Game theory is the mathematics of strategy. John Von Neumann, a Hungarian born mathematician, is considered the father of game theory. The sometimes poker player was inspired by the game to develop this branch of mathematics in the late 1920s.

Game theory studies decisions made in an environment where various participants interact. It takes into account the variety of choices that each person has at each point in the process and determines optimal behavior when weighed against the costs and the benefits of each action.

Unless a one-player game, a player’s choices will be influenced by the actions and behaviors of other participants. The games studied by game theorists consist of a set of players, a set of moves, or strategies, and a specification of the payoffs (benefits) for each combination of strategies.

Games fall under different categories. Poker is a zero-sum game. This means that the total value of the game stays the same or goes down. Zero-sum games provide benefit to only some players and always at the expense of others.

This is game theory in a nutshell. The main point with regard to poker is that each player should play depending on how the other players play. And may also play on how he thinks the other players will play based on his representation of how they are trying to optimize their profits.

In other words words the mathematics of game theory go like in a self-feeding loop, where the behavior of others will change our behavior, which in turn changes their behavior. In fact this is what the top pros master well, as they understand intuitively very well how they can play in a way to induce others to make mistakes.

Most of us feel that in poker there are only the cards, but if that were true participants in poker tournaments could be children or scholars. Texas Hold’em Poker tournaments differ from other games such as video poker because we play against other players and not against the house. In addition poker is more than just a card game and understanding the intangible aspects makes the difference between amateurs and professionals.

Focus and observe: Becoming too involved in a poker session and losing your head completely are mistakes to avoid. Pay attention to everything around you. Watch and listen carefully to your opponent to see his body’s posture and his face’s expression when he speaks. Many players talk in a relaxed manner but play with more tense movements. If observation alone does not give you too much of an edge over your opponent, you can apply aggression to test his reactions.

Psychology: There is of course a psychological aspect in the game of poker. By playing aggressively, you can intimidate the most passive of your opponents, so that you easily force them to fold when it is preferable to reduce the number of players involved in a given hand. Bluffing and deceiving are also very important and you must understand well the opponents using a lot of these types of bullying. Find their weaknesses as it is certain that at some point they will make a mistake. Such opponents offer better profit opportunities than the conservative rocks who only bet with a strong hand.

The extra-sensory perception: This skill comes with time and can help a player at times when he has nothing on which to build. A player who has developed this type of technique feels comfortable using his instinct even if it may seem a bit risky. For instance if your opponent makes a bit bet at the river, he would often be bluffing to try stealing the pot. Instincts may help in such scenario, as your subconscious could have noticed something you are not aware of.

Math: Mathematics is an essential element in poker because of the ability to assess the likelihood of whether certain situations with a large pot will conclude in your favor or not. Using odds and probabilities is crucial so that you can maximize profits and minimize risks and bad calls. If you base your game on odds calculations and not on your emotions, you will play closer to optimal poker.

In many articles on poker, you probably read that large pocket pairs like AA or KK should be raised or reraised almost always except in special situations. The basic theoretical idea is that you really want to limit the number of opponents in order to avoid luck to hit a garbage hand and destroy your beautiful hand.

What about middle pairs? Indeed, too many players are really struggling to fold their mid pocket pairs in the range from fives to tens. Such hands can be very strong to raise or call for set mining at the flop, but will be hard pressed to cope with serious aggression. This is very theoretical and an untold number of factors must be taken into account, but it is usually very difficult to defend this type of hand after a 3-bet, for example. You will likely be in a coin flip situation, or worse if your opponent has a pair just above yours.

The case of strong aces. While hands like AK or AQ are obviously strong for any poker player, remember that you do not have in any case a made hand and that you will need to hit the board to beat your opponent. I do not of course mean that you no longer play these hands, but that you must know to fold them if needed.

Indeed, after a raise or a 3 bet for example, unless you have a perfect knowledge of your opponents, it is usually very difficult to make 4-bet or to make a simple call with this kind of drawing hand.

In poker you need to understand situations and one of the most important skill is to know to fold. Fold or raise is a good approach. Either be the aggressor with such hands that have both fold equity and drawing potential, or fold if you are under the impression that your opponent has you beaten and will not fold easily.

Many of these principles and examples refer primarily to calling stations (9,1). The closer a player’s scores are to that extreme, the more likely he is to act, think, and feel like a calling station.

