At The Table

Introduction

In this article

• Which issues affect the development of your poker business
  
• Why even small inefficiencies handicap your career
• How to use resources efficiently
  

There are lots of guys more talented than I am at poker. But I’m striving to be the “poker player of the future,” if you will, who focuses and measures himself based on how well he does in these smaller areas. A guy could steal a pot from me and say, “I outplayed leatherass. So how did he make $1 million in a year and I made $40,000?” My answer: look at the small inefficiencies and missed opportunities.

Most poker careers end before they even get started because of lost resources that didn’t need to be wasted. As part of my ongoing series, “Where Poker Businesses Go Wrong,” I’m going to focus today on play at the table. My feeling is that inefficiency is what typically derails what would otherwise have been long-lasting poker careers.

Here are the at-the-table factors that I see most often in players who go down a wasteful path:

Most common mistakes

It was in November 2009 that Isildur1 began challenging members of Team Full Tilt to play gargantuan heads-up sessions at $500/$1,000 No Limit, with pots growing to just south of $1 million. Over the course of three weeks, he beat down online icons like Tom “Durrrr” Dwan to the tune of nearly $5 million.

What did I think of Isildur1? I thought he was a genius, a prodigy — maybe even poker’s Mozart. I also thought he was a fool. Days after his massive run, Isildur1 showed he was human after all. Overconfident, he took on Phil Ivey and Patrik Antonius simultaneously across eight different tables. The contests were epic, with more than $5 million spread out across the tables. By the end of the session, Isildur1 had given back more than half his winnings. By January he was playing on a stake.

I have one rule when it comes to the nosebleed games: Don’t play them. DO NOT. Granted, thinking about your poker like a business — which means protecting your assets and capital — isn’t nearly as fun as thinking of it as a means to worldwide fame. But slow and steady wins the race. I tell you the following not to brag, but to support my belief system: I pocketed almost $4 million during my five-year career without ever even sniffing a nosebleed game. There probably still aren’t more than 10 guys in the world who’ve made more than I have playing No-Limit online, despite lots of people who have been at one point up on me by $4-$5 million but lost those profits since then. I’d venture to say that most would give anything to have that capital back.

My personal advice in moving up the stakes is that you should have a big enough bankroll for 100 buy-ins at all times. If you’re playing $100 buy-ins, you want to have $10,000 in your account, minimum. Is this the smartest way to invest your money? No, but it does give you peace of mind and you can only really play your best poker when you’re comfortable.

If you’re winning with ease at your present limit, you should definitely consider moving up the stakes, but not until you’ve saved enough for 100 buy-ins. This is probably the most conservative advice you’ll ever hear. But I tell you this as someone who’s never gone broke or even had so much as a losing month: I’ve never taken a shot at a limit for which I didn’t have at least 100 buy-ins.

Some guys want to win enough to buy a house; I just don’t want to lose the one I already have. I’ll forego being a hero in the poker world if it means never being a goat in the real one.

When you play online, the decision to add tables is akin to a company considering the pros and cons of expansion. Will more locations lead to more revenue? Or is less more and will more be less? So how do you know when adding to the number of tables you play at simultaneously equals smart growth? I’m constantly encouraging people to push the envelope. If you’re able to play five tables as well as you can play four, then you should; otherwise, you’re giving up 20 percent of your potential profit margin.

But adding tables can also be a slippery slope, because if you keep adding more and more with abandon, you’ll eventually arrive at a point of diminishing returns.

There are a couple of ways to view expansion, poker-wise. You can play more tables at lower stakes where you know you’ll do well. This enables you to reach the “long run” more quickly. This is key. If your results per hand are consistent and your goal is to play 100,000-150,000 hands in a month, playing more hands at once will hasten that yield. The fewer hands you play the more subject you are to variance. By playing more hands, you start to minimize the impact of variance and skill wins the day. The profit you can expect by virtue of your skill level expands the more hands you play.

The downside is you might be playing lower stakes than you could be. You are probably not improving and thinking about situations as well as a guy who is playing at fewer tables. A lot of improvement comes from playing fewer tables and grinding on decisions. If you have 12-16 tables going on, life becomes more difficult.

It’s a virtual certainty that your win rate will suffer slightly as you move up in hands. But if your dollars-per-hour metric remains steady or improves, you’ll know that your move up in the number of simultaneous hands played has been a smart one.

Forget multi-tabling for a second. Here’s one question to keep in mind: If I were only able to play one table, what style would I play? Loose and aggressive or tight and conservative?

Here’s my answer: If I could play just one table, I would probably around 30 percent of my hands at a 6-max table.

