Where Does One Big Bet Per Hour Come From? Part I

Where Does One Big Bet Per Hour Come From? Part I
By Barry Tanenbaum

Professional cash game players make one big bet per hour. Everyone says so. But do they? And if they do, where does it come from? Do they just play tight, or do they know some secrets that mere mortals don't?

For starters, most pros do not make one big bet per hour (BB/hr). A few make a little more than that, but many pros make a lot less. They make decent money simply by playing a lot of hours. What we want to do here, though, is look at those select pros who actually do generate 1+ BB/hr at $30-$60 and up, and look at some the ways they do it. This article explores only playing skills. They also use many other skills such as game selection and mental preparation, but we will not look at them now.

I am presenting the methods we will explore in a rough hierarchy of skills. As you move from easy games to tougher games - as you start to meet more skillful opponents - you need to develop new skills if you wish to continue to win. As you develop these new skills, you will also need to reduce your dependence on your previous skills.

Let me try a slightly tortured analogy. As a young Little League pitcher, a kid may develop a terrific fastball. It may terrorize his youthful opponents, and he may progress rapidly. But as he advances, he will come across hitters who can hit fastballs. If they couldn't, they could not have advanced. If our kid wants to go to the next level, he will need to develop new skills, like a curveball, slider or change-up. He will use the fastball less and less. Again, as he moves through the minors, he will continually need to improve his speed, variety and location, or he will be left behind by those who do. As the opponents get tougher, he must continue to add and grow.

A similar evolution of skills happens in poker. A player may start out playing tight, and win against loose opponents. If he tries to move up to more advanced games, he will find that everyone can play selectively, and he needs to add skills to continue to win. The skills in this article are (roughly) in the order that professionals develop them. Certainly many paths are available, but to reach to pinnacle (1 B/hr in tough middle limit or higher games), the pros must not only develop most or all of the skills, but do so in approximately this order. They then chose to utilize the skills best suited for the particular game they find themselves in.

In general, the skills they use are:

1. Playing tight
   
2. Folding early
   
3. Reading hands
   
4. Avoiding Traps
   
5. Winning without the best hand
   
6. Inducing calls and bluffs
   
7. Playing the players
   

1. Playing tight: We all understand playing tight. You just do not play many hands, reserving all of your action for the few premium hands you receive. This method is, in itself, sufficient to beat almost every low limit game. Enough players are making enough errors, playing too many hands and playing them far too long, that the tight player simply outwaits and out powers them on the hands he does play. By always starting with the best hand against opponents who play too many mediocre hands, the player can generate a decent winning rate.

Does it work? Take a look at the pros playing in $4-$8 games, for example. They make between $6-10 an hour, in general, simply by being tighter than anyone else in the game. These pros play as many hours as necessary to pay for rent, transportation and food. It is not a very glamorous life, to be sure, but many value the lifestyle and freedom.

I call this form of professional play "Relying on the kindness of strangers." The pros are doing nothing special, except to hope they find lots of bad opponents. This approach works well, to some degree or another, at the low limits up to around $6-$12. Beyond that, opponents improve to the point where just playing tight may win, but not at that elusive 1 BB/hr rate. My estimate is that tight, reasonably aggressive ABC play will get you around $10-20/hr in most $15-$30 games. Play higher than that, and you need considerably more weapons just to get above breaking even, much less get to the 1 BB/hr plateau.

2. Folding Early: You might think this sounds a lot like playing tight, but it is really different. A lot of tight players simply cannot let go of a hand. They figure that they waited so long to get a premium hand that they might as well play it to the river. Frequently they make what I call "sympathy calls." They get pocket kings, bet or call all the way into a ace on the board, lose to some weak player who called a pre-flop raise with an A3 offsuit, then show their cowboys around so everyone can see how unfair life is.

Well, aces beat kings no matter how good a player you are or how long you waited for the kings to show up. Pros let the hand go quickly almost all of the time. In fact, pros let a lot of hands go that many other players invest in. A piece of that elusive 1 BB/hr comes from the money pros do NOT put into the pot and eventually lose.

Another example occurs when a player hits a small piece of the flop. Average players stay in far too long with minor holdings, hoping to hit a kicker, second pair, or runner-runner draw. Successful players abandon these hands right away.

If you sit around low and middle limit games and listen to the table talk, you will hear a lot of players saying things like: "I know you have me beat, but I have to call." "I had to call her, I had pocket aces." By contrast, when you listen to winning players and pros talk, the conversation centers on "How could I have gotten off that hand? I can't believe I paid him off; I must be slipping." Their focus is on saving bets, not on wining pots offering poor odds. Hey, if you can save 1 BB/hr, and you were breaking even before, you have achieved your goal without having to win anything new.

So playing at this level, pros respect most raises, give up big pairs they feel are beaten, give up on what might be second-best kickers early, and do not buck the odds to make draws. You can too.

3. Reading Hands: Once you get past really soft games and into middle limits, fewer players play terribly. Simply playing tight and folding hands early will not be enough to get the money. In these tougher games all successful players must become at least very good at reading hands.

Poker would be an easier (if silly) game if all of the cards were dealt face up. Pros work very at trying to achieve the next best thing: figuring out their opponents' holdings based on their actions and tendencies. In reality, though it happens occasionally, most pros cannot specify a holding exactly. Putting an opponent on a range of hands, figuring the probabilities of each, and acting accordingly is normally the best one can do.

So how do you do it? Though it is well beyond the scope of this article to go into the specifics of hand reading techniques, the general concepts are well understood. First, you need to observe your opponents' tendencies. Which ones are loose and which ones are tight? Who is clever and who is clueless? Who bets draws and who only bets made hands? Does this opponent play "by the book," or is she creative?

You need to look at all of the showdowns, then go back and reconstruct the betting. Did this opponent three-bet pre-flop with pocket five's? Many opponents will never do it, but if this one will, you need to make a note of it. Did this opponent have a chance to raise on the turn with the nuts and not do it? You need to know who is capable of doing that.

Who in your game bluffs, and who probably has not bluffed in years? Who will try to steal blinds with nothing, and who needs real values? If you bet into an ace, and your opponent has one, will he raise?

Acting on all of this information, you should try to build a picture. Take a five-way unraised pot. You see a flop of KhJs5s. The small blind bets and the big blind calls. If the big blind is a good player, you can pretty sure she does not have a king, but rather is on a draw. Do you see why? If she had a king, she would be very anxious to raise, and eliminate players who may have smaller pairs or gutshot draws. But with a draw, she would want to invite a multiway pot to get the best pot odds if she does make her hand. Using this preliminary read, you begin to build up a picture of this, and the other holdings around the table. Of course, you can be wrong (she might have decided to slow-play a set of jacks), and you need to be ready to take in contradictory information and resolve it. Your read makes an excellent beginning to your decisions regarding how (or if) to play, or whether to pay off if a draw gets there.

The more you try to read hands, and the closer you can come, the more successful you will be. Of course, you need to couple this detective work with taking appropriate and consistent action.

In Part II, we will look at the other major methods pros use to make one big bet per hour.