To Flip or not to Flip?

I made the journey to the Fox Poker Club for their main event this weekend and very early on had a hand that I think is worth a little discussion, players often ask whether you would take a flip early on in a tournament to double your stack, usually the response is no as the variance is too high and the double stack is not worth twice as much as a single stack (tournament chips are not linear in value, that is the most valuable chip is your last one as once you lose it you are out, similarly each extra chip you have is worth slightly less than the previous one). For these reasons this refusal to double or nothing early doors is quite a sensible one in my opinion, but poker is not a game of absolutes as the hand I am going to discuss will illustrate.

First off a little background information that is important, the tournament is a 2 day live event with a £400 + £35 buyin and a £10 optional dealer bonus, the starting stack is 25,000 +  2,500 dealer bonus and the blinds start at 25/50 with 45 minute levels. It has quite a good structure and allows 1 re-entry per person for the first 6 levels, it has a guaranteed prizepool of £25,000 and I was expecting around 70 – 80 entrants.

We are in the first level of the tournament having played for about 30 minutes, I am down slightly on my starting stack at around 26k and haven’t yet showdown a hand. In the hand in question UTG opens to 800 (16bb) from a stack of 21.5k and gets two callers from middle position, and it folds to me in the big blind and I look down at AQo. I have played with this villain before and he is very loose and is often busted within the first couple of levels and immediately re-enters, he is quite happy to bluff and gamble and although he is UTG here he doesn’t have to have a big hand. He also varies his raise sizes frequently, generally weaker and monster hands he would be raising slightly less (400-600) and so I was fairly confident that I could narrow his range down and gave him a range of approximately the following QQ-77,ATs+,KQs,AJo+,KQo, I think AA and KK are unlikely here due to the sizing. Against this range I am about 51% so it looks like a good spot to squeeze, however we are 430bb deep and I have also seen the villain get it in with pretty much all of his opening range here so I cannot rely on any fold equity and this also means I am reluctant to 3 bet then fold to this opponent. 

So this spot is basically a question of whether I want to flip or not, if I do then I can raise to around 3k with the intention of getting it in against him although I would have to re-evaluate if one of the other players raises back, if I am just called preflop I will have to re-evaluate but I think this is an unlikely case. If I do not want to get it in here then I can either call out of position or even just fold, even though this seems quite tight the guy will barrel a lot of the time and my life will be difficult out of position 4 way. So I quickly weighed up the pros and cons of 3 betting to get it in here, these are what I saw the cons to be:

1)We are very deep and flipping is high variance

2) I have very little fold equity to add to the EV from flipping

3) It is possible one of the other two players is trapping

4) I might only get calls which will mean I am playing a bloated pot out of position against a loose opponent

5) Doubling my stack is less than twice as good as keeping my stack

  

And the pros:

1) The villain is on my immediate left and is very aggressive making it harder for me to win chips without a decent hand while he is there

2) The structure is good and even if I lose I will have 90bb left to try and work with or gamble

3) It is a re-entry tournament, which increases the chances he will get in when I have him dominated, it also means I can re-enter if I lose and then bust my remaining chips

4) There is 1,600 of likely dead chips in the middle

5) Getting a big stack would allow me to be more aggressive in subsequent hands

6) The villain is likely to gamble off his chips in another hand and this is a chance for me to get them before someone else does

This last point links quite nicely to my previous blog about edge, in particular how our edge changes as the dynamics change and how our edge isn’t as big as it may appear if there are other good players at the table fighting for those chips. Point 6 definitely has a lot of weight here as there were other good players at the table who I didn’t want to get his chips as they would make my life even harder, add this to the fact that my edge over this player is reduced due to me being directly out of position and this edge is going to diminish as the blinds increase. If I had had position on this player then I would have been much more likely to call and assess on the flop.