At my present stakes, I play about 22-24% of my hands spread over 9-15 tables — and sometimes as many as 20 tables. My rationale for playing 7-10% fewer hands, is that I’m better off ditching the bottom third of the hands I’d customarily play, in favor of seeking more profitable situations over a greater number of simultaneously played tables. What you ultimately want to achieve is the perfect balance between playing too many hands and too few.

Many people have criticized me because I tend to focus on things that were once considered peripheral. Increasing my profit margins 1 percent here and 2 percent there is a far cry from a poker game in the Wild, Wild West. Those incremental improvements, which I still seek, are what made my poker business as healthy as it is today.

When playing at full capacity, in the more difficult games of the present time, I make about $0.50 a hand, playing between 9-20 hands at a time on two monitors. I rack up about 1,000 high-stakes hands per hour and 7,000-plus hands on a given day. If I play 200 days a year, that’s 1.4 million hands per year. My ability to play profitably at this level is not just a function of my poker skill, but also my ability to make incremental improvements along the way.

Poker is a game where we have to bet a lot to win a little, making it a thin-margin business. But consider the following:

On a given day, I’ll have 20 tables going at once. I play 20 percent of my hands at an average of one hand per table per minute. So I’m playing four hands per minute.

The average pot size for those hands is $300 or so, which means I’m playing $1,200-worth of pots per minute. That’s $70,000-worth of pots in an hour. If I play for 10 hours, that means I’ve played for a total of $700,000 in a day. I’ve chanced that I’ll lose or win $10,000, even though I’ve technically risked $700,000.

Margins are a mindset. My advice might yield 1 percent here, 2 percent there. But when you add those things up, it makes for a very profitable poker player. Mine is not sexy advice — I’m not promising you that I know five ways to swoop in and steal a pot from Phil Ivey. But in focusing on the small stuff, maybe you’ll learn a new play you didn’t have in your arsenal before and maybe that play only comes up once an hour. But if that wins you a hand an hour, you’ll be looking at a new profit source that’s contributing to your bottom line. Also, factor in that you have this new play, which detracts from your opponents’ ability to make decisions against you. That’s yet another profit source. Add another table and apply my advice — you get the picture. You’re gaining margin points where you’d not have before.

If you always keep your wheels turning and have your mind on margins, you’ll find it yields significant profit down the line. Again, this is not sexy advice. But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: We are here to make money. This is a business. Check your ego at the door.

Some players say they prefer to play loose, while others prefer to play tight. They call each other donkey-nits, clown-fish, and all manner of animal inspired names. They may not be playing from a hand chart, but they’ve decided whether they prefer always to err on the side of aggression or conservatism. They pick a style and stick with it.

That doesn’t make much sense. Every decision you make at the poker table should be based on what you think will win the most money.

Maybe you’ve been playing tight all day and a couple of loose players are constantly raising and cold calling each other. It’s time to re-raise and grab all of the money that’s sitting out there. Your cards don’t matter. You should squeeze. You already know that both players have weak and wide ranges here. The first guy will have a hard time calling your raise with a speculative hand, knowing that he’ll wind up squeezed between you and the cold caller. The cold caller is even less likely to call, since he usually would have re-raised himself if he had a hand worth a 3-bet.

Maybe you’ve been playing loose all day and a super tight and oblivious player shoves over your 3-bet. You think his range is only aces and kings. You should fold your queens. Queens are normally a powerhouse hand when you have a loosey-goosey image. But this opponent doesn’t pay attention to that stuff, and he’s super tight to boot. Your awesome hand has turned into muck, and that’s exactly where it should end up.

It’s OK to deviate from your “standard” play when the situation demands it. In fact, that’s the best way to play.

When you attend to your important decisions, you must not rush them. You generally have a lot more time than you realize and you can always click the time bank if necessary (or download a script that automatically clicks it for you, which is what I recommend). I use a simple mental checklist that I have on my computer screen for when I arrive at an important decision:

• What do my opponent's actions mean?
• What is the best action to take vs. his range of hands?
• Consider all of your options carefully before deciding and make sure to take lots of deep breaths.

While these tips will help you, the single greatest way to add tables is through sheer repetition. If you play full-time for 2-3 years, you will have seen so many of the same situations that your decisions will become mostly automated. Once decisions become automated, you will spend less time on them, which will free you up to add even more tables.

If you’re treating your poker like a business then you wouldn't want to spend that time any other way.

About the author

Dusty Schmidt is an instructor at PokerStrategy.com, as well as the author of Treat Your Poker Like A Business and Don't Listen To Phil Hellmuth: Correcting The 50 Worst Pieces of Poker Advice You've Ever Heard. In his five-year online-poker career, Schmidt has played nearly 9 million hands and won close to $4 million, without ever having a losing month. He is a columnist for Card Player Magazine. Schmidt’s books can be purchased at www.DustySchmidt.net. 

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