Relative poker ability

[Guruman]

"I'm a better poker player than that guy every day of the week and twice on Sunday." "He's not nearly as good as he thinks he is" "I keep getting my ass kicked because everyone at this table is better than me."

It's an undisputable fact that poker is a game of skill. Consequently it must be concluded that every player is either better or worse than every other player at his table at the game.

The question is: how do we determine our skill relative to our opponents quickly enough to determine our chances of making money at any given table?

The amount of money won and lost is an unreliable barometer for a single session, but I believe that there are other ways to tell whether or not you've outclassed your opponents at the end of a session.

Sklansky's fundamental theorem of poker says that you've gained when you made the play you would have made if you knew your opponents cards and you've lost when you make any other play.

I'd suggest that given this definition of good poker play that there are a few independant skill factors that make up any individual's poker game:

A)ability to count outs and determine the probability of hitting those outs
B)ability to accurately put opponents on a narrow range of hands
C)ability to disguise one's hand from his opponents
D)ability to psychologically manipulate the opposition by putting them on tilt, making them your buddies, and otherwise confusing and decieving them.

At any given poker game the player who is the most superior at the most of these traits will be the favorite to win the most money.

As an ex:
Say we rank each of the poker skills on a scale from 0 to 100. In a five handed table the players are ranked as follows -

Player 1: Math)80 HandReading)80 Deception)50 Psychology)45
Player 2: Math)20 HandReading)60 Deception)60 Psychology)50
Player 3: Math)20 HandReading)20 Deception)30 Psychology)10
Player 4: Math)70 HandReading)70 Deception)55 Psychology)25
Player 5: Math)10 HandReading)30 Deception)10 Psychology)75

Player 1 is the clear favorite to win money since he understands the math in the game, is a pretty far superior hand reader, and doesn't get beat horribly in deception or psychology by others.

Player 3 is probably the worst player at the table, and is the most likely to lose all of his money quickly.

I'd argue that when we are first introduced to the game of poker that our relative skill level in each of these categories (with the exception of D:Psychology) is at or around zero.

The first skill most people learn is math or hand-reading, and I'd argue that these two are the easiest to measure relative to your opponents.

You can tell when a person doesn't understand the number of outs available and will fold a 15-outer for one bet or call a 2-outer for 3. This example doesn't have to be so extreme in order for it to be an effective barometer. If you can detect even the occasional bad call or fold that was made for a mistaken math concept then you can rest assured you're at least that much better in that one skill than your opponent.

One's ability to read and disguise a hand can't be ascertained as well from the rail, though you should try. Once you're in this can be the first thing to watch when assesing your play relative to your opponents. Be honest with yourself about how close you came when putting your opponents on a hand, and also pay attention to how well your opponents are doing. If you're not getting action with your monsters and are facing a ton of aggression with your mediocre holdings, you may not be disguising well enough.

Determining your relative ability in the first three skills should often be enough to tell whether you're playing better than your opponents as opposed to whether you're running hotter than them IMHO.

The first three skills are difficult enough before adding psychology to the mix, and I consider this factor to only be an edge if the other fundamentals are comprable. I'd argue that a player like player 5 in the example is also a particularly poor poker player - just not as bad as player 3. I'd also argue that player 4 is almost as good as player 1, but suffers loses his edge due to the psychology factor.

to sum up:

1)There are several distinct channels of poker play, each of which any player can be better or worse than his opposition at

2)To determine how tough a table is, look for mathematical cognizance from the players, and see how well you can read their hands from the rail.

3)To determine whether you outplayed your opponents, rate your games according to the four skills as opposed to counting money.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

[Schwartzy61]

I didn't really read the whole thing cause it was kinda long but here is a truly simple way to figure it out...

In one of Sklansky's books they talk about someone who cold calls too much. If you see someone cold calling too frequently you can figure that guy is donating to the table. Put a few of those donks together and you are at a profitable table. Also if you see someone playing more than 30% of his hands, he is also most likely donating to the table. These seem like much easier to read barometers.

As far as outplaying your opponents, someone cold calls preflop with a bad hand and then proceeds to call to the river with his bad hand and catches runner runner for trips, I would say I outplayed my opponent. If I was getting good cards the whole time and wasn't ahead I would say I'm getting outplayed. If I never hit a flop I would say I have no clue if I'm being outplayed because I haven't hit a freaking hand worth playing.

