MTT Luck Part 1

I've had a terrible few days of luck following a short spell of running above EV, on the train back from London this morning I was dozing and thinking about Luck in MTTs, and what it really means and whether I could reduce the luck effect in my games, I will share some of my early morning half-asleep thoughts over a few blogs:

A lot of poker players will talk about how they get more than their fair share of beats or how they never win crucial flips, or how so and so is always in god mode. Luck is much more than your pocket kings holding to ace rag, or your queens winning a race v AK. Luck can take many subtle forms some of which we don’t appreciate.

Table Draws

The first element of luck in an MTT is undoubtedly the table draw, imagine sitting down to a table where you have known sharks all with position on you, while your friend has a table full of fish, clearly you have been unlucky and will find it harder to gain chips than your friend. This can be particularly true in deep stack MTTs for two reasons, firstly the game is deeper stacked so players skill edges are more apparent, on a table full of sharks it is harder to get paid with a set when your opponent holds top pair, but on a fishier table it may well be much easier. Also deep stack games generally mean that your table will stay together for longer, so you will be playing with you current players for a lot longer, if the table if full of sharks it can be hard for anyone to gain chips, while the players at the neighbouring tables collect the chips of the weaker players.

Further to this I believe that if you are at a tight table, this means you will as a rule be playing lots of small pots, this means there is usually low variance at the beginning of the MTT but this gets higher towards the middle/end of the game game as you are frequently shorter stacked as a result of not winning many big pots.

Conversely a looser table means fewer but bigger pots, so variance levels can be quite high at the beginning but comparatively less in middle as your stack size is usually better when you survive the loose play.

So which table is preferable at the start of an MTT? I would say a loose table that allows me to play a tight aggressive game where I can look to get paid handsomely when I hit, since this is my preference I must accept a high level of variance at the start of a MTT, it will mean making more marginal decisions, such as stacking off with JJ preflop to a known loose shove but the same hand would be an instant fold on a tight table. It also means accepting that the loose player will chase his draws and inevitably will hit some of the time. However, winning bigger pots enables the player to take more control in the middle stages and provides a cushion against variance as they can usually take one or two hits from shorter stacks, it also allows the player to use their stack to apply pressure in the mid stages. A player coming from a tight table may have won numerous pots but may not have even doubled their starting stack, whereas a player from a loose table may have tripled or quadrupled their stack playing 2 or 3 pots only. I know I have been frustrated many times playing at a tight table, where I can chip away and win lots of small pots but still fall behind the average stack and find myself in shove fold mode too quickly, I definitely want a loose starting table, particular if the structure is deep. Of course I have no influence over who starts at my table or how they play so this is 100% luck.

Orthodox Hands

For the purposes of this blog I am going to define what I call an orthodox hand:

An orthodox hand is a hand where you and your opponent would play the hand virtually the same way if the roles were reversed, let suppose player A has 20bb and picks up AK in mid position and raises it up to 2.5x, player B in the BB has QQ and 20bb so shoves and A calls. Now let us suppose player B is in mid position with AK and raises it to 3x, now player A is in the BB and also shoves QQ, clearly the action is virtually the same and this is what I call an Orthodox Hand. AK v QQ is the classic example and is probably the most frequent race seen in MTTs and the outcome can be the difference between winning a title or busting out early on a final table.

Let us take another example where player A has AA and player B has 66, A raises and B just calls, everyone else folds and the flop comes 36T rainbow and A bets half the pot and B calls. The turn is a Jack and player A bets again and B now shoves over the top, now if player A is tight and B is loose, then A will usually have a hard time folding here but if the roles were reversed then player B might be able to fold their overpair if they know that A is a tight player with a narrow range here which comprises mostly sets. Therefore if A goes broke with AA but player B would not go broke with the same hand then it’s not an orthodox hand as there is some skill in deciding whether to call, but if both players were to go call with the AA (if the stacks are too shallow to fold AA here for example) then this becomes an orthodox hand. Clearly this is a matter of judgement and it is not easy to identify whether a hand was orthodox or not, but bear with me because it is the conclusion drawn from this rather than the exact definition that is important.

