I will be away from home for much of the next month. First, I will be in the San Francisco Bay Area for a week doing tourist stuff, and some medical things as well. After a brief stop in Las Vegas to do laundry, Betty and I will be off to Europe for a poker cruise and sightseeing trip to Venice, Med and Black Sea cruise, Athens and Madrid. We are really looking forward to it.

I will try to keep up with the website, but please bear with me if Thoughts of the Week and forum posts are brief and/or sporadic.

Today we will discuss the quick call. If you play on-line, tune to another website now. But if you play live, this will be a useful Thought.

You are in the big blind and flop a set of sevens on a board of J-7-3 with two spades. In this instance, you decide to check-raise, so you check and the last player bets. You raise and someone calls. Now the original bettor re-raises and you four-bet, again the caller calls two more and the button calls as well. Now a spade comes. Should you bet or check?

To some extent the answer lies in how fast the caller called. If that person has a flush draw, she will call without a thought most of the time. If she has some other hand, like AJ or QQ, she will have to think about what is going on, and should she raise, call or fold.

With a flush draw, most people know that at limit poker they are along for the ride…they want to play a cheaply as possible so they will not bet or raise. They also know they are almost always getting the right price to call, so they will never fold. This makes their decision easy and they just call quickly since that is the only real choice they have and they know immediately what they are going to do.

So if the calls are fast, you are now beat and you should check and call, hoping for the board to pair (Set Holder’s Prayer: Praise the Lord and Pair the Board). If the calls came slowly, then most likely you are not looking at a flush (at least from the caller) and you can bet.

This is one of the most reliable tells in poker. And I am reminding you of this to tell you to slow down when you have a flush draw and are facing bets and raises. You must be aware of your tempo in these situations and pause to avoid giving off these flush-draw tells.

You can use these tells to make and save bets (like you can muck your set on the river if you trust the tells), and you need to keep your opponents from gaining the same advantage.

I just submitted Part V, the final part of my series on Strategic Differences between Limit and No-Limit play. I am going to write a few non-series columns for a change.

One I will write soon will be about luck. Actually about good luck. Poker players never feel they are having good luck, only normal luck (in which their wins come from their superior play) and bad luck (in which their losses come from the inferior play of their opponents).

I was reminded about this recently in a conversation with my friend Igor, who was having excellent results (well deserved). I postulated that perhaps he was having excellent luck, and he replied that he did not remember any significant suck-outs or hitting three-outers. I am sure he was right.

But good luck in poker can be well hidden. As a mediocre example, suppose you play live and average 35 hands per hour. In a six-hour session you should get pocket aces one time (roughly, of course). Would you really notice if you get AA 1.2 times per six hours (note this is 20% more often than typical). If you play 5 days a week, that means you will hold AA 6 times instead of 5.

Over 3 months, this is 12 more AA than usual. If in general you average 10 bets per pocket A you hold (just for an example), this is 120 bets extra over that time. So over the 360 hours, you have picked up .33 big bets per hour more than you should from this subtle effect alone.

I know you PokerTracker guys will tell me you know how many AA you hold. But you don’t know if you make 10% more flushes than normal, or if they hold up 1.2 times as often as they theoretically should, or if the pots you win are 1.2 times larger than normal.

This is why poker is such a long term game, and why guys who play mediocre poker can run good for weeks and months while thinking they are playing well. And these guys are in the worst trouble, because when things start to go bad, as they always do, they do not change anything because they were convinced by the artificial winning streak that they were playing well.

Today I thought I would discuss smart people. Specifically, smart people who play poker and the three significant errors they make at the table.

Smart people are attracted to poker because it is an interesting and intricate game with many strategic options. Many of the top players are also very smart people. Such people have an edge in poker because they simply can think of more variables in the short time they have to make a play, and remember more about about opponents, than other players can.

However, smart people also make one (or both) of three types of errors at the table.

1 - They want to look, or be thought of as smart.
2 - They give their opponents credit for playing (or thinking) as well as they do.
3 - They play too high.

They want to look smart. This is an ego problem. Unfortunately much of winning poker is quite dull: folding most hands and playing the ones you do play very straightforwardly. Oh, a few chances for cleverness do arise, but not all that often. And, even worse, frequently your one or two brilliancies per night do not get shown to anyone, so only you know how smart you are.

This galls some smart people who want to impress their peers, rather then just win money. So they show their cards, or make many more clever plays than is necessary, or even profitable, (Mike Caro’s “Fancy Play Syndrome”) to impress their tablemates (or even the TV cameras).

They give opponents too much credit. If you are a smart player who has studied strategy, you are probably thinking at level three or even beyond. Many of your opponents are not. When you start attributing to them thoughts and strategies they do not possess, you are going to misread their hands and the situations you find yourself in. This will cost you money. If you are true student of the game (as most who visit this website are), you need to learn to think down, and not put opponents on thoughts and hand you may have, but they don’t. This includes thinking they are always bluffing you.

They play too high OK, yet another ego thing. For many, poker is about finding the best situation to make money. For some others, who tend to be smart people, they feel they only prove how smart they are if they play against top players, frequently for mare than they can afford (is this really smart??) They do this partly because they enjoy mixing it up with other strategically adept players, and trying to prove their superiority. They also do this to be seen playing at these tables so others will respect them for playing with other top players.

Truly smart poker is finding the most profitable spot you can and making the best decisions you can regardless of who is watching or what they think.