[Finite_Risk]

Lots of good stuff here. I kinda look at my poker education in 3 stages:

1. Learning to play what I have
2. Learning to play based on what I think my opponents have
3. Mixing up how and what I play

It is very gratifying after being somewhat of a nut peddler for the first few months to learn the value of position and the fact that it is not necessarily wrong to raise normally with suited middle connectors on the button....you'd be surprised how well that works and how much that helps an otherwise tight table image

[Guruman]

I made the OP in a moment of clarity I had after seeing a post in Qtip's monopoly thread that stated "I can play 10,000 hands against someone and not know if I am better than him or not." (sorry - that's from memory)

I found myself strongly disagreeing with this statement and just tried to go about defining exactly why I disagreed.

[ QUOTE ]

As far as outplaying your opponents, someone cold calls preflop with a bad hand and then proceeds to call to the river with his bad hand and catches runner runner for trips, I would say I outplayed my opponent. If I was getting good cards the whole time and wasn't ahead I would say I'm getting outplayed.

[/ QUOTE ] These are the obvious times. What if you're easily reading a narrow range of cards on him but he's not making many mathematical mistakes? Who's outplaying whom?

[ QUOTE ]
If I never hit a flop I would say I have no clue if I'm being outplayed because I haven't hit a freaking hand worth playing.

[/ QUOTE ] I disagree with this sentiment, and it was the point of my original post. I think you can determine who played better by looking at how well you were able to read your opponents cards, how often you could cause your opponents to misread you, and how often you could use these advantages to force a mistake.

Harrington says there are several situations in NL tournaments where the correct play will ofen be the same regardless of what cards you hold. While this is less applicable in limit, it is not erased entirely. There are opportunities for you to take down pots without showing down. If Dan Harrington sat down at my small stakes limit table and caught no cards all night, his play would look markedly different than a weaker player in the same situation.

[elmitchbo]

you responded but couldnt't be bothered to read it all? first of all, it took 2 minutes to read. that was to much for you, but you had an opinion anyway. if someone puts a considerable amount of thought and consideration into a post you should at least read it all before saying "if people cold call it's a profitable table, i guess."

now.. to the OP good post. i think that you have to weight the skills. personally i think that the math is the easiest thing, the hand reading is the most difficult, and the pshycology is a toss up based on personality. anyone with reasonable intelligence can learn to calculate outs after reading any single poker book. if they can't do that, then you should consider them ripe for the picking.

hand reading is something that can be improved by dilligent study, but it usually comes from solid experience or just a natural talent for reading people. tilt is something that is a personal thing. different things set off different people. really good players know what their buttons are, and know when someone is trying to push them. that's tough. some people, that other wise are very good players, get themselves in trouble for silly reasons associated with psychology.

to summarize.... the easiest thing is the math, scale of 1 to 5. the next thing is hand reading scale of 1 to 10. i would also add a bonus point category for knowledge of poker theory (aka.. making the right moves in the right spots based on math and hand reading, add or subtract 1 to 3) the last thing is pschology which isn't measured on a numeric scale.... it just is waht it is. the guy is stoic, or anal, or compulsive, or an an addict, or reserved, or analytical, or whatever..

[Zetack]

[ QUOTE ]
If Dan Harrington sat down at my small stakes limit table and caught no cards all night, his play would look markedly different than a weaker player in the same situation.

[/ QUOTE ]

If by weaker you meant weak I might agree with you. However, there are probably tons of weaker players than Dan Harrington whose play would be very hard to distinguish from Dan's in a small stakes limit game when catching no cards. (assuming Dan is in fact a very good small stakes limit player, which I'm not sure anybody has established.)

--Zetack

[johnc]

My personal approach to poker is to seperate my ego from my play in order to make the best judgements possible.I don't really care how I rank - if chips don't come my way b/c the table's too tight or tricky or maniacal or whatever then I'm gone whether or not I think I'm the best. I'm not critisizing the OP's intentions of judging ppls skills quickly to determine who's the best. If knowing you're the best at the table is your bag well more power to you. I'm there to make $, period. As far as importance of skills, the math should be a no brainer, at the table. I save the cerebral math analysis for later. Reading cards and the other players at the table is the key, IMHO.

[RiverDood]

I like this gradation better. The original poster's list of elements includes lots of well-thought-out categories -- but it doesn't really make room for the capstone of good poker: "Knowing when to make the right play at the right time."

A couple months ago, I watched a pretty good/tricky LAG player get taken apart in a tournament by a really plodding calling station. It was weird but very instructive. Mr. LAG jammed pots with scare cards -- in ways that would have brought folds from most opponents. But Mr. Station just called, called, called, and showed down mediocre but winning hands.

In most other settings, Mr. LAG wins and Mr. Station barfs out chips. But this was an important anomaly. The first set of categories doesn't really include ways to account for that. I suppose it could be shoehorned into B or D, but it feels like stretching the definitions.

