It's been a while!

Intent in T20, Poker & England captaincy choices

First of all, apologies for not having posted for a couple of months. I hope that regular readers can understand that this period has been a pretty busy time for me, with the IPL Auction, Hundred Draft and the start of the County season as well. I’ve also been away on a couple of holidays, which I find are pretty good investments in terms of recharging the batteries and ensuring maximum enthusiasm for what you do, regardless of the industry you work in.

* Thanks so much to everyone who has bought me a coffee. It is much appreciated! *

Moving on, I want to talk about a recent tweet that I posted which picked up quite a lot of interest:-

Quite a few people misinterpreted the point I was trying to make here, with a number thinking I was calling for blind aggression without taking into game situation. To clarify, I am not. Of course, situational awareness is critical, but also it’s vital not to just let your opposition’s best spinner bowl whatever they want with impunity - putting them in a tough spot is also worth considering, and we will talk about tough spots later on in this piece. Some people’s misinterpretation of my tweet also seemed to be apparent in a pretty lengthy mega thread on Reddit which I found, and you can read that here. In that Reddit thread, someone referred to Peter Brand’s quote from the Moneybag film about baseball thinking being medieval, and there’s a strong argument that a lot cricket thinking is too.

In fact, I didn’t mean for people to draw that conclusion at all. My point was simple - if a commentator is going to be very critical (and let’s face it, calling it unacceptable falls into that definition) of a player taking an attacking option then the commentator also has to be consistent and criticise a player for playing a slow, match-losing innings which negatively impacts on their team’s chances of winning that match - but very rarely, they do. It seems brushed under the carpet, particularly when a big name player plays that innings, and that is unacceptable as well.

It’s pretty well known that I advocate something of an ‘intent merchant’ style of play, but it’s backed up with maths and solid logic. Plus, it’s very good to watch and gives a team a clear identity, and from a branding point of view, that can’t be bad for a team either. If I was a neutral, I’d pay to watch Birmingham Phoenix and Punjab Kings. Would I pay to watch some other teams that I won’t mention, who nudge and nurdle their way to mediocre scores and then try and defend them? No, I wouldn't.

The problem is that a lot of commentators, coaches and ex-players don’t ‘get it’. Luckily, I generally work with coaches who do get it. But these other commentators, coaches or ex-players either didn’t play T20, or did in the very early years. However, from around 2017, there has been a big change in the way some teams have approached T20 cricket, with a general rise in boundary-hitting percentages, which lead to increased strike rates and economy rates. If you’re a batter, and you’re not increasing your strike rate each year, you’re probably falling behind, but if you’re a bowler and you can keep your economy rate pretty constant, that could actually be considered a win for you in a lot of circumstances.

This not ‘getting it’ from high profile people in the industry. is a big problem in terms of improving the understanding of T20 cricket for the casual fan. It’s why the 189-9 from Punjab Kings got far more criticism than the 149-3 from Delhi Capitals the previous day, despite posting 40 runs more. PBKS got their runs in an unconventional manner, going hard from the start and continuing to do so, but picked up runs at the death from their bowlers. Delhi, with the exception of opener Prithvi Shaw, scored slowly and between David Warner and Rovman Powell, scored 7 from 22 balls. To me, it’s those slow innings which are unacceptable - much more so than getting caught on the boundary exhibiting attacking intent. To put that into some further context, if Delhi were to post 189 in their match with Warner/Powell scoring 7(22) between them, their other batters would need to score at a rate of around 185 - very difficult, if not impossible.

This neatly brings me on to poker. I’ve mentioned a few times on podcasts that I used to play poker pretty seriously, full-time for a bit before the US ban, and the similarities between poker and T20 cricket are numerous.

When I first started playing around 20 years ago, tight was right. A TAG (tight-aggressive) style, perhaps playing around 15% of hands dealt to you, raising most of that 15% and betting your best hands for value was considered the optimal approach by most. Certainly, that style of play was advocated in numerous text books and from high profile players.

