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Well it’s that time of year again: time to play that marathon of tournaments, the World Series of Poker. So, heading into it I was thinking about what might be the biggest mistake newer players make when they play the tournaments at the WSOP. I thought about what I have seen in the past, and it really comes down to lack of stack control, lack of risk management. What I mean by this is that newer players move all in too much.
Here is the thing: All in is an easy choice. It is the choice that takes the least thought. It is, in fact, an abdication of choice. Let me explain. When you want your opponents to fold, you want to look scary; you know that moving all in will be scary. After all, you just bet all your chips. If you are afraid of having to make more decisions during a hand — on the flop, the turn, or the river — you know that moving all in will stop you from having to make any further decisions. After all, you just bet all your chips; so if you get called there will be no more betting. But here is the thing: Successful tournament play is about managing your chip stack. Great players bet to not risk their whole tournament on one hand, if they can avoid it. They bet to manage their risk in order to maximize their chances of staying in the tournament to win it.
Here is why the all-in play is an abandonment of responsibility: If you are bluffing, the skill comes in determining the smallest bet that will still matter to your opponent, the smallest bet that will tell a good story about the strength of your hand and will get your opponent to fold. In order to determine what that amount is, you have to know something about your opponent. You have to figure out how he will react to different-sized bets. You have to determine the story that your opponent will actually believe. And determining that bet amount is hard. It is certainly much harder than just making the choice to move all in. If you make the smaller bet and get called, then you might beat yourself up about whether a bigger bet would have gotten your opponent to fold. But even if you do get called, you will still be in the tournament. If you move all in and get called, well, you know you made a scary bet. But you are out of the tournament instead of living to play on.
From a mathematical standpoint as well, the all-in is disastrous since it puts a tremendous amount of pressure on your success rate. Let’s say you determine that half the pot would be a good bet to bluff, that that is the amount your opponent will fold to if he is somewhat weak. So let’s say there is 10k in the pot and you bet 5,000. You are letting the pot lay you a price. In fact, the pot is laying you 2 to 1. This means the bluff only has to work a little over 33% of the time to be profitable. Even if you bet the whole pot, you only need to win a little over 50% of the time for the bet to be profitable. That is not a lot of pressure on you.
But let’s look at the flip side. What if you have a stack that is 30K and there is the same 10K in the pot? You want to look really scary to your opponent so you move all in. Now you are laying 3 to 1 on the play, which means you have to win that pot over 75% of the time for the bluff to be profitable. That puts a lot of pressure on you to be right that a bluff will work. I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like I am smart enough to be right about anything that often. So I don’t put that kind of pressure on myself.
Add to the mathematical problem that the all-in actually doesn’t tell a good story. The fact is that an all-in often looks more like a bluff than a smaller bet does, because it appears that you don’t want a call. If you bet closer to between half and all of the pot, you look more like you have a hand because that is what a good hand would bet. An all-in will often invite a call. So when you look at both the storytelling aspect and the mathematical side of things, the all-in looks pretty poor.
The skill in bluffing comes from being able to determine the smallest bet that will get your opponent to fold. It reduces the mathematical pressure on you for your play to work and reduces your risk, your variance, all at once.
On the other side of the coin, when you have a huge hand, why would you move all in there? The skill you need when you have a good hand is to determine the largest bet that your opponent will still call, which again takes some thought about who your opponent is, how he perceives you, and how strong you think his hand is. The looser and more aggressive he perceives you to be, the looser he is himself; and the stronger you think his hand is, the more you can bet. But the answer is almost never all in because that will often cause even the craziest opponent to fold too often. It will cost you money in the long run, because you will chase away opponents who were willing to call something but not an all-in.
The caveat to the all-in play has to do with stack size. When you figure out the right bet and it turns out to be either half or more of your stack or half or more of your opponent’s stack, then you might as well move all in since you or your opponent will already be pot-committed anyway. In that case, the math determines that an all-in is correct.
But the all-in should only be used under those circumstances. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Don’t try to avoid them by abdicating and moving all-in instead of taking the time to think out a better bet. Even if you make a mistake on your bet size, you will not be taking yourself out of the tournament with the bet. And you will be putting less pressure on yourself to be right. When you make the all-in mistake, you are out the door.
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