me.
But in general I am not one who feels I have to go out and accumulate a lot of chips. I’m trying to avoid risks to a certain extent. When I have a super-deep stack I am trying to avoid situations where I am going to lose a lot of chips. I want to avoid situations where I can lose a ton if he has a better hand.

The Second Day

Playing a tight-aggressive strategy worked for Ferguson in 2000. He found himself at the end of day one with an above-average stack of 30,300. With a solid foundation, Ferguson upped the aggression just at a point where people were starting to dream of the money. It’s a strategy he recommends to any less experienced player looking to take on the main event field.
CF: I think players tended to play too passively and would fold too much to raises. Back then my strategy was to put pressure on those types of players. For a fairly inexperienced player that’s still probably a good idea. I’m not saying it’s how I would play, but if you think you are outclassed a little bit you definitely want to take the more aggressive approach.
You hear people like Phil Hellmuth saying they don’t want to take risks in tournaments. But if you take the super- aggressive style you may not be as good a poker player as they are, yet you might outplay them. They may decide they don’t want to do a coin-flip and throw their hand away.
Eventually they will pick up a hand, but then you have two shots. You might have a better hand (unlikely) or you can suck out on them. And even if they win they are probably only winning the money you already stole from them.
Ferguson’s approach to mid-stage tournament play, however, is different. And it also differs from a lot of top players. He continues to play the game one hand at a time, not setting targets or objectives. He focuses on the cards, the players and that moment in time. Just as he did back in 2000.
CF: When the antes come in you have to play a few more hands. You have to loosen up a bit. In first position I will play 10-15% of my hands. If it’s folded around to me in second position I will play 16-18% of my hands and so on. But I don’t have any objectives in mind like stealing once per orbit. Just play the hand. Don’t worry about the past or the future, just play this one hand as well as you possibly can and most of the time that means fold.
Some people try to get too tricky and think they have to steal once per orbit. I let it take care of itself. I want to have as many chips as I possibly can, but I want to be in the tournament.

The Third Day

Ferguson finished day two with a huge 183,500, putting him ninth in chips and in the money with just 45 of 512 players remaining. He maintained his aggressive approach, and continued to find big hands at the right times. Before long he found himself down to the last ten, the point where the adrenaline really begins to surge. For Ferguson this meant sticking with the careful disciplined play that got him this far.
CF: You really want to avoid the coin-flip at that stage. There is so much money to be made climbing up the places. I’m even avoiding a 55/45. With ten players left you really want to move up the ladder at that point.

Jeff Shulman held a massive chip lead at this stage with 2 million of the 5.1m chips in play. Ferguson was still focused on playing one hand at a time though, and when Shulman made a standard button raise and he looked down at a pair of sixes he knew what his move had to be. However, he had no idea how significant this hand would prove to be.
CF: He was raising a lot and I hadn’t really been playing back at him, so I saw sixes and thought I couldn’t really lay this one down. It’s at least 10/1 he has a higher pair so I moved all-in. He called, which he got a lot of criticism for, but if he is going to raise half the time there it is hard for him to fold pocket sevens.
Having said that, I don’t think he had to call. I don’t think it was a bad play though. I think I got pretty damn lucky. I can’t think I played good poker, because I got my money in dominated. But I stand by the raise. Even if I know he has pocket sevens, how often is he going to call?

What happened next changed the face of the game. A six arrived on the flop, handing a huge pot to Ferguson and dramatically shifting the momentum of the final table. Three hands later Ferguson picked up Aces, Jeff Shulman picked up Kings and Cloutier picked up Jacks. TJ managed to get off lightly, raising to 200k only to see Shulman push all-in and Ferguson call.
CF: I would have considered a call in TJ’s position. Only because he was getting such huge odds. He had already put 200k in and he is calling 250k to win 1.4 million. Even if he is dominated he is getting about the right odds. And it’s a monster mistake to fold if he isn’t dominated.
Ferguson’s Aces held up and play ended for the day. For the first time Ferguson began to feel the magnitude of what he was about to achieve.
CF: During the whole tournament I had been very calm, but when I finished that day with 2.5 million and my nearest competitor had 500,000 – that was when I started to get nervous.

The Final Table

The final six took their seats in front of the TV cameras and the action took just two hands to kick into gear, when Ferguson knocked out Roman Abinsay to extend his chip lead. It took less than an hour to get down to four players, and when Chris Ferguson dispatched Steve Kaufman in third to go into heads-up play against TJ Cloutier he had a huge chip lead and it looked like it would be over in two or three hands. Even back then Ferguson was a heads-up expert, having played countless hands on IRC poker.
CF: You need a lot of concentration in heads-up play, because you are always in the action. Sometimes players at a nine-handed table get bored and play too many hands. You are not going to get that in heads-up. You have to play more aggressively. If I have position I am playing about 80% of hands. If I’m in the big blind I will play 80% of my hands to a minimum raise, but I will fold a lot otherwise. Position is really valuable.

But Cloutier staged an impressive comeback, playing a trappy style against the relentlessly aggressive Ferguson. He managed to level the chipstacks and Ferguson was visibly deflated. He admitted afterwards he was feeling outplayed and was looking for a spot to gamble. So when Cloutier re-reraised all-in following Ferguson’s 600,000 re-raise with A?-9?, Jesus was left with a tough decision. He held a narrow chip lead – did he want to gamble for the title? After several agonising minutes he made the call and Cloutier flipped over A-Q.
The board came 2-K-4-K, but then a red nine was peeled off and placed on the river. Chris Ferguson threw his hands up in the air and the online generation had its first winner – its first hero. It was a moment that changed the future of poker, and set the stage for the internet revolution that was to follow. All thanks to a slice of luck. Ferguson is sanguine looking back, and he’s the first to pay credit to the importance of luck in winning a poker tournament.
CF: Running good is really important in a huge tournament like the main event. I love these guys who win the WSOP and literally think they are the best player in the world. I guess it makes them happy, but unfortunately if they act on it and they are not right they are going to lose a lot of money.
I don’t think I will ever win the main event again. I’m confident in my ability, but I also have confidence in my ability to judge how hard it is to win the main event. Anyone can say they can win the main event, but not many can do it.