The Anti-Straddle Manifesto

THE ANTI-STRADDLE MANIFESTO

by Brent Jenkins

1.     INTRO

I’ve had it, fellow poker players. I hit my breaking point, so I’ll be the blasphemous one to come out and say it: enough with the straddles. So much of the community worships at the altar of straddles, but I reject their dogma. Not only are straddles overrated in most respects, but I believe they are a downright cancer on the poker ecosystem, and are somewhat offensive to the logic and design of the game itself.

As a full-time grinder now firmly in his middle age, I can safely say I’ve played tens of thousands of hours of live poker, all over the country. Many thousands of those hours have been played with the straddle on, and I’ve always gone along with it happily enough. Why? Because I didn’t want to be “that guy,” and because the prevailing sentiment amongst players I respect was always that straddles were good for the game. I’ve long had my doubts about that claim, but always suppressed those doubts in the interest of getting along.

But as I said, I’ve had enough. I now believe we need to wage war on the straddle, de-normalizing it if not outright banning it from the game. I won’t let these Stakes Terrorists™ take over my game and gaslight me about it any longer. Someone needs to make a case for the other side, so I’ll be the contrarian who takes the heat.

Straddles just kind of suck, and you suck if you’ve ever been pushy about them.

In order for me to properly make the case here, this manifesto’s going to have to reach unreasonable length.

Here are the main vectors of suckiness, as I see them:

• Straddles are logically absurd.

• Straddles are bad for the ecosystem.

• Straddles are bad for social dynamics.

• The relationship between pot size, stack depth, and profitabiliity is misunderstood.

• There exist much better options for juicing up the game.

• There are a host of logistical and enforcement issues with the straddle.

• A subset of straddle-lovers tend to behave like total c**** about it.

These are all the areas in which I’ll be ripping the straddle a new one. So, if you’ve got the patience to hear me out on all fronts, strap in and enjoy this possibly-mentally-unwell rampage. Or feel free to jump to a specific topic. I’ll break this into chapters.

But first, I’ve got to tell you a little bit about where I’m coming from…

2.     VALUES

I’ve long noticed that my personal value hierarchy, as it relates to things in the poker world, seems to be inverted from what most grinders care about. For most grinders, How profitable is the game? is the primary consideration above all others. How much fun am I having? is usually a top concern as well. They want to play in games that are maximally fun and maximally profitable.

Now look, I agree that a super fun, super profitable game sounds amazing. Sign me up. I took the poker path in life because it was the most fun thing I could do while making good money. But as far as I’m concerned, there are, and have always been, even higher principles to consider. There are principles that we should hold as sacred to the game we love, and never violated to make a few extra bucks or to stave off boredom.

For me personally, those principles are: protecting the fairness and integrity of the game, and treating the other humans around you with civility. Any tradeoff that involves dinging one of these tenets of the game in order to raise the fun or the EV, is a tradeoff I’m unlikely to be comfortable with.

In a game that inherently involves such brutal levels of random “unfairness,” protecting that which is fair about the game is critical. Many of the rules of poker are there to ensure we operate from as level of a playing field as possible, from which point we can apply the beautiful mantra “may the best (or luckiest) player win.” I care very much that these rules are respected.

Game integrity applies most obviously to things like outright cheating, but also to mild, grey-area infractions that are kind of quasi-cheating.

When fairness and integrity are honored, the game can truly be a meritocracy. The meritocratic nature of cash games is sacred to me.

Yet, within this sacred meritocracy, an environment where everyone treats each other with civility is something I believe should be a baseline expectation. I truly want poker to be a gentlemen’s (and gentleladies’, of course) game. If certain “fun” players who lose a lot of money can’t uphold this sacred virtue, then I say good riddance to them. I’d rather lose their action while having this principle upheld.

Some examples of things I’m talking about with regard to fairness, integrity, and civility are: never going north or south with your chips, always acting in turn, stacking and displaying your chips properly, not seeking favoritism for yourself in any way (nor advocating for it on behalf of whales), never skipping someone on the waitlist, paying attention so as not to slow the game down, not berating other players, and respecting everyone’s individual decisions regarding how much to buy in for (within the range on the plaque) and whether or not to participate in things like straddling or the standup game.

On that last point, I think the poker world should revere the principle that anyone is free to sit at a poker table and play exactly what’s on the plaque, no more, no less. None of us are entitled to anyone’s action above and beyond that. This is the social contract we all enter into in public casino games. As far as I’m concerned, not straddling is well within everyone’s rights, and nobody deserves to become a pariah for exercising that right. In my mind, it’s those who would make them a pariah that are out of line.

All these things just feel morally right to me. This is how humans treat each other with fairness and integrity at a public poker table in a casino. Not to sound too cheesy here, but this is quite literally more important than any amount of money or fun. I don’t believe I’ve adopted this hierarchy because it benefits me personally, but because it feels like where my conscience inevitably leads.

This difference in value hierarchies often creates friction between me and the players who want me to participate in the upholding of their values (cash money, baby).

Other players may strongly disagree with my way of seeing things, and that’s okay. I don’t want to go off on a 10,000-word tangent about that. The point here is to lay the groundwork for my readers, to let them in on the frame from which I’ll approach everything else.

3.     THE LOGICAL ABSURDITY OF STRADDLES

The first time you ever heard of a straddle, your first instinct was probably that sounds dumb, or that sounds weird, or that sounds unnecessary. Then you found out how normal they are and how much everyone loves them, and you came around. But your initial instinct was correct, dear reader! I hope I can help you see that.

There’s a heavy status quo bias I must attempt to overcome in this manifesto, and so I’ll start right here. Straddles are so normalized that they seem to be a part of the very fabric of live cash games, but I’d like to ask you to go on a little thought journey with me, in order to hear me out…

Pretend you’ve never heard of a straddle. Nobody’s heard of a straddle. Straddling isn’t a thing. Every starting pot correlates perfectly with the blinds listed on the plaque, and every player gets to buy in to their comfort level in relation to the listed blinds. Whenever anyone starts feeling, for whatever reason, that the current stake just isn’t doing it for them anymore, they are free to go play in the game one level higher instead. If they’ve got the skills and the bankroll to match their ambition, there will be nothing stopping them from winning more money in the bigger game.

The concept of imposing the next game up’s stakes upon the game below it isn’t a thing, because there’s no reason for it to be a thing. There’s already a clear and straightforward way to find the exact game you want. This “free market poker economy” naturally sorts players into the tables they want to be at. If you want to start playing for bigger stakes in the middle of your session, or you anticipate that you might feel that way later, sign yourself up for the bigger game.

In this world where straddling doesn’t exist, everyone is aware that if you want to play for twice the blinds you’re currently playing for, you can go play in the next game up, where those are the exact blinds provided. Then, in this world, someone comes along and tries doing this neat little trick: when they’re under the gun, they’ll put out twice the big blind, and it will count as a third, even bigger blind.

When this person tried this, everyone would look at that them and be like, “My brother in Christ, the game you’re looking for is right over there,” while pointing to the next bigger game running (or the building interest list for it). “We are playing this game, not double this game. If we wanted to be playing double this game, we’d be in that game.”

There’s no problem that needs fixing by introducing something called a straddle. The idea that you would sit in a game that’s half as big as the one you want to be playing, and try to turn it into the game you’d rather be playing, instead of just sitting in the game you actually want to be playing, is as ridiculous and unnecessary as it sounds. My dude, just decide what blinds you truly want to play for, and then pick that game! It’s so easy.

Disregarding how accepted straddles are in real life, when considering the idea of them from first principles, they serve no purpose and start to seem rather absurd.

