The $2 mistake that cost me $400

I saved two dollars.

Live $1/$2, and I had the seven and eight of spades on the button. Raising was the obvious thing and I did not do it. I put in two, because suited connectors like company, because limping is cheap, and because I have done it a thousand times without once thinking about it.

The flop paired both my cards. Two pair, eights and sevens, on the button, in a pot with a crowd in it.

By the river somebody had a bigger two pair, and he had it because the pot had been cheap enough for him to be in it at all.

Four hundred dollars.

What two dollars actually buys

I have always known limping is bad the way you know a road is icy: as a warning rather than as a number. So after this one I sat down and worked out the number, because the warning was plainly not doing anything.

Flopped two pair is a strong hand. Against one opponent it is close to a lock. Against five it is not really a hand at all.

The whole curve, because the shape of it is the argument:

• One opponent: 80.6%
• Two: 67.0%
• Three: 57.0%
• Four: 49.6%
• Five: 43.9%

The first player to tag along costs thirteen points. By the fifth, a hand that was a four to one favorite has stopped being a favorite at all.

Nothing about my cards changed between the top of that list and the bottom. The only thing that changed was how many people were allowed to see a flop with me for two dollars.

A raise is a filter before it is a bet

Here is the part I had backwards for years.

I thought raising was for taking the pot down, or for building one. Sometimes it is. On the button with 7♠8♠ it is mostly neither. A raise is a filter, and what it filters out is not the hands that would beat me in a fair fight. It is the hands that were never going to be in the fight.

Twelve dollars folds out nothing good, and it is not supposed to. It folds out jack-four offsuit, and queen-nine offsuit, and king-five offsuit: the hands that call two dollars because two dollars is nothing and the flop might come.

Now look at what beats eights and sevens. To make a bigger two pair, a hand needs two cards that pair the board above an eight. Almost every one of those hands, at $1/$2, is a hand that calls a limp and folds to a raise.

I did not get unlucky. I paid two dollars to keep alive the exact category of hand that had me drawing thin, and then one of them turned up, which is what happens when you invite enough of them.

Putting a number on it

Say the pot got to four hundred dollars, which this one did.

At 80.6% my share of that pot is $322. At 43.9% it is $176. The two dollars I saved cost about a hundred and forty-seven dollars of equity in a single hand, before one decision had been made after the flop.

That is seventy-three times the money I saved. And it is not the exceptional case, it is the ordinary one. It usually goes unbilled, because most of the time the flop misses me completely and the two dollars looks free.

The part I cannot tell you

Here is the confession.

I cannot tell you that board.

I know my hand, because it is the hand in the story. I know what I flopped. I know what beat me and I know what it cost, because four hundred dollars is not a number anybody misremembers. Everything in between is gone. The third card on the flop, the turn, the river that did it, the sizing on every street: I did not write a word of it down, and by the time it mattered to me it was a week old.

That is annoying for a blog post. It is worse than annoying for a player, because the missing part is the part that answers the only question worth asking, which is whether this was one bad night or a habit.

One limped button is a story. Forty of them in a month is a leak with a dollar figure on it, and those two things look identical from the inside. You cannot tell them apart by remembering harder, because that is a question about a pattern, and patterns only exist in writing.

Which is the difference between running bad and playing bad, and it is the one question in this game a record answers and a memory does not. This hand was not variance. I know that now because I did the arithmetic afterwards, not because I could feel it at the table. At the table it felt like a cooler. It felt exactly like the hand where I folded correctly and lost anyway, and those two nights have nothing whatsoever in common except how they felt.

Log is free, all of it, and works offline with no account. A session takes ten seconds and a hand takes fifteen, which is roughly the amount of effort I did not spend on the most expensive two dollars of my year.