By Lou Krieger | Published on August 17, 2010

How Poker Has Changed, Part I

Poker has changed more rapidly over the past few years than it has in the entirety of the game’s history. Seven years ago, just before the beginnings of a poker boom that was triggered by Chris Moneymaker’s improbable World Series of Poker win, when he overcame a then record field of 839 players to take home $2,500,000 and become a household name in the process, poker was a different beast altogether.

In the US, at least, prior to Moneymaker, poker was mainly a cash game, played at fixed-limits. No-limit poker was mainly confined to tournament offerings, seldom played in cash games in the United States, and the internet boom was just beginning. To say Chris Moneymaker’s victory – a parlay of astronomical proportions that began when he won a $55 online satellite and ran it into a multi-million dollar payoff – had an impact on the growth of both online poker and the number of entrants in the game’s biggest event, the World Series of Poker, is an understatement of massive proportions. From 2003’s then-record number of 839 entrants to 2006, when 8,773 entered, the WSOP grew to more than ten times the number of players in the main event.

But size isn’t everything, at least not in poker. The nature of the game changed too, and giant leaps forward in poker strategy and tactics have been made, as new players, younger players, and older players too, continued to raise their games, which in turn forced others to upgrade their skill sets in order to compete, or else risk dropping by the wayside as their bankrolls vanished into the hands of more skillfed, sophisticated poker players.

Some of these changes were subtle, almost imperceptible, while others represented big concepts that were either new to the game, or concepts that had been used in the past, but never to the degree that’s seen now, or used by so many sophisticated poker players.

Continuation Bets, Defending Against Continuation bets, and Raising on Air

One big poker concept was that took hold in recent years is the massive popularity of the continuation bet. It’s nothing new; poker players have used this tactic for years. You raise before the flop and regardless of whether the flop hits you or not, you’re going to bet if you’re first to act or if the action is checked around to you.

The thinking behind this play is that unless the flop also helped your opponent, he will have a hard time calling if you raised both before and on the flop. But its popularity led to many players adopting a counter strategy of raising those who almost always make a continuation bet if they raised before the flop. Their reasoning is simple. A raiser is statistically more likely to raise with big cards than a big pair, and if he does, there is only one chance in three that the flop will help him. Since the flop is more likely to miss a player than to help him, then by raising his continuation bet, it will be the original raiser who has a tough time calling with nothing more than two big cards.

That’s where we are right now. The fact that players who raise are more likely to have nothing after the flop than a big hand, led to the prevalence of raising on air, with nothing at all other than audacity and the idea of taking the play – and the pot – away from an opponent who more often than not, isn’t likely to have much of a hand.

Range Versus Range

Five years ago poker players were trying to put their opponents on hands, and many still do just that. Haven’t you heard opponents say, “I knew you had AK,” or something equally specific. Well, there’s little chance that your opponent can figure out your hand well enough to be specific about it, especially in early betting rounds. Poker players who think they can do this with regularity are just dreaming.

What good poker players do is assign a range of hands to you based on the hands they’ve seen you play. For example, if you raise from early position, I might assign a range to you of any pair of tens or higher, along with AK, AQ, AJs, and KQs. That’s a total of five pairs, and since there are six ways to combine cards of the same rank into pairs, it’s a total of 30 hands – six pairs of aces, six pairs of kings, etc. To that I can add 64 big-card combinations, since there are 16 ways to combine and ace and a king into Big Slick, and you’re likely to play any of these four, 16-way combos, that’s a total of 64. Added to the possibility of your pairs, that’s 90 possible hands you could raise with, assuming my assessment of your likely raising hands from early position is accurate.

While I was not able to assign a specific hand to you, I don’t really have to. After all, I’m not playing a specific hand against you. Regardless of the cards I happen to be holding, I’m playing the range of hands I need to have to warrant a call – and to do that I’d need to hold a hand that’s bigger than half of your raising range in order to make a solid call with some expectation of winning. So if I can beat the bottom half of your range – basically, all of your big-card combos with the exception of AK, I have a hand I can call with. Since 30 of your raising hands will be pairs and there are 16 ways to combine big cards, the top half of your range are pairs of tens or higher and AK, for a total of 46 out of the 90 hands you’d raise with. If I’m not somewhere north of there, I’m better off folding.

That, in a nutshell, is the basic thinking behind range versus range. If you had a much narrower raising range, the hands I’d have to have to call you would be much smaller. If you were prone to raising with lesser poker hands, such as pairs of sevens, eights, and nines, as well as with AJ, KQ, KJ, and QJ suited or not, I could call with weaker hands and still figure to be north of your median raising hand. Not only that, I could also reraise with lesser hands too.

It usually doesn’t pay to put a player on a specific poker hand. Put him on a range of hands instead, and based on how he bets and raises in conjunction with the community cards on the board, you can often narrow down your assessment of his holdings. But even if you can’t, if you are accurate about your opponent’s playing proclivities, you can put the odds in your favor by playing hands that figure to be better than his the majority of the time. There’s no mystery to this. The mystery lies in how accurate you are in determining the range of hands your opponent will play, and how he will play them most of the time. That’s where the art of poker comes into play, and while it’s something you can improve with experience, it doesn’t lend itself to a formulaic approach.

Fold Equity

The concept has always been with us, though its name is somewhat new. The concept comes from semi-bluffing, a bet made with a hand that’s probably not the best hand right now, but a hand that stands a good chance of outdrawing any opponents who call.

Semi-bluffing provides two ways to win. Your opponent can fold and you’ll win the pot, but even if you are called, you have a reasonable chance of catching one of the cards you need on a subsequent round to make your hand.

But to give yourself two ways to win, a semi-bluff can only be made with more cards to come. If you bet the river with an unmade draw, you’ll only win if your opponent folds; you can’t win if he calls. If you bet on the flop or turn, you can win if he folds – this is referred to as “fold equity” – and you also have a chance to win by improving.

When you add the idea of fold equity – that percent of time an opponent will fold to your bet – to whatever your chances are of improving to the best hand, it might raise a hand from one that would otherwise be a loser to one that’s worth playing.

Thinking in terms of fold equity allows a poker player to become creative with hands that would otherwise be folded if considered solely from the perspective of the hand’s chances of improving to the best hand on future betting rounds. That’s why you often see good poker players raise with otherwise suspect hands. They’ve done the math and realize that a bet from a hand that’s currently only a 40 percent shot to win, but has a 15 percent chance of inducing the opposing player to fold, now has a 55 percent chance of winning.

The danger of fold equity, of course, is that many weak players use this notion simply as a way of talking themselves into playing hands that ought to be folded because their assessment of fold equity is horribly wrong. If, for example, you’re playing against an opponent who seldom folds and cannot be bluffed, just forget about fold equity. You have none. Instead, all you should do is value bet your good hands instead, because while you can’t bluff this kind of player you can and will get paid off every time you wager.

The second of this two-part series will explore Third-Level Play, Decision Support Tools, Playing Through Multiple Streets, and Calling: The New Disguise