If you’re a player who’s resistant to officially playing game B, yet commonly tries to unofficially turn game A into game B through the use of a straddle, let’s unpack what’s going on here. My guess is that it’s one or more of the following:

A.    Financially, you’re uncomfortable risking the amount of money involved with deeper effective stacks at the next level. To protect your downside risk, you want to have the buy-in limits of the smaller game in effect while you play for bigger starting pots.

B.    Strategically, you’re way more studied, skilled, and confident playing 100-200 BB stacks than you are playing deep. Imposing the bigger stake on the lower game gets you the best of both worlds: bigger pot sizes and the stack depth where you enjoy the biggest edge.

C.     You’re not up to the challenge of trying to beat the better players that occupy the next stake up. Imposing a straddle on your current, lower game creates a situation where you get to play the starting pots native to the bigger game, but against players who are worse than the average player at that next stake.

D.    You think there’s something more profitable about a three-blind structure over a two-blind structure, even when holding the biggest blinds equal.

E.     You simply think three blinds are more fun than two blinds. They make the game more gambley, players get all in more often, et cetera. This is valuable in and of itself.

F.     You don’t think the bigger game will actually run, so the closest thing you can get is playing the smaller game with a straddle.

G.    You know they’re straddling at the next stake up, so straddling at this stake is as close as you can get to playing the next biggest game without a straddle.

My response to A, B, and C is basically tough shit. It seems rather brazen to try to capture all the benefits of bigger starting pots without having to accept any of the downsides that naturally correlate with them. In my straightforward ideal of an ecosystem, there should be tradeoffs associated with moving up: primarily having to face tougher opponents and having to risk more money. You don’t just get to pull this neat little trick that allows you to circumvent the tradeoffs and give you the best of both worlds.

I mean, in today’s poker world, you really can pull the neat little trick, but of course fighting against that concept is what I’m doing here.

Players in group D are quite savvy, because there is a difference in how the math of the game works in, say, a 5/10/20 game vs. a 10/20 game. This presents an opportunity for some to increase their edge in one game relative to the other, and for others to have theirs diminished. But, basically, I consider this a tough shit situation as well. Like, I understand, from a purely selfish EV standpoint, why certain players prefer three blinds to two, but poker is a zero-sum game, and anything that increases EV for one player necessarily decreases it for another. It never hurts to ask, I suppose, but one shouldn’t expect people to consent to their own EV-reduction.

Also, the difference between “a three-blind game where the biggest blind is $20” and “a two-blind game where the biggest blind is $20,” is not significant enough to be worth allowing straddles to muck up the whole poker ecosystem in the way that they do.

I’m fairly sympathetic to motivation E, but ultimately I’m going to land on, you guessed it, tough shit. Not everyone shares the same idea of what’s fun at the poker table. For some, it’s the conversation, social dynamics, and getting away from the nagging wife. For others, it’s the action of big pots and gambling that’s fun. For others still, it’s the thrill of competition, the cerebral chess match that’s strategically richest when stacks are deep, when the threat of overbets and deep-stacked pressure looms.

For those in the action-loving camp, of course it’s fine to feel that way, but they must understand that, even if most people see it their way, not everyone will. They are free to straddle their own UTG hands for fun, if they desire, but they should have no expectation that everyone else will join in. For some people, “having fun” may not even be something they’re trying to do while playing poker. And quite honestly, that’s their right.

As for motivations F and G, well, they point to what I’m going to tackle in the next section anyway, so here we go. (spoiler: tough shit to them as well)

4.     STRADDLES ARE BAD FOR THE ECOSYSTEM

I’ve already described my ideal poker ecosystem. It’s one where every game clearly plays just as it’s listed on Bravo and on the plaque. This is straightforward, logical, and easy to understand. It would serve everyone’s needs as well as possible. If there had never been such a thing as the straddle, nobody would think there was anything wrong with this system.

But somehow, somewhere along the way, the straddle did take root, and the result is a very ambiguous ecosystem.

What we have is a situation where two groups of players, with opposing wishes regarding the straddle, are thrown into the same game and expected to figure it out amongst themselves with no problems or resentments.

It is absolute insanity that this is the status quo.

With enough interested players, a poker room might hypothetically be able to run two tables of 5/10 and one table of 10/20, but instead they’ll run three tables of “5/10” that are all squabbling over whether the game should be 5/10 or 5/10/20. One stake is meant to satisfy players occupying two different tiers of the ecosystem.

“But Brent, there usually aren’t enough players to open a 10/20 game. That’s why I have to play 5/10 and try to get the straddle going.”

The problem with this objection is that there are so many players who feel the same way that, surely, if they all tried, they actually could get a 10/20 game going. It’s the status quo that’s hurting the 10/20 game’s chances, and it’s both a self-fulfilling prophecy and a colossal self-own that these players won’t even try. The inertia of laziness prevents any change.

As recently as a few years ago, there were thriving, daily 10/20 and 20/40 games at the Bellagio. I played in them. It can happen again.

I don’t have that much sympathy for your plight if you won’t even throw your name on the interest list and try to get the snowball rolling. This is like saying “No woman would ever date me,” and because of that lack of confidence, never asking anyone out. Then later saying, “See, no woman ever did date me. I was right.”

If all you ever want to do is turn game A into game B, that seems not only lazy, but also unfair to those players who truly just want to play game A.

Despite how popular straddles are, the status quo really is unfortunate for players who want to add straddles to their game, because the official rules favor non-straddlers. The only tool straddle-lovers have at their disposal is social persuasion. And if getting to play what you want requires everyone to fall in line with the will of the majority, what you have is a terrible system.

If one shithead who refuses to straddle can ruin everything for you, something needs to change, either in the structure of the poker economy, or in your own mindset regarding your approach to the game. (or, the non-straddler needs to fall down a manhole one time)

Sticking with 5/10 as the example stake, I’ve heard proponents of the straddle say something like, “I’d like to play 10/20, but the problem is they’re straddling in that game, and I don’t want to play 10/20/40. So I’d rather have the straddle on here at 5/10.”

To me, this sounds like a straightforward argument against the straddle, a blatant admission that the existence of straddles in the ecosystem prevents you from moving up to the stake you actually wish to play. And yet, many players in such a position are happy to straddle themselves, thus perpetuating the same predicament onto those players in the pool one stake below them. This method of solving the problem, in the moment, for oneself, reinforces that which keeps the problem in place long-term. Straddles tighten the flow of new blood into each successive level of the ecosystem.

With this barrier to moving up in place, the status quo incentivizes the downward trickle of straddles throughout the stakes. I guess that’s great if you’re a straddle-lover, but this downward trickle isn’t evenly distributed. At a certain stake, more people may reject the straddle than embrace it, and this will create a bottleneck of discontent players on the other side of that stake.

In my regular poker room, this snag happens between 2/5 and 5/10. That is, most of the 5/10 players want to straddle (making it 5/10/20), while most of the 2/5 players don’t want to straddle. This creates a bit of a dead zone for players who truly want to play a game where the biggest blind is $10. They always have the option of playing 5/10 and refusing to straddle, but most people don’t want to risk becoming a pariah over that, so they just give up (either staying at 2/5 or giving in to the straddle at 5/10).

Going from 2/5 to 5/10/20 is an absolutely ridiculous jump. The bets you’re forced to put in every orbit while you look for good spots increase from $7 to $35! For anyone who wants to move up from 2/5, but who quite reasonably “only” wants to double the forced bets instead of quintupling them, the only way for them to accomplish that is to decide to straddle-block at 5/10, and be willing to take all the social heat that comes from that. I think it’s really lame that the status quo forces that choice on someone. It’s absurd that we’re allowing the ecosystem to operate in this way.

