We are on a 3b/4b/5b shove scenario....

villain or, we 3b, villain 4b , we 5b....

We hold a hand like A2s and after doing the math (countin FE) our shove is ev- , like -3.5bb.

My question is if is still better to 5b than folding, because we already 3b to aprox 7bb. So each time we fold we lose 7bb and each time we 5b we lose -3.5bb. We should take into account our 3b or is just dead money and our fold is costing 0?

Thanks !

You and villain have 100bb effective stacks. It goes raise, re-raise, re-re-raise etc until finally you have 99bb in. Your opponent raises his last 1bb, it's 1bb for you to call. Before you call he flips his hand over and shows you his cards, he has the stone cold unbeatable nuts.

Calling has an EV of -1bb. But you're gonna call right, because when you fold you lose 99bb? After all, -99 is way worse than -1.

That isn't how it works. If your EV is -3.5bb when you call that is taking into account the money already in the pot. It actually means that calling is 3.5bb WORSE THAN folding. Folding is 0EV.

How much money will you end up with if you fold? How much will you end up with, on average, if you jam? Which is bigger?

Thanks guys, I'm still a little confuse.

Supose an extreme case and we always 3b and fold to 4b. At the end we are losing 700bb/100. But if we 5b with -3.5bb ev we end up with -350bb/100???

What is wrong with this?

Your -3.5bb is calculated at the time of your decision, i.e. right before your call. In my contrived example, your EV for calling is -1bb. Surely you can see that folding is better than calling, though, even though by your metric, folding is -99bb and calling is -1bb?

The deal is, if you called, you are losing 7bb + 3.5bb not 3.5bb.

The problem here is that you can calculate EV relative to any point in the hand you want. But if you want to compare actions to see which has the higher EV, you have to pick THE SAME SPOT.

For your -3.5bb EV, i.e. calling, you're calculating EV from the time of your decision. But when you call folding "-7bb" you're calculating it from the start of the hand. If you use the same point as the calling decision, then the EV of folding is 0.

If you fold, you will lose 0 more bb. If you call, you will lose 3.5 more bb.

Got it, thanks !