What you don't see Part 1

Live Cash Games / Marcus Bateman / 31 January 2011 / Leave a Comment

Had this player looked at the evidence of what the youngster was not doing, rather than what he was, his decision here would have been trivially easy.

In Silver Blaze, one of the fifty six Sherlock Holmes stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, one of the key clues in solving the case comes in the form of a pack of guard dogs not barking when a supposed break in occurred. This is an important point in poker, as it is often thought that it is only from pieces of immediate evidence that conclusions can be drawn about a player, but in reality, a lot more can often be found out by the moves that your opponent is not making.

As an example, I remember a hand played in a cash game in the Vic I was sitting in, where a young player who was very loose and aggressive pre flop and on the flop, but much tighter for big bets late on in the hand, check-raised a player on the river for the rest of his stack. The player called, only to be shown the nuts, and then later complained about what a cooler it was considering how many hands the kid played.

However, had this player looked at the evidence of what the youngster was not doing, rather than what he was, his decision here would have been trivially easy. Although this kid had turned up with all types of hands in small pots due to his very loose early street style, he was basically never showing up in big pots without monster hands. He was certainly not making moves like huge river check raises as bluffs, and a lot more could be inferred about his play from what he was not doing than what he was.

Very few players actually balance these sort of huge plays well, and it only takes a small look over my PokerTracker to see how rare these sorts of moves are amongst most low stakes players - even ones who are hyper loose and aggressive - who basically always have rates of less than 2% (I compared this to a small sample from Yorkie Puds 50NL database and the top ten all had a river check raise percentage of 0%!). People often think about advertising and image in poker in terms of hands they have shown-down, or big calls they made, but simply never making a certain move in a certain spot can be just as telling a piece of information to the astute player.

In the follow up to this, I'll be looking at just why this apparent lack of information is so useful in poker, and why people's psychological tendencies make this an even bigger information source than it first appears.

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