I sometimes get accused of being "results oriented" in certain threads. The kind of situation I'm talking about is when people are debating a certain play and they are trying to talk about how wide someone's range is. One camp wants to assume we're playing against a narrow range and the other camp wants to assume we're playing against a wide range. Then results are shown and the villain is seen to have a weak hand.

When I claim that a villain showing up with a weak hand justifies tailoring our play to a wide range, that's when I am accused of being "results oriented". So I'm starting this thread to see if we can come up with a definition:

What does it mean to be results oriented?

My definition of being results oriented is that you justify your play based on what cards came after the play. Since the cards falling is a "random" event (random enough anyway) and we don't know what will come in the middle of a hand, it is obviously pointless to say things like, "We shouldn't have raised since the flush came in afterwards", or "We should have bet more to push that guy off his gutshot".

But I don't think justifying a play based on reviewing an opponent's actions after we see his hand is necessarily results oriented. For example, let's say that we think our opponent's range for getting it in preflop is all pocket pairs, so it makes sense to get it in with TT. If we do get it in and our opponent shows 44, that is evidence that the range we assigned him is either accurate (or close to it), or that he's getting it in even wider than we thought, so either way it justifies that getting it in preflop with TT is correct against that guy.

On the other hand, if he shows up with AA, it proves nothing. It could mean that our range was wrong, or it could mean that our range was right and he was just at the top of it this time.

Based on some posts I've read in the forum, it would seem that there are many people who would disagree with me on the last 2 paragraphs and would call that thinking "results oriented". So if you do disagree, I'd like to know why, and what your definition of "results oriented" is.

I believe that the key is to understand that the results only strengthen the range going forward. It is not a justification for the wide range beforehand if that evidence was not available at the decision point. It can give evidence to support that a certain range was accurate, but it cannot be said to add anything to the range assignment at the time. If in the moment, I believe the range is 55-AA and he shows up with 44, I can say that my range assignment was inaccurate, but I cannot say that I "should" have made his range 22-AA because at the time I assigned the range I was working with less info. Results help you look forward, not back, and since in order for samples to have meaning n>>>>1, then even if he shows up with something outside the range we cannot necessarily widen the range to include it because it could just be an outlier.

Honestly, I think people in this forum struggle more with remembering to attempt to assign a range more than the proper assessment of the results to that assignment. I don't think most of us understand the kind of focus and work playing even one hand properly requires.

In that particular case the results only show that the range should have included 44; you obviously can't just conclude that he plays 33 and 22 the same way also.

Let's say in your example you have 99, and you believe his range is 55-AA. Then you have less than 50% equity against that range, and so if there isn't a lot of dead money in the pot, you fold. Let's say when you fold your opponent shows 44.

In my opinion, it is totally valid to say, "my fold was incorrect because I've now seen that I have at least 50% equity against the range AA-44 and whatever else he has in there". It is of course still not valid to say, "my fold was incorrect because I had the best hand that time". Do you disagree with that?

I guess I do. You can say that my ranging was incorrect, but according to the range you selected, the fold was correct. If, with the info you had at the time 55-AA was "correct" than the fact that he flipped 44 only shows that you didn't have the same info. If I know absoultey nothing about a player then I can rightly assign a range of ATC to a particular action. When his hand is revealed I gain information. That doesn't meaen the ATC range was incorrect at the time. This is hypothetical obviously since we can always make some kind of assumption, but in neverland, a total unknown has a range of ATC even though after the fact, his range is revealed to be something different.

I tend to use the term more tightly than you defined it. It is for people who make OP saying, "I got it in PF with KK and lost to ATs." Should I have just called instead and folded on the flop when the ace hit?" Or people who say, "I should have made a PSB on the flop and turn to prevent someone chasing the FD that hit on the river."

What you may be referring to is the tendency of some posters to preface a HH with, "The villain is a TAG that is positionally aware," then disagrees with the analysis that is given because the villain ends up raising 73o UTG. Yeah, you might have been right to call/raise/fold, but you're using a definition that almost nobody else understands.

I totally know what a positionally aware TAG is.

Just not focusing on making the best play possible and focusing more on whether you win or lose. Ranges are so subjective I feel like you can't tie that in with being results oriented. Ex lets say you checked bottom set on a dry board in position on the river and my opponent turns over 2nd set. Thinking you played the hand well is results oriented being that more often than not a value bet would be best. Idk my opinion.

