Keep It Simple Stupid

[Greeksquared]

I am primarily writing this post in my utter confusion of how the play at the WSOP takes place compared to how play takes place online and described in these such forums.

Dan Harrington said "Keep It Simple Stupid" I think this is the perfect way to play...especially with all the over aggression and over betting that has taken place in the tournament.

I dont understand why people play so over aggresive and make playing this game difficult. This is why there are so many duels where both players have hands that are questionable.



I dont understand going all in with AQo for 30 times the blinds and then getting called with AQo.

I dont understand calling with KQ,IMO one of the absolute worst hands to call a big overbet with PF. I especially dont understand calling with A7.

I dont understand how you call 2/3 of your stack away on a stupid pair of nines..you worked that hard to get that far and then flip a coin(at best) to stay in. How horrible is this.

I dont understand calling all your chips with AK to someone who has you covered.

I dont understand how "jesus" can have a Ph.D in CS specializing in artifical intelligence and still makes terrible calls.

I dont understand bluffing early in this tournament. WHy would you bluff...especially for all your chips...especially to an unkown...especially when you still have over 50 times the blinds.

I dont understand how bad Phil Hellmuth is. He cant control himself and basically tells you his hand as does Negranaeu.

Does live play force people to be aggresive and try and read your opponent and make those tough calls. Why make poker tough on yourself. Play like Dan Harrington. THe man has made it to 2 consecutive final tables.

Maybe Ive played online too much..and have played very few multitable tourneys. I dont understand. But simple play is the only play that makes sense for me. I understand in tournament play that you will have to make tough calls..but the reward from what ive seen doesnt make any sense.

I play very simple...only pocket pairs..limp reraise with KK,AA. Fold everything else if it misses the flop. I play suited connectors close to the button. I fold AQ except in LP and will fold AK alot too in EP. I have made a lot of money slow playing 99-QQ. No one on earth ever pays attention to the way I play. The stakes are too low. I keep it simple and I win..not much thinking. It might even be best by never raising with any hand PF. Yes I understand fighting weakness with aggression..but come on.

I leave you with another great quote from Harrington.

"Its all about survival"

And has a flush ever missed this year..

also...
I do understand that my spelling and grammar are awful. And I understand that we see less than 1 percent of what actually occurs. But only one player makes sense. I also undertand that Harrington did go all in with T8h which he can since hes so tight. I also understand that aggresion can makes things simple but can also make things tough.
BTW, I do like being aggresive with nothing...so I can easily fold if played back ala Raymer.

[CheckRaise]

[ QUOTE ]

I play very simple...only pocket pairs..limp reraise with KK,AA. Fold everything else if it misses the flop. I play suited connectors close to the button. I fold AQ except in LP and will fold AK alot too in EP. I have made a lot of money slow playing 99-QQ. No one on earth ever pays attention to the way I play. The stakes are too low. I keep it simple and I win..not much thinking.

[/ QUOTE ]

You think that people playing the WSOP wouldnt notice this type of play, dont you think pros would probably pick up on this. If you never changed it up you would get no action because every time you bet people would know you had the goods and would fold.

[krabby5]

I play simple, too...i'm probably more aggressive than you, but I don't take too many chances....I also play low stakes, too..$5-10 buy-in tourneys...
You can't play fancy at those levels...the players are too stupid..Most low stake players over value any pair and draws..those are the ones that I try to get my chips from when I have the goods...

I also find that when I raise pre-flop and raise after flop, I usually win the pot right there...Other players know I am tight so they expect me to have a good hand..which REALLY pays off later in tourney...
You can also build a nice stack around the bubble time of the tourney..most people fold waiting around for the money..usually a min raise will win pots in this time period.

But against better players, it would be harder to play this simple...

[jwvdcw]

Although you are over-simplifying things, I agree a lot. I think, though, that you underestimate the toll playing 13+hrs for 5 straight days takes on your mind. Overall, I agree though. I think that a solid, no mistakes player can go far in a tourney like that, although he'd be hard-pressed to win it unless he caught Varkoni-esque cards.

[Moyer]

Harrington said to remember the KISS method when you're under extreme pressure. I think he was talking about those big pots when you've been put to a tough decision and you're trying to figure out what your opponent thinks you think he thinks you think he has. I'm no big money NL tourny player, but I think sometimes even the pros get so caught up in the pressure and trying to make "great reads" that they forget about the simple stuff like "I have a very good hand and it's heads-up, I shouldn't fold".

[MrDannimal]

Some of those can be explained as simply bad moves by people who aren't very good (any bad call involving a no-name).

If you watch any online tourney, there's always a handful of people who have gone from 1000 to 5k or 6k in the first 30 hands or so. They get ludicrously lucky. They often also don't make the final table. The same has to be true of a 2,500 player live tourney.

When good players make moves like this, they're often overestimating the opponent. Negreanu came right out and said that he made moves that won't work on "bad" (or unbluffable) players.

How much does the tourney mean to some guy who won his seat via a $40 satellite? Sure, you've got a pile of Raymers and Moneymakers who are skilled and take the main event seriously and get in via online play. But you also get a lot of clowns who would play a lot differently if all $10,000 came right from their pocket. Instead, they make some crazy (to an observer who sees everything in hindsight and understands "good" tourney play) plays. Either because they know they have no chance to win, or because they know their only chance to win is to make risky plays and get lucky to get a big pile of chips. Maybe they just want to take down a pro.

Some of it is just you being an armchair critic. Take Matusow's call with the 9s. He almost certainly put Raymer on overcards. It's likely he didn't put him on overcards and a diamond draw. Given that, he's a 3-1 favorite based on his read. He also might have been assuming that Raymer was trying to get him back as part of their history in the tourney. If you think Matusow would have called if you told him Raymer had AJd, you're crazy. Awful easy to call him stupid from your living room and not having played like 40 hours of poker over 3 or 4 days.

