Zoom out

The following thing has happened to me a lot. I study poker with John Doe once in a while. John and I are scheduled to study in a few days. I get an email from John saying that he hasn’t had a chance to play, or that he doesn’t have any interesting hands to go over, so maybe we should postpone another week.

To John, studying poker is about reviewing hands.

Then let’s say that John and I get together to study and have some interesting hands to go over. Here’s another thing that I often find. We go through a hand pretty quickly — maybe two or three minutes — decide what we think the right play would have been, and then we move on to the next hand.

In my opinion, John is too “zoomed in”. I think he would benefit from zooming out when he studies poker. Let me explain what I mean by that with an example.

Last night I was playing 1-2 at Red Rock. I had a spot where I think I should have made a big bluff, but I didn’t pull the trigger. Someone limps EP, main Villain limps behind, someone else limps, I iso to $15 from the CO with J8hh, and they all call. Flop comes KQ6r and it checks around. Turn is an offsuit 3.

It checks to the main Villain, she bets $53 into the $61 pot, and it folds to me. I have about $220 behind. I wanted to shove, but I folded. (She showed 53o FWIW.)

Why I wanted to shove is a little bit beside the point of this post, but it’s still worth some explanation. There’s a handful of reasons why, but the most important one to me is this lady’s preflop range. When she called my iso, she kinda mumbled to herself, “Ugh, I’m playing loose”. I don’t think she was trying to be deceptive. I believed her when she said that. So I really don’t think she has any sets. She’d probably 3bet KK and QQ, and I don’t think she makes that comment with 66 or 33. Or with KQ, K6s, or even K3s. Which leaves her with very little value. After playing around in Premium Poker Tools, I came away pretty confident that a shove would have been +EV.

Now, back to the main point of this post: at this point when people study, they often just move on to the next hand. I propose that you do something different. I propose that you zoom out:

• Ask yourself what you would do if she didn’t make the comment preflop.
• Ask yourself what you would do if she tends to play a tighter range in general preflop (this lady played a lot of junky hands).
• Ask yourself what you would do if you were shorter stacked.
• Ask yourself what you would do if you were deeper stacked.
• Ask yourself what you would do if she’s a good handreader.
• A bad handreader.
• If you have a bluffy image.
• Etc. etc. etc.

Try to look at it this way. There are soooooo many possible spots you could find yourself in as a poker player. Let’s just call it a trillion different spots.

If you only ask yourself what you would do in this one specific spot, well, that’s not really helping you that much. You’re probably never going to find yourself in that one specific spot ever again.

But, if you ask yourself what you would do in a bunch of related spots — if you zoom out — now you’re really helping yourself grow as a poker player.

Note that this concept isn’t unique to poker. Imagine that you just get your first job as a lawyer and want to understand how your mentor approached a certain case. Imagine that you’re a programmer trying to understand how your team lead was able to fix that nasty performance issue. Imagine that you’re a chef trying to understand why the owner adds fish sauce to the tomato sauce. You’re not just trying to understand that one particular scenario, you’re trying to get some more general takeaways.

Maybe you think I’m arguing against a strawman here. Take the J8s hand for instance. I was saying that most people figure out what they want to do there, and then move on. I was sort of implying that they weren’t taking away any general lessons here. Maybe you want to respond and say that that’s not true. That by studying that specific hand, you naturally just sort of are able to see how things would be different under different circumstances. Maybe it’s just really clear that when we add all of the sets and other value combos to her range, that we no longer have a +EV bluff, for instance. Or that if she was a typical weaker 1-2 player, her range would be too value-heavy for us to make a play at the pot.

Here’s my response to this. Yes, this happens. By studying one hand, you do naturally extract out some general lessons. However, I think that by explicitly trying to zoom out and ask yourself a bunch of related questions, you’re going to be able to extract out many more general lessons than you otherwise would. And I think that doing so is usually a better use of your study time than simply moving on to the next hand.

Let’s end by returning to the very beginning of this post, where John wanted to postpone the study session because he didn’t have any hands to review. I always find that a little silly. It doesn’t mean you can’t study poker! You just have to zoom out!

For example, instead of studying a particular hand, try to study something more general, like triple barreling them off top pair. Try to get a feel for when it is, and when it isn’t profitable to make that play. Try studying value 3betting, or 3bet bluffing, or cbet sizing, or whatever else you find interesting. There is so much to the game of poker. So many of these more general situations that you can study.

Again, you don’t need a particular hand to study these sorts of things. You’re zooming out and asking yourself what you want to do with different hands, against different Villlains, on different boards, with different stack sizes, etc. etc. etc. If you do this, I think that you’ll find your study time to be a lot more productive.