MTT Luck Part 3

My previous two blog entries have shown that there is often a very fine line between skill and luck, the two entities cannot always be clearly separated, even though it is obvious that skilful players win in the long run over weaker opponents, luck has a powerful influence over a longer period than most people appreciate.  Even seemingly straight forward actions have hidden elements of luck behind them and I will briefly discuss a couple of classic scenarios here.

Say you are dealt AK and raise get one call from the blinds; you are both fairly deep stacked, say 60bb or so. The flop comes down 29J rainbow. The villain checks so you decide to c-bet, he calls and the turn card is an 8. Now what do you do? Let us suppose you have history with this villain that they often call the flop bet to combat c-bets but fold turn with a big part of their range, betting the turn here is a big element of skill, now if the villain is unknown to you, either because you have never played them before or you have not made any notes or paid attention to their play then betting the turn has a huge slice of luck whether he calls or folds, this doesn’t mean that there is no skill involved or that betting the turn is wrong, but whether the villain calls or folds is out of your hands once you bet, you can control the bet size etc to help turn luck in your favour but that’s it. This example clearly demonstrates that the more information you obtain on your opponent’s patterns the more you can increase the skill factor in your play and in turn reduce the luck element.

Now let us suppose we are playing in a MTT full of competent and observant players and have been at the same table for an hour and have been totally card dead and played no hands as a result. All of a sudden you get AA in early position and raise and the whole table snap folds. You of course curse your bad luck that no one else had a hand, or if we had had a few hands in the last hour or so someone else may have been tempted to play a marginal hand against us because we don’t have an uber-tight image caused by not playing a hand for over an hour. It is true that if you had had a few playable hands in recent orbits your image wouldn’t be as tight as it is, but we cannot control the hands we get dealt. This is an element of luck that is out of our hands, or is it? If you are finding yourself card dead at a competent table then you should be able to open some pots with weak holdings which does two things; firstly it gives your image a boost, you no longer look like a complete nit so when you do get a monster hand you are more likely to get some action, secondly it also helps you to pick up a few smaller pots (providing you are choosing rights spots and telling a good story with your actions) and this will help you avoid some orthodox hands as described in MTT Luck Part 1 of this blog. Being a bit looser in the right conditions has a double effect at reducing the luck element in your game. Although being loose and playing more hands you run the risk of running into bigger hands and this has its own element of luck, providing you pick your spots well and do not go over aggressive you will be using your skill to gain a small edge which can only be a good thing.

When people talk about variance, or bad beats or luck of any kind they often will refer to the long term. Indeed I have mentioned it in my blog a few times. How often do you get a beat and tell a friend only for them to tell you that you want the call in the long term? What exactly is long term? Long term is a concept whereby if we play enough hands then the effect of luck will cancel itself out and we would run exactly at EV. The truth is that for MTTs at least, the long term does not exist. It is not a tangible entity; you cannot say that 10,000 MTTs or even a million MTTs is the long term. There are simply so many variables in MTTs that it is impossible to get close to the long term. By variables I mean such factors as buyin, number of runners, what stage of the MTT you are at, the dynamics etc. For example you might win one flip in a $5 MTT with 100 runners, but this is not cancelled out by losing a flip in the WSOP Main Event, although in terms of luck it is the same, clearly the weighting of luck is balanced towards the Main Event. It is physically impossible for anyone to play more than 100 Main Events in their lifetime so any luck encountered in the Main Event is short term, and the variance in it as such is off the scale. If I was to tell you that you were playing the main event and were going to bust out losing a flip would you rather it was a) Towards the end of the first day a long way from the money, b) Lose once inside the money but having only doubled your buyin or c) Bust early on the final table having already secured $1,000,000? Clearly you would choose c) as it means you have secured a tidy sum, but the variance in losing flip c) is far greater than losing a) or b) since there is more at stake on the FT. As such the stage in which we encounter luck also has an influence on our variance which makes the long term even further away.

