Pragmatism, Dogmatism, and Theory

When it comes to poker, I admit that I am a bit of a Theorist. This isn't the best way to be. A Pragmatist is the best way to be. However, down the route of pragmatism lies danger. If you are not too careful, it becomes dogmatism, and that can cost you a lot more money than sticking to the theory.

Chen and Ankenman are the greatest proponents of "theory"; so much so that they list their justification on page one, "Common Misconceptions", Number One.

We can gain an edge over our opponents by knowing their strategies and exploiting them. But this edge can only be temporary".

Let's jump to another area of theory -- the hands with which you should raise all-in when your stack is, say, an M of 7 and you are on the button. Andy Ward has produced a nice little table of this, which is mathematically sound. In other words, if you follow this table, it doesn't matter what your opponent does.

However, in the three or so years since I first saw that table (since mathematically expounded in the Chubukov table) Andy has change the hands with which he plays that way. Indeed, even when he first revealed them, players such as Gryko observed that they would choose different hands, although they accepted the principle.

Why? Because the players defending hadn't read the tables. On top of that, even if they had, they didn't know if Andy had. Andy discovered that there was no need to play at the point where "it doesn't matter what your opponent does". You could play even looser than that, because defending players did not play perfectly. And, to a man (or woman) the way that they did not play perfectly was that they folded too often. Pragmatism led to a better result than theory.

Now, Chen and Ankenman would observe that this advantage could only be temporary. To which the obvious reply is "Yes, we know. The trick is to adapt just before your opponent adapts."

Now, pragmatism is all very well, but the important thing about it is that you have to understand the theory first. If you don't, then you will not realize that you are playing in an exploitable way, which only happens to work because your opponents haven't yet woken up on how to exploit it. This weakness is, along with a bankroll that cannot withstand variance, one of the major reasons for people who move up in stakes failing. They play a certain way. They win. They move up in stakes. They lose. They cannot see how this can be anything other than bad luck. They are wrong.

Back in the mid 1990s, dogmatism was rife. The reasons for this aren't hard to see. For a start, theory was (as we can see now) in its infancy. What mathematical stuff there was being written (e.g. in the game theory field) was not being written by gamblers. So the concept of game theory was that both opponents played perfectly (and the concept of multi-player 'unsolvable' games wasn't even touched). In a land without theory, you just went with what worked. You didn't really care if this was 'perfect' play or 'exploitable' play, because, in practice, this didn't matter at the time.

This led to certain areas of dogmatism. For example, always check it down when another player is all-in, because eliminating that player "moves you up the ladder". The extent to which this is complete bollocks (often you want the number of players to remain constant while you build up your stack, for example) is now obvious (except, perhaps, to a few of the real old die-hards) but at the time, any bet into a dry side-pot was seen as heresy. Various other "standard" plays of the time have since been shown to be mathematically dodgy. But the established players swore blind that they were right.

The early "how-to" poker books often fell into the same trap. They told you how to beat the games as they were at the time -- which was fine -- but they also implied that this was the right way to play, which was where pragmatism fell into dogmatism. It was only when the new Internet "geeks" came along, playing sometimes in a way which had the old-timer non-Internet casino poker players just staring in disbelief, that the dogma was revealed for what it was.

But theory can have its downfalls too. Aaron Brown, in that excellent book "The Poker Face of Wall Street", is virtually the proclaimer of negative EV plays that work because your opponents do not play perfectly. In this sense it is a dangerous book for novices (and is one reason why I recommend it wholeheartedly) but his attack on the "math-geeks" is most appositely expressed when he talks about the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Let's take not the standard two people, but four people. We have two game theorists, experts in the mathematics of poker and all game-related issues, whom we shall call Mr A and Mr C, and two professional criminal partners, who we shall call Mr Big and Mr Little.

We combine these into their various pairings, AB, AC, AL, CB, CL, BL.

I'll assume that you all know the prisoner's dilemma situation. If you give up the other guy and he says nothing, then you get one year and he gets 10 years. If you both say nothing, you both go free. If you give each other up, you both do nine years.

Now, Mr A and Mr C say to themselves, "Fuck, the other guy is bound to give me up, so if I give him up, I get 9 years instead of 10, so I have to give him up".

When partnered with mathematicians Mr A or Mr C, Mr Big (who knows nothing of game theory but much of loyalty) says "Who are these guys? I don't know them! Hell, maybe they'll stay quiet and I can get off! I'll give them up. Mr Little says the same.

But when Mr Big and Mr Little are both put in the box, they say "Ahh, he's a pro. He won't grass." And they both stay silent, and both go free.

As Aaron Brown points out, he can think of better things in life than to be stuck in a cell with a guy for nine years while that guy congratulates himself on what a good game theorist he is.

You often come across this situation at poker tables in multi-wayers. A player might make the correct play assuming that both of his opponents will play perfectly (to which the reply, as Brown might put it, is "what the hell are you doing in a game where you assume that your opponents will play perfectly?") but it's the wrong play given one of the player's known foibles/weaknesses (perhaps he folds too much, perhaps he calls too much, perhaps he's too passive, perhaps he's too aggressive). When you are the third player in this kind of scenario, it's incredibly annoying.

So, I try to start with the theory and adapt it as and when I see fit. In poker, this changes dramatically from site to site, from level to level, and on the time of day. In particular, late at night, players are far more likely to call, whereas in the afternoon, they are more likely to fold. These are equally exploitable. To call one game "good" and the other game "bad" on the gounds of looseness is wrong. The only game that is "bad" is where your opponents make the correct decisions. "Loose" or "tight" has nothing to do with it. But it is here that dogmatism comes into play. "Loose, action" games are seen as "good" and tight, no-action games are seen as bad. And the reason this is stated is because it is, in the main, true. You tend to make more money in the looser action games. But beware of dogmatism. The reason for this is nothing to do with the looseness, it's to do with the negative EV decisions that the opponents are making. If players fold inappropriately, those are negative EV decisions too, but the games show up as "% Seeing flop 14%, Avge pot 4x the big blind" and the pros avoid those games like the plague. In fact, you can move in, steal blinds for a couple of circuits (and perhaps actually make a hand) and move on. There's lots of poker sites you can move around doing that. It's not like it's a single casino.