Memory: A Few Surprises

Ah, memory, our precious capacity. We recall past events, relive them, summon anew the emotions linked with them - and, of course, conveniently edit them for future needs.
Memory makes us human. No other creature can, with the flick of a neuron, revive the past, reignite old passions, reconvene special moments and treat these ephemeral visions as though they were real and palpable - not fleeting phantasms or illusions. Without a past, there could be no present.
For the poker-playing members of our species, our memories are precious weapons. We recall the patterns of actions of particular opponents. We remember the bozo in the Hawaiian shirt who dangerously overplayed his hands, the grizzled old codger who turned out to be a bit trickier marked cards than we first thought and, of course, we can rerun the vision of that sweet young thing in the cut-offs who ... ??? ... now what did she have that hand when she kept leaning over toward me ...?
And, of course, we need these "remembrances of things past." Our bankrolls depend on our memorial abilities. If we don't use them, we'll lay down the best hand against the bozo, get trapped by the old codger and dump (perhaps willingly) our entire stack into the lap of Sweetums.

Where am I? Where's my brain medicine?

But, take care. Memory isn't what you may think it is. Memory is not a recording tape; it isn't a video system. We don't just pick up information from the world about us and record it for playback.
Memory is very complicated and, so, here comes another of "the professor's" short lectures - poker lessons included.
First, we don't remember things we didn't pay attention to. In a fascinating study, while people were analyzing the video replay of a basketball game, a woman twirling an umbrella walked across the screen.
More than half the viewers never noticed her. Of those who did, many couldn't recall an umbrella. But if they were warned that something unusual might happen, they saw her and the umbrella.
Poker Moral: Watch what is happening around you at the table. Try not to get too absorbed in one part of the game because you will miss other information that may turn out to be important later.
This is particularly true when playing online, where it is easy to get distracted and not notice who actually put in the first raise. It is an especially important factor when playing multiple tables.
Second, we don't remember things with anything approaching accuracy. In fact, human memory is quite dreadful. We think that we know what we saw; we believe in our recollections, but the data show otherwise.

He was a short man with green hair, wearing pants on his arms if I remember correctly.

Studies of eyewitnesses to crimes are revealing, and upsetting. People's memories for the actions observed, the clothing, age, race and even sex of the offender are often wrong. What witnesses report are not things that actually happened but things that were important to them at the time. For example, if an intruder was armed, they will recall that marked card tricks, but not the color of his jacket.
Poker Moral: Don't trust your recall of particular hands. In fact, if you don't believe me, try this. Write down all the details of a recent hand you played. No "baby" hands please ("I raised with AA; he called with KK"). Pick a hand that had some play to it, with a raise or two and more than one caller. Try to lay it all out with enough detail so that someone else would know what happened.
See what I mean? Not easy, was it? Perhaps now you understand why you online mavens keep clicking on the "last hand" button. I know I do, if only to assure myself that I really processed what was happening.
Third, emotions will affect your recall. Sometimes they are helpful; others not so. An event that is poignant and significant tends to be recalled accurately.
I once lost a huge three-way pot (well, huge for the level I play, a tad over $5,000) when my red aces (against KK and the black aces) got leveled by runner-runner clubs. I recall the setting, the table, the other players; I still see the cards with a crystalline vision (although, admittedly, the size of the pot may have grown with the telling ... I can't recall ...).

I was surrounded by crocodiles ... I can't remember a thing!

On the other hand, emotions can also lead you astray. In those studies of eyewitnesses, the more frightening the setting, the less accurate the memory.
Actually, some of this effect is due not to a disrupted memory, but to an inaccurate or inappropriate interpretation of what happened. If you were frightened, angry or upset you're likely to mischaracterize what transpired so it fits with your emotional state. Intruders become bigger and fiercer; attack dogs grow more teeth.
Poker Moral: Don't misinterpret your opponents because you're upset. There is an understandable tendency to think that someone who sucked out on you is a terrible player. He may be. He may not be. But don't let the memory of that hand control how you interpret his actions in the future.
Fourth, memories are fleeting and what remains in our mind's eye is often a distant depiction of the truth. We recall the convenient; we twist events of the past to suit the present and misrepresent history to smooth the future.
Poker Moral: Don't trust your memory of how much you won/lost in any session more than few hours old. Don't believe the tales you tell yourself about how you played a hand, toyed with a table of tough Vegas regulars or dealt with a losing streak of epic proportions. Don't always believe your personal myths of mucked monsters, called bluffs, escaped traps.
Some of the tales you tell yourself may be right but, probably not. An awful lot of people can't recall whether they saw the movie or read the book ... or just heard the plot described by someone else.