I can't believe someone "as bad as Hellmuth" won 9 bracelets. It's pretty ludicrous to bash Phil based on like 15 minutes of footage of him from this year, most of which was probably chosen because "Whiny Phil" makes for good TV with him as bad guy. Yes, I'm sure you've seen him on TV other times, but you're still seeing a big minority of his play. If Negreanu is so obvious with his play that you know his hand all the time, how is it that he played as well as he did at the WSOP this year? Or won the Plaza tourney? Or made final tables on the WPT?

There are more ways to play than just "tight and patient". It's worked for Dan the past two main events, but so has Gus Hansen's style. I'm pretty sure that Erick Lindgren would fit in between the two styles, and he won twice and made a 3rd final table on the WPT this year.

It's great that you've found a style that works for you. But you're playing primarily against people who aren't very good, and who probably don't care much about their money when they enter the tourney (not only is there not much to win, but it's a small enough quantity that losing doesn't hurt much). If you played bigger online tourneys (buy-in wise) or live tourneys with a decent size buyin, I bet you'd have less success just playing medium pairs and up.

As for how good players can make mistakes, it happens. I'm training for a marathon, and on my longer training runs I run for a while and take a minute to walk and rest. When the run segments have a half-minute in them (for example, I run for 7:30 and then walk for 1:00), I make a bunch of math errors late in the run, and have to figure out my next break time 3 or 4 times to get it right and check it. It's 3rd grade math and I have a degree in Computer Science, why is it hard? Because running a lot of miles is hard, and doing it affects the brain. Playing poker for 12 hours a day for days in a row is hard, and it affects the brain. Things you could do easily when you're fresh get much harder. Even Dan Harrington has said that.

I'm not sure how you can say that only one player makes sense, when you've got so many examples of other styles being successful across a big stretch of tournaments. Or how you can admit you see a tiny portion of what goes on and then ignore it to make assumptions with little or no base. If you folded every time someone played back at you, you don't think good players would start playing back at you more and more? You don't think that if you just played bigger pairs, people would stop giving you action? I think people who limp re-raise with AA or KK (and only those hands) are foolish, because you've effectively announced your hand to the world. You decry this tactic with Hellmuth and Negreanu, but embrace it for your own play?

There's a lot of inconsistency and contradiction in your post.

[Don_Lapre]

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[CrisBrown]

Hi Dannimal,

I agree. Yes, we can to some limited extent critique the play of a single hand (Lederer's 77 vs. Brunson's AKs, or Matusow's 98s vs. Raymer's AJs) but to critique a player's overall game, based solely on what you see on a telecast, is just ludicrous. You see maybe 1% of the hands played on ESPN's WSOP coverage, and only about 1/3 of the hands on a typical WPT telecast. Daniel Negreanu won WSOP Player of the Year honors, so he must have done something right at some point along the way, even if by his own admission he played poorly in the final event. Phil Hellmuth didn't luck into his 9 bracelets; even Norman Chad (hardly a Phil Hellmuth cheerleader) credited him for almost always having the best of it when the money went in.

As for why the top players are so aggressive, it's simply that aggressive poker wins tournaments. They didn't show Dan Harringon making a lot of fancy moves, but they did show one, and I'm sure it wasn't the only one he made in the tourney. Nutpeddling might let you squeak into the money in low buy-in events, but in big buy-in events, the opponents will quickly peg you for that, and they just won't pay you off. So unless you get an incredible run of great cards, you'll be squeaking along at the bubble, with too few chips to really challenge for the top spots.

In high buy-in NL tournament play, the cards are only one element of a complex decision matrix, where table position, stack size, blinds, tournament position, table image, and player- and hand-reading are often more important than the cards themselves. As a rule, it's probably better to assume that the top pros are reaching their "incorrect" decisions based on factors that you and I are either unaware of, or can't estimate because we weren't at the table for the last X hours.

In short, rather than asking why their games are so bad, perhaps it's better to ask what you can learn from them....

Cris

[Richard Tanner]

I don't know who you are in real life, but you're my new god. I yell in my head what you said almost verbatum (sp?) whenever I watch these shows.
I play almost exactly the same way, then torwards the end I throw in a few bluffs, not alot but a few bluffs, and they work because of table image.
You'd really be suprised how many people pay off your hands online (not the highest quality environment I understand) even though they know you have the goods, it's fantastic.
In closing thanks for verbalizing my thoughts for me, and keep up the good play.

Cody

A slight addition to my post, I think I personally play a little more agressive than the original poster (i.e I tend to lead off with Aces and Kings, and I usually small bet ace high flush draws and such when the situation calls for it).
Also, I agree with alot of what McDanimal said, alot of styles are correct, and many players representing these styles can be successful. However I would say that Gus Hansens style loses alot of value when playing in the WSOP Main Event due to the lack of fear (read: stupidity) of many of the novices.

[Freudian]

I think some of them are probably poor plays. But some of them are also made with increasing blinds in mind. If you only count on premium hands to build a stack, you will get blinded out. Waiting for something better to come along is risky at best. And when you have someone like fossilman at your table who wields his big stack around, you have to make a stand at some point even with a pair of nines etc.

As for Jesus, Hellmuth, Matusow etc. I don't think their play is much worse from anyone elses. It is just that they like to portray themselves as having a good ability to read others (and they may have) so we would expect them to make fewer poor calls.

Anyway, 99% of the tourney never shows on TV. So it is hard to know what really happens at the tables. Often in WPT you see someone lose half his stack in a hand, and the next hand that is shown he is back to having a big stack.

As for Dan Harrington. It is obvious his way to approach the WSOP works great for him. I loved the way he used his table image in the last episode.