Welcome

Hello all, welcome to my online poker blog.

I've been playing on and off for a decade after being introduced by a friend.

I played regularly for a few years during the poker boom and had a decent record at the micros, particularly Rush and Zoom No Limit Hold'em games (here's one of my graphs).

Around 2012 I began a new career which involved immersing myself completely in study in my spare time, so I had little to no time for poker. However recently this burden has eased and so I have been gradually dipping back in.

I'm an amateur player who still hopes to some day beat the rake.





Sunday 7 March 2010

Pot Odds - the EV way

Just learned a useful EV calculation for pot odds.
( PotSizeAfterCall * EquityShare ) - BetToCall
This is just another way of thinking about it - and I prefer it to the traditional way of expressing them eg "getting 2/1 to call, I'm good better than a third of the time so I do". This way we can actually find a good estimate of our actual EV from calling. Consider the following example. Blinds are 10/20, we are playing HU poker with 2000 chip stacks. Opponent is aggressive and has been continuation betting on every flop. We have {AsQh} in the blind. Villain raises his button and we decide to call since many of his hands will be dominated by ours. The flop comes {9d9c5s}. We check and opponent fires out his typical continuation bet of 80 into 120. Calculating some equities in pokerstove, if he's raising preflop with the top 20% or so of hands and c-betting with every one of them our equity is very nearly 50%. Using the equation our EV is
EVcall = 280 * 0.5 - 80 = 60
The EV of folding is always 0 so calling here is clearly better than folding (discounting continued aggression on further streets of course). Raising could be better than calling but that is opponent dependent and more difficult to work out. The point is, how many of us would auto muck here? Probably most... The majority of villains will too which is why betting these boards is so profitable. Players fold when they have a significant equity share in the pot. Now, calling here and then folding on a further street is very exploitable but my point was to show you that a play considered standard by many amateurs is actually a huge leak. So this is why top players sometimes make weird plays like calling down with king high or bottom pair. Look for videos of Patrik Antonius and you'll see what I mean. They calculate their likely equity % based on opponent's range and then make a decision based on expected value of each play.

1 comment:

  1. interesting stuff , and ur right about them pros i wud suggest . i love those q high hero calls.

    ReplyDelete