Taking all this into account within a few seconds I decided to raise to 3k, UTG shoved and the other players folded, I called and flipped my AQ to find he had pocket 8s, I had got 430bb effective in preflop with AQo which may seem crazy but I was happy with it in this spot. Alas, I didn’t catch and ended up down to 4.5k, but after grinding this stack for a while I got back to the starting stack and eventually got well above average when I got it all in with AcAh on 2s4c5h 4h board v Kh3h and my aces held (They do hold sometimes!). I eventually busted on the last level of day 1 after triple barrel bluffing a K high board and getting called down by KQ, this left me around 20bb and soon after I got AK and flatted an UTG open the flop came KQ3 and I called his bet then he checked the brick turn and called my bet, the Ace on the river gave me top two and he put me all in, I called to find he had JT and rivered the stone cold nuts, I had slowplayed preflop and on the flop to try and get value and I did get value but in doing so I ran the risk of him hitting which he did on this occasion. Given my recent run in live games I can’t complain about some misfortune!

In summary, although generally we want to avoid flips when very deep in tournaments, we shouldn’t always shy away from them if there are stronger reasons for flipping than against, it will always hurt to lose big flip early on in a MTT and it increases variance but in the right spots it can increase your $EV, particularly if you can use the big stack well.

Edge

I often hear of poker players talking about their edge over the table, but I believe many people fail to understand what edge means and more importantly they overvalue their edge, particularly in the latter stages of MTTs, in this post I am going to briefly go through what I believe edge means and what it entails, I will give you advance warning that this is quite a woolly entry and probably won’t help you in any tangible way except help kill 5 minutes of time while you are bored at work J

Most poker enthusiasts will have seen the movie Rounders, where Mike McDermott proclaims that if you can’t spot the sucker in the first 20 minutes at the table then you are the sucker, while this is generally true it doesn’t mean that if you can identify the sucker(s) that you are not one yourself! Simply identifying weaker players alone is not enough, you need to be able to identify what it is that makes them a weaker player and work out the best strategy to take advantage of their weakness. Once you have successfully identified a strategy that is going to give you a positive expected value in a certain situation then you have an edge over that player in that situation, but bear in mind that they may have identified another situation where they have an edge over you!

OK so let’s start off with a simple example, we are in a deep stacked MTT versus Steve, and we have seen Steve call down huge bets with weak hands, basically he is a calling station. We have therefore decided we will not bluff Steve but will value bet him hard with a range of hands, as such we have an edge over Steve when we have those value hands, but Bill is a bluff monkey and will bluff most of the time, therefore Steve has an edge over Bill as he will be correctly calling most of his bluffs (although this is by accident it is still an edge if Bill does not adjust!).

Now imagine we are in a different MTT and have Mike at the table, he is open shoving 200bb every hand, so we decide to wait until we have a good hand and call his shove, this edge is not as big as people might think, and this is for 2 main reasons, firstly other competent opponents will also be  trying to do the same thing to Mike and if we are at a 10 seater table it may be that all of the other 8 opponents have the same objective which means our edge on Mike is a fraction of what it would be if the other players are not paying attention. Secondly we may pick up a hand that we are happy to call with and end up losing anyway, either because Mike had a better hand or got lucky, or because one of the other players had a better hand than us in a 3 way pot. This being said, we can definitely claim to have an edge on Mike, although the size of the edge is unclear.

A few days later we see Mike at our table again and he is open shoving every hand, the only difference now is that it is in the later stages of an MTT and we are only 20bb deep with the blinds due to go up soon. Now we can’t wait as long for a decent hand (neither can the other players) as each steal from Mike adds a more meaningful amount to his stack while diminishing ours, while waiting for a premium hand against Mike when 200bb deep is fine, we cannot afford to wait for such a strong hand when 20bb deep, we are forced to call lighter so our overall equity will usually be less when we do call, this means variance will be a lot higher but it also means that the size of our edge is vastly reduced.

Nigel is a nit, he plays very tight and loves to setmine and hope to stack people with big hands, as such early on in MTTs it is hard to win big pots off him so we have little edge, however if he fails to adjust as the MTT progresses stealing versus him becomes more profitable as he will be folding a lot of the time so our edge here would increase as the tournament progresses until he correctly adjusts.

These examples show that edge is not something that is static; it can change as the dynamics of the table change so you should be constantly assessing your strategies against your opponents and adjust where necessary.

