Thanks For The Visit, George

Published on Tuesday, June 09, 2009 10:05:00 PM

Recently my friend George visited me from England. George adores poker but rarely plays above 6-12 and who prefers 3-6 or 4-8 (in the pot-limit games that are much more common in his homeland, he finds a small one). He wanted to play a lot of poker while he was here, but because the main purpose of his visit was to spend time with me (there's no accounting for taste), we had two choices: either he had to play higher than he likes, or I was going to have to play lower than I have in years.

Without knowing it, my friend did me a big favor, because he gave me a chance to test something empirically that has mostly been a theory for me: the notion that I wouldn’t be embarrassed if seen playing in a low stakes game.

My job lets me hang around with many of the world’s best players, and I have seen many of them hurt badly by the ego factors that lead them to think something like “I have a reputation, so I have to play in the highest game in the room.” I already knew I didn’t have to play in the highest game in the room, because the biggest games in some of the places I play in LA and Vegas are way too big for my poker bankroll (you can run through a lot of cash in a bad two hours at 1,000-2,000), but moving all the way down to 4-8 and being seen in that game for lots of hours in one week was a good test. 

My ego passed test number one, but this was a multi-part test.  The next part was to see whether I could still play my best game when I was playing for low stakes, because a lot of good players have that problem too.  In fact, great high stakes players who have to sit in a low stakes game (this can happen for any number of reasons: no seat currently available, no game currently available, no cash currently available) are often terrific targets for players who are playing at their comfortable level, because to someone who plays 300-600, it can be pretty tough to resist the temptation to play too many hands or make curiosity calls.

I won just about every low stakes session I played, but I’d still give myself just about a grade “B” for playing as close to the best as I’m capable of.  I can still remember a few starting hands I’d never have played at 40-80 and two curiosity calls I made on the end that I’d not have made in a bigger game, but in general I did OK after I remembered that it can be tougher to make someone lay down a hand with a bet at low stakes, and that it often doesn’t pay to “set someone up” for a later play because he wasn’t paying attention the first time.

My probable skill edge aside, though, I think the real reason I won just about every low stakes session was that my friend George was sitting there, and I wanted to impress him. We have one of those friendships where we exchange a lot of friendly barbs, and if I’d done much losing with him around, I’d never have heard the end of it.

I realized this fairly early on in the week, but what I didn’t realize was that this was a corollary to one of my favorite tips about how to make sure you play your best game. Because playing too many hands is one of the single biggest problems players have at almost every level of the game, I often suggest to people that they pretend they are playing at the final table of the Poker Million (not because of the money, but rather because they used under the table cameras there to show the TV audience what cards the players held).

In fact, I had offered up a variation of this same tip in a seminar I’d given just days earlier, when I mentioned that in the early days of my friendship with Phil Hellmuth, it was hard (and justifiably so, back then) to get much respect out of him for my playing abilities.

I told the audience that these days, whenever I felt my “A” game slipping away from me, all I have to do is pretend that Phil was standing four feet behind me and critiquing my play, and those marginal hands would then go straight into the muck. A nice fellow I’d met earlier in the week named Howard, who had been at the seminar, mentioned this to me after I’d made a pretty lame play in a 10-20 hold’em game I was playing in while I was waiting for my seat in the 4-8 Omaha high-low (Now there’s one I never thought I’d see myself type: “playing in a 10-20 until I could get into my 4-8”!).

“Now Andy, what would Phil have thought about playing that hand from early position?” Howard asked with a smile, and I smiled right back and said “You know, you’re 100% right, I’m glad you reminded of that one, and I have a feeling you’re going to be sorry you reminded me of my own advice.” My play immediately sharpened up and my chip stack started rising dramatically. I was glad that Howard didn’t suffer any personal damage from reminding me of my own tip (my wins came in pots in which he wasn’t involved, and eventually my other game opened up).

So whether you have to pretend a TV audience can see your hole cards, or whether a poker expert friend is sitting behind you ready to pounce with a post-session analysis, or you don’t have to pretend because someone you want to impress is playing with you, your results will be a lot better if you can find one or more techniques that keeps you playing your “A” game.

Of course, that begs a larger question: just what the heck is an “A” game?  I’m not talking about some absolute scale where Daniel Negreanu is an “A” and I’m a “B” and the typical Wednesday night player is a D. When I talk about your “A” game, I’m talking about your “A” game, and not someone else’s.

What’s more, your own personal “A” game is almost certainly different for different kinds of poker games. I believe (might be wrong, but it’s my belief) that my best form of poker is no-limit hold’em, tournament format, and so I hold myself to considerably higher standards there than I do when I’m playing live pot-limit Omaha or shorthanded seven-card stud, two games I don’t play very often.

In other words, if I play a no-limit hold’em tournament and make two mistakes in the course of the tournament (I might make more than that: I’m talking about mistakes I can recognize either after the hand is over or when someone points them out to me after the tournament is over), I’m not going to give myself an “A” for that tournament, even if I win it.  On the other hand, if I make two mistakes in an hour of playing shorthanded seven-card stud, I might well give myself an “A” for that hour, because I don’t have the same level of expectation for my performance.

While playing one’s “A” game is important, what might be even more important is the honest self-analysis you have to perform both to recognize whether you are playing your “A” game at the moment, and also to understand that you should have higher standards for some kinds of games than others. I don’t walk around with the self-image of “brilliant poker player.” My self-image has multiple personalities: great at this, pretty good at that, fair at this, rotten at that. Not only does this help me with game selection, it also helps me understand where I need to do more work to improve (unless I want to be just a one game specialist, and I don’t).

So thanks for the visit, George.  It would have been nice to see you even without the poker, but you helped me look at a few things that are going to help me improve… and believe me, in the modern poker world, I don’t care how good you are: if your game isn’t consistently improving, you’ll find your results consistently worsening.

This article was written by Andrew N.S. Glazer, the Poker Pundit.