Calling stations do not play to win. They may say it, but even they do know that they do not mean it. They are so dominated by their passivity and desire to get along with other people that they take actions they know are foolish and leading to consistent poker losses.

Less extreme loose passive players have more self-control and flexibility. When dealing with a less extreme player such as a 7,3, you must be cautious in applying the above principles. You will still have to make the same sorts of adjustments, but you must use more judgment and expect a more effective and unpredictable opponent. You need to constantly look for stylistic variations and adjust to how he is playing now.

All loose-passive players are heavy losers. They lose more consistently than anyone, even the maniacs. Once people have identified a loose passive opponent, they will bet into him and raise him with abandon. They know he will call, even when he is clearly beaten. When he finally gets a hand and raises, nobody calls because they know what he has. Loose passive players have the worst possible combination: they give action, but do not get action, making them the easiest opponent to beat.

If either score is outside of the pattern (below 7 on looseness or above 3 on aggression), a player is outside of the corner labeled “loose-passive,” and some of the principles may not apply to him. He will be less predictable and harder to beat.

Since loose passive players share looseness and passivity with the adjacent comers, some parts of this section in the playing style map will overlap with the sections on loose-aggressive and tight-passive players. But they are worse players than these two types, and they are certainly the easiest opponents to beat at the poker table.

So if you find a loose passive opponent at your table, make sure to isolate him and target him in order to extract cash from him.

I play them like a big pair because that’s what the opponent is putting me on. It’s easy to lay it down if I get raised or check raised on the flop (because I usually have nothing). Of course a lot of times I raise, bet the flop and the opponent folds because he missed the flop. The times I hit the flop with a draw, 2 pair, or trips, it’s a gold mine.

Here’s my all time favorite scenario though:

I’m playing $2/$4 NL. I open raise to $16 with 98s. I get reraised the min to $28. This almost always means a big pair and better yet, it means if I hit the flop I’m going to bust the opponent.

So I call the $12. This is a very cheap price to pay to get a chance to take his entire chip stack. The pot is now $38 including the blinds. The flop comes 982 rainbow. I bet $20. The opponent raises to $80. I call.

The pot is now $198. I checked and he bet $100. I check raised all in to $310 and he called instantly. I have a feeling he’s somewhere out there telling his bad beat story about how his AA got cracked. If he would’ve reraised the correct amount preflop, I would’ve folded, but a min reraise is the perfect scenario.

So the moral of this story is pay attention to bet size. If you raise pre flop, do not min raise, but if you are the one getting raised, call in a deep stack situation where you may double up your stack.

The real big area that I miss this information isn’t in the play once on the table. It’s when selecting a table. I took advantage of IdleMiner for FullTilt and it would run for hours a day and I have a huge database on all the players at my level – and I always mine a few tables at the level above me as well. So very rarely would I sit down at a 6max tables and not have at least 200 hands on at least 5 of the players sitting there. This is HUGE when quickly evaluating the fishyness of a table.

My practice was, if I were playing $10NL on FullTilt, was to open all say 20 tables at the level. Let it run for like 5 or 10 hands and let Holdem Manager update and get going. Then I would filter through the tables by hand and look at the basic table stats – and then the rating on each player – and then lastly on the size of the stacks.

Any table with a VPIP under 30 was immediately closed down. Any table with a PFR% over 10% was closed down. Then of those tables that were left I looked at the ones with the highest average pot. At these tables I would look at what ratings I had for each player at the table. If I saw a 6max table with 4 weak players with at least 1 buy-in I would be mashing the button to get on the waiting list. Generally I didn’t mind if there was one other player that the stats told me was dangerous and a good player. It’s easy enough to avoid these players and still make money off the weak players. But any more then one generally and I would take that table out of the running.

Now be careful. Just because you see a fish – or two – or three at a table doesn’t mean it’s worth sitting at. If these guys have real short stacks you might want to just move on and find the next one. Why? Because I find that by the time I actually get at the table (assuming I have to get on the wait list), I will more then likely be replacing one of these fish from his seat. And two there are plenty of other players like me that are like vultures monitoring the tables and they will spot this juicy table too and many times I find myself 20 minutes later sitting at a table full of predators because we quickly sat down and busted the fish. To me sometimes it’s just not worth it.

So that’s my general algorithm for table selection. But not having these statistics available to me has really hampered my ability to find good tables on PokerStars. Generally I sit down and it takes me at least 30 minutes to even figure out if I have a good table or a bad table. The good news is as I play more, I get more and more statistics on the players around me and this problem should slowly lessen.