I will give another couple of quick examples where we might find an edge against otherwise good players; Charlie is a very good player whom we respect but we observe that he c-bets almost 100% of the time, therefore we know we can call wider on the flop and can also utilise the check raise more often, we can float and see what Charlie does on the turn, particularly if we know he gives up on the turn a lot of the time then floating every flop could potentially be profitable against him. Pete is very aggressive opening preflop but will fold to a lot of 3 bets and he only 4 bets with KK/AA or AK; we can take advantage of his play by 3 betting a wide range, especially if we have position. Note that Charlie and Pete may actually be better players than us overall but if we can find some small chinks in their armour then we can bridge the gap somewhat.

At this point I want to split edge up into 2 categories, Showdown Edge (SE) and Non-Showdown Edge (NSE). From the examples above it should be clear that we have SE v Mike and NSE v Nigel, that is against Mike we get our edge from showing down better hands than him, whereas versus Nigel we are trying to win pots without going to showdown (e.g. we expect him to fold before showdown unless he has a big hand, in which case we would probably recognise he has a big hand and fold before showdown ourselves).

I think a lot of players over value their Showdown Edge against opponents when late on in MTTs, since by definition this edge is obtained from showing down better cards we are relying on luck to have a better hand then our opponent and that this hand will hold up, it may often be the case that the good hand doesn’t present itself too soon and we are blinded down  so once we get the chance to put the SE into use we actually don’t get as much value as we only have a 15bb stack say instead of 20bb (so doubled to 30bb instead of 40bb, an effective loss of 25% edge), on top of this we may run into the top of their range or they may suck out on us.

A common misconception is players believing they can outplay their opponents postflop and have a big edge as a result of this, well this may be true when deep stacked, but once effective stacks are 20bb deep there isn’t much room to outplay opponents, it’s very difficult to double barrel and often opponents can shove when they hit part of the flop and this is generally more correct and harder to exploit than when 100bb deep. This demonstrates that there is less skill difference in latter stages of tournaments than you might realise if our only edge is showdown edge.

Early on in MTTs having showdown edge is preferable to NSE, but as the effective stacks dwindle as the blinds increase this shifts to NSE being more preferable since it relies less on luck, that is we don’t need hands to use the edge, we just need Nigel to not have much himself and we can continually steal chips from him, even when stacks are 15-20bb deep we can use this edge by min raising and picking the right spots to steal.

Sharkscope and other similar websites are often used by players to see if their opponents are winning or losing overall, this can give a broad guideline but should be taken with a pinch of salt, a player may be a massive loose losing fish early on in MTTs, but once they get deep they may play close to perfect and might actually be the best player at the table for the current dynamics, or a winning player may be weak playing deep stacked poker but they are successful overall as they have mastered the art of shoving and 3 bet shoving when the stacks are 25bb or less but we may be able to stack them early on if they can’t fold top pair when we hit a bigger hand.

It may be that you think you are outclassed at the table, in which case you want to try and implement the reverse of these thoughts, that is try to think how your opponents will utilise their perceived edge on you and try to minimise those situations, this is usually going to be easier to achieve when the stacks are smaller, so if you are in the later stages of an MTT against stronger opponents often it may be better to play more shove / fold poker which is harder for them to exploit.

Well that is a lot of waffle, which is probably of little practical use to you, but I like to try and discuss topics that aren’t already hugely documented to help generate fresh ideas and approaches not only to my own game but also for any interested readers out there and this sometimes means the blog post doesn’t yield anything concrete, I am sorry if you are left disappointed by this or any other posts but I generally let my thoughts flow and capture them as I go without too much editing later on.

To summarise the concept of edge please bear in mind that someone you identify as a fish at the start of an MTT may play better later even though their style does not change and similar a solid player may become more exploitable as the stacks get shallower if they do not adjust their game. The key is to try and identify what edge you think you have over your opponents and adopt a strategy against them to maximise this edge, but you should also be aware that this strategy may need to be changed depending on the current dynamics you find yourself in.