The Importance of Small Pots

In the world of poker, there are certain common pitfalls that most players fall into. One of the most prevalent of these is, without a doubt, small pot neglection.

It is all too natural to obsess over a large pot where a player gets check-raised on the river and is forced to fold a very strong hand.

Observation shows that when reviewing poker hands, players tend to focus on massive, excruciatingly painful pots that are too close and/or too rare to matter in the long-term.

To escape this almost irresistible trap, a highly effective training method is to intentionally ignore hands where the pot exceeds 40BB, forcing the focus back onto situations that tend to happen with high frequency.

An Analogy: The Memory Bias

Why does the human mind have a large bias towards reviewing big pots? Because these are more memorable. The brain is designed to discard common and mundane events in order to free up capacity to deal with more pressing and unfamiliar situations.

• The Rare Event: A person is much more likely to remember calling an ambulance for a stranger than they are to remember a routine daily task.
• The Mundane Event: Taking a slightly awkward amount of time to find a train ticket is a “mundane” event that is quickly tossed in the mental garbage.

Your mind does not think that these are worthy of your attention because it assumes you have mastered them to the same degree of competence as you have mastered mundane life events such as brushing your teeth or putting your shoes on – but in poker, this is rarely the case.

Imagine a massive recovery process, where you must relearn how to walk or talk. In such a scenario, worrying about surviving a bear attack (a rare big pot) is useless compared to mastering the basics of movement. The mundane situations are essential, you just assume they don’t matter because you have mastered them in life. In poker, players are essentially learning to “walk and talk” for most of their careers; therefore, the focus must remain on all small to medium common spots.

The Illusion of “Close Spot” Importance

Sometimes, stressful massive pots are only difficult because they are mathematically too close to call. When an aggressive regular fires three barrels in a 3-Bet pot and you find yourself humming and hawing with top pair, the reality is that whatever you do, it probably does not matter much in terms of long-term EV.

Presumably, a strong aggressive opponent will have a roughly balanced range, will value bet competently, and bluff enough in this situation that you cannot simply fold all of your bluff-catchers.

While you can assess this spot by examining your blockers and how suitable a bluff-catcher your hand makes, but any decision made will likely only be a microscopically profitable (or unprofitable) one.

What makes these pots feel important is their size, but their net impact on your long-term EV is close to zero. Spending an hour discussing this hand with a friend is a waste of time when there are hundreds of small common spots where significant mistakes are made on a regular basis. It is these mistakes and this misallocation of review time that truly hold most players back.

Escaping Small Pot Autopilot

Another outcome of neglecting small pots is that, in-game, players often switch off mentally. Again, the mistake here is the subconscious assumption that because the mundane events of real life are “solved”, those of poker must be too. This leads players checking down the limped pot without even thinking twice about whether bluffing might be profitable.

Example Hand

You are in the big blind with 5♦4♣ and the button, who is an unknown player, limps into the pot. The SB folds and you check. The flop comes A♣9♥7♠ and you check. Your opponent checks behind and the turn is the 10♦, where it goes check-check again. The river is the 9♣ and now your decision is a no-brainer. You must bluff. Five-high has zero showdown value and so your EV from checking is zero.

From a mathematical standpoint this means that if you can make Villain fold more than 40% of the time by betting two-thirds of the pot, then this is what you should do. In limped pots, most of your opponents will have the same “neglectful disinterest” for the pot mentioned earlier. Therefore, bluff catching with speculative hands like K-high and Q-high is probably not on many players’ agendas. Your bluff is going to work more than half of the time here and print you money.

Missing these bluffs due to boredom or detachment results in a significant loss of EV over the long term.

The “Scavenger” Mindset

Winning poker is all about ruthlessly seeking out lots of little edges in mundane-looking spots. The best poker players in the world have the ability to fight for every scrap of EV over and over again in small pots.

This “scavenging” approach is often more sustainable than playing high variance large pots. If you successfully collect these extra profits over time, you will gradually amass so much extra profit that you can survive downswings in big pots. This, in turn, reduces the emotional obsession with coolers and bad beats and refocuses your energy to where it really matters – common spots.

Summary

• Small common spots are often neglected because humans are wired to ignore routine. In poker, however, mastering the routine is essential.
• Stressful, gross spots only feel difficult because they are mathematically close – meaning the final decision has a smaller impact on your win rate long-term than you think.
• Getting away from the habit of autopiloting is the only way to win more than your fair share of small pots.
• Scavenging extra EV consistently is more important for long-term success than the outcome of any single massive pot.