http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19...roblem-443652/

In this simple poker game with $300 stack sizes and $100 antes, and a single round of betting, the person who acts last has a $5.55 EV advantage (or about 6% of the ante).


http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ggordon/poker/

In this simple poker game with $2 stacks and a single round of betting, the person who acts last has a $0.064 advantage (or about 6% of the ante).


In the real world, humans are stupid and flawed, and the best strategies for extracting money from them revolve around exploiting those flaws. Maybe position is irrelevant or maybe it's critical. It depends entirely upon what sort of idiot you're up against.

Fish tend to be passive and bad at hand reading, which allows a good player to be very aggressive even when out of position and still make money. But I believe that these strategies themselves are highly exploitable, and that theoretically perfect players would force each other to be extremely passive when out of position, in order to protect their ranges.

(Note that in the first game I linked to, the optimal strategy for the player who acts first is to check his entire range. That's how much of a sacrifice the theoretically perfect OOP player must make - he checks the nuts 100% of the time, to protect his checking range)


That seems really stupid to me. With more streets, the person who acts last has more opportunities to exploit the information given to him by the person who acts first. If this doesn't seem to be the case in practice, I assume it's because of some general human bias which causes people to play badly when faced with OOP aggression (calling too much?).

But I think, even in practice, that this isn't true. It's commonly believed that the deeper you get, the more important position is, and that's pretty much the same thing, right?

As a real test of this, we could figure out what the expected value of acting last is in Rhode Island Hold'em, which has been solved and which has 3 rounds of betting. I just spent like 10 minutes trying to find it with no success.

Read my posts in the thread, and re-think.

It's important to note that I'm fixing the stack size (e.g. to 100BB) and then looking at increasing the number of betting rounds. Of course, if you increase the stack size along with the number of betting rounds, or just assume infinite stacks, then you might be right (in fact, in this case I think you *are* right).

I think a game where the cards don't change but you have "200 rounds of betting" is highly non-intuitive ... esp. vs. other poker knowledge. Can the game get checked down for 10 "rounds" and then people start betting again?
At what point does any bet represent all-in, no matter what size it is?

I understand what you are saying, and for 100bb stacks it seems likely that there aren't going to be 50% of the rounds where it checks through ... but then maybe it's a good strategy, if you have the nuts to check back 120 times?
It's obviously better to bet more than 1bb per. round if you have bb > rounds, which you didn't specify (but seems you assumed).

To look at it another way, if you are at betting round 1 of 200 and have 100bb stacks then it's not obvious that even min. betting the 2nd nuts (by either person) is good (as you are effectively open shoving). Which means that betting at all would be bad.