Two Unusual SNGs, part one

Last night, I played what I think were my two longest SNGs this year.  One lasted 1 hour and 44 minutes.  The other one started about 8 hours ago, and it's not done yet.

The one that lasted 104 minutes was one of those where I knew who the other good player was, he knew I was his main competition, and we each knew that the other knew we knew.  Nothing was said, nothing had to be.  Sometimes you just know, early in a SNG, that you're going to be heads-up with that guy* unless something unusual happens.

About 40 minutes in, we were in fact heads-up.  He was by far the chip leader the entire tournament, but I trapped him with a lot of big hands just before the heads-up, and I went into it with a slight chip lead.  With 13,500 chips on the table, I quickly got him down to 3.000, he fought back and had me down to 4,000, back and forth it went.

We were doing exactly what good players are supposed to do.  I adjusted, he adjusted to my adjustment, and I adjusted to his adjustment to my adjustment.  In game theory, theoretically two such players can adjust to the adjustments until they are both unexploitable.  This is a practical example of the Nash Equilibrium.  For a while I had a sense of what that must feel like.

Of course, in the real world somebody has to win.  The point of poker is to win money, not to reach an equilibrium.  And most of the time in poker, we are trying to exploit the other player (find his weaknesses) rather than trying to play unexploitably.

I eventually figured out that he was a "calling station" (someone who tends to call any bet that you make), and I made up a big deficit by making big hands, value betting, and knowing that my value bets would almost always get called.  But by the time we were heads up, he had adjusted, knowing that I was always betting strongly with my good hands, and he started folding more often when I would put a second or third bet in the pot.  Again, none of this was said, we just knew.

That's how it went, back and forth, one of us would be agressive, the other would figure out what betting that percentage of hands meant, and he would adjust.  He was one of the best heads-up players I've ever been against, and at one point he jokingly asked if I could see his cards.

The thing that, after more than an hour-and-half, finally broke our flirtation with Nash was that he got tired (this was a little after midnight.)  About 95 minutes in he said that he was tired, and that he was going to go all-in every time until someone won.  And he did exactly that.  Nothing is more exploitable than doing the same thing every time, unless it's telling someone that you're going to do the same thing every time.  After I folded to four straight all-ins, I knew that he meant what he said.

The problem was that I went completely card dead.  He would go all in, and my hand would be 83s, or 74o, or some other junk hand that didn't warrant risking all my chips.  I lost half my stack folding my garbage, and finally got to the point where I had to pick a hand and call his all-in.  Of course, I don't remember what the hand was (I would be really good at this game if I had didn't have the short-term memory of a goldfish), but I finally picked a hand and went with it, and he won.  He told me exactly what he was going to do, he did it, and I couldn't do anything about it.

Frankly, I don't think either of us wants to face the other heads-up again.  In fact, good profit-mazimizing players often practice "game selection" or "table selection," or sometimes even "seat selection"** to avoid certain players.

Normally I don't pass up any SNG on Americas Cardroom, because it takes too long for the next one to start.   But if I see a SNG, check the tournament page, and see that Pauls927 is registered, I'll probably move on to the next one.  With only three players cashing, why should I risk my buy-in playing against someone that will probably get one of those three spots?

In a local chess tournament, I enjoy being challenged, and I don't know what players I will be matched with.  That's fine for recreational chess, but with poker, it's all about the Benjamins.  A serious poker player will do anything that he ethically can in order to mazimize profit.

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*My practice is to use male nouns and pronouns when a field is mostly male, as is the case with poker.  Likewise I refer to a nurse in the abstract as "she" or "her" since most nurses are women.  As those conditions change (women predominate in US law and medical schools) I will change with them.  Five years from now I will probably refer to an unknown doctor as "she."

**Seat or table selection is usually possible only in live cash games.  In tournaments, whether live or online, seats are usually assigned.  In the local charity room, I picked a number out of a hat to get my seat assignment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium