Poker Is Not a Slot Machine Game

 

In Ed Miller’s book, Poker’s 1%: The One Big Secret That Keeps Elite Players on Top, he begins by advising his readers to not play poker as if it were a slot machine game.

I was immediately disappointed by this section of the book because he conflates slot machines with video poker machines. The 2 games are significantly different.

He could have made the same point and been more accurate, but here are some thoughts about why you shouldn’t play poker as if it were a slot machine game.

The Video Poker Example

For the sake of argument, we’ll assume that video poker IS a slot machine game, though, and proceed from there. If you’ve been reading my columns for long, you know how video poker works. You input your money, draw a hand, discard cards, and get paid off based on the poker ranking of your final hand.

You might get a 9 for 1 payout for a full house and a 6 for 1 payout for a flush, for example.

These payouts are fixed based on the value of the hand. According to Ed Miller, most Texas hold’em players play poker as if it were video poker. They try to make a big hand like a set or a flush.

Their goal is to get in cheap and try to flop something. They focus on implied odds.

What Are Implied Odds?

The idea behind implied odds is that even though you’re not getting good odds for putting your money in the pot right now, if you make your hand, you’ll get paid off at a higher rate later in the hand when your opponents keep calling your bets when you make your hand.

But, what often happens is that even though you THINK you’re going to stack someone when you make your flush, you win next to nothing when everyone folds. It’s not that hard to put you on a flush, after all.

And what’s worse is that unless you flop the nuts, you might wind up with the 2nd best hand and get stacked yourself.

Yes, a flush is a strong hand in no limit Texas hold’em, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to see the kind of payoff from it that you think you will.

Real money poker is a situational game, whereas video poker games are not situational. A flush pays off at the same amount no matter what. In poker, there’s a big difference between a flush with an ace in it – the nut flush – and a smaller flush.

And good poker players account for those differences in their actions at the table.

Good Poker Players Go Into a Hand With a Plan

An inferior player has a plan – it’s to make a flush and stack someone when he does.

A better poker player has a plan, too, but it’s multi-faceted. He’ll often try to win the blinds by raising preflop with his suited ace. The second part of his plan might be to bet into the flop with 4 cards to a flush as a semi-bluff. If he gets called in that situation, his plan might be to hit his hand and win on the turn or the river.

Also, most players are going into the game with the same plan. They’re hoping to hit a big hand and stack an opponent. If you’re playing with the same strategy as everyone else at the table, you’re going to see the same results as everyone else.

It’s a way to guarantee mediocre results.

20+ years ago, you could play this way profitably. There were still enough fish at the table willing to put their money into the pot with inferior hands.

Most players now are more sophisticated than that. They’re waiting to hit big hands, too.

The First Step in Getting Away From Slot Machine Like Play

The next step in a poker player’s evolution, according to Miller, is to become a tight aggressive player. This is better than the slot machine strategy explained previously, and Miller simplifies it succinctly.

Only play good hands preflop, bet if someone checks in front of you, and fold if someone raises.

This will work against many players, but it won’t work against an opponent who’s actually good at poker. You’ll win a lot of small pots by playing aggressively.

But it’s also really easy to beat a tight aggressive player. All you have to do is raise against him.

We already know he’s going to fold most of the time if you raise into him. So, it’s easy to crush such a player.

The tight aggressive strategy involves betting fairly often but folding in the face of a raise.

That’s a huge vulnerability to spot and an easy one to exploit. According to Ed Miller, 3 out of your 4 opponents at the poker table will be following one of those 2 strategies – the slot machine strategy or the tight aggressive strategy.

Another Step in Your Development as a Poker Player

If you believe that poker is a game of math, you’re well on your way to become an elite player. If you don’t believe that math in poker matters, you can resign yourself to mediocrity.

The next step beyond that is to start thinking about poker in terms of frequencies. This is more important than thinking about odds, outs, implied odds, hand ranges, value bets, or bluffs.

Your folding frequency is an important starting point. When your opponent bets, you have 3 choices:

• Raise

• Call

• Fold

How often you do each of those is your frequency. You have a raising frequency, a calling frequency, and a folding frequency. How often you do each affects how profitable each move is.

When your opponent bets into you, the frequency with which you take any of those actions has more to do with those actions’ profitability than the cards you’re holding.

At the same time, you do need to have some sense about how you play. If you call 100% of the time with 27 offsuit, you’re doomed to lose.

The goal is to pick hands that make sense in the game of poker and then getting your frequencies right. If your frequencies are better than your opponents’ frequencies, you’ll win more often than your opponent and earn more money.

This is the opposite of how most players think about the game. They look at how strong their hand is and decide to fold, call, or raise based on the strength of the hand.

But think about how important a folding frequency is. Every time you fold, your opponent wins by default. If you want to win against me, all you need to do is figure out which situations are ones where your folding frequency is higher than it should be.

Most players in today’s games fold too often on the turn and the river. If you want to win money at no limit Texas hold’em, you just have to increase your betting and raising frequency on the turn and the river.

What You Think Matters So Much Matters Less Than You Think

You might think that poker is all about reading your opponents and getting them to do what you want by manipulating their tendencies.

Or you might think it’s about trying to make a big hand and stack one or more opponents – that’s the slot machine strategy.

Or you might think it’s about being so aggressive that you just run over the rest of the table.

But those are all mistakes, according to Miller.

The stuff that really matters is getting your frequencies as close to correct as possible. This means closing in on the optimal frequencies for:

• Checking

• Folding

• Calling

• Betting

• Raising

If you can get close enough to the right frequencies for all these options in multiple situations, you can win more money than you lose at the poker table.

The 2 Basics of Poker Frequencies

The math behind poker is complicated, but it does eventually boil down to 2 rules that will hold up in most situations:

The first is that if your opponent bets or raises, it’s usually more profitable to call.

The second is that if you bet on one street, and your opponent calls, it’s usually correct to bet again on the next card.

Let’s say there’s $100 in the pot and your opponent bets $100 on the river. If you call, you’re getting 2 to 1 on your money.

This means that as long as you think you have at least a 1 in 3 probability of winning with this hand, you should call.

It also means that if you fold more than 50% of the time, his bet is profitable regardless of what cards he’s holding. You’re just giving him money.

And these frequencies change if your opponent is betting less. Suppose your opponent is betting $50 into that $100 pot instead. The odds change to where you’re getting 3 to 1 on your money instead of calling.

Your opponent makes money if you fold more often than 33% of the time.

Conclusion

Miller’s book goes into dramatically more detail about the various situations and frequencies in the game, but the point of this post should be clear now.

Poker is a dramatically different game from a slot machine or even a video poker machine.