It is true that the more MTTs you play the closer to EV you should be, but this does not mean that because you have run below EV for the past 1,000 MTTs that the next MTT you play you will run above EV. Luck does not remember the past; it has no concept of time at all and I believe it is entirely possible that some people are luckier than others, even over vast amounts of MTTs. There are so many variables at work that it is a mathematical certainty that even if two people played 1 million MTTs each that one of them would be luckier than the other, they could play another million MTTs and the gap could become even wider, there is no reason that it should get closer together just because they are getting closer to the long term. This is because they are in fact NOT getting closer to the long term. Just like when you try to count to infinity, even if you count to 1 billion you are still not closer to reaching it since it is not a tangible entity. In reality this means you could play as many MTTs as physically possible and run below EV over that sample but still run below EV in the next 1,000 you play.

Does this mean that long term is a myth, is it a lie spread to cover the fact that poker is rigged or that some players are luckier than others? No, the long term is valid as principle even though it is not tangible or achievable. What it actually refers to is that over time each MTT you play has a smaller influence over your sample size. Let us suppose we have flipped a fair coin 100 times and it has come up heads 90 times and tails 10 times. If we say we win when the coin lands tails then we are running 40% below EV, we are only winning 10% when we should be winning 50% in the long term, how very unlucky. What is the chance it comes up tails next? It is still 50/50, now let us suppose we flip the same coin another 100 times, this time it lands heads 70 times and tails 30, now we are running 20% below EV, so we are still running under EV. If we add the two samples together we have 160 heads and 40 tails, which means overall we are 30% below EV, which is closer to neutral than our original sample even though we continued to run under EV during the 2^nd sample. Now let’s suppose we flip the coin another 9,800 times and it lands heads 5,000 times and tails 4,800, we are still running below EV but combing it with our 200 flip sample we have a total of 5,160 heads and 4,840 tails which means we are running about 3% below EV. The reason for this is that each toss of the coin has less of an influence in the overall scheme of how close to EV you are. Taking the example of flipping the coin only once, you can only ever be 50% above EV or 50% below it. As such the long term is merely a principle of saying that the luck factor will tend towards the expected values the more you play, but you can never play enough to guarantee that you will be anywhere close to your EV.

A common mistake among MTT players (even seasoned pros) is failing to appreciate good luck when they get it. Poker seems very easy when you get dealt hands frequently and sit on the right side of coolers and hit all your draws, win the big flips etc. Even an average or weak player can win an MTT if they get enough of this run good and when this happens to a player early in their playing days they may get delusions of grandeur about their game, this is often followed by tilt rants when they don’t run as good as that all the time. Average players can go on heaters and can win numerous tournaments in a short span and it can seem like they are a world champion. Meanwhile their peers may look on with envy, hoping it will be their turn soon. This is a wasted emotion, but we are human and can’t always control our emotions as well as we would like.

Another factor that people often overlook in MTTs is that there can only ever be one winner, that combined with all the elements of luck that are involved in MTTs mean it is incredibly hard to win any individual MTT. So with so much luck is there any edge in MTTs? Yes of course there is, since there is obviously skill involved in a lot of hands, players who work hard and have an edge over others will be making good decisions more often than others and these players are more likely to have good results than those making bad ones. The more of an edge you have the less variance will affect you, but even the most skilful player is at the knees of variance. The two biggest weapons against variance are decision making and volume; make enough good decisions in enough MTTs, you will get deep enough often enough and you should come out a winner at some point, although I can't tell you when that point will be as that is in the hands of luck. Don’t let downswings affect your decision making as hard as it may be. Remember, all we can do is minimise the effect of luck where we can, do not worry about what is outside of your control as this can have no positive effects. Simply worry about what is under your control,  focus on your own decision making and look to continually improve your game and let variance and luck do as it pleases for we are a slave to it and not it’s master.

Thanks for reading, hope you have enjoyed this 3 part series, I won’t wish you good luck since that would be ironic, but I wish you good decision making!