Back in the grind

I sat down for about 2 hours last night and just crushed it. It was one of those nights where even my marginal hands were holding up. I must have gotten pocket 10’s five or six times, and each time the flops fell, they held as over pairs. How often does that happen? It was nuts.

Also I don’t know what’s going on but I am flopping a lot of sets. I get these little pocket pairs and I am fairly confident now that I will hit the set on the flop. So much so that I don’t raise pre-flop cause I want as many people in as I can get. Those two things stand out in my head for my play lately.

So I sat down and 2-tabled it for two hours. My initial buy-in of $10 turned into like $28.22, and that was only after a tough suck-out on my last hand as I was trying to push the session total over $30. What’s the fuss about thirty bucks you say? Well that puts my little experiment bankroll now over $100 and moving pretty steady.

It also pushed my BB/100 mark to a little over 25. I have managed to maintain pretty good discipline with a SawFlop% of around 33%. That’s a little higher then I would like it to be – but at these limits it’s expected. For me it will be my main focus to tighten those screws as I move up.

I am still going to hold fast onto the fact that I want a $200 bankroll before I move to the $10NLHE tables, so I still have some time to go. I have also yet to take a considerable losing session so I know that will probably pop it’s head up sooner or later.

I am growing a little antsy at these tables as the better I play I do tend to think about “man if this was only 2-4 or even 1-2 this would be that much better.” But I knew I would think that at times, and it actually hasn’t happened that much. It’s all economies of scale and I am not really looking at the money as much as I am looking at it as “points.”

It was to the point last night where I had top set against two to a flush on the board and I go all in to get called by 2 players. When the turn and river come rag – rag I actually raised my hands in the air and pumped my fist. Looking back I am surprised I didn’t do the Tiger Woods fist pump. I was that excited about winning ten bucks. Haha this is free poker. When you look at it like that, it puts a big damper on things, but when you look at it as tripling up your buy-in that puts it in perspective.

I am finding that I am a guy that needs a comfortable bankroll. I like to play aggressive and lean on people. I like to serve out pressure on people and to do that you have to be pretty comfortable with your bankroll. At the $5 NLHE tables, it’s pretty easy to do that cause what do I care about 50 cents. But I know that will change as I move up, so in order to keep that sense of security I need to keep a nice sized secure bankroll.

It’s one thing for me to play tight and aggressive – but once I start to play tight conservative, I am off my game totally and my results usually show it. If I am able to sit at a table and get into my game, I fall into a flow and I usually start to see my buy in multiply.

That is probably my biggest goal when looking towards moving up. Being able to keep this sense of secure aggressive play. It is fun to watch as my personal play style seems to be surfacing from all the hundreds of poker books, magazines, websites and thousands of hands. I have such a melting pot of poker theory in my poker psyche that it’s nice to start to see my own sense form. And basically that’s the purpose of this entire experiment.

Yet despite that, I managed to grind out a nice win for the bankroll. I walked away from the two tables after just under two hours with a net of +$11. Not too bad doubling up my buy-in in 2 hours.

Not where I want to be – but on the right track. Like I said I don’t even feel like I played great cards. It was just a grind out session taking down pots mostly with aggression. Hey maybe that’s the secret. It definitely could have been more profitable, especially since the two tables were never even full tables. One was usually always like 8-9 players, and the other one was usually 5-6 so I had to loosen up a bit more on that one.

I am starting to feel my game adjusting. Not really “my game”, but I need to adapt my so-called poker game to these tables. It has been a while since I played this low and I needed to tweak my poker game a bit. Hopefully I don’t wreck what it was. But hey that is the goal of this experiment, blow up my old game and rebuild it from scratch.

Not bad to take a $5 initial bankroll and to turn it into 13x’s that in 13 hours of play. That’s basically doubling up the 5$ buy in each hour of play. Especially when you consider I had a couple problems trying to find my stride and adapt my game. Hopefully now it will start to snowball and I can get on a steady roll.

Good luck to you.

Normally I hate sessions like this. I hate when I am quickly down a buy-in or two. It’s pretty crazy cause I play super tight when I start a session. I like to pick my spots until I have some sort of image that I can work with. Also like I mentioned before, I tend to not have any Holdem Manager reads on players when I sit down – so for about the first 50 hands or so I basically just ignore any stats as the sample size is just too low (50 is still too low for some stats but ok for stuff like VPIP and PFR%).