For some players, it’s not just the size of the starting pot they care about, or whether or not there’s two or three blinds, but the depth of stacks relative to the biggest blind. For every capped game, the fact that straddles cut the effective stacks in half is a big fucking deal to those players (such that they’d much rather play 5/10 with a 3K cap than 2/5/10 with a 1500 cap).

I’ll dive into the topic of stack depth later, but this is another thing that’s wrong with the status quo we have. If ever there is to be a game that has an understood, “default” straddle, that’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t kick in until we’re talking about an uncapped stake, where people who have the capital to do so can play deep even with the straddle. That’s the only way to have a game that straddles while also maintaining stack depth.

In capped games, Deep-Stack Fetishists™ can’t really do anything to make the game deeper for themselves (outside of violating the “don’t go north” ethic). The default, what’s-on-the-plaque version of the game is as deep as it gets. You can buy in for the max and not straddle, and that’s about it. Hopefully you and some other players at the table will run it up and then you’ll get to play really deep, but that’s something that either will or won’t happen. You can’t force it.

Players who don’t like playing deep, however, have multiple ways of avoiding that. Let’s say you really want to play a $20 biggest-blind game, but with a 100BB stack. You could sit in an official 10/20 game that has a minimum buy-in of 2K or less, and buy in for 2K. Mission accomplished. Or you could buy in for a big stack at a lower stake, while trying to get that lower stake to double their stakes. But they never seem to want to do the former, only the latter. It’s all so goddamn convoluted and indirect.

Again, it’s easy to forget how nonsensical this is because we’ve all become so habituated to it. Most of us have straddle-brain because that’s what we’ve come to know. I urge you, reader, to sniff out any status quo bias in your own way of thinking about this. Imagine how much more smoothly the ecosystem could function. Imagine a world with no more cancer, poverty, or people from the state of Florida, if only we didn’t have straddles mucking everything up.

5.     STRADDLES ARE BAD FOR SOCIAL DYNAMICS

“Terrible take, Brent. Straddles are fun and drive action. That’s GREAT for social dynamics.”

What I mean is that the very existence of straddles, of the choice they force each player to make, creates a rift in the player pool, and that rift is what’s bad for the social dynamics.

Players who love the straddle end up growing frustrated and resentful of the players who won’t straddle. And the players who just want to play what’s on the plaque grow frustrated and resentful of the players who are always trying to push the straddle (just because they give in doesn’t mean they like it).

Straddle-lovers tend to have a more stratified playing experience. When straddles are on, they’re in a good game. When straddles are off, they’re in a bad game. I think the fact that our system even allows for this potential route to disappointment is a net negative.

No straddles at all would lead to a higher level of baseline satisfaction with the games. Everyone would get to play for the exact blinds they had in mind, and any disappointment in one’s game would have to be born from elsewhere (the other players are too good, or boring, or whatever). That seems like a better world than one which also includes the additional disappointment vector of straddles.

I believe there’s a huge difference between your obligations as a player in private games versus public casino games. A lot of players go off the rails here, pushing to create private game dynamics in their public games, in a way that tramples some of the core values I expressed before.

In private games, it’s understood that you can’t just show up and play optimal, tight-aggressive poker, while not talking to anyone and refusing to participate in any Game-Juicers™ (straddles, bomb pots, 7-2, etc.). You can still win, but if you want to be a regular invitee, you must also contribute to the vibe and culture of the game. Be sociable and fun, show bluffs, play looser than optimal to “give action,” go along with whatever whacky gimmicks are proposed, and be lenient with the donators when they thoughtlessly break rules.

And you know what? I agree with all that. No one has a fundamental human right to be invited to private games. One must play the meta-game in order to earn their spot on the roster.

But the nature of public casino games is antithetical to this. Public games are all about equal access and zero politics, and this creates the meritocracy I so cherish. If you have the money, you can sit and play. The only things you need to do to succeed are play good poker, not run out of money, and behave well enough not to get banned. You don’t have to schmooze the whale or have an ounce of social charisma. You’re free to play as optimally as you’re capable of, or as annoyingly aggressive as you want, without worrying that your play style may be creating a negative experience for your opponents. You don’t have to wonder whether you’ll be allowed back the next time. Your only true obligations in a public game, as far as I’m concerned, are respect the rules of the game and don’t be an asshole.

This distinction between private and public games could not be more important. Anyone who cares about the meritocracy of poker skill should care to uphold it.

Now look, there’s nothing wrong with behaving in ways that are “good for the game” and help make the atmosphere more enjoyable. You’d really be doing the other players a solid, and they’ll likely appreciate you for it, but make no mistake about it: in public games, we do not meet up to take majority votes. The explicit agreement we all make is to play what’s on the plaque of whatever table we’re sitting at. No more, no less.

If someone decides that doing what’s “good for the game,” in the way most people mean it, would actually be bad for them and their own experience in some way, it seems reasonable for that person to decline the request that they be “good for the game.” The other players may be frustrated and not understand his or her reasons, but it’s important for them to remember that that player hasn’t really done anything wrong. As long as they’re otherwise treating their tablemates civilly, they deserve no derision, and anyone who would deride them is themselves out of line. They’ve allowed private game desires to override their sense of public game ethics.

This is all about code-switching. Know what environment you’re in, and adjust your own behavior and expectations accordingly. Despite the fact that I’ve written this unhinged manifesto raging against the straddle, this is all in the context of public games. I’m perfectly capable of code-switching, and if I get an invite to a good private game I want to be a part of, I’ll happily go along with straddling and all the other shenanigans involved with the etiquette of that world.

I think the popularity of streamed games like Hustler Casino Live has confused many players about the difference between the two environments. Make no mistake about it: when you’re watching a streamed cash game, you are watching a private game.

Here’s a common archetype of player: someone who’s extroverted, loves the thrill of gambling, has solid poker fundamentals, and is focused on making sure the whales and recs at the table have a good time, because they’re his primary source of poker profit. This player commonly tries to get the straddle going because in his mind it’s a no-brainer, and it should be a no-brainer to all the other winners in the game too. I mean, not only does the straddle transfer additional EV from the recs to the winners, but it helps those recs have fun even while they’re losing more. It’s obviously a win-win for everyone, right?

Well, I think this archetype of player lacks the theory of mind to appreciate that there is another type of winning player who sees poker in an entirely different way. When it comes to gambling, this player gets no special thrill from big pots and big swings. Their love of the game comes from creating and capitalizing on opportunities with deep stacks, and they may believe (correctly or not) that they’re very profitable even in “tough lineups.” This player may not even want to do anything that causes the recs to lose more if such a measure would also decrease this player’s edge over the other pros at the table. The Deep-Stack Fetishist™ knows he’ll beat the fish either way, but deep stacks help him to also beat his tougher competition at a larger clip. Everyone around him seems to have degen-brain, but at no point does that actually become his problem.

The Deep-Stack Fetishist™ understandably doesn’t get many private game invites, but public casino games are their protected space to go nuts. In my opinion, this is an important and morally correct protection.

Now look, nobody wants to be the guy who writes off the importance of whales and recs to the ecosystem, but I guess I kind of will be that guy, at least as it relates to certain boundaries around other values.

I already laid out why maintaining game integrity and civility are more important to me than maximizing the softness of a game. What that means to me is, if there’s a whale in the game who’s having a lot of trouble following the rules, or who’s being kind of a dick, I am certainly not going out of my way to make sure that guy’s having a good time. I would rather him leave the game and have his seat filled by a grinder who will uphold those values, even if it results in a lower win-rate for me.