Zen and the art of record-keeping.

Final Poker Moral: Be as honest as you can be with yourself. Keep records. Work on that Zen-like calm that will enable you to step beyond the many failures of our memory systems.
Author Bio:
Arthur Reber has been a poker player and serious handicapper of thoroughbred horses for four decades. He is the author of The New Gambler's Bible and coauthor of Gambling for Dummies. Formerly a regular columnist for Poker Pro Magazine and Fun 'N' Games magazine, he has also contributed to Card Player (with Lou Krieger), Poker Digest, Casino Player, Strictly Slots and Titan Poker. He outlined a new framework for evaluating the ethical and moral issues that emerge in gambling for an invited address to the International Conference of Gaming and Risk Taking.
Until recently he was the Broeklundian Professor of Psychology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Among his various visiting professorships was a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Now semi-retired, Reber is a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

How to Crush Live $1/$2 No-Limit Hold'em

$1/$2 No-Limit Texas Hold'em is by far the most popular poker game being played in casino poker rooms.
Without a doubt, your average table features a motley crew of fish waiting to give their money away.
With a little help from this article, you'll get your fair share of it.
The Game
The game is $1/$2 No-Limit Texas Hold'em, the Chevrolet Cavalier of poker. The minimum buy-in is $40 and the max $200.
$1/$2 is the smallest No-Limit game run in most casinos and for that reason the games are very, very soft.
Your Average Opponent
$1/$2 games are inhabited by everyone from 60-year-old nits, to first timers, to gamboolers who raise every hand, to young, sunglasses-wearing wannabe pros.
Some of these players are actually good, but most are not. They're first-level thinkers, thinking only of their two cards and nothing else.
They are going to be clueless to the fact that you've folded the last 30 hands and are now betting hard into them.
What they're going to be doing is thinking, "I has a pair of jacks; how much?" and then pushing the required chips into the pot.

Target acquired.

 

These players are your targets, and the source of the bulk of your winnings.
Loose-passive players have two major weaknesses - they call too often before the flop and they take their hands too far after the flop.
You'll often hear new players lament about how it's impossible to beat fish because all they do is call.
This sort of thinking is so fundamentally wrong it's laughable.
Players who call too much are the ATMs of the poker world, readily dispensing money to whoever has the patience to wait for a good hand.
Your Ideal $1/$2 No-Limit Hold'em Strategy
You play tight, you make top pair or better and you bet! Not exactly groundbreaking stuff. Play ABC poker, make your good hands and bet them.
Loose-passive calling stations will do what they do best: call. So let them call, stop bluffing them, and value bet your good hands relentlessly.
When you play tight before the flop, you make your post-flop decisions easier. By playing solid hands before the flop you will make solid hands after the flop.
When you eliminate marginal hands from your repertoire you'll find yourself with fewer difficult decisions after the flop.
Your goal is to flop top pair with a good kicker or better. You have to avoid getting caught up in the table flow.
Just because half the table is limping in up front with K♥ 3♠ doesn't mean you have to.
Stick to playing tight and focus on playing hands that can flop big.

Playable Hands at $1/$2

Big Pocket Pairs (AA - TT)
These hands are already made for you. A single pair is often good enough to win at showdown, so when you start with one infrared contactlenses, you're ahead of the game.
Big pocket pairs are such big favorites that you should always raise them for value when nobody has raised in front of you. With aces, kings, queens and even jacks you should often even reraise.

Stick to playable hands.

 

