Posted by Dr Fro 9:23 AM
There is no transitive property in poker.

As you may or may not recall, the transitive property is the one you learned where if A > B and B > C, then A must be > C. In poker, I may beat Chris, Chris beats John, and John beats me. I am not talking about short-term successes based on variance (luck), I am talking about having a long term expectation of one person beating another. There is no transitive property in poker.

This is weird and not intuitive, but it can be explained.

You have to first understand the concept of the perfect game of poker. In this game, all players play the perfect game that maximises the expected profits on every decision. They bluff with perfect frequency that maximise the resulting profits. The boring part of this game is that nobody makes any money at all. In the end, everyone breaks even because they all have the identical strategy.

As you probably learned in studying game theory and the famous “Prisoner’s Dilemma”, one guy is going to adjust his strategy to take advantage of this. He is going do one thing different that gives him an edge. How can this be? After all, if everyone is playing perfectly, you can’t do better! This is actually untrue. Your strategy can only be defined as perfect in relation to the competition you are facing. You put 8 to 9 men in the box to stop the run against Nebraska. You drop a linebacker into coverage against West Coast pass-happy teams. Both are smart defences given the circumstances. Neither is perfect in all situations.

So we get to a fundamental point in poker. You cannot rank all players and expect any person to have a negative expectation against those above him and a positive one for those below him, unless he is always adjusting his game perfectly.

I did very well playing pot-limit poker at the London Victoria Casino. The players all probably knew much more than I did about the game. But being a foreigner with little experience in pot-limit, my approach to the game was unlike anything they have seen. They had no answer for me. (Had I lived there longer, they would have developed one for sure). This phenomenon partially explains “beginners luck.”

Why am I telling you this? It is because lesson #1 in poker is that you NEED TO ADJUST. Sounds simple, yet I personally believe that this is the biggest problem that most players have. I saw American golfers try to play American golf in Scotland and it was laughable. Put up your driver, take out your 4-iron, and put it in the fairway. Adjust, adjust, adjust.

What adjustments do you need to make? Well, that will be a post of its own. For now, just remember that if you aren’t consciously adjusting for each game you play in, you are throwing money away. Maybe you will make the wrong adjustments. That’s ok, because at least you are giving yourself a shot. With no adjustments, you have no shot.

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