I’m sure you’ve seen them, I sure have. The most remarkable I’ve witness was on my last trip to Las Vegas. I was at the Orleans and a roly-poly, bespectacled older fellow sat across from me. I could tell right away he was annoying because his wife grabbed a chair and sat behind him (Don’t you hate that? Guys with girlfriends and wives with so little life of their own that they are willing to sit for hours and do nothing while their guy plays cards?). Every few minutes this guy would lean backward into his wife who would snuggle him and pop some sort of treat in his mouth which he would chop wildly with his mouth wide open. Seriously! Like he was some sort of pit bull! He had a thick accent (probably Mediterranean or a Spaniard) and was clearly known at the table, a regular. Like most regulars that play low fixed limit, he was playing nearly every hand and his betting lines were passive and entirely conventional. But, for some reason today, the poker gods where smiling on him. What seemed like every hand this guy was showing up with monsters, full houses, flushes and quads at least twice. Rack after rack our little super snacker was sending his wife to the cage for a color up. He could not lose! All’s the rest of us could do was look on with unconcealed disgust and envy as he would turn hands like 6-3 into an 18 big bet winning full house.
The remarkable thing about heaters is not so much the player that catches cards and makes strong hands. All players do that from time to time. The thing that makes them so extraordinary is making strong hands at PRECISELY the moment when one or two opponents make their strong (but second or third best) hand as well. It’s rare to get pocket K’s, it’s even more rare to flop a set with them. It’s astronomically rare to make a set of kings at precisely the moment when an opponent makes two pair or an under set. Isn’t it almost always the case when you flop strong, bet and everyone either folds or you get only one caller who folds on the next street?
I have had lots of stints of running good. I catch my normal frequency of starting hands (20-30%), about a third of those I connect with the board and about half to two thirds of those I end up winning the pot. Only about one or two hands in a five hour session when I’m running good do I make big hands that get paid off. My good sessions happen about one in eight or ten. I do well in these sessions, usually doubling and sometimes tripling up my original buyin. In my biggest session I quadrupled my buy in. Much more common are grinding sessions when I get up one buyin and then get coolered once or twice and bleed back to a half buyin, then grind back up and bust back down again, always pivoting around that one or two buyin mark.
I have never had a monster, “can’t lose” session where I needed a wheelbarrow to get the chips to the cage and it’s got me wondering why. Not that I’m whining and seething with injustice about why I never got my big heater. I’m curious about the factors that influence the occurrence of these sessions and I’m pretty sure tight hand selection is one of the factors.
The hallmark of “running like God” is taking normally garbage starting hands and making monsters. However, if I’m playing correct poker, even when I’m “running good” I still don’t play hands like 9-5 off suit. So, those one or two sessions when I walked away with 4 buyins I was still only playing maybe 30% of my starting hand range. This is contrary to nearly all my opponents who convince themselves they are in the middle of a supernatural event when the run good and start playing normally losing starting hands. One time in 400 they may “get it right” and have a legendary session. They imagine that “you never know” when one of these streaks may hit so whenever they win a few pots they talk themselves into thinking a heater is starting. Having a monster session and witnessing other players having one only reinforces this squishy thinking. The trouble is 399 times they will get it wrong and predictably lose their meager winnings right back. In fact, those 399 times they lose so much they never get out of that hole. Even the monster muncher guy and his little zoo keeper wife and their huge winnings that session I witnessed will make up only a few percentage points of all the losses that came before. His fate was sealed not when the poker god’s smiled but when he decided 10-4 off suit was a hand he could win with.
By playing half or less of my starting hands compared to my opponents I may be curtailing the size of any monster sessions I may have (or more correctly moving the frequency from 1 in 300 to one in a thousand) but I’m also protecting the winnings I make FAR more frequently. In sessions when I grind out a half a buyin, if my opponents played the exact same session, would have lost 2 buyins.
Honestly, it is tough to fold hand after hand only to watch a whale of player stacking mountains of chips making quads with 7-2. The only consolation is the advertising value of such sessions. My opponents see these heaters and are encouraged that they will be the next recipients of the smiling poker god’s manna and keep right on playing their horrible strategy.
