I’ve been watching the WSOP Main Event coverage this past week (at least up until my bedtime), as I assume many of you have. Don’t worry if not – no spoilers incoming.
As usual, a lot of strong pros make it deep in the main – there’s no mystery to unravel there. But another pattern is quite clear when you take a look at the players who don’t have as strong a track record.
Many years ago, I would look at some of the non-pros (and even pros) who had success in the main event and I’d judge their play. They’d way overplay hands routinely, play way too loose and too aggressive, and make all kinds of dumb plays.
They’re so lucky. If I had their run of cards… man.
I knew I was better than them. I understood concepts they didn’t know existed. And I had self-control, patience. Some of them can’t even wait 10 minutes to play a hand. Some can’t go a day without tilting.
To be honest, I started writing today with the intention to follow up on last week’s email, because I had the realization that super loose aggressive play is very conducive to maximizing your EV once you factor in opportunity cost.
But I decided that’s the less interesting point. I’m more interested in proving my old self wrong.
**Lots of Chips and a Chair**
For most of my career, when I’d see Day 1 and Day 2 chip-leaders’ names, the ones I recognized were seemingly always the wild players. And I had a perfectly good explanation for this: Survivorship Bias.
If 1000 super loose-aggressive players play the ME, 900 crash and burn, and 100 end up with big stacks, that’s not proof of a winning strategy. It’s just evidence that loose aggressive strategies create bigger swings and, therefore, both the biggest and shortest-lived stacks.
And I still believe that’s true. But if survivorship bias was all that’s there to blame, and the EV of their strategy was worse than tighter play, you’d expect to see things get closer to even by the end of the tournament. The sprinters would be the ones at the top early, but the tortoises would be well-represented enough by the end.
But that’s not what we keep seeing, is it? We keep seeing the top 100 largely composed of players who are either quite skilled, very aggro, or both. And it’s not as if these are the majority of the players who enter. If you look around your table on day one, you’ll likely see more nitty recreational players than wild recreational players. And you might see more tight pros than super loose pros.
And yes, it’s true that a more conservative style of play lends itself to a higher ratio of min-cashes to bracelets, but even still, if conservative play were the optimal strategy, given how top-heavy tournament structures are, we’d see more nits in the top 100.
The numbers speak for themselves. (he says, with confidence, while running literally none of the numbers. But go back and look at the past ten years and tell me what you find!)
**Evidence of What?**
So you see a player making some truly foolish plays, deep in the main event – and to be clear, I mean actually foolish ones rather than ones you just don’t understand. You see this player not understanding pot odds or bluffing with a hand that has way too much showdown value to consider bluffing or talking about a hand in a way that makes it clear that they haven’t studied a solver a day in their life. And when their style of play is maniacal, as it often is, the natural tendency for most people is to treat this player's foolishness as evidence that their style is wrong. They’re a lucky idiot playing the wrong way, and you’re the unlucky genius on the couch watching.
(Disclaimer: I’m going to keep saying 'idiots' but I don't mean idiots – I’m using the dialogue that may run through a good player’s head.)
It’s actually evidence of the opposite. If we accept that this type of player is making it deep more often than tighter recreational players or even weak-tight pros, there are two primary explanations:
If you insist you’re better than these players (and you may be right), and if “an idiot” can have so much success in large field tournaments with a style like this, imagine how much success you could have if you took on the positives of their style without some of the mistakes.
**Know Your Table**
Now, in a cash game – at least against decent players – being overly loose and wild doesn't work so well. In a high-roller, like a Triton event, it doesn't work either. It's for the same reason both times: you're sitting across from players who are willing to put their stack in, so blind aggression doesn't have much to take advantage of.
Field size changes that. In the Main Event, the Millionaire Maker, the other big-field tournaments, thousands of runners sit down, and many of them hold onto their tournament life with everything they've got – even more tightly than they would in a normal tournament. That's exactly the kind of setting where aggression gets rewarded most. Fortune favors the bold, and it favors them most at a table full of people with death grips on their stacks.
**Change My Style?**
So what should you do with this? I wouldn't bring this new strategy into every tournament, and I certainly wouldn't carry it into a cash game. And, honestly, I'm afraid to suggest that you do anything at all. First of all, because many of you will write me back next week saying, “I tried playing crazy and busted in the first round. You owe me $1500.”
And also because if you play a tighter style – especially a tight, passive style – my guess is there's a reason for it.
Our natural play style tends to follow our personality. I don’t just mean how loud and outgoing we are, but also how we navigate and tolerate things like risk, control, and uncertainty away from the table.
So it’s not going to be as easy as “just see what the maniacs do and do that!”
But what you can stand to do is inch your way towards a more aggressive strategy, at least in larger field tournaments. And even that should (on average and over the long run!) serve you well.
And even if this does nothing for your poker game, perhaps the lesson I took (aka was reminded of) from it will be helpful:
When someone is doing something successfully that you want to be doing, have the humility to consider that you might be able to learn something from them.
– Phil