Poker Strategy

What is Poker Strategy?

Poker offers players an enormous number of different techniques and stratagems. Players need to master as many as possible and mix them up often. It is better to be unpredictable to the opposition, even if you make some mistakes, than to play an otherwise perfect game in a perfectly predictable way.

There is no one, single poker strategy, any more than there is any money-making "system" for casinos or sports books. There is no Holy Grail of poker. For that reason, no single player should possess only one strategy.

Poker offers players an enormous number of different techniques and stratagems. Players need to master as many as possible and mix them up often. It is better to be unpredictable to the opposition, even if you make some mistakes, than to play an otherwise perfect game in a perfectly predictable way.

Poker authors talk about strategies of all kinds: Some are best adapted to combating the playing styles of your adversaries. Others are best suited for playing certain types of hands. Early in the game it may make sense, for example, to play somewhat passively, probing for tells and information. In the late game it may make sense to play in a more predatory way, honing in for the kill. That is an example of a poker strategy.

Writers may talk of strategies for "profit-maximization" - one of those rare, strong, pat hands in the middle of good competition. Other strategies might be for mere "survival" - staying in a game with a weak hand that might draw well.

Another context in which the term "strategy" is employed is the competition at the table and the stakes being played. When stakes are low, even skilled and experienced players may play much looser than normal, just for fun or entertainment. Newer players, unaccustomed to seeing their chips migrate to other stacks, might play squeaky tight. You can profit from a loose or careless player, or from a tight player, but it is hard to do both at once. It is all in the "strategy" chosen.

In truth, it is a bit unfair to make the single word "strategy" carry so many meanings. A useful distinction is the one made in the military between "strategy" on the one hand and "tactics" on the other. Strategies are more long term scenarios for reaching an ultimate objective. A long-run strategy for the evening in a social game may be to enjoy the camaraderie and end perhaps just a bit ahead of break-even. Or it could be to maximize earnings, regardless of the social impact. Tactics, meanwhile, are the means employed to reach some short-run or intermediate goal.

Poker Strategy basics

Compare for a moment any table game version of poker and "real" poker. What are the differences? Well, there are several, but probably the first one you think of is that in table games, you play against the house, and in poker you play against other players. That's true. An implication of that difference is even more important: In table game versions of poker, nobody's cards are hidden (for long) and no betting decision is made after you see your cards. Add to this the reality that virtually no skill is required to play, and the dealer has no discretion in what he or she does with the house hand. In "real" poker, you get to see your cards, and then have one or more betting opportunities after that.

Bets made (theirs and yours) help clarify the ambiguities of what the cards truly are. If poker did not have this feature, it would be just like a video poker game or a table game, where essentially the outcomes are the results of the whims of chance. Skill and judgment (two words used with great pride by seasoned poker players) are really bound up in discerning how to bet the cards given to you in light of what you think or know the other players' cards are.

The key phrase in the preceding sentence was "how to bet the cards." To say "play poker" is the same thing as saying "make bets." The rest is just mechanics. "Poker strategy," therefore, is the same as "betting strategy." This embraces all the other topics.

Experienced poker players will say, with justification, that luck has very little to do with winning poker, at least in the long run. The key is to maximize the production out of the hands you do get through the wise making of bets. Luck, like the rain, comes down on the just and the unjust, the good and the bad. At the end of the night, the more skillful player will prevail. This is an article of faith. The only concession to its validity is that the standard deviation around any game of chance is big enough to allow an undeserving winner to walk off every so often with part of a sharp player's bankroll.

To make this point a little more concrete, play a couple of rounds of poker with all the cards face up all around the table. When each player can see not only his or her cards, but also the cards in all the other hands, the game is reduced to the mechanics of matching up cards to see which hand is strongest. This gets really dull quickly. The only decisions to be made in the betting are technical ones; that is to say, choices relating to the probabilities that a hand will improve. For example, does it make sense to draw two cards to a three-card mini-flush? These questions can be decided by calculation or experience.

David Sklansky, one of the most widely-read authors on poker, restates poker's essential feature of dealing with the unknown - the ambiguities of the adversaries' wagers and their hidden cards. He calls it "The Fundamental Theorem of Poker" and expresses it thus:

"Every time someone acts, if they would have acted differently had he or she seen your cards, you win. Every time you act, if you would have acted differently had you seen the other players' cards, you lose."

In this context, "winning" and "losing" refer not to pots, but to gaining and losing ground in the long quest to arrive at the end of the evening, ahead by enough money to have made it worth your while to have been there. Notice that he says, "acts" in his theorem. He could have said "bets." It's all the same.

Poker strategy, therefore, in the framework of Sklansky's "Fundamental Theorem of Poker," is to induce others to bet in ways inconsistent with their cards and yours, while grounding your own bets firmly in reality."