By Tony Guerrera

When many people analyze poker situations, they analyze hands as if they are independent from each other. The reality of poker, though, is that hands do not happen independently of each other. Instead, hands occur over the span of a session, and against commonly encountered foes, hands occur over the span of multiple sessions. What happens during a specific hand affects the results of many hands yet to happen; thus, when making decisions, you need to consider the impact not only on the hand in question, but also on hands yet to be played. Considering what will happen in future hands is a game within a game. As a result, such considerations are referred to as metagame considerations. Metagame considerations are important in both cash game play and tournament play.

Suppose you’re in a shorthanded $400NL game ($2-$4 blinds). You have $600 in front of you, and after a person limps in front of you, you raise to $24 with K9…a pure positional play based off your command of the table. The big blind calls, and the limper folds. There’s now $54 going into the flop. The flop comes 962. Your opponent checks, you bet $40, and your opponent calls. The turn is the T, and your opponent goes all-in for $100 into a pot of $134. Based on all the information you have on your opponent, you put him on {99, 66, 22, 78}, a distribution against which you are drawing completely dead.

Within the context of this specific hand only, this is a clear-cut fold-no doubt about it whatsoever. However, let’s think beyond this hand for a moment. Suppose you know that your opponents are apt to push you around. By making this call with your K9, you might show your aggressive opponents that you’re willing to call sizeable bets on the turn with a pair, even when an overcard falls. As a result, they may become less willing to attempt bluffing you out of pots when they suspect you flopped top pair. This can potentially make your life at a tricky, aggressive table much easier.

Of course, there’s no way we can guarantee that your opponents will be less willing to attempt bluffs against you. Additionally, it’s very difficult to quantify the gain in future EV you get by making this $100 call when you are drawing dead. I’m not going to advocate a decision one way or another, especially since the table needs to be much more well-defined than what I’m able to do in this article. However, you should at least be thinking about the implications of calling instead of immediately folding. The only way to beat tough games is to be as flexible as possible with your thoughts, and to do that, you need to break out of autopilot poker.

Let’s now consider a tournament situation. Action is down to seven players in a big multitable tournament. You are the chip leader with 40 big blinds, and all your opponents have somewhere between 5 and 20 big blinds. Action folds to you, and you’re in the cutoff with 98s. You raise to 3 big blinds, the button folds, the small blind pushes all-in to 9 big blinds, and the big blind folds. You’ve been mildly aggressive as the big stack, but there’s no indication that you’ve been abusing your chip position. Couple that with the fact that the small blind has been fairly tight, and you come to the conclusion that the small blind is on a distribution looking something like {88+, AJ+}.

There are 13 big blinds in the pot, and it’s 6 big blinds to you. Against this distribution, Poker Stove says that your 98s will win 31.8% of the time and tie .58% of the time. We haven’t defined a precise payout structure here, or a precise situation involving all your opponents’ stack sizes; however, independent chip model (ICM) calculations will probably indicate that calling here is marginally +EV or -EV.

Let’s think beyond ICM for a moment. If you fold here, your opponents may get the idea that they can resteal against you, and if your opponents start reraising your blind steal attempts, your control over the table is no more. If you call here, you’ll show your opponents that they are putting their tournament life on the line whenever they go over the top. Against typical tournament foes, this will result in them playing very conservatively, allowing you to continue gobbling up blinds and building your stack.

Of course, we need to consider the reverse situation. Perhaps showing that you’ll call an all-in with 98s will embolden your foes to start going over the top with hands like A8 and KQ. Just like anything else in poker, when you are thinking of metagame considerations, you need to make sure that you are covering all possible angles…not just the angles leading to the outcome you desire. Be neither an optimist nor a pessimist at the tables…be a realist.

On that note, many players make bad plays and then justify them by saying that they are part of a metagame that carries an overall +EV. This is the same type of thinking that occurs when people overestimate their implied odds. We know that overestimating your implied odds can devastate your bankroll. Similarly, cloaking bad play by deluding yourself that it’s part of a +EV metagame is also bad for your bottom line. Metagame considerations are very important, especially if you’re playing in high level games. Just make sure that your metagame analysis is detached from emotion and self-comforting notions; when playing poker, you need to perform hard, dispassionate analysis, and you need to be brutally honest with yourself at all times.

Tony Guerrera is the author of Killer Poker by the Numbers

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