Kasi-Blog

On the weekend, I went to a poker game. The pay-in was 5 Euro, played at two tables of six players each. The game was Texas Hold’Em. Each player received an initial capital of 10.000 units. I had to quit the game at midnight, by then I had about 25.000 units. I gave the money to somebody at the table who had lost all his money in an earlier round. Three hours later he made it to the third place. Poker, and especially Texas Hold’Em is an easy thing. If you do it right.

• First rule – Only bet money that you can give away. If you need to win to pay off something else, you can surely forget that you have any luck. So play for fun, not for necessity.
• Second rule – The aim is to win money, not to win the game. There is nothing bad in discarding bad hands, if you must.
• Third rule – you don’t need to know the rules – ask instead. Texas Hold’Em has a lot of rules, not everybody plays with the same rules. It is not dumb to ask for these rules. Plus, it will give you more information about your opponents then their betting will do in the first round. How they present their game tells you lot about their personality: arrogant, friendly, anxious, clear-thinking – all these characters you can see already before even the first hand is dealt, if you ask enough questions.
• Fourth rule – if you still have some money, then don’t fold before the first flop. Do not give away the cards too early. The odds are good enough that even bad cards will find a match in the open cards . Dare to play under any circumstances.
• Fifth rule – calculate your chances. Only real experts can calculate their chances in their head in real time, but go through this short list: – does my hand have two cards of the same kind? – does my hand have two cards of the same color? – does my hand have two cards which are in a range of three to four cards, such as a seven and a nine? – does my hand have high cards? If you can answer “Yes” to any of these questions, you have a realistic chance of winning.
• Sixth rule – bet little money right from the start. Don’t let yourself get taken away by the size of the pot, or the bets of your opponents. Small steps when raising the stack will signal that you have a modest deck. If you have a bad deck, then you won’t lose to much money. If you have a good deck, you opponents will continue to put in money in the pot. And you have the surprise moment if you suddenly go all-in.
• Seventh rule – don’t bluff. Sun glasses, poker face – if on average you play an honest face, which means modestly raising if you have a good hand and slowly raising or folding if you have a shitty hand, it will pay off. Don’t underestimate how much people can read in your gestures, your eye-movements or your betting styles. Experienced players can see these signals – if you are not an experienced player you can only answer with honesty.
• Eighth rule – if you have to bluff, then try to distract yourself. In tournaments and in online games this is not so easy. But if you play in a friendly setting, engage in conversations with your opponents. Ask them about their hobbies. Tell jokes. But do this continuously – if you are only friendly when you face tough odds, it will surely show.
• Nineth rule – once all the cards are open and the showdown comes closer, the situation changes. If a lot of people are still in the game and your hand is lousy, then quit. If a lot of people are still in the game and your hand is good, then wait for others to quit or encourage them gently to be brave enough. If there are one or two people left, it is time to challenge them. Random behaviour is now the best strategy. The best thing is if you make this openly: take out a coin – if it is heads you go in with big money, if it is tails then with small money. At this point of the game, there is no sense in behaving rational.
• Tenth rule – there are a few times in the game where you can behave like a total lunatic. For instance, if you have to go, if you need to go to the toilet, if you can truly convince your players that you don’t care about the money then make an all-in blind. I have seen this work several times, especially if you announce an all-in blind (by the way, what I mean with this is that you declare you will go in regardless of the cards). The first thing that will happen is that 4 out of 5 players will fold even if they have good cards. They don’t want to bet all their money. This means that the reckless people who stay in the game often don’t have cards which are too good. They bluff. And this is your chance – with an all-in you can sit and relax while the cards are being unfolded. And often this happened to me: I won these crazy games. And I ended up with twice as much money as before. Which is then the perfect moment to quit the game.

By the way, if you want to know about the real economics of poker, you can ask Steven D. Levitt.

This entry was posted on Samstag, März 17th, 2007 at 17:10 and is filed under kasinomics. Tags: economics, game, poker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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