If the whale is a chill dude who can act in turn, of course I’ll like him more. I’ll be more friendly with him if I’m feeling social. But I wholeheartedly reject the notion that it’s even partially my responsibility, in a public game, to make sure he has a good time and wants to come back (this includes with respect to his straddle preferences).

I am not an entertainer. I never asked to be one nor accepted such a role. My job is to show up and play the cards as well as I can, not babysit the experience of a grown-ass man who chose to play poker at the casino of his own free will. If he doesn’t enjoy the game for its own sake, and needs all these bells and whistles thrown in, I’m going to go ahead and bucket that one as not my problem.

Being an asshole is bad, but being quiet and civil is fine. And being sociable and friendly is above-and-beyond awesome.

If some recs did stop playing because a bunch of boring fucks like me were at the table, I’m actually totally okay with that. I prefer playing with the type of players, win or lose, who are chill and simply like playing the game. I think my own career would be fine if we lost some subset of losing players in this way.

The fact that other professionals may disagree with me on that, well, their concerns are not my problem. In the interest of full disclosure, however, I should admit that I am a delusionally arrogant son of a bitch who licks his lips at any lineup.

I like having fun when I play. I really do. I enjoy talking to players I find likeable and interesting. I often drink beer and wine while I play. I attempt to be funny (with an embarrassing success rate). And I play a style that builds big pots, whether the straddle’s on or not. Most of the time, I feel at home and relaxed at the poker table. But the fun I have at the table comes about the organic way. I’m not interested in forcing the issue, when I’m not in the mood, because the community says I have a duty to uphold. That’s a social contract that I never opted into, because I don’t acknowledge that contract’s legitimacy in public games.

“Let’s get this game out of the muck.”

This is something you often hear in conjunction with a proposal to straddle, and I want to unpack how misguided I believe this way of thinking is.

Maybe the game’s been uneventful for a few orbits. Everyone’s card dead at the same time. Pots are small. There have been lots of BB walks, preflop raise-and-take-its, and passive check-downs postflop.

From the action-lover’s perspective, the game has gotten dangerously boring. Something went off the rails and we have ourselves a problem that needs fixing. In comes the straddle.

It’s understandable why such lulls in the game would feel boring, but boredom is an emotion, and emotional reactions don’t necessarily correlate with anything being objectively wrong with the game.

Deep-stacked cash game poker is such a rich and beautiful game, and the fact that lulls will happen is inherent to its design. There’s an everchanging flow to the dynamics of the game, and savvy players can try to capitalize on snags in the action, using them as valuable set-up periods for what may come later, if nothing else.

Lulls in the game are not something we need to “fix” with interventions. Just let them run their course. Every pot still starts with the blinds we all agreed to play for in the first place. Those blinds are there for the taking every hand. If it seems like everyone else has gone to sleep at the wheel, get out of line and steal that shit!

The occasional boringness of poker, in my opinion, is perfectly offset by the highs it presents on the other end of the extreme (when deep stacks are getting wielded aggressively and with precision). If we try to change what’s boring about it, we actually damage what’s so great about it as well. But I’ll go nuts on that topic in a little bit.

Poker just is kind of boring sometimes. I would suggest to anyone who finds that reality intolerable, that perhaps this just isn’t the game for them. I’m not interested in changing what I love about the game to get someone else who doesn’t love the game to start loving the game.

I say all that to reinforce the main point of this section: the divide that may form over the issue of straddles, rather than the straddle itself, is what’s bad for social dynamics. People disagree on the straddle because there’s more than one reasonable way of seeing it. And these disagreements are little seeds for resentment that don’t need to exist at all, were it not for the status quo we find ourselves in.

Finally, let’s move on to the asymmetry in the rules and social approaches to straddling vs. not straddling.

There are two beautiful things about being in the non-straddler camp. First of all, the official rules are in your favor. You have a right to not straddle that cannot be overridden by a majority vote. Secondly, it’s a decision that can never be exploited by another player. It’s guaranteed to be either EV-neutral or EV-positive. What that means is that you never have to discuss it with the table and see who else is on board. You make a personal decision, and then you fully respect the autonomy of other players regarding their straddling decisions. It’s fine if they do, and it’s fine if they don’t. You’ll have no basis for resenting them, unless they start it by giving you shit about your decision.

On the flip side, straddle-lovers have the rules of the poker room and the EV-math working against them. The only way for straddling not to result in a massive transfer of EV from the straddlers to the non-straddlers is if there are no non-straddlers. Unanimous consent is wholly necessary, and that can only be achieved through social tools. If a non-straddler joins the game who is impervious to their social pressures, they’re shit out of luck, and are left to quietly (or not so quietly) resent the non-straddler for ruining their whole entire life.

Such is the cost a stubborn non-straddler must pay in the system we have now. They get to have their way, but they pay a social cost for it. Personally, I don’t think anyone deserves to be disliked and resented because they insist on playing the game that really is the game they’re sitting in.

And the cost that straddle-lovers must pay is also a social one. I often complain about how pushy they can be, but I recognize the reality of their tools and incentives. They kind of have to be pushy if they really want to get their way, at least sometimes. I think that kind of pushiness is out of line, therefore I sometimes end up finding them obnoxious and deserving of resentment in their own right.

And so we come back to the main point one last time: the choice that straddles present creates a rift in the player pool, and that rift is harmful to the social dynamics at the table. That’s bad for everyone involved, including the poker room. It’s better for business when the players get along.

Not-straddling isn’t bad for the game. What’s bad for the game is constantly banging the drum that not-straddling is bad for the game.

6.    PROFITABILITY AND STACK DEPTH

“Straddles make the game more profitable,” is practically gospel among winning players. This is claimed as a self-evident fact, and disagreeing is outside the Overton window. Well guess what, I disagree.

At least, I believe it’s not nearly so cut and dry. It may be true for most, but not for all.

If your argument for how this is works is that straddles make whales and recs happy, keeping them at the table and thus maximizing the game’s softness, I wouldn’t fight you on that. But I’ve already beaten that horse to death in previous chapters.

But the other way people mean that is basically “bigger starting pots = more money won by the winning players.” This is where I really want to push back.

I know it seems counterintuitive for it to even be possible that that’s not true, but just go with me here, because I think I can make the case.

We can start by stretching the concept to its extreme. If straddled pots are better than non-straddled pots because they’re bigger, then why not double-straddles, or triple-straddles? Wouldn’t they be even more profitable?

Exactly! some of you might be saying. But if we keep extrapolating that, eventually we end up with the biggest straddle being half or more of the effective stacks, maybe even a blind all-in. I think most players would roll their eyes at that point and admit it had gone too far. There’s no room to actually play poker. And yet, on the other end of the extreme, it would seem pretty ridiculous to play 1 cent/2 cent with billion-dollar stacks.

We all actually agree that there exists some reasonable range of stack-to-blind ratios, we just disagree in exactly where we want that pin dropped.

If you want bigger pots and more all-ins, straddles will get you there. But bigger swings do not necessarily equal edge realization. In fact, they can directly hinder it.

There are (at least) two big questions that inform one’s profit-generation in cash games: How big are the pots? and How big of an edge do I have over my opponents? Many players assume these two questions have a positive correlation. But that’s not the way Deep-Stack Fetishists™ see it. For them, their edge is believed to be its biggest when they have the extra maneuverability that deep stacks provide. For those players, starting pot size falls into direct conflict with edge realization. Basically, in straddled games, they run out of stack before they’re able to do their best work.

Now, I understand that having a reduced edge can still result in more actual money being won, assuming the pots are big enough to overcome that difference. But the point is that, at least for a certain subset of players, there is a formula to be considered here, and a conscious acknowledgment of the tradeoffs involved.

