If you play TAG sit n go stategy in a 10 online game or fast format live tourrnamet with 20 minute rounds to cash you will only see 80-100 hands (or 80-100 times around the table). So at best you will see less than 1/2 the hole card combinations but your table will have seen all the hole card combo's 4 times over.

 

One of the conclusions to be drawn is you want to hit your big hands late.

If you are hit them early making moves late is going to be more important as you can not expect to get cards as you would be expecting to beat the numbers. 

 

One option is to play small ball in tournents but in short cycle tourneys like sit n go's this will more likely you will bleed your chips off. In long format tournaments small ball LAG is one strategy to get deep ala Gavin Smith.

 

The second conclusion to draw is you have to bluff in order to keep your stack. Since timing is everything this is an art that must be learned to survive in sit n go's.

 

In No Limit Variance in bankroll is part of the game. The swings can be huge.  In stocks the amount of variance is quantified by a number called the beta co-efficient.  Wikipedia defines "The Beta coefficient, in terms of finance and investing, is a measure of a stock (or portfolio)’s volitility in relation to the rest of the market." In poker terms this quantifies the amount of volitility in the 2 dominant styles of play.   TAG has lower volitility or low beta and LAG is has high volitility or high beta. 

 

 

Like I stated in timing, there are 1.1 unique billion flops and 220 unique card combinations.  There is not enough time in ones lifetime to play enough poker see all the 220 poker hands and then all the unique poker flops (250 billion hands of poker).  This would include playing one hand per minute every day for the rest of you adult life.  So we can look at the players then use some finance terms to classify poker players into 3 categories Secular Bulls, Secular Bears and Pigs.

 

Secular bulls are players who play well and are consistently lucky, the Phil Iveys, Micheal Mizrachis and Gus Hansens of the world. The term secular bull comes the long term way the cards run in month or years periods.  A secular bull can have a bear run within this a time frame that could run days or weeks within a longer secular bull run.

 

Secular bulls thrive playing a loose aggressive style of play and shift gears into tight play. These players play catch cards to accumulate chips and bluff to get paid on thir big hands.

 

Secular bears are players who play well and run badly like J.C. Tran, Dan Harrington and me.  Like a secular bulls, a secular bears can have a bull run in a time frame that could run days or weeks within long term secular bear run.

 

Secular bears thrive playing a tight aggressive style of play and shift gears to loose play.  We bluff to accumulate chips and play loose to get paid on our big hands.

 

All the above listed players are good players, the rest of players are pigs.  Pigs are not winning players.  All the above listed players have made money playing tournament poker pigs are the dead money..  Jim Cramer has a stock market show and he has a money making philospohy for stocks.  "Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered."  This is true for poker as well. 

 

Bulls and bears have gears by which they adjust their play.   Pigs dont generally change gears.  A classic example is an anecdote about the World Series of Poker.  It is said that the chip leader at the end of day one never has won the world series.  Why?  These people do not have enough skills to thrive in the constantly changing environment of a long format poker tournament. This are living members of the pig population. We all start out as pigs because we choose a poker style and stay wth it until we get enough poker weapons to expand our skill play and play a wide variety of hands well.  Some of us never get beyond our pig ways and will top out skill wise being good low level players.

 

 

Stock markets before black-scholes (look it up in wikipedia) and automated trading were about as corrupt as some poker tables.  It was an insiders game exploited by the floor traders in New York to their own personal benefit.  Us as non-inside traders were left to look at the ebb and flow of funds and guess as to which way the markets would go. In poker, like stocks, we can not know what is going to happen on a hand by hand situation. Unless we happen to have insider information by looking at the cards in advance, If there is a casino that will let me play that way let me know.  

 

If you did a detailed forensic analysis of the stock market you can long term ups and downs and witnin each you can still find stock that went down in the up market, up in the down market did nothing in either market. In the long term its a secular trend these trends run from 5 to 25 years.  In shorter time frames there are secondary bull and bear trends. All this analysis is hindsight. Moving forward it can be analogized as gambling.

 

The best analysis book on poker is David Skalsky's "Theroy of Poker".  I believe this book as a decision making tool is not very good but is an excellent analysis tool in retrospect. 

 

But we can take a look at our success and failure over a long period of time to tell how we are running.  Experienced poker with sharp card sense know when they are running good or bad and we know over a long time how well we are running.  I read a Jen Harman interview where she stated she ran bad for a year once.  Alll the pros sniped in envy at Phil Ivey in 2006 that he had a horse shoe up his arse. These trends do not last forever and we do not often know when the change occurs but we know that its changed after some period of time.

 

Just like players and cards, a hot player has cold streaks, a cold player has hot streaks, and bad players always lose.  When you are hot milk it dry, when you see a hot opponent avoid him, when you are cold, tighten up and bluff.

 

 

Some poker tracking software can tell us in whatever time interval we want to see how well we are running over some period of time.  You will find Bull or Bear that your cards will run random (I have checked), you will get an even distribution of all 220 starting hands, you will bet get every card in 1/52nd of the time bit your wins and losses run in streaks.  When you are playing track it.  Count how many times a flush hits, how many times best hand preflop wins, or how many times a set hits.  These things trend in short cycles. 

 

There is a math law that states that the probability of a random event happening, if its truly random, will have no influence over future events. But when you see "random" events occur in clustered a clustered fashion,  we know at some point in the future enough that event will not occur in order for the numbers to fall back to the mean and their expected probability over the evnironment. Can you say how much longer the event will continue to occur? How long will it take for the event to fall back to the norm?  You cant ever tell, thats why playing good poker means never taking a gamble. If you get your money in good 70% of the time over time you will be a winner playing, all other things equal.

 

There are several loose aggressive player that make good money timing the cards (and good stock and options traders).  You have to run good generally to win at poker this way but it can be done.  Many of these players are making rational, though arguably flawed decisions that ultimately pay off.  A tactial loose play decision based on subjective (NOT emotional) criteira can pay off. Becasue really, what poker table is ever an equal playing field.

 

Just like in the stock market the good traders are not typically gambling. They have rationally identified something that is not in the numbers.  One of my favorite examples is a stock trade I made that ran contrary to professional advice I heard. 

 

This stock is Valero. Valero is a company that refines lower oil grade called heavy crude oil.  All the stock professionals were down on the stock as oil was cheap and refininf capacity was adequate, to them. Well adequate to them was 70% and the economy was growing.  With all the environmental regualtion iot takes almost 10 years to build a new refinery. As is sits all the refiners are simply adding capacity to existing refineries but as the economy grown the grown in refining capability did not keep up. Once the prefessionals realized this the stock skyrocketed.  Then the gulf war 2 came along gas shot up and a good stock became a great stock.  The off topic lesson here is, if you are taking a gamble have good rational reasons behind your decsion.

 

My gambler buddy will gamble into card trends and he does it in a way that pays off.  By itself its a bad betting strategey but if you apply other rules then it could work.  Some examples of these rules are to get into these pots for one unit or less if possible, have position, or know you are playing a passive table multiway  for example.

Starting Hand Criteria

Preflop Betting

Reading and Classifying Players

Reading Flops

Reading Turns

Turn Betting

River & Showdown Decision Making

Value Betting

Bluffing

 

Playing Tight

Betting Patterns

Agressive vs Passive

Tournaments

Short table play

Heads up Play

Playing Loose