Looking at hands in the light of day

An important part of becoming a better poker player is having the willingness and openness to look back critically at hands you've played and see if there is anything you should have done differently. The most obvious time to do this is when you've lost a big pot. One of the great things about playing poker on the internet is that you have at your disposal both the technology and the audience to enable you to get almost instant feedback from other poker players on a hand you've played.

I did this with hand 3 from my terrible Rush session last night, the hand where I called all in on the turn w/ TPTK and lost to a turned nut flush. I converted the hand using the Flop Turn River hand converter (http://poker-tools.flopturnriver.com/Hand-Converter.php) and posted it for discussion in my two favourite discussion forums, Full Contact Poker (http://www.fullcontactpoker.com/) and 2+2 (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/). What I came to realize thanks to the feedback on the hand was that my call in that hand was stupid. My thought process at the time was, "There are lots of hands besides the flush he could have," but completely overlooked the fact that many of the other hands in his likely range also had me beat: QQ-AA, 33, KQ, AK with a diamond. The reality is that there were very few hands he would play that way that I beat (since I had no read to suggest he was a laggy maniac).

This brings me to an interesting article I came across today when looking on the internet for articles on poker psychology: Smith G, Levere M and Kurtzman R (2009). Poker player behavior after big wins and big losses. Management Science 55(9): 1547-1555. In the article the authors examined millions of hands from three levels of NLHE cash play online: 50NL, 200NL, and 1000NL (if I recall correctly). Their conclusion was that at all levels of play, single large pots lost had a significant impact on the players, causing them to become both looser and more aggressive immediately following the loss. The theory supporting this finding is called the "break-even" model, whereby when gamblers suffer a big loss they adopt a strategy designed to get them back to even as quickly as possible. In poker this translates to playing more hands in the hopes of getting lucky and flopping big, and getting more aggressive in the hopes of pushing opponents off pots. This is likely a key component of what we know as "tilt" in poker.

Although I wasn't playing loosely in that particular hand, it is certainly possible that I subconsciously slipped into break-even thinking after getting stacked on the previous two unlucky hands. Instead of slowing down, thinking through the hand carefully, and making a difficult but disciplined decision to fold to the turn push, I rushed (no pun intended) into making a bad call. The result speaks for itself.

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