There’s an inverse correlation between starting pot size and depth of stacks. Once the starting pot reaches a certain threshold, someone may reason that, based on the personally tailored assumptions they plugged into the formula, their diminished edge is costing them more value than the bigger pots are providing them.

For many players, probably even a large majority of winning players, there isn’t actually much of a tradeoff here. Primarily, I’m thinking of tournament specialists, players who lack experience playing deep, and grinders who have studied the hell out of 100-200 BB poker. Anyone whose skill set lends itself to playing medium stacks. The situation in which they’d be most likely to make a big mistake is if they were playing deep. For them, bigger starting pots and edge realization fall hand-in-hand. Obviously, it’s in those players’ best interest when the straddle’s on.

I’m advocating here for the minority of poker players whose profit margins are at their highest when stacks are deep, and the players who think that’s true even if they’re wrong. I’m defending their right to stand firm and keep playing the exact game the casino claims to be running on that table.

So what’s so goddamn special about being deep to Deep-Stack Fetishists™? Well, it’s all about the increased complexity, optionality, and maneuverability throughout a hand, even in pots that grow big along the way. In fact, it’s in those big pots where having maneuverability is most important.

The more decision points there are between your first chip and your last chip entering the pot, the more it’s possible, through great play, to position yourself into an increasingly dominant situation against your opponent(s).

Decision points are where we gather and disseminate information. The more information you’re able to gather before making your last decision of the hand, the more profitably you’ll be able to make that decision. At least, if you’re better at synthesizing information than your opponent. And the more data points you’re providing to your opponent, the more opportunities you’ll have to throw them off with disinformation along the way.

Every decision point is another opportunity for you to make the right choice while your opponent makes the wrong choice, growing your edge exponentially with each successive one.

It’s the exponential nature of this effect that I think the vast majority of players fail to appreciate. Humans are famously terrible at wrapping our heads around exponentials. A failure to grasp the exponential growth of something like compound interest, for example, prevents many people from getting rich the reliable way. And so it is with the “compound interest” of the edge you can have in late-hand decisions.

Just to fully flesh out what I mean here… Let’s say for the sake of argument that, at every decision point, you make better decisions than your opponent. And you only proceed to the next decision point if you can do so with a range that has sufficient playability/profitability accounting for all the permutations of what might happen next.

This means that, with each successive decision point, your opponent is straying further and further away from having the right range for the situation. They’re positioning themselves up shit’s creek without a paddle, worse and worse the deeper the rabbit hole goes (because you now have all the paddles).

In hands that end on decision point 6, you only have so much room to grow this gap. Sure, maybe you get it in as a thin favorite with that last decision and generate some EV. That’s nice. But if the hand has enough breathing room to reach decision point 8, those two extra branches of the game tree might give you the space to maneuver into an absolutely dominant position right when the pot’s at its biggest.

Let’s dive into an example hand…

HJ opens.

Hero 3-bets the BTN.

Villain 4-bets from the BB.

HJ gets out of the way and Hero calls.

Kc Js 6c

Villain bets. Hero calls.

Kc Js 6c 5s

Villain bets again.

The action’s on Hero. This is decision point #4 for him (decision point #9 if we’re tallying up every decision made by players who VPIP’d this hand).

In a straddled pot, the effective stacks will usually be short enough that this turn bet is an all-in. This will be the last decision Hero gets to make, and he only has two options to choose from, call or fold. It may be a tough choice, but it’s a simple choice that offers few avenues for creative edge-finding.

But in an unstraddled pot, even with the same starting stack size, a standard turn bet will leave one chunky bet behind going to the river. This scenario presents Hero with three immediate choices (fold, call, or raise), as opposed to the two choices we had in the straddled pot.

Not only is that 50% more optionality right now, but the middle choice itself splits off into four different permutations. If Hero calls, Villain will do one of two things on the river, and then Hero will do one of two things in response. Therefore, Hero’s turn calls will develop into either, 1) call turn fold river, 2) call turn call river, 3) call turn check river, or 4) call turn bet river. And so we find blooming, from this one extra level of stack depth, versatile and heretofore inaccessible branches of the game tree.

Let’s put ourselves in Hero’s shoes and hone in on what this looks like for specific hands in our range…

Say we have a bluff-catcher, something like QQ or AJhh. In the straddled pot, the fold/call decision facing an all-in may or may not be a tough spot (depending on Villain’s profile and the pot-odds math), but it will be a frustratingly limited spot. There may not be an identifiable edge to be exploited. We’ll just have to pick whatever feels like the least bad option. Maybe we fold both, call both, or fold QQ but call AJhh due to the blocker effects. The hand played out in a relatively EV-neutral fashion, and there was never a chance for us to do anything about that.

Now let’s say we have those same hands in the unstraddled version of this pot. Oooh baby, now we can start cooking! No longer is this our last decision point, where we’re forced to make a binary decision with bluff-catchers. Now, we can split our bluff-catchers amongst all the following buckets: 1) fold turn, 2) call turn fold river, 3) call turn call river, 4) call turn check river, 5) call turn bet river, and, hell, even, 6) jam turn if we want. Some of these buckets make more sense than others, but simply having the options allows us the possibility of finding a sneakily profitable one.

Instead of having to make a disciplined turn fold with QQ, we can put it in the call turn fold river bucket if we want. Of course, much of the profit in that bucket lies in the times when Villain gives up his bluff on the river and we’re able to showdown a winner. A winner that, in the straddled pot, we only could’ve shown down by making what’s probably a bad call of an all-in bet on the turn.

With AJhh in the unstraddled pot, maybe we consider putting it into the call turn call river bucket due to its blockers. Or maybe it even winds up in the call turn bet river bucket, as we decide to turn it into a bluff on scary rivers. Maybe that’s a good and idea and maybe it’s not, but the optionality is everything.

Next, let’s say Hero has a good draw, something like AQcc. In the straddled pot, we’ll be forced to either fold a 12-outer to the nuts facing a turn jam (a devastatingly painful fold to have to make) or stubbornly call it off in way that’s probably losing EV. But in the unstraddled pot, with chips behind, the options really open up. Not only does calling the turn become a reasonable choice, but we also now have the option of jamming over Villain’s turn bet, trying to generate some fold equity with a semi-bluff. And yet, at the end of the day, finding a nitty fold here might very well be the best choice anyway. This is optionality at work.

Lastly, consider holding a strong hand like AA, or even JJ. In the straddled pot, we have an easy call of the turn jam (though somewhat concernedly so with AA), but in an unstraddled pot, this already-good situation splits into multiple compelling options? What’s the most profitable way to proceed? Should we call turn, planning to call most rivers (keeping all his bluffs in), or should we go ahead and jam over Villain’s turn bet? By opting for the latter, we’ll attempt to get max value from his AK before any action-killers hit the river, and we can deny equity to the segment of his bluffs that are drawing now but planning to give up on the river. This is an interesting and complex choice to make, and the fact that we get to make it at all is a net good if we’re better at making poker choices than our opponents.

I would argue that, not only is the added complexity more profitable if you navigate it well, but it makes the game that much more fun and interesting. How boring to run out of decision points on the flop or turn. Playing is always more fun to me than getting it in and sweating a runout.

Here are a handful of plays and strategies that are available when stacks are deep and hands are rife with many potential decision points:

• More developed preflop raising wars, including the ability to 6-bet with fold equity, or with stacks still behind.

• Multiple streets of postflop play in pots that were 4- or 5-bet preflop.

• The ability to defend a wider range of hands versus 3-, 4-, and 5-bets preflop, as well as the ability to float a wider range of hands on the flop (good implied odds hands)

• Conversely, certain non-intuitive early-street folds can become elite folds (reverse implied odds hands).