Anyways I started grinding at the $10NL level and after about 2 hours had won back to even. I decided to call it a day because despite not winning any money – I was able to walk away feeling good about my overall play at the end.

Today I sat at my computer actually planning to play some SNG’s to mix things up a bit. Sometimes I do this as a sort of “reward” for myself as I enjoy some SNG and Tournament poker even though I feel my style is strongly more suited for cash. Anyway I logged in and noticed that I am only like 50 FPP’s from my deposit bonus of $50 and I decided to work that off before anything else.

So this time I decided to sit down at only three 25NL tables. Yes I know really it’s probably dumb – but I am stubborn and realize I can play at the level – and dominate – I just don’t have much room to move when variance throws a brick into my face when I first sit down. So I decide to only sit down at three tables rather then the normal four to increase my focus and concentration. I figure I have the $50 deposit as insurance and away I go.

Well let me tell you – I really need to start clocking some hours on the weekends and prime time. I played for overall about 3.5 hours and initially was probably down a buy-in across the three tables while I was just waiting to catch some hands. I had a couple hands where I rivered a second pair – only enabling me to then pay off some guy with a set. This happened twice and I hate when this happens. It’s an easy fold with one pair – but when I hit my kicker on the river it’s so hard to fold it to some of these passive players.

The first two hours were really odd. It seemed each hand I got it in good either pre-flop or on the flop – I ended up losing. So why isn’t this a bloodbath post about how much I hate poker? Cause when the reverse seemed to happen I sucked out some major river cards to take down some huge pots. It basically evened out.

I seriously think I am a much better player when I have a larger stack. Yeah I hear most of you saying “Duh” but I just think it really fits my game. I am able to apply much more pressure. And with my real aggressive style – when another player looks over and is trying to think “should I 3 bet him?” he knows that not only am I not afraid to mix it up – I also have the ability to felt them.

I think it just really lends itself to my styles’ image at the table. Now when I talk about style dont misunderstand. Generally at these levels image and style mean absolutely zero. But there is generally one – or maybe two people at a 6max table that will pay attention. You MUST identify these people and play accordingly.

For about the last 30 minutes of my session, I went on an insane run. It just seemed like I was getting good starting hands – and even when I didn’t my garbage turned to gold. I had two sets of quads (didnt get to win much with them though). I was also able to really assert myself on the table and was really being aggressive pre-flop. I also had the immense pleaser of tilting a few players with my constant aggression and 3betting.

Isn’t it an awesome feeling when you have raised this guy in the blinds 5 rotations in a row from the button, and when he finally decides to push back and shoves his $30 stack in against your $1 raise you look down at KK or AA. This happened to me. They finally got fed up with me and shoved trying to “make a statement” and wouldn’t you know it – I wake up with a monster. God that’s a great feeling.

Basically I milked this out for a bit – but I knew I was going to get caught at some point so I tightened up a bit and won a few more smallish pots and decided to just call it a day. It’s a great feeling in my quest to know that I basically just doubled up my bankroll (up $200 in winnings and the $50 from the bonus). Now my roll stands at $500 and I am able to comfortably and guilt free play $25NL.

I have another $300 on FullTilt but I think with all the deposit headaches going on these days I will just keep it there. I am nowhere near ready for 50NL right now anyways so I am in no rush to get my bankroll to that level.

This is a gambling series on television, including competition in eight different casino games; four per week, starting with Blackjack and ending a final game of Texas Hold’em poker. Among the pros participating in the series, there were three blackjack players, Ken Eniger, “Hollywood Dave” Stann and Joanna Wlodawer. And three famous poker pros, Evelyn Ng, David Williams and Mike “The Mouth” Matusow.

Holy good god is this show awful. Are they seriously trying to merge the WWE and Poker together? The two biggest tools I have ever seen were the Hollywood guy and the Chainsaw guy. Holy christ where they ridiculous. I honestly felt bad for these two as they continually embarrassed themselves time and time again trying to play up for the camera’s. I mean did that guy really get up walk across the blackjack table and do a chainsaw animation towards the other guy when he hit an All-in blackjack?

This was by far the worst Poker/Gambling TV production to date that I have seen. I mean it is far and above a huge chip leader in that category. Do not waste your time on this show. Watch “Poker After Dark” or “High Stakes Poker”, these poker series are great entertainment when you see the pros losing a half million dollars stack on a bad beat. And when Phil Hellmuth loses it, this is so hilarious. Or when Phil Ivey got bluffed by Tom Dwan.