Same thing for some of Gigabet's legendary bullying. I find it very instructive to read his hand histories on the MTT threads, because he's doing lots of things that superficially look like bad poker. But he makes them work. He has very good instincts for when opponents don't want to get in a fight, and how he can use that to steamroller the table with crummy cards. He's not putting people on tilt at all. Maybe paralyzing them.

That comes more into the realm of "Making the Right Play at the Right Time" or "Mixing Styles." Add that as a fifth category on the original post, and then I think it's a more useful list.

That extra category also gives you a way to acknowledge -- and analyze -- the fact that people who are regular winners in some settings suddenly do poorly at other tables, including ones that they think are less skillful.

[Guruman]

I'm glad we're having this discussion because I think it can be important to find an objective way to rank your poker akills against your opposition.

to address a couple of suggestions that have been made so far:

Riverdood:

[ QUOTE ]
The original poster's list of elements includes lots of well-thought-out categories -- but it doesn't really make room for the capstone of good poker: "Knowing when to make the right play at the right time."

...

That extra category also gives you a way to acknowledge -- and analyze -- the fact that people who are regular winners in some settings suddenly do poorly at other tables, including ones that they think are less skillful.


[/ QUOTE ]

I like the idea of adding this category to the list, though I'd define it a little differently. I'd call it "adaptability" and have it mean the ability to change one's game based on the various levels and styles of players one encounters. I'd agree that this is a powerful poker skill, and it's worthy of it's own ranking.

Michbo:

[ QUOTE ]
i think that you have to weight the skills. personally i think that the math is the easiest thing, the hand reading is the most difficult, and the pshycology is a toss up based on personality. anyone with reasonable intelligence can learn to calculate outs after reading any single poker book. if they can't do that, then you should consider them ripe for the picking.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'd disagree that the math intrinsically any easier or harder to learn than hand reading, if only because there is so much math to learn. I think that the math may suit your particular learning style better than hand reading would, but that's the purpose of ranking them all on the same scale.

A person who ranked above 90 on the math scale would have the ability to quickly calculate - the pot, pot odds, implied odds, probability of hitting a hand, probability of the hand being good, probability of opponents having a particular set of cards, as well as expectation of a bet/call, a call, a fold, and a check/raise in any given situation. If we all had a headsup display in our pokershades [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img] that could accurately display all of this info in every hand, many of our decisions would become much easier than they may currently be.

With that said:

It's occurred to me that some of my categories are more static than others. A person's math ranking will probably not move much during any given poker session and against any given players. His deception and his adaptability rankings may move a little more based upon who he's playing, but probably not in wild swings. His hand reading and his psychology rankings may be all over the map at a given table though.

Imagine a player that may have a bead on the rock to his left's cards most of the time, and maybe he has even confused this rock into folding better hands on occasion. He's got Gus Hansen sitting across from him though, and the fact that he's a star and that our hero can't get a read on his cards causes a serious psychological deficiency whenever this opponent is in a hand. His hand reading and psychology rankings are bound to be all over the spectrum depending on which opponent at the table happens to be in the hand with him.

So, here's a list of revised categories and definitions that we can use to rank ourselves against our opposition listed in order from static (stats that don't move during a session) to dynamic (stats that move based upon which individuals you are facing in a hand).

1)Math Skills one's ability to calculate and utilize poker math such as pot size, pot equity, probability of making a hand, and expected value.

2)Adaptability one's ability to make adjustments in his game based upon differing opponents.

3)Deception one's ability to disguise one's hand from his opponents.

4)Hand Reading one's ability to put his opponents on a narrow range of possible hole cards.

5)Psychology one's ability to cause an opponent to play at a level below his or her capabilities in one of the other categories. Also refers to one's ability to resist psychological ploys of opponents.

I like this list better than the original, and it's starting to look pretty useful to me. What do you think?

[RiverDood]

Nice update. Your tweaks on the "Adaptability" category all look good to me.

On "Math Skills," I'd stretch the category here to rate people as well on their starting-hand selection. A lot of that is directly or indirectly derived from doing the math. Styles vary a lot -- but within an hour it's usually pretty clear who's picking starting hands according to some sort of intelligent framework and who's sloppy or scared.

In fact, what if you call that category "Analytics"? That way you're evaluating people not so much on whether they can quote the odds of 55 vs. AK to two digits past the decimal -- but more broadly on whether they price draws out of the pot when they've got TPTK in Holdem; whether they keep track of dead cards in 7-Stud; whether they have some awareness of when they might be quartered in Omaha/8, etc.

Just a thought.