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We’ve all had a situation similar to this take place. We’ve been patiently playing a tight, solid game of poker and we start to get some real hands. We get aces and kings and play them aggressively and win some nice pots without a showdown. Then we decide after having all these monster hands in a row to make a bluff and suddenly someone calls us down with third pair. We think to outselves, "Man i've been playing nothing but the nuts all day long, how can this guy call?" The thing is he doesn’t know we've been playing the nuts, because we haven't shown down any of our hands. He’s just seen us winning these big pots without a showdown and starts wondering if we really have it or not.
This scenario really illustrates that we must remember which hands we’ve shown down, not just what we’ve had. While we know whether we’ve been bluffi ng or secretly holding monsters, the rest of the table only knows what they’ve seen. Now, you can manipulate this some by showing cards even if people don’t call you down, but generally I’m not a big fan of giving players at the table free information. I’d rather just be aware of what they’ve seen and what they haven’t and work from there.
Which brings us to the main point: We may go through a prolonged period of having good hands and never showing them down. What do we do then? Well, we poker players always suspect our opponents of larceny, and the longer we go without seeing a hand, the more we believe we’re being robbed blind.
If you’ve ever played any of the stealth video games with an “alert meter” that goes up every time you make a sound, eventually resulting in the alarms going off and you getting caught, then think of there being a “doubt meter” in poker. Every time we bet and raise and take down a pot without a showdown, we make a little noise, raising our opponents’ doubt meters. If we keep making noise long enough, they’re going to start looking us up to see if we really have the goods.
I’ll use an example from the recent Borgata Winter Open I played in. It was Day 2 and I had a slightly below average stack. The blinds were getting up to where most of the players at the table had between twenty and forty big blinds. After playing patient poker most of the day, I picked up a run of cards in which I had A-Q twice and A-K once in about a twenty-hand span. Each time I reraised my opponents pre- fl op and they folded. About ten hands later, one of the players raised in early position. I reraised him with pocket aces and he called. The fl op was 9-9-3 and he checked to me. I bet about half my remaining stack and after agonizing for about two minutes, he folded pocket eights face up like he had made a huge laydown. I realized that if this player thought I was reraising an early position raise light enough that 8-8 might be good for all my chips, that his doubt meter was just about full.
So I waited patiently, hoping I would get a chance to get a good hand against this player again because with his doubt meter about to go off, I could get him to make a huge mistake for a lot of chips if I just picked my spot. Sure enough, about two orbits later on the button, he raised my big blind. I looked down to see pocket kings. I reraised him and almost without hesitation he reraised me for almost all my chips. I counted my chips out to make sure that if I put the rest in he wouldn’t be able to fold. When I was confi dent he couldn’t, I pushed all in; he had a disgusted look on his face and said, “I have to call.” He had A-6, but he was so convinced I was making moves on him that his doubt meter went off and he played a huge pot with a very bad hand.
He actually went on to win the pot, but that’s not the point. The point is that I remained aware that no one else at the table knew I had a string of good hands since they hadn’t been seeing my cards. In fact, they all suspected exactly the opposite – that I was winning with bad cards, simply because poker players always want to believe people are stealing from them.
So next time you’re at the table, keep tabs on what hands you’re showing down and how often; and maybe you’ll be able to anticipate when your opponent’s doubt meter is about to go off and cash in on it.
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