Where Winnings Come From at Poker
If you play poker using perfect basic strategy, you will make money on average from any opponents who don't. For whatever reasons, ranging from lack of knowledge to lack of attention, some player will make decisions that are simply wrong. The wrongness of these decisons will be borne out mathematically, in that an opponent who deviates from basic strategy will take actions that give him either a negative expectation or a lower positive expectation than he would have if he played correctly. Either way, you will end up with more chips than if that opponent had done the right thing.
But what happens when no one makes any basic mistakes? Imagine a game in which every player completely understood basic strategy and was able to implement it perfectly. For the sake of argument, let's even say that each player had a hand-held computer that analyzed each situation based on a digital snapshot of all the visible cards and provided the mathematically correct action to take at every turn. So equipped, every player would see their net winning odds and payoff odds on the LCD screen and would only take the decisions that had the highest expected values. Every player would therefore expect to win money in the long run. But such an outcome is obviously impossible. Poker is a zero-sum game, so for any player to win money on average, some other player would have to lose money on average. But how can a player lose money on average when he only bets with positive expectations?
The answer to this apparent paradox is this: basic poker strategy is really nothing more than a plan for dealing with the uncertainty that is inherent in poker, but some poker players are more uncertain than others. In other words, the competition within a group of competent players is not over how to correctly play each of their hands in a certain situation, it's about knowing what the situation is. The "situation" consists not only of the cards held by opponents, but perhaps even more important, what those opponents will do with them.
Players who are able to pick up information that their opponents miss will base their decisions on less uncertainty, almost as if they could see cards that their opponents cannot or see into the future to learn what actions those players will take. The quality of these players' decisions will be greater than those of the competition, allowing them to net profits. This is why a player who makes decisions that are perfectly consistent with good poker play will still lose money to players who implement the same strategy but are better informed on their surroundings. Clausewitz might have said that perceptive players win because they are better able to see through the "fog of poker."
By themselves, unseen cards dealt fairly are purely random. But the moment an opponent checks, bets, calls, or raises with the cards in his hand, those cards become nonrandom, and, thus, valid targets for your intellect. By observing your opponents' actions, you can arrive at assessments of their holdings that are superior to assessing those holdings as completely random cards. And with that knowledge, combined with your knowledge of that player's style and inclinations, you can make solid guesses about the actions that player will take. If you are able to use these information-yielding tools more effectively than your opponents are, and are able to frustrate their use of those tools against you, your basic strategy decisions will be based on more information than those of your opponents, and your play will be superior to theirs. Among players who have mastered basic strategy, this is where winners and losers are made.
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