The profit in these hands comes from when you flop an overpair to the board or a set. When you do, bet.
Your loose-passive opponents will be more than happy to call three streets with worse hands.
Good Top-Pair Hands (A-K - A-J, K-Q)
Top-pair hands are hands that make top pair and when they do so, do it with a good kicker.
In a game where most of your opponents are loose-passive, your kicker is going to make you a lot of money.
For example, if you have K♣ Q♣ and the board comes king-high, you can bet three streets for value against a loose-passive player.
He will be more than happy to call all the way down with K♦ 9♠ only to find his kicker is no good.
Good top-pair hands are good enough for a raise when the pot has not been raised before you.
Top-pair hands do better against one opponent than many, so keep that in mind when choosing your bet sizes.
Speculative Hands
These are hands that are rarely going to win at showdown unimproved, but when they hit they make big-pot hands.
A big-pot hand is a hand like a set, a full house, a straight or a flush. Holding these hands, no matter what the action, you're ready to put your stack on the line.
They are speculative hands because they have to hit before they'll be worth anything. They rely on the implied odds that you win your opponent's stack when you do hit.
Ideally you would like to see the flop as cheaply as possible with these hands. Speculative hands do best when played in position, so be wary about playing them from up front.
Pocket Pairs (99-22)
Pocket pairs make huge hands when they flop sets. Sets are often hidden, and you can easily stack someone who has top pair or an overpair.
For that reason it's OK to limp pocket pairs from any position.
When facing a raise, you have to think about your opponent. If he is a tight player and is unlikely to pay you off when you do hit, you're best off folding.
If, however, he is a loose player (or you're multiway with more than one loose player), you can call a reasonably sized raise to play for "set value."
The main thing about pocket pairs is that when you hit a set you should almost always be looking for the best way to get all your money into the pot.
Suited Connectors, Suited One-Gappers (Q-Js - 67s, K-Js - T-8s)
Suited connectors are great hands, played within reason. They do make both straights and flushes - both big-pot hands.
The problem is they don't do it nearly as often as you might think.
When you're in early position, you're best off folding low suited connectors.
If your table hasn't been seeing too many raises before the flop, you can limp the best suited connectors like J♥ T♥ or Q♠ J♠. All others should be folded.
Suited connectors are hands that play well in position. More often than not you're going to miss the flop or hit a weak one-pair hand.
Playing them from out of position, in contrast, is going to put you in too many marginal spots after the flop.
Suited connectors should rarely be played versus a raise unless you are on the button and it is a multiway pot, or the raise is very small.
Suited Aces (A-9s - A-2s)
Suited aces are decent speculative hands because they can flop the nut-flush draw and they do have some high-card strength with the ace.

durrrr can play 6-3o. You can't.

 

Nut-flush draws obviously have value because you can stack smaller flushes.
The problem with flushes though is that they are right there in the open. Everyone is always aware when a flush draw comes in, and as such it is sometimes difficult to get paid.
Suited aces are good hands, but not good enough to limp in from any position. You should be more willing to limp the closer to the button you get.
Against a raise suited aces should seldom be played. You're not going to flop a flush nearly as often as you flop a pair of aces with a weak kicker.
A weak pair of aces can be a curse. You feel like you have top pair and should see a showdown, but by the time you get there you find yourself outkicked and half a stack short.
Weak Top Pair Hands (K-Jo, Q-To, etc.)
These are hands that you want to steer clear of for the most part. They are dominated hands and should be avoided at all costs unless you can get in cheap from late position.
From early position and/or against a raise they should not be played at all.
They don't make many straights or flushes, and when they hit a pair you're going to find yourself on the losing end of the kicker battle more often than not.
Everything Else
Everything else is trash and should not be played marked cards even if it is suited. Suited trash is still trash.
Players get themselves into trouble all the time playing weak suited trash because they think they're going to make a flush.
You don't make a flush with weak hands nearly as often as you may expect, and the rest of the time you're bleeding money. Stop playing them.

Position, Position and Position

The importance of position can't be overstated.
Many people think they understand the concept of playing in position, but they routinely call raises with marginal hands, only to play the rest of the hand out of position.
This is a leak that costs you money. When you're out of position you're playing a guessing game - you have to anticipate what your opponent may do.
They dictate the flow of the hand: if they don't want to put more money in, they don't; if they want to bet three streets, they do.
Which is why being in position is so important: it puts you firmly in the driver's seat. You get last say on everything.
If you want to see a free showdown you do; if you want to value-town someone, you do.
Your opponents will be guessing, just as you are when you're out of position.
As the better player, with the advantage of being in position, you'll ensure that they're guessing wrong more often than right.

First you get the cards. Then you get the moniez.

 

Sit Back and Wait for the Dollars
That's really all there is to it. The most important skill you can have at $1/$2 is patience.
Sit back and wait for a good hand. You should be folding 80% of your hands.
Do not get involved just because you are bored. Start with solid holdings and make solid hands after the flop.
When you're card-dead, that doesn't mean you should be sitting around watching TV. Pay attention to the game and your opponents.
Profile them in your mind; identify who the weak players are and what their tendencies are.
If you know who the loose players are and who the tight players are, you'll be able to understand their bets and raises and what they mean.
Once you figure out your opponents' tendencies, the rest is just a waiting game. Make your big hand and value bet.
Exploit the calling stations and force them to put their money in with worse hands.
$1/$2: it's an easy game.