In every poker situation, there is always one optimal play. The hard part is determining the situation. I have a story that will explain what I mean, but before i get to that, I want to discuss something slightly simpler.

Sometimes when people are discussing hands, they might say something like: “Raising is a good play here. So is folding. The only bad play is calling.” This is never the case. Every play has an individual equity. A fold always has an equity of zero (money in the pot no longer belongs to you, so you can’t count that as a loss when determining which play is currently the best play). Therefore, raising is only a good play if it has a higher equity than zero. If it doesn’t, it is a strictly worse play than calling. This is true for all situations. You might not always be able to calculate the equity, but the number always exists in theory, regardless of whether or not you will ever know what it is (or would have been).

I know the “feel” players will cringe at this next statement, but every situation in poker can be broken down into mathematical terms. It is usually impossible to do without some extreme simplifying, but again, the numbers exist regardless of whether or not anyone is ever able to fi gure them out. For every action there is a probability tree of all future actions and results that exists.

Obviously, there are tons of factors that go into every decision. Even forgetting the mathematical aspects, there are plenty of psychological factors. In theory, you could create a supercomputer with perfect understanding of not only poker and the math behind it, but also of the human brain and the psychological implication of every possible body movement. However, since poker is a game of imperfect information, the question you have to ask is: “just how much information does this supercomputer have?”

As I said at the beginning of this article, in every poker situation, there is always one optimal play. The hard part is determining the situation. Now for the story:

It is Day 3 of the 2008 World Series of Poker Main Event. Blinds are 1,000/2,000 with a 300 ante. John raises in early position to 6,000 with Ah-Q.. Tom calls from middle position and everyone else folds. The fl op comes Qh-9h-3s. John bets 12,000 and Tom calls. The turn is the 4h. John decides to check. He thinks he probably still has the best hand (as well as a redraw to the nuts) but is a little afraid of the fl ush and would prefer to avoid a huge pot out of position. Tom thinks for about fi fteen seconds and checks behind. The river pairs the 4. John bets out 25,000 hoping for a call. Instead, Tom raises to 100,000.

John’s fi rst instinct is to fold. Tom probably slow played the nut fl ush. It’s unlikely Tom has a boat because he would have reraised Q-Q pre-fl op. That leaves 9-9 and 3-3 as reasonable possibilities, but the board on the turn was so draw heavy that Tom would have bet those hands. It would have been a poor play to let John see a free river with a random heart in his hand.

Using this logic, John decides the nut fl ush is Tom’s most likely hand and checks his cards one last time before folding. He looks down at the ace of hearts and realizes Tom can’t have the nut fl ush. What does he have? K-Q of hearts? John checks the board and sees that the Qh is out. Maybe he has K-J or J-T of hearts, but would he really risk giving the Ah a free card with those hands?

Meanwhile, Daniel Negreanu gets moved to the table. He sets his chips down and then takes a look at the action. He sees Tom is a grey-haired, slightly overweight white male in his late 40s. He is well-kempt with no expensive jewelry. His chips are neatly stacked, and Daniel pegs him as a tight, conservative player. He then notices that Tom’s hands are shaking terribly, and Daniel just knows he has a huge hand. Since Daniel didn’t see any of the action before the river, he doesn’t know if that means a fl ush or a full house.

Body language specialist Joe Navarro is also at the table. He sees the same shaking that Daniel noticed, but thinks Tom is bluffi ng. Why? Because Joe has some information that Daniel didn’t have. When the turn card came down, Tom was calm: no shaking, not even a subtle glance at his chips indicating he was thinking of betting. Joe saw the same thing as the river card came down. Joe was also watching John as he checked his cards and just barely started to muck his hand. Tom didn’t start shaking until John pulled his cards back in close and put his protective chip back on his cards. In other words, Tom didn’t start shaking until he had reason to believe his bet would be called. Joe is sure that Tom is bluffi ng.

Internet legend Chris9215 was watching the whole hand. He thinks that John is representing a strong, one-pair hand. K-Q at minimum, maybe even A-A. Chris has also seen Tom’s tight play all day and assumes he has a strong hand. He thinks that Tom bet way too much to get a call. He laughs to himself about how bad and predictable live players are as he waits for John to fold and for Tom to politely show him the nuts (or close to it).

Michael is also at the table and has yet another take on the hand. Just a week before this, Michael was at Tom’s table in a satellite. They were chatting and Tom mentioned how he had won his seat for the WSOP at Bodoglife.com. He was playing the satellite for the cash since he already had a seat. They discussed strategy for online tournaments, and Tom said he always uses the same strategy. He plays very patiently and waits for big hands. The weaker players always pay him off. Michael saw Tom put his tight strategy to the test and saw that it worked. Michael had seen Tom play so patiently and tight that he was sure that Tom had a huge hand against John. He had come to like Tom, and was hoping that John would foolishly pay him off.

Ben is another player at the table who has played a lot with Tom online. Ben knows that Tom is known as one of the tightest grinders at Bodog and has made a killing in online games with his super-tight strategy. Ben is also sure that Tom would not make this bet without a huge hand.

