The fog of war and luck

Poker Strategy / Marcus Bateman / 23 December 2009 / Leave a Comment

Poker is a game where the successful player is effectively just making fewer mistakes than their opponent. People often think of the big, fancy moves in poker as the route to success, but in reality the cutting out of mistakes is much more important. A big bluff might feel good, but it will never be able to pay for the fact that you are simply playing too many hands (or too few for that matter).

Mistakes tend to come in poker when you are confronted by situations where you do not know how to behave. Just like the fog of war confusing soldiers and ruining sound battle plans, so it is in poker, where situations frequently arise where there is no one clear course of action.

In these situations players frequently make a mistake and get rewarded, which leads them to make the mistake frequently in the future through positive reinforcement; or to make the right choice and get punished, which leads them to start making mistakes in the future, through negative reinforcement. The huge amounts of luck in poker twist players into believing the wrong thing simply through humans being overly concerned with the results of a single hand.

Frequently you can be in a tricky situation where your course of action is extremely unclear, and it is these situations which truly separate strong and weak players. Just like in warfare, for the most part if you are unsure how to proceed you should err on the side of aggression. Weak players tend to capitulate in difficult spots, choosing to fold rather than look stupid/lose a larger pot, where as stronger players will usually go down fighting, calling with weak hands if the price is right, or trying to push people off pots if they feel they have a chance.

Obviously there is a fine line between well timed aggression and suicidal behavior (being able to show restraint in some of these situations is crucial to long term success), but on the whole you are better off trying to fight through confusion than back away from it. No one can make the right choices in every pot they play. Sometimes you will look stupid, sometimes you will lose a big pot where folding was a definite possibility, but strong players pick themselves up and keep fighting, and do not modify their playing style due to a bad run of pots, and this is crucial for your long term success.

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