• More room for overbetting on late streets, and on multiple streets throughout a hand.

• Leveraging the benefits of position to greater effect.

That’s far from an exhaustive list, but you get the idea.

If this kind of stuff just doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to you, and you’re also a great player who knows how to wield a big stack, then I’d encourage you to do some more introspection. Perhaps you’re not fully appreciating what a disservice you’re doing yourself whenever you agree to cut the effective stacks in half for the sake of driving action.

For Deep-Stack Fetishists™, playing in straddled games can feel like playing with handcuffs on. Half the tools have fallen out of their toolbox, and they’re forced to be closer to even with their opponents, skill-wise.

“But Brent, not every hand is 3- or 4-bet preflop. Most hands will still be very deep anyway.”

This kind of mindset reveals one or both of the following: 1) You’re in a game where everyone’s too passive preflop. This should be a highly profitable situation for you, and is not a problem that needs fixing, and 2) It’s a bit of a self-own to need to rely on straddles to build big pots. Generally speaking, good poker is aggressive poker. Unless there are blasters at the table doing this work for you, you should often be taking the lead and building big pots in the hands you play. It’s the passive players who need a boost from the straddle to play big pots.

The excitement of gambling, action, and all-ins is a powerful cognitive bias when people think about these things. I routinely hear things like, “Straddles are good because they get people to go all-in more,” or, “Straddles are good because you get to play bigger pots against players who are worse than you.”

And it’s like, okay, yeah, those effects of the straddle are true, but whoever said we’re supposed to stop our thinking about it right there? Might there be other factors to consider as well? Might different factors have inverse, offsetting effects on one another? Not just “Does the money go in?” but, “How does the money go in?”

Again, this will be a formula, of sorts, that each player should intuit for themselves. The estimated value that bigger starting pots add to the game, must be weighed against the estimated degree by which one’s edge shrinks along with the effective stacks.

It’s totally reasonable to do that calculus and conclude that, yep, I still want to have the straddle on. But it’s also fair for a player to conclude the opposite for himself or herself. They might think straddles make the game less profitable for them because of their deep-stacked prowess relative to their opponents.

Deep-Stack Fetishists™ may be a small minority of players, and perhaps most of them overestimate their deep-stacked edge and are simply wrong, but it’s a perfectly legitimate position to hold, and if it’s what they believe, they shouldn’t be expected to do anything other than act in accordance with that belief (i.e. not straddle).

As I said before, it may very well be true that the majority of winning players should prefer the straddle, strictly from an EV standpoint. Tournament players, players whose experience has primarily been in medium-stacked games, and the large cohort of very strong cash game crushers who got strong at the game by studying the hell out of it.

Until fairly recently, solvers didn’t even have the capacity to solve at 300+ BBs. The vast majority of the study that well-studied players have done will have been in the 100-200 BB range. That’s their wheelhouse in which to play their most knowledgeably and comfortably. 500 BB depth and beyond, not so much. For players like this, the bloating of starting pots and shrinking of stacks aligns perfectly with their edge realization.

And like, good for them, I guess. I don’t blame them for preferring the straddle, but my point here is that, if I believe my EV is highest when stacks are deep, why would I consent to that which takes away win-rate from me and transfers it to you? Sure buddy, let me just bend over and spread ‘em for you real quick (and please be gentle with me, I haven’t done this since college).

Over my long career, I’ve dabbled in many different forms of poker education, but I have never been a big study guy. My play-to-study ratio is probably something like 100:1. I have not grinded a thousand hours of drills and solves on GTOWizard. I fully admit that many of my opponents play more optimally than I do off of short-to-medium stacks, because they’ve done the work that I haven’t. And like, I guess I should correct that and hit the lab a little harder. Guilty as charged.

But where I think I make up for it, in the meantime, is by having edges over them in some other facets of the game: more experience playing deep, better instincts, a heightened ability to solve puzzles on the fly, willingness to get creative and experiment, better hand-reading skills, and more adeptness at playing multi-way pots. Some of these edges are ones that I can stretch further and further the deeper stacks get. It might even be the case that some of my grinder opponents have an edge on me when stacks are below, say, 200 BBs, but the edge flips in my favor when we surpass that.

If there’s nothing wrong with the etiquette of it (as I have vehemently argued), then of course I won’t want to willingly handcuff my own game. I want the fight to go down on my territory, where I can shove a several-hundred big blind stack in their face if the moment calls for it.  

I don’t think many straddle-lovers acknowledge the legitimacy of this whole other perspective on the game of poker. They get frustrated when other good players won’t straddle, wondering, “How does this pro not understand that straddles make the game better?” I contend it is they who lack the understanding.

That said, there’s one particular way that the straddle induces action and potentially creates more EV for savvy players, which I do want to touch on in this section. It’s the comparison of the immediate ROI difference when stealing the blinds in straddled pots vs. unstraddled pots.

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume a standard open size of 3X the biggest blind. In 5/10 and 10/20 games, raise-and-take-its will return a 50% profit on one’s investment. But in a 5/10/20 game, raise-and-take-its will return a 58% profit. Sometimes, the standard open at 5/10 will be 30, and yet when the straddle goes on, the standard open only jumps up to 50 (generating a raise-and-take-it profit of 70%).

This is a pretty big deal! Theoretically, it should induce more action.

I appreciate those mathematical incentives, but there are a few reasons they don’t sway me towards the straddle:

• The increased ROI of blind-stealing in straddled pots is somewhat offset by the reduced likelihood of having everyone fold. There will be one more player in the blinds to get through, plus, often, savvy players behind you looking to re-steal.

• A big leak for many players (fish and grinders alike) is being too loose preflop. Since straddles actually reward looser play, this is less of a leak in straddled games. If you’re better than your opponents at the fundamental poker skill of patience, straddles diminish your edge in that regard.

• There is still the negative trade-off of losing out on deep-stacked maneuverability, which I’ve so thoroughly discussed.

I just wanted to acknowledge that particular effect of the straddle, so my readers don’t think I failed to consider it.

A bit of an aside here… but I do want to acknowledge that the ability to open to 2.5X or 3.5X or whatever, if that’s what one wants to do, is a wonderful thing. More optionality allows for a wider variety of ranges and strategies. Currently, this is one big advantage that straddled games have over unstraddled games, at least in the poker rooms that have players use $10 chips in their 5/10 games.

In a 5/10 game where the small chip is $10, you can’t open to 2.5X unless there’s a straddle on. I have heard this as an argument in favor of the straddle, and it’s a great point. What I would say, though, is that the straddle shouldn’t be necessary for this. 

For some reason, there’s a coastal divide on this chip denomination thing. Everywhere I’ve played 5/10 on the east coast, the small denomination chips used in those games are 5’s and 25’s. This allows players to easily open to 2.5X, 3.5X, and so on. No problems or confusion are caused by using these denominations. Everything’s fine. And yet, everywhere I’ve played 5/10 in Vegas or California, those rooms have their players use 10’s at this stake instead.

This has never made any sense to me. I think all such rooms should simply switch denominations to whatever allows for a greater flexibility of sizing. This would solve that one particular problem, which, I begrudgingly admit, the straddle currently does solve in the meantime. (Shout out to Aria for recently making this exact change!)

Aside over…

If you want to argue that I should participate in the straddle to be “good for the game” in the fun/social sense, that’s an angle I addressed earlier. But if you insist on telling me that straddling will make the game more profitable for me personally, I’m going to assume you mean well but just haven’t thought about it deeply enough to understand where I’m coming from. Either that, or you’re incapable of relating to the idea that someone would have genuine belief in himself or herself as the best player at a tough table, if only when given access to their complete moveset.