Matt is sitting at the table with some information that no one else has since he is sitting directly next to Tom. He has had his headphones on and hasn’t been paying too much attention to the other players, but he notices the frenzy in which Tom’s feet are shaking and rubbing up against each other. Matt doesn’t care about anything else. He sees how nervous Tom is and is 100% sure he is bluffi ng. Matt wishes he had played his pocket deuces so that he could make a hero call in this spot.

Finally, Will has noticed something that none of the other players at the table have. The table behind them just broke a minute ago, and their table is next to break. Will isn’t quite sure how savvy Tom is, but he is thinking to himself, “This would be a sick spot for Tom to use his tight image to get away with a big bluff. The table is breaking soon, so this will be his last chance to do that before having to rebuild his image again.”

Now we come back to John who is the only one who has to actually make a decision based on the information he has. John has been studying poker for over a year now and is trying to become the best player he can be. He knows how complicated it is, and he strives to make the best play as often as possible. But what should he do here?

If he had the supercomputer to aid him, he would have to give the computer the information from the table. He would explain how tight Tom has been playing, and how he hasn’t shown down a bluff yet. He wonders if the computer would use the same logic to determine that Tom doesn’t have a full house, and would have bet to protect his fl ush if he had one on the turn. Which is more important? Two hours of tight play or his hand reading analysis?

Unfortunately, John is leaving out all the information that Daniel, Joe, Chris, Michael, Ben, Matt, and Will have picked up on Tom. From John’s perspective, there just isn’t enough information to make a confi dent decision.

John looks down at his ace of hearts one last time, and decides that if Tom really has the unlikely fl ush or boat, then he played the hand well (aside from not protecting on the turn) and deserves the pot. John knows that Tom is a tight player and probably isn’t bluffi ng, but he just can’t give Tom credit for a huge hand either. He sees all the chips in the pot and just can’t bring himself to fold. He pushes his chips forward to make the call and regrets it just before they hit the pot.

John holds his hand over the muck as he waits for Tom to fl ip over a huge hand. Instead he hears the two most beautiful words in the world: “You win.” John fl ips over his A-Q and Tom disgustedly throws his J-T of spades face down into the muck. “How can you make that call? That call is terrible. You probably haven’t paid any attention at all to how tight I’ve been this whole time!”

Tom looks around the table and sees Joe, Matt, and Will smiling to themselves. They are all thinking, “I wasn’t even in the hand and I knew you were bluffi ng. Nice play fi sh. Try and make it less obvious next time.”

Though those three are chuckling, Tom sees the contrasting expressions of the rest of the players. Daniel, Chris, Michael, and Ben are all completely shocked. Chris even says to Tom, “Wow, nice bet. I thought for sure you had a huge hand. Great bluff even though it didn’t work out.”

Tom shakes his head and berates himself mentally. He knows he just bluffed away a huge portion of his stack in the most important tournament of the year. He mumbles, “That’s why I should never bluff the donkeys. They always call”.

Meanwhile, John has already forgotten that his fi rst instinct was to fold. He mentally pats himself on the back for trusting his gut and making the right call. John never becomes aware of the whole picture and all of the information he was missing. He doesn’t care, because he is now the chip leader at the table.

If it wasn’t already blatantly obvious, this story was fabricated to show a point. In every poker situation, you are always given a few pieces of the puzzle. If you are observant, you might have more pieces than anyone else at the table. However, you will never have every single piece. There are just too many.

In this case, every single player at the table came to a reasonable, logical conclusion about the hand. If any player had described their thought process about the hand, an expert player would have agreed with their conclusion, based on the information that they had. The problem is that some of the players were missing vital information about the hand that might have changed their read.

Just remember this story next time you are trying to make a decision that involves fi guring out what your opponent is thinking. There is always more information to glean. The slightest gesture or even article of clothing can be the fi nal piece of the puzzle that you need to make your decision. Of course the best piece of information would be hundreds of hours of previous experience with the player, but reasonably, that’s not something you can often have in a tournament.

Again, we come back to what I said at the beginning: In every poker situation, there is always one optimal play. The hard part is determining the situation.

In each situation, you are facing an opponent (or multiple opponents). You generally won’t know what they have, but you can always determine a range, weighted based on the probability of each hand. With minimal information this range will be rather wide, and the optimal play will usually be the one that is the most “standard” or part of the least exploitable strategy. As you gain more information about your opponent(s) and can come closer to pinpointing not only his hand range, but also his thinking process, suddenly your optimal play becomes much more “specialized.” For example, against an unknown player facing a big bet on the river, it would be a mistake to always fold without a huge, huge hand. Your opponents would be able to start bluffing you left and right. However, if you are against a very tight player, this can often become the optimal strategy.

Finally, I want to reiterate my fi rst point. It may seem like you have many good options in a given situation, but there is always only one correct play, and the rest are all mistakes. Not having complete information will often lead you to a play that may seem incorrect based on the results, but is actually correct. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that given the specifi c situation you were in, with the specifi c information you had at the time, your play was correct. So when you are reevaluating your play in hindsight, realize that the situation may not be the same. The information you have gained after the hand (i.e. seeing their cards) changes the situation you were in completely. What matters is the situation you were in at the time you made the decision.

Hopefully you have been able to follow my somewhat convoluted thought process. If you have, you should have come full circle in your mind to my original statement: In every poker situation, there is always one optimal play. The hard part is determining the situation.