Poker co-operation

Before you start slamming me how such a concept is a pure nonsense in poker, allow me to come up with a few arguments, to prove that not only is cooperation present in poker, in certain types of games it is quite important too.

Before I elaborate: no I'm not talking about collusion and if poker collusion is what you're interested in, (which is cheating and as such, illegal) I suggest you take your business elsewhere.

If you think hard enough, I'm sure you can recall examples of seeing cooperation between poker players, in one shape or another. In tournaments, there's often cooperation between players when they reach the money-stages. While this is far more obvious in STT's, I'm sure there's plenty of it going on in MTT's too.

The best time to spot this spontaneous team-work in action is when there are like four players left at the table, and the top three positions are ITM.

In this situation, if there's one guy who's barely dragging his stack from one hand to another (and there's always a guy like that) he's sure to come under some combined attack from the other three players.

When he finally commits his last chips, it often happens that all three of the other players will call him, and then check around, all the way to showdown. This way, they'll limit his chances for a comeback by putting more hands into the showdown, and in the same time they'll limit their own losses on the hand. Let's suppose that you are one of the players with the thicker stack. What you want to see is the weak guy gone, so you guarantee yourself a spot ITM. This is just about the only hand in the whole tournament you don't want to see anybody fold. You want to be in there with all the other guys, and since the hand you're in on, is not exactly something you know you can beat the "all-in" player on, you want to pay as little as possible. The well-stacked players want the same thing, (if they know what's going on) so they'll act the same way. Come showdown, the poor "all in" player will have to face four hands instead of just one. You do not necessarily want to win this hand. As long as one of the other guys with big stacks wins, it's mission accomplished for you.

All of this has a lot to do with tournament strategy and psychology. Remember, surviving takes on a whole new meaning here, compared to regular ring games.

Another example for cooperation comes in pot-sharing games. Omaha Hi-Lo is a great example in this sense, as it illustrates cooperation better than anything else. It is also a game where cooperation can literally translate into cold, hard cash.

Imagine the following: you are in an Omaha Hi Lo hand together with three other guys. You have the nut high, and you know one of them has the nut low. Since the pot will be shared between the two of you, no matter what you do, you might as well try to generate as much money into it as possible, even though your share of the action you get into the pot is only 50%.

In this case, your mutual interest is to get as much money into the pot as possible from those players who will end up losing. Through efficient cooperation, the two players holding the two nut hands can maximize their winnings. Most of the time however, players just don't pick up on what's going on, or they're just too greedy and want the whole pot for themselves. They fail to realize that winning the whole pot is sometimes impossible, and then they fail to adapt to the situation and cooperate for increased results.