People try to monopolize the word “fun” to mean one or two things at the poker table, but I’m a weird dude with an entirely different concept of having fun with the game. Pot size be damned, I like trying to play circles around my opponents. For me, straddling is a redistribution of my fun into other people’s fun. What can I say? I fucking love the game of deep-stacked Unlimited Texas Hold Them (the Cadillac of poker).

Luckily for me, the version of the game that I enjoy the most and think is the most profitable happens to be the default version of it. It’s what the room lists on Bravo or Poker Atlas. It’s what’s on the plaque for the table. It would be the answer the dealer gives if a passerby asks, “What game is this?”

The unstraddled version of the game is the game. If you’re a straddle-pusher, you’re the one trying to change it to something else. Never forget that.

7.     BETTER ALTERNATIVES FOR IMPROVING THE GAME

If you tell me that players should behave in ways that are good for the game, I’ll wholeheartedly agree with you. Where we disagree will be in the details. As I explained in an early section, I consider any game that upholds the virtues of fairness, integrity, and civility to be a good game. How loosely the chips are flying isn’t a top concern.

Here’s a list of what I consider to be vastly underappreciated behaviors that are good for the game…

• Pay attention until your hand has been folded. Don’t slow the game down because you didn’t know the action was on you. And don’t act out of turn because you thought the action was on you when it wasn’t.

• Always keep your chips stacked neatly and displayed clearly, with the biggest chips out front and on top.

• Don’t keep your arms in front of your chips while you’re playing a hand. Everyone does this, but don’t!

• Don’t say things like, “Would you have called if I went all in?” or, “What did you have?” to an opponent you just beat in a pot.

• If you’re the first player to show by rule at showdown, quickly table or muck your hand. Don’t say, “You’re good,” or, “king high,” while doing neither, expecting your opponent to table their hand first.

• Don’t telegraph your actions before it’s your turn. A minor but common example is doing the “fold hold” preflop.

• Pay attention when dealers are reading hands at showdown, counting bets, counting stacks, and awarding pots. Bonus points if you do this even in hands you’re not involved in. Speak up if you think they’re making a mistake.

I won’t bang on about all these things, but I feel like they don’t get enough love when people consider what’s good for the game. I could probably write a separate manifesto on each one.

Let’s return to the topics of action and fun. I’ve already discussed ad nauseum whether we should tinker with the game to increase those things, but that’s an entirely different consideration from how best to accomplish that goal, if we decide that it is indeed a goal worth pursuing.

I want to look at that latter consideration, because this is another area in which I find it absurd that the straddle has achieved so much cultural dominance.

Straddles add a third blind to the game, but that’s it. They create bigger pots, incentivize a little more looseness, and cut effective stacks in half. I guess that’s cool if you have degen-brain, but the strategic adjustments are mild. Not too much really changes other than running out of stack at decision point 6 instead of decision point 8.

Contrast that with things that add a significant wrinkle to the game, drastically altering strategy considerations while maintaining deep stacks. I’m talking about Game-Juicers™, like the 7-2 game, the standup game, and double-board bomb pots on dealer pushes.

For the way my brain works, these are way more fun than simply adding a third blind. These are significant strategic twists which demand drastic adjustments in order to navigate well. I suppose for some that might be a bad thing. For me, I think of them as shiny new puzzles to solve, and additional avenues through which I may be able to outwit my opponents.

The standup game is probably the goat, both in terms of inducing action and being great for social dynamics. I mean, have you ever seen (or heard) a table that was playing the standup game that didn’t also seem like they were having a great time? The ever-ratcheting tension as the number of standing players gets fewer and fewer. The race to win a hand when you’re still among them. Who’s going to get it done, and who’s going to punt it off trying to get it done? The luxury, as an already-sitting player, of trying to make a hand and pick off one of the standers’ ill-timed efforts. The fact that everyone has a dog in the fight, EV-wise, rooting for the remaining standers to keep losing. The showing of the hand after you just bluffed your way to a sit-down, and the table’s reaction to seeing it. The standup game is fucking fun.

And let’s not sleep on the 7-2 game either. The idea of incentivizing people to try to win with the most airball, dogshit hand in poker, and punishing everyone who lets them win with that hand, is hilarious to me. “Is my opponent just desperately trying to get one through with 7-2?” is an admittedly interesting and fun thing to think about when facing a 1.5X jam, holding AT on a board of A834K. Trying to get it through yourself vs. knowing when to waive the white flag with it. Having to sweat every hand you’re not involved in, hoping to fade the winner showing one of the 16 dreaded combos. The reaction of the table whenever they do, having to pay out a bounty and some measure of begrudging respect.

Both the standup game and the 7-2 game keep everyone emotionally invested, even in hands they’re not involved in. Every hand is a sweat for everyone at the table. And the effect on the social dynamics adds more fun than simply increasing the size of the starting pot, at least to me.

And then you have something like bomb pots, and especially double-board bomb pots, providing a nice little change of pace every half hour, if done on dealer changes. A little variety to keep the game fresh, and with the double-board version, the strategic implications and adjustments required to play them well are massive.

If we’re looking for something like the straddle, might I suggest what I consider to be a better option: the BB ante. It doesn’t do anything gimmicky like those other Game-Juicers™, but it accomplishes much of what the straddle accomplishes, with less of the downside tradeoff. It increases the size of the starting pot, increases the immediate ROI for blind-stealing, and, theoretically, the dead money in the pot incentivizes even more looseness than the straddle does. Yet, replacing the straddle with a BB ante has a much less drastic effect on the depth of stacks (standard opens will be smaller). I think the BB ante is a reasonable compromise between the pro-straddle and the anti-straddle crowds.

Part of the reason I’m so anti-straddle is because, if the table feels it needs a Game-Juicer™, I believe all these alternatives are better options. Depending how extreme of an effect the players are looking for, there’s an option for every need. The straddle is the nut low choice, but unfortunately it has the momentum of status quo going for it. My hope is that having a few more stubborn straddle holdouts at the table will force the issue a little bit, and get people to experiment more with the other Game-Juicers™.

8.    LOGISTICAL AND ENFORCEMENT PROBLEMS

Unanimous agreement for “mandatory straddles” sounds straightforwardly fair, but I have often noticed that random hiccups will disrupt the flow of straddles, such that different players end up contributing unequal amounts. This is something that can never really happen with the first two blinds, and I find it hard to brush it off as insignificant.

Let me rattle off a few:

A.    Players sometimes simply forget they were supposed to straddle, and nobody reminds them.

B.    Occasionally, due to seat changes or players leaving at weird times, one player “lucks out” and goes from being UTG+1 to being in the BB the next hand, effectively skipping their turn to straddle.

C.     Upon returning to the table after missing their blinds, if a player wants to come in, the fair thing to do would be to post all three blinds unless they’re coming in on the natural straddle. The problem is that some room policies, and therefore some dealers, will not allow the returning player to do this (it probably has something to do with gaming regulation compliance). So even if that player is trying to do the right thing, the rules of the room won’t allow it to happen. They get to come back in the cheap way.

D.    Sometimes the UTG player is away from the table but hasn’t yet missed a blind. In time-raked games, dealers are instructed to deal cards to all absent players until they miss a blind. Since the straddle isn’t an official blind, dealers have to deal cards to that seat. Now, the next player over is effectively under the gun, but not officially. If this is a room where straddles are only allowed UTG, dealers may say that the effective UTG player cannot straddle. They can blind raise, but they cannot straddle. These are convoluted rules forcing someone to get skipped over in the straddle rotation.