Here is a recent hand from the PKR Open:

Blinds are now 30 / 60

Button is at seat 9

Seat 1: Mutufs - 2,280

Seat 2: englANDfans - 2,870

Seat 3: ForFoxSake - 5,140

Seat 4: checkerr87 - 2,360

Seat 5: buscseb - 4,182

Seat 6: GoldHands - 5,500

Seat 7: Toffeyman - 2,480

Seat 8: bpitman - 5,725

Seat 10: brentos - 2,440

Moving Button to seat 10

Mutufs posts small blind (30)

englANDfans posts big blind (60)

Dealing [A s][A h] to ForFoxSake

ForFoxSake raises to 180

checkerr87 folds

buscseb folds

GoldHands folds

Toffeyman raises to 540

bpitman folds

brentos folds

Mutufs calls 540

englANDfans folds

ForFoxSake raises to 1,260

Toffeyman raises to 2,480 (all-in)

Mutufs folds

ForFoxSake calls 2,480

ForFoxSake shows [A s][A h]

Toffeyman shows [K s][K h]

Dealing Flop [8 d][2 c][Q c]

Dealing Turn [K d]

Dealing River [3 c]

Toffeyman has Three of a Kind: Kings

Toffeyman wins 5,560 with: Three of a Kind: Kings

I get AA cracked by KK, but if I had been Toffeyman here with KK I would have played it the exact same way. We are equally likely to be on the good (AA) or the bad (KK) side of this hand, furthermore my EV when I have AA v KK here is the same as Toffeyman’s EV when he has AA and I have KK. This means over the longrun our EV in this orthodox hand is the same. Note in effect here I may as well have had KK and lost to AA as it wouldn’t have affected either of our play in the hand. Since I am equally like to have got the KK side of this hand rather than the AA, the hand above is not a bad beat, it is actually a flip!

In an orthodox hand note that since both players would play the hand virtually the same, there is no skill difference involved in the hand whatsoever, and since no skill is involved the hand is 100% luck, this includes your hole cards and any and all community cards dealt. Whenever the luck element is 100% in a hand it is essentially a flip as the cards are meaningless, it is just in effect a lottery. Taking the AA v the set of 6s example above, if the villains calls your shove but you would also call the shove if the roles were reversed then you have not outplayed your opponent or been outplayed, so the skill element is 0% which means it is all down to luck!  So if you hold the set of 6s but would have called the all in if you had the AA, then if your opponent calls and hits the 2 outer Ace on the river and you lose the hand then it is not a bad beat but merely a flip (you were just as likely to be the one holding the AA here and rivering the 2 outer).

Let’s just clarify that again, you could get your money in as a 90%+ favourite and lose the hand but it is not a bad beat if you would play the hand the same way in the villain’s shoes, the hand is in essence a flip as the roles are just as likely to have been reversed and over the long term neither of you will gain any EV from the other as you both will have been on each side of the orthodox hand the same number of times.

Note the more orthodox hands you are involved in the larger variance will be (as you are essentially flipping each time), this is why variance in the late stages of MTTs is huge because the stacks are so shallow that most hands play themselves and everyone plays them in a similar way, so most hands become orthodox hands. 

The only way to try and combat this is to use your skill edge to win as many non orthodox hands as possible, the more chips you have the more orthodox hands you can afford to lose before being eliminated. Good MTT players will win non showdown pots which weaker players do not take advantage of and the weaker players fall victim of orthodox hands a lot more as they are invariably shorter stacked and they play hands in a standard way. The best MTT players are often deeper stacked and so can avoid orthodox hands more because their deeper stack allows them to play hands in a different way (if you have 20bb it is very hard to fold AK preflop for example, but with 70bb you might find you are behind and can fold).

Another way to reduce the effect of luck is to control tilt, the next time you get a big hand cracked think about how you would have played the villain's hand, if it was practically the same as they played it, then try to think of that hand as an orthodox hand in which you lost a flip rather than losing to a 2 outer or however the hand played out.

That's all I will say on the subject for now, hopefully I have explained the concept of orthodox hands well enough for you to understand, but if it is not clear then feel free to leave me a comment and I will try and provide a more detailed example. I will give more thoughts on MTT Luck in the near future, until then good luck!