JV'S KILLER POKER:
NO WAY OUT

BY: John Vorhaus

It's a consummation devoutly to be wished: You hold pocket aces in late position, put in a raise at the first opportunity, and find yourself against a small enough field to feel like your aces have a chance. The flop comes 8-4-2, a safe enough flop, you figure, since your foes are unlikely to be in there with 8-4, 8-2 or 4-2, and while small sets are a possibility, you judge that a remote possibility -- especially when it's checked around to you and then just one subsequent player calls your bet. You put him on a good eight or an overpair; you're not scared; nor should you be.

But here comes the turn, an offsuit 7. He checks. You bet. He raises. Now you have that familiar sinking feeling: You've been trapped by a slow-played superior hand. Could he really have been lucky enough to hit his set or second pair? Could he have been boneheaded enough to call your initial raise with two disconnected low cards? Maybe he played a 5-6, drew to an inside straight and got there. In any case, you are now in the midst of a familiar situation: You're stuck on the hand and there's no way out. You're going to call his raise on the turn because, hey, you might pair up or ace up on the river to beat him -- unless your pair gives him a boat, or unless he's already on a made straight. In any case, you're committed... committed to losing two more big bets because you feel, fatalistically, that there's no way out.

Is this true? Is it really true that you can't escape further damage? After all, why not fold? Why not save those two bets for a time when they'll do you more good.

Sure, you reckon, he might be bluffing. But for the sake of this example, let's assume that you know he's not. You've never seen him check-raise bluff, but you have seen him check-raise trap many times. Nor is he the kind of player who might put you on overcards and think that his ragged eight is the best hand. No, he's a just another straightforward, unimaginative player who just barely knows how to check-call the flop and check-raise the turn. For the sake of this example, let's assume that you're 100% certain he has you beat. Yet you call. Why is that?

Could it be that you feel you're owed? We all know how rarely pocket aces come around. When they come our way, we naturally anticipate winning with them. Why not? They're the best possible hand, and we're good people. We deserve to win. Thus burdened by this feeling of entitlement, we tend to underestimate the strength of our foe's hand, and overestimate the chances of beating him on the redraw. Our thinking is skewed by the emotional attachment we have to those beautiful bullets. We want them to win. We need them to win. If they don't win, it's a tragedy and a shame, but not so big a tragedy and a shame as folding now. That would be just unfair.

You see this sad rationalization in at least one other circumstance: when a player holds pocket kings and there's an ace on the flop. He raised pre-flop, driving off (he assumes) all hands except premium ones. Well, what's a premium non-pair hand? A hand with an ace, of course. But when that ace hits the flop, our holder of king-king suddenly loses all perspective. He puts his foes on underpairs or draws, even when his foes start raising like flags. Why? Because pocket kings come along as rarely as pocket aces, and he feels like he's owed. In my book Killer Poker, I refer to this as "the phenomenon of the stealth ace": To a player holding pocket kings, an ace on the flop will actually, physically, totally, vanish from view.

Folks, discipline in poker means more than having rigorous starting requirements. It also means getting away from hands when you're beat. If you can't fold aces when you know, with every fiber of your being, that they're just going to cost you bets upon bets, then you don't have discipline. If pocket kings leave you vulnerable to the stealth ace, you don't have common sense. All you have is a feeling of entitlement, and this feeling, even if it's justified (which it's not), puts your focus on entitlement instead of perfect play. This can only hamper your perceptions, warp your decisions and degrade your results.

I'm not saying there aren't times you should stick with your pocket aces or pocket kings. If the chance that your opponent is overplaying his hand plus the chance that you can beat him on the river add up to a favorable gamble, by all means go for it. Players do bluff, and players do overplay their hands. But they don't do these things as often as you think, not in those instances when your thinking is torqued by desire or dreaded entitlement. At the limits most of us play, things are mostly what they seem to be. The cleverness, trickery and chicanery we assign as values to other players are more likely to come from our own subjective reality than from the hard facts of the game. In other words, if you're holding an invested hand like A-A or K-K, and you come to realize that the only way for your hand to hold up is for the other guy to be bluffing, you'll believe he's bluffing, just to defend your emotional investment in the big hand.

Get away from that. Get out of that. See things as they are. Sometimes other players trap us, but sometimes we just trap ourselves. There's always a way out -- a way to minimize collateral damage -- if you're bold enough and honest enough to take it. Remember, the universe doesn't owe you anything but an education, and it gives you lessons every day.

(John Vorhaus is author of the KILLER POKER series and News Ambassador for UltimateBet.com.)