In situations C or D, usually the dealer is simply trying to do their job to the best of their ability, and they may even be doing it correctly according to the instructions their bosses have given them. But the players have gotten used to the other dealers, the ones who are less sharp or just don’t give a shit, who let these things happen. So when a rules-sensitive dealer pushes into the box and starts straddle-blocking, the players often start gaslighting these dealers and telling them how things are supposed to work. And yet, according to the rules in such a scenario, the players could very well be in the wrong.

The fact that most dealers let you get away with something does not make it officially sanctioned policy. I hate it when a poor dealer is just trying to do what their bosses have told them to do, and they have to contend with a table full of voracious straddle addicts who are pressuring them to allow something they’re not supposed to allow. I don’t like putting dealers in such uncomfortable, awkward positions.

There are too many annoying technicalities which muck up the fair implementation of “mandatory straddles.” For someone who cares so much about maintaining whatever measure of fairness we can in this brutally unfair game, I find these straddle infractions hard to brush off as meaningless. I can’t help but think about the EV-stealing that’s going on, and I hate it.

The fact that straddles can’t be managed in a fair and equal manner quite literally causes a disgust response within me. It makes me want to have nothing to do with them.

9.    THE POOR BEHAVIOR OF STRADDLE-PUSHERS

Full disclosure: my biggest pet peeve is people behaving with entitlement. This greatly colors my passionate stance on this topic…

The majority of players who prefer straddling are pretty chill about it. They may straddle themselves and hope it catches on. They may ask if the table’s interested, and if the answer’s no, they may ask again later once there’s been significant turnover. They may even lightly rib someone for not straddling, in a clearly good-natured way, if they’re friendly with the other party. But ultimately, they respect each player’s individual choice on the matter. They’re not obnoxious or pushy about it, because they understand the difference between private games and public games, and they know they have no standing from which to push the ethics of the former onto the latter.

These are not the players I’ll be complaining about here.

But there’s a subset of straddle-loving players who don’t know or care to act like gentlemen about it. They have no qualms about resorting to straight-up bullying behavior. They’ll flat-out berate someone for not straddling. They’ll continuously make fun of the non-straddler. They’ll try to guilt-trip the non-straddler. They’ll try to make the non-straddler’s experience at the table so negative that they’ll either cave or leave the game.

I find these players to be so grossly out of line at the table, and so opposite from me value-wise, that I’m actually repulsed by them. Their existence drives me to an even more anti-straddle position. I am a petty son of a bitch, and I hate the thought of these players getting what they want. I hate the thought of their social pressures working, coercing timid players, who secretly would rather not straddle, into compliance.

This type of player has recently made me snap, causing me to write a 450,000-word manifesto on the topic. I mentioned in the beginning that, for nearly my entire career, I was happy enough to be a fellow straddler when I was at that kind of table, but one too many recent run-ins with these Stakes Terrorists™ has me wanting to opt out of the straddling community altogether.

Fuck giving in to their demands, agreeing to make the game worse for myself and better for someone I don’t even like for no reason at all. These Stakes Terrorists™ have been hijacking poker games for too long. I’m kind of mad at past-me for not standing up to their shit earlier.

What they seem to forget is that they are the ones trying to change the game from its natural state. It’s rather brazen to go into a public poker room with a sense of entitlement that one will get to play something above and beyond what’s on the plaque.

When Stakes Terrorists™ have been on a lucky streak and people have been regularly straddling in their game for many months, lucky is exactly what they should consider themselves. But they never seem to exercise any gratitude about having had it so good for so long. Instead, they move the goalposts. This game just IS a three-blind game now, they think.

When a non-straddler joins a table that had previously been “mandatorily” straddling, breaking the unanimity, Stakes Terrorists™ don’t like taking no for an answer. Their go-to is something like, “Hey man, everyone here has been straddling. You’re really going to come into our table and refuse to do it? That’s not cool.” But yet, when the Stakes Terrorist™ first joins a table that isn’t yet straddling, what the table was doing before the new player arrived is no longer a relevant concern. He wants to change what they were doing before and get the straddle going 100% of the time. Hypocrisy much?

When Stakes Terrorists™ and other straddle-lovers grow frustrated with non-straddlers, their resentment is misplaced. What they ought to resent is how face-palmingly dumb our status quo of an ecosystem is. It should be the case that, when they want to play a game where the biggest blind is $20, they put their name on the 10/20 list. It shouldn’t be standard operating procedure to try to create a $20 blind in a 5/10 game.

I think many Stakes Terrorists™ feel that non-straddlers are being selfish, but, again, I think this is precisely backwards. I mean, who’s really the selfish party: the one who minds his own business and respects everyone else’s decision, or the one who has to force their agenda onto everyone else for it to work?

When children start fighting over a toy instead of peacefully sharing it, you take the toy away. The straddle is a toy, and Stakes Terrorists™ won’t let us share it peacefully, therefore it must be taken away.

If you’ve ever found yourself constantly deriding a player who never did anything to you other than have a different straddle preference, congratulations on being a Stakes Terrorist™! You should look into doing ayahuasca about it. Or some other therapy of choice.

10.  DE-NORMALIZING THE STRADDLE

If the straddle ever fell out of favor and became de-normalized, what might the benefits be?

• Bigger games would run more easily.

• Players would generally get along better.

• The other (much better) Game-Juicer™ alternatives would rise in popularity.

• The ecosystem would be more straightforward and easily navigable for all.

• The jobs of poker room staff would get somewhat easier, with fewer player conflicts and table changes to deal with.

So how do we get there? Well, it will take more players refusing to straddle (and hopefully some poker rooms willing to implement bold new changes).

The main force working against a potential uprising is the common desire to just get along with others and not become a target for dislike. I suspect that most of the players who prefer to play without the straddle simply go along with it when asked, and start straddling anyway, because it seems like that’s what people want them to do. “Whether the poker game is straddling or not” is just not one of the top thousand concerns in their life. It’s not something over which it’s worth being perceived as the lame one at the table.

In this way, I believe the number of players who do straddle is far greater than the number of players who truly want to straddle. Stakes Terrorists™ would have it their way a lot less often if we lived in a world where “mandatory straddles” were decided by anonymous, written vote.

I have empathy for all the reluctantly straddling recs out there. They’re not professionals. They don’t know any better. They’re just following the lead of the more forceful regs in the game.

But I know better. I can see through the bullshit.

I suspect I’m just yelling into the void about this. Nothing will ever change, except that I’ll be making my own life a little harder. Nobody at the poker table will be my friend. My house will get rolled with TP every week. Stakes Terrorists™ will give me swirlies, throw me in the locker, and steal my Trapper Keeper. My own mother will call to say she doesn’t love me and she never did.

But I have to try. Complaining about something you’re not willing to do anything about is lame as hell, so I’m doing something. I’m writing this manifesto, and at least for the time being, I’m refusing to straddle in my own games. Maybe I’ll give some cover to other would-be non-straddlers who want to play in my game but were hesitant to do so before. Maybe one or two curious souls will read these words and feel bolstered in their own anti-straddlism.

If anyone feels inspired to join me, welcome to The Rebellion [insert Predator handshake meme].

Will I continue not-straddling for forever? Who the hell knows? I reserve the right the change my mind on this or any other subject, should reason compel me to.

All I know is that the straddle-lovers have dominated this conversation for far too long. The case for another way of seeing things needed to be made, and I have just the right amount of cocaine and undiagnosed Asperger’s to actually make that case.

If you honestly read this entire manifesto, 1) What the hell is wrong with you? and 2) Thank you. If you agree with what I’ve had to say here, please join me in the fight against the unfair stigma placed on normies dating people with Down Syndro- ah shit I mean the fight against straddles. Wrong manifesto.

FIN