15 Minutes of Fame

It seems like everyone today is taking a shot at their 15 minutes of fame. Flipping through the TV channels reveals a bizarre menagerie of the desperate and the talentless, jumping through the hoops of ever stranger reality TV shows. Poker is no different, and has always given the hopeful the opportunity for triumph and disaster. Tournaments have always been a classic for this, but with the incredible popularity of the game today, even cash games, traditionally the home of the quietly profitable, give the chance for very visible fame or failure at the highest levels. Today's world-class player can be tomorrow's broke railbird.

I remember a few years back on PokerStars, a celebrated online player shot through the ranks of the cash games there and developed a "rep." His high point, besides an amusing website and inevitable forum groupies, was sitting in the very first $100-$200 limit hold'em game on that site. Perversely, this signalled his slippery slide, as he sat out of 99 percent of the hands and basically wasted a seat for ego purposes. Several months later, he was effectively broke, and the rumour mill had him begging for minimum buy-ins for the baby-stakes tables.

A safer, less adventurous route to poker fame can be found in the fields of punditry and writing. Probably the most famous of these is David Sklansky and his vaunted Theory of Poker. Incidentally, his main theory has taken some knocks over the years, and seems far less robust than when it was first unveiled. But this is the problem with declaiming, "This is a fundamental law." Before you know it, some smart new kids on the block start poking holes in it, and the whole edifice gets a little crumbly. Just ask Isaac Newton.

My fondness has always been for the more kind-of-thinking tools approach - some rough and ready ways of quickly coming to grips with a situation and squeezing some value out of it. So, in a circuitous- OK, very circuitous - route, we arrive at my own 15 minutes, my infamous DIYDDIYD - or more fully, damned if you do, damned if you don't. This can be a valuable way of looking at situations that arise in pot-limit Omaha games, especially online, where the buy-in cap means that you will frequently find yourself in an all-in situation on the flop, or that it will be pretty much imminent on the turn.

The four-card nature of Omaha means that even when you know a player well, it is rare that you can put him on a precise holding. For example, it is not uncommon for there to be little difference in how a typical foe would play a hidden set on the flop or a very big draw. So, the key to these all-in situations becomes ensuring that your potential return is positive against the range of probable hands, not just some "looking into your soul" hand in particular. For the mathematically inclined, these situations can be worked out quite precisely away from the table, and this exercise can help you recognise those spots where you simply cannot be making a good return against your opponent's range -
DIYDDIYD. An example from online play will clarify things:

A tight player raises first in from the button in a full ring game with K-Q-J-J, suited to the King. A looser, experienced player calls from the blind and checks a 10-5-4 flop with two of the tight player's suit. The tight player bets the flop and the experienced player suddenly springs to life and check-raises all in, or with just enough "change" to mean that he will bet the turn almost regardless. Superficially, this looks like a very clear call, but our tight player has wandered smack-dab into DIYDDIYD territory.

The experienced player normally has two types of hand here - a nut-flush draw with additional outs, or a set. Very occasionally, he might have both, or a much weaker hand like two pair. Against this range of hands, our tight raiser is simply losing money on his call; paradoxically, to pot-limit Omaha novices, the more likely the experienced player is to have the drawing hand, the worse the call becomes. This is because he is a comparatively small dog to a set, but a crushing one to a nut-flush draw with extra outs of any kind.

In a nutshell, if the best you can hope for against your foe's range is a coin toss, with a lot of other much worse potential hands against you, you have identified a classic DIYDDIYD scenario, and will need very, very favourable money odds to continue. Proceed with caution and consider passing. And earn your 15 minutes of fame the right way, not the railbird way.