ABC and FPS
Randy “Nanonoko” Lew was known for playing 20+ tables of online poker at once. He made millions of dollars with consistency and volume. When I watched him stream his play, what I noticed was that he was playing to win. Maybe that doesn’t seem unusual. What was unusual was that no one else I knew, myself included, was really playing to win.
We were playing for other reasons - to prove how smart or unique we were, mostly. The contrast with Randy was striking. He didn’t go for any fancy plays. He didn’t seem to particularly mind if his opponents might be bluffing him. He just played solid, sound poker. Once I saw truly egoless play, I couldn’t ignore how different it was from what everyone else was doing.
At the time I was playing poker in Detroit, where there was a saying: “ABC players don’t last.” The idea, I suppose, was that if you played a straightforward strategy you’d eventually be figured out. But it was never that clear what ABC meant. If it meant playing your hand strength and never bluffing, sure, that’s not a great strategy in most games; but if it meant playing a mathematically sound strategy, that’s a lot more complicated. According to the math, bluffs are certainly part of a good strategy.
One guy’s girlfriend would call him while he was playing and ask, “Are you tricking them?” Many people think that playing your actual cards is the default strategy and bluffs are tricks. But poker (and chess) are less about tricking your opponent and more about doing what makes sense. When you make a game with certain rules, some plays make more sense than others, and you need to do what makes sense more often than your opponents.
It’s like if we were playing basketball and you drove to the basket while doing a handstand. You would succeed in surprising me - I wouldn’t have expected you to do that - but you probably won’t succeed in scoring a basket. Surprise is only valuable if it gains you something tangible within the framework of the game.
In poker, bluffing isn’t a trick, it’s part of a sound strategy. The hard part is bluffing with the right hands at the right frequency. My feeling was always, I wish I could play ABC poker. I dream of playing ABC poker. Meanwhile, I was crushing the game, and my strategy was completely different than everyone else’s, so apparently it wasn’t that simple or easy.
The opposite of ABC is FPS - fancy play syndrome. This is when you eschew the obvious play for something really complicated. Occasionally you come out looking like a genius, but more often you fall flat on your face.
Getting back to chess, if you do want to win more, you should know that you don’t have to do that much to win a chess game. Just play solid and avoid big mistakes. The catch is, this is harder than it sounds. This idea was immortalized by GM Tony Miles after an uninspiring win: “I did fuck-all, but it was enough.”
I’m often surprised by how players react when their opponent does something crazy, something that violates all rules of chess logic. It’s as though everyone’s always a split-second away from giving their opponent credit for being the biggest genius in the world. Rather than looking for ways to punish their opponent’s probable mistake, they immediately go on the defensive. Or sometimes, they try to go over the top with an even crazier move. But the truth is, the standard stuff beats the crazy stuff - that’s what makes the standard stuff standard, and the crazy stuff crazy.
In poker of course there’s a lot of uncertainty about what your opponents are doing. You always have to make assumptions that are necessarily subjective. However, it’s helpful to think about the game theory concept of domination. A dominated play is one that’s inferior no matter what assumptions you make. Ben Sulsky, one of the best poker players in the world, has said that he considers his main job as a poker pro to be avoiding strictly dominated plays.
This jives with my game review process in chess. If I missed an opportunity to do something spectacular, I’ll appreciate the spectacular line because I love chess, but when it comes to improving my results, I’m not primarily focused on those kinds of opportunities. I’m thinking more along the lines of, “What did I do in this game that was crazy, and how can I stop doing that?” If I can cut out the big mistakes, I know I’ll have a good chance in most games.
ABC play is good when you’re starting out, but surely to get to the top, you have to do something exceptional right? Not necessarily. When asked if he prepared anything specific to target Anand in their World Championship match, Magnus Carlsen said, “Nothing special apart from playing 40 to 50 good moves in every game.”
To play at the highest level, you don’t have to do something crazy every game. You have to get the simple stuff right really, really often. It sounds simple but it’s hard to do. ABC beats FPS.