#262: “Experimental Sand Re-nourishment”
For about a fortnight in July, the beach in Balluta Bay beside where I live in Malta underwent ‘experimental sand re-nourishment’. The idea was to dredge sand from the middle of the bay and heap it onto the tiny sliver of a beach in an effort to make it a more significant beach. I scoffed when I read the proposal and was no more convinced when the two huge dredgers began their work, going back and forth each day. Surely the first significant storm, of which there are many in Malta, would be the undoing of the project?
Last month, Dara and I put out a ‘Chip Race’ topical piece on Charlie Carrell’s ‘Fuck GTO’ video. Charlie is a super-smart guy who understands the benefits of a GTO approach to the game but his point was that the action of striving for GTO in every spot in poker is stifling to the creative mind and detrimental to the development of a player. Dara and I used Charlie’s video as a leaping off point, both of us espousing the virtues of understanding balanced lines almost like they are the steps to a dance which should be first learned. The vast majority of today’s best players have at least a strong foundation in game theory as it applies to poker, understanding the benefits of selective deviation.
When Dara and I first met in 2011, a lot of our poker chats were about short stack shoving and calling ranges, one of the only ‘solved’ areas of the game. Early in his career, Dara had worked out sub-20bbs GTO ranges, a time-consuming inference process, but one that put him in an amazing spot in the days before shove-charts or ‘snap-shove’. He had and still has a reputation of being something of a short stack ninja master and I guess in that regard I became his padawan. (I can literally see Willy Elliot’s ‘Batman & Robin’ comic of us as I write this). At the time, I was employing a close to game theory optimal approach to these spots, not as nailed on as his ranges but in respectable proximity (almost always within a pip). With his help, my ranges sharpened to GTO, which I combined with a strong understanding of ICM (another shared area of joint nerdy interest) to print a lot money in the short stack satellite format for several years.
Our logic was that by sticking to these fundamentals we would never again have to worry about this aspect of the game. We were unexploitable and every mistake our opponent made would make us money. We would of course make exceptions versus specific opponents, deviating when we were confident of a villain’s particular leak – the most obvious being when he called far too tight. However, for the most part, we stuck to our ranges, acceptant that the GTO line would sometimes be the less profitable line. There was one very important reason for this which Dara made clear in the ‘Chip Race’ piece and it is a point one to reiterate: In the fast-paced and varied real world of tournament poker, it’s hard to pinpoint the moment when your opponent has adjusted to something resembling GTO and if they have and your response is not GTO, they have turned the tables on you. They have begun exploiting you. They have begun profiting off you.
Charlie calls this a guessing-game but one in which you strive to be the better guesser, the better estimator of what to do in a dark tunnel. That’s a tightrope and while there is no doubt that Charlie is a skilled tightrope walker, that’s a risky business. Variance obscures a lot in poker. The field size of your average tournament, the buy-in relative to your bankroll, your table draw and the turn of a card all conspire against the poker player, creating chaos, making it hard to figure out where you really stand. A high wire exploitative/exploitable approach adds another variable.
That said, there are plenty of highly exploitable lines that extract maximum value from population tendencies and they should not be ignored by a player. As I said pre-flop shoving ranges are the solved bit of poker. It’s almost always a game of approximation down the streets, vastly more complicated situations presenting vastly more opportunities for deviation and exploitation or as Charlie would put it, ‘creativity’. I must admit that I, myself, have been deviating more than ever whilst playing live poker this year and I’m so far having one of my best years on the live felt. A tidy sum in cash games plus 17 cashes in 48 tournaments with a >100% ROI makes me feel like I’m making good plays in context but I’m far too long in the tooth to believe that variance is smiling at me over an insignificant sample.
Experimenting is fun and right now it looks like my beach is getting re-nourished. I have to be vigilant and keep reminding myself that one storm could take it all away.