Around that time, the ‘Harrington on Hold-em’ book series was one of the best sellers, and when released, was considered a classic. Author Dan Harrington had an extremely successful career playing a patient, TAG style in high value tournaments with long blind levels against weak opposition - the perfect type of tournaments to adopt that TAG strategy. The problem for the readers, however, was multi-fold.

Firstly, if you tried to adopt that style in your cheap local casino tournament, you’d end up getting blinded out because the blind structure means you have to play a looser style of play, playing many more hands. Being blinded out is the poker equivalent to waiting too long to tee off when chasing - remember the times where teams leave it until they need 15+ an over before thinking about batting more aggressively? That’s the cricket similarity to being blinded out in a poker tournament.

Secondly, and even more importantly, astute readers might have noticed the phrase ‘weak opposition’ in a recent paragraph. The problem was, that this dynamic was unable to continue. Poker players, at least those who took it relatively seriously, were generally pretty intelligent and started to study the game hard. With the advent of numerous online forums where hand history could be critiqued, YouTube videos from full-time pros plus coaching sites, it didn’t take long for the player pool to become much more educated. The percentage of weak opposition able to be easily exploited by a TAG, old-school style player started to dwindle rapidly.

Astute players started to realise that a selectively looser approach, playing a higher percentage of hands (but being smart in terms of picking the spots to do so) and playing them very aggressively (known as a LAG - loose aggressive style), was more optimal.

The viability of this approach has been proven by a number of more recent Game Theory Optimal studies, and it makes complete sense. Firstly, the ability to play more deceptively is a real positive - when a LAG player is playing a hand aggressively, you don’t know if they hold ‘the nuts’ - the best possible hand, or are completely bluffing. It diversifies their hand range hugely, meaning it is very difficult for their opposition to put them on a tight range of hands, and just generally puts their opposition in many more tough spots than they’d prefer.

So, back to cricket. If you’re a coach, or a bowler, what would you prefer to have as your opposition? A LAG - the poker version of an intent merchant, who is going to be a real challenge to you in terms of their aggression and can take the game away from you very quickly, or would you prefer a TAG - a player or team who will nurdle the ball around, with little boundary intent until it is too late? I know what I’d rather my opposition did.

England in white ball cricket have adopted the LAG approach in plain sight, yet other teams are extremely reticent to copy their style. It goes against all the ‘conventional wisdom’ which people in cricket have been brought up with - ‘bat the overs’, ‘get a single after scoring a boundary’, etc. This is constantly brought up by commentators when a player gets dismissed going for a second consecutive boundary - but the same commentators, being extremely results-oriented, will be full of praise if the player pulls off the same feat twice.

Will cricket have its poker revolution, where the weak decision makers get smarter? Only time will tell, but it will be fascinating to see whether more teams start taking the LAG/intent merchant approach, and recruiting players who are conducive towards executing such a strategy.

Finally, I wanted to finish on Joe Root’s resignation as England captain. As soon as the media turned on him, this step seemed pretty inevitable. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t see Root as a particularly astute captain, and have articulated my reasoning previously, but England have a big decision to make as to who replaces him.

The easy option would be Ben Stokes, as a high-profile player and one who would be as good as guaranteed a starting spot. However, Stokes is quite injury-prone, and in the couple of games I watched him captain last season in The Hundred, didn’t strike me as being particularly tactically astute either.

Could the best option be to take a similar approach to what Australia did with Tim Paine? Would a captain who does seem more tactically astute, such as Sam Billings or James Vince, make more sense? Yes, both of them are not currently in the starting XI, but the expected run deficit with the bat between them and the current team members is pretty negligible. Certainly no more than 5 runs per innings, if that. An astute captain in Test cricket should add more value than that, and whoever is in charge of making this decision in English cricket (I genuinely don’t know who is!) should ensure they adopt a diligent approach to the decision, exploring all options.