Now here’s the thing: In the realworld, such a sequence may take an hour or more to play out, depending on how long it takes your blind to come back around. In fact, only the very best, most attentive and retentive players will track the sequence and plan a response. Online, though, you can whip through three laps in ten minutes or less, and the speed at which certain situations repeat themselves allows even the most inattentive opponents to catch on.
Which is exactly what we want them to do.
In the realworld, we have to worry about our best foes not just cracking our code but also deploying effective countermeasures. After all, if they’re focused enough and smart enough to detect our trends, they’re also (possibly) focused enough and smart enough to anticipate our adjustments. Online, though, we can count on our worst foes having knee-jerk reactions to our play. They absorb our patterns without really understanding what they mean, and they react to those patterns without considering that we may be anticipating their reaction. Online poker, then, with its sizzling pace of play and ultra-high context density, gives us the chance to victimize our foes by their predictable assumptions and flawed responses.
You attack a guy’s blind. He folds. Two minutes later, you attack it again. Again he folds. Maybe he even does you the favor of chatboxing about it, protesting, u cant have a hand every time. Two minutes later, you attack again. This time he’s ready to take a stand—but this time you actually have a hand. Yes, you’re lucky to pick up a real hand at an opportune moment, but you’re also prepared to exploit the luck that comes your way. Should you happen not to pick up a real hand here, you merely refrain from attacking the blind. You know the guy is primed to play back at you, so you don’t give him a chance to do so unless and until it suits your ends.
Can you think of other examples of “third time’s the adjustment” thinking?
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Here’s one, from the end stage of a sitngo tournament.
Fortunately for you, you’re down to heads up play. Unfortunately, your opponent currently outchips you by about 4 to 1. Given the size of the blinds relative to your stack, you know it’s time to start making some all in moves and try to double through. Do you wait for a premium hand before pushing all in?
Hell, no.
You look for a semi-strong hand like A-middle or K-J, and push all in with that. Given the random distribution of hands, it’s unlikely that your opponent has a better hand than yours at this moment. Even if he does, there’s a range of better hands he’ll fold here (e.g., little pairs and A-T) because this is the first time you’ve pushed, and his first impulse will be to believe that you have a quality hand. In the name of not letting you double up and get back into contention, he’ll fold to your first all in stab.
Now, though, he’s on guard. Now he’s alert to the possibility that you’ve taken your small stack into push and pray mode. Good. This is exactly what you want him to think.
You swap the blinds back and forth a few times. Since you’re playing online, this takes all of forty-five seconds. Then you pick up another semi-strong hand.
And you push all in again.
Of course he’s suspicious. Of course he’s wary. He thinks you’re just trying to bully bet your way out of trouble. And, of course, you are. But he still can’t call because, again, he probably doesn’t have a hand, and, again, he can’t discount the possibility that you do. So he folds once more. Even as he folds, though, he cements a picture of your strategy in his mind. He figures you for desperate. He concludes that you’ll keep making desperation raises with semi-strong hands (or even no hand at all) and that all he has to do to beat you is to wait and call you down with a major holding. He might not even wait for all that major a holding, since the lower he thinks your raising standards have fallen, the lower his corresponding calling requirements will go.
Meanwhile, you’re anticipating this adjustment, and you’re right out in front of it. Having taken a couple of shots with indifferent hands, you picked up a couple of blinds before your foe was in the mood to call. Now that he’s in that mood, you just wait to pick up a hand of real quality, something like Q-Q or J-J, go all in and hope to get a call from a worse hand like A-x or T-T. Will this happen? Sometimes. If it doesn’t, you continue to joust and trade blinds, let some time pass, and create the impression that you’ve given up your desperation-raise strategy. Then you go ahead and steal all over again! Prime him to call, and manipulate him into calling with a worse hand.
Luck is a factor here, but not the way we conventionally think of luck. It’s pure luck, for instance, to pick up pocket aces when your foe has pocket kings. Of course, the money will go in the middle. It’s a no-brainer. What we’re talking about here is something called applied luck, where you launch a sequence of actions leading to one conclusion if the cards break your way, but a totally different conclusion if they don’t. With applied luck, it doesn’t really matter if you get lucky or not, since you have a plan for every eventuality. Plus, no matter what happens, you’ve got your foe leaning the wrong way because you’re anticipating, or actually dictating, his adjustments.
Consider the orphan flop trifecta.
An orphan flop is something like 8♣-3♦-3♥, a forlorn little waif featuring no straight draws or flush draws, and not likely to have hit anybody’s hand. These orphans are just looking to be adopted by the first person who bets. If that person is you, your foes will naturally be incredulous. Incredulous or not, though, the first time you go the adoption route, they can’t be sure where you’re at, and in their uncertainty they’ll often give you the benefit of the doubt and fold. If you bet at the next orphan that pops up, you turn incredulity to suspicion—and you do so by calculating design. This guy is a lying sack of sushi, your foes now will think, who thinks he can adopt every damn orphan that comes along. I’ll show him! It’s the “I’ll show him” part of their thinking that’s important. They postulate that you’ll bet at all unwanted pots and now plan their little response. Next time you bet at that orphan, they decide, they’re gonna raise you no matter what they have. That’ll teach a lying sack of sushi like you a lesson!
But you know this. You know they’ve made an adjustment—it’s just the adjustment you’ve guided them to. And you’re already a step ahead. When the next orphan comes along, you’ll either have a piece of it or you won’t. If you miss it completely, you won’t bet, and you’ll be content to have adopted two orphans out of three with virtually no risk. But if you happen to have hit the flop, look where you’re at: You can bet a strong hand into opponents who are primed to counterattack—probably with less of a hand than they folded the last two times you tried!
Again, you’re relying on applied luck: adapting your strategy to the actual cards that fall. If they fall your way, great. You’re in the catbird seat. If they don’t…that’s great, too. Your fold in this situation just tells your foes, See, guys? I don’t attack every orphan that comes along. Which, of course, just lends more credibility to the steals you later launch.
It’s all about balance, adaptation, response to circumstance, and staying a step ahead. Thanks to context density, your balance and adaptation are quickly rewarded in ways they just usually aren’t in b&m games. In the realworld, it can take so long for the orphan flop trifecta to play out that your inattentive foes can’t be counted on to remember what you’re doing and to make the adjustments you want them to make. As previously noted, the cardroom players most likely to suss you out are your best, most attentive enemies. They’ll make adjustments, but not necessarily the ones you want. Online, weak minded opponents will acquire a sense of how you play your orphans without even realizing it. The notion will be forced into their