Reciprocality: The Cause of Profit at Poker-III

Reciprocality: The Cause of Profit at Poker
Part Three
by Tommy Angelo

From part one:

Before anything flows, there must be a difference. Between different elevations, water flows. Between different pressures, air flows. Between different poker players, money flows.

In the world of reciprocality, it's not what you do that matters most, and it's not what they do. It's both. Reciprocality is any difference between you and your opponents that affects your bottom line. Reciprocality says that when you and your opponents would do the same thing in a given situation, no money moves, and when you do something different, it does.

You can mine for reciprocal gold anywhere in the poker universe. In this four-part series I will examine reciprocality as it applies to information, position, bankroll, quitting, tilt, and betting.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Position Reciprocality

"The first shall be last and the last shall be first." -- Jesus

Think of every hand of poker. Think of the enormous number of hands played on the internet, and then add to that every hand played in home games and casinos. Now think of that sum total of all hands, broken down to street by street. All those streets. Now think of how many of those streets were and will be headsup. All those headsup streets. Millions, billions, whateverillions, it's a lot. Now consider this. Every one of those streets has exactly one thing in common. Someone goes first, and someone goes last.

I agree with anyone who has said that acting last is better than acting first. But we have to slow down here -- because this is delicate. Position reciprocality is not the difference between first and last. It's the difference between firsts and lasts. When seen through the lens of reciprocality, positional advantage does not belong to the player who acts last. It belongs to the player who acts last most often.

The advantage of acting last exists during every round of betting. It's always there, at every moment, like home field advantage during a football game. At pro football, during the regular season, to keep everything fair, each team plays half their games at home and half on the road. The rules do not allow a team to create a home-game/away-game reciprocal advantage simply by folding their away games. But at poker, we are allowed to do exactly that. We can fold our "away games," our bad positions, and thereby act last more often than we act first, and thereby create an advantage.

Bankroll Reciprocality

There's your net worth, and after that it's all just accounting. You can say you have a poker bankroll, but really what you have is an imaginary, movable wall between some of your money and the rest of it.

Behind your main poker bankroll wall, there are two other walls on wheels that you construct and maneuver. There's the money you partition off and put on the table to bet with. That's one bankroll. And then there's whatever other funds that are immediately available to you while you are playing, such as the money in your pocket, or maybe even the money in your buddy's pocket. Wherever it is, if it's money that is not on the table, and you can get to it without losing your seat, that's another bankroll. So all together, you have three separate bankrolls when you play. That means you have three ways to run out of money. You can go table broke, pocket broke, and broke broke.

Let me ask you something. Do you play your best game when you are running out of money?

I sure don't. The less concerned I am about funding, the better I play. And I believe the same is true for my opponents. So really, all I have to do is partition my money better than they do, and I make money. Reciprocality.

Quitting Reciprocality

"Walking away is easy. The hard part is standing up." -- me

I have always had very strict policies when it comes to quitting, even when I first started playing poker. Back then I had two main quitting rules that I absolutely never broke. I would always quit if I was out of money and nobody would lend me any, and I would always quit if everybody else did.

Eventually I quit all that stuff. I quit running out of money, and I quit being the last guy to quit. Nowadays I think of quitting as a skill set unto itself, with branching subsets of skills for each type of quitting situation. There's knowing how to quit at limit games, and there's knowing how to quit at no-limit. There's knowing how to quit when you have a curfew, and when you don't. There's being able to quit when you're ahead, and when you're stuck. There's quitting when you feel good, and for when that doesn't happen, you need to know how to quit when you feel bad. There are many ways to outquit your opponents.

One thing about tournaments is nobody ever quits. That decision is done for you, or rather, to you. The good news is, it is impossible to make a bad quitting decision in a tournament. The bad news is, your opponents can't screw it up either, which means there is no reciprocal gold to be found in tournaments by the superior quitter.

By one way of looking at it, I have made tens of thousands of terrible quitting decisions. Times when everything was wrong. When I was tired. And tilted. And the game was bad. But I'd play on. I'm talking situations where a panel of quitting experts would unanimously decree: "You are severely injured and you are bleeding all over the table. Quit. Quit now."

But I wouldn't. I'd take the next hand. And that'd be one bad quitting decision. After that hand, I'd have the option to quit, but no, I'd take another hand -- I'd make another quitting mistake. That's two quitting mistakes in four minutes. And I had just begun to not quit.

In time, my blood started to clot, and I got a little bit better at quitting, and then a little more better, and then one day I realized that every session of cash-game poker I ever play will end on a quit, so I really should continue forever to work on getting better at quitting, and a few years later I realized that if I wanted to quit well every session, then I'd have to be sharp at the very end of every session, since that's always when the quitting happens, and a few years after that I realized that no action is an island, that everyone else's sessions always end on a quit too, and that the real reason there is money to be made by quitting well is because sometimes my opponents don't. Reciprocality.