OP, in a nutshell, you can be results orientated with information too.

You just have to ask yourself whether you made the correct play based on the information at the time the hand took place. If you gain information from the results of the hand that you didn't know before (e.g. Opponent plays flushes passively or can squeeze light) then you cannot retrospectively say your decision was good/bad because of it. The information gained is useful for future hands, of course.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/17...nking-1373832/

Ok so here's a thread where I felt you were being results oriented. You said you were happy someone called $100 preflop with 34o but this is totally non-standard and there is no way you could ever actually put someone on that range. If you didnt know he had 34o I dont think you would recommend someone min3bet JJ utg or whatever hero ended up doing.

OK, you guys are saying the same thing, and this is the reason I made this thread. Let me try to explain:

In my mind, there is a huge difference between "the correct play" and "a good/bad play based on the information we currently have". My definition of the "correct" play is the play you would make if you knew your opponent's actual hand (or range) and how your opponent would play that hand (or the hands in his range). This is what we wish we could do all the time. But since poker is a game of imperfect information, we often won't know what the correct play (by my definition) is at all. So we have to guess.

What I am saying is that after we gain information from the results of a hand, it can sometimes (but not always) tell us whether the guess we made--which might still have been our best guess at the time, even if proved wrong later--was correct or not, in the sense of being the best play against his actual range, not what our guess was.

So the results won't say "I made a bad decision" or "I made a good decision"; they'll say, "I made an incorrect decision because I had a bad read" or sometimes even "my play was more correct than I thought it was because of how Villain played this hand I wasn't expecting". Like I said before, I don't think of those as being the same thing.

I am really glad you brought this thread up as it was one of the ones that was on my mind when I made this thread. It's a great example of a time where I was being called "results oriented" but the person saying it was backing it up with a stupid argument.

First of all, I never said I would recommend someone min-4bet JJ there. I didn't make any kind of recommendation in that hand as to what the best play would be. If it had been me at the table, I would have been shocked to see that hand as well.

The specific thing I was responding to was this post by you:

Here's why the bolded is crap:

1) You claim you want to jam for protection, so the other callers will fold hands worse than ours. That's already suspect. If I am 4betting, I would like to get called by those worse hands.

2) You then claimed later in the thread that getting called by a worse hand is not something we should expect to happen, so that when we do get called it must be by a real hand and we should expect to be in trouble (even though you wanted to jam in a spot where a hand that has us in trouble is never folding).

3) Your claim that "we must be in trouble when someone calls $100" is proven utterly false by the results of the hand.

When you call me "results oriented" in that thread, you are basically implying that we should not be adjusting for the fact that there's a fish at this table who will call $100 cold with 43o. We should instead be sticking to the platitude that we need to get heads-up with JJ.

Going back to what I said about the "correct" play versus "good/bad" play, I do not think it is results oriented to say, "if Villain would have folded to our shove, then Hero's preflop play was more correct than shoving would have been". I also don't think it's a contradiction to say, "Shoving would have been a good play given the information we had at the time, but the results show that that information was wrong." And finally, it is definitely also true that if Villain would have called anything with his 43o, shoving for value is definitely better than raising $100 for value. So the results do not even imply that Hero's play was correct--only that it was more correct than shoving if Villain would have folded to a shove (which we still don't know).

But the reason I started this thread is not to bring this argument up again. The reason I started this thread was to see if I could gain some understanding of why people consider this thought process invalid and "results oriented".

I believe this is going to boil down to semantics.

this would seem to be simple common sense.


If a range is much wider than we assigned, then results DO show us we were wrong. Even if one trial only----however one trial isnt enough to say emphatically that a players range is X. He may have been pissed off that day and did something out of the ordinary.

We work with what we have, and what we see "so far".

Results DO matter when you look at a large sample though. This is the culprit that bites players in this forum quite often. There are many specific types of hands that appear over and over again, with the players assigning their own ranges to the villains, yet the results keep coming back that the ranges assigned were too wide. Yet the players refuse to narrow the range, because that would mean they have to fold say kk preflop and God only knows they wont have any of that, so there you go. Results CAN matter after enough of them are seen. (At least they matter in correcting the ranges assigned)

For me, its about timing.

You are being results oriented when you justify an earlier decision based on subsequent information that you didn't have access to at the time you made the decision.

So when you say you made the "right play" after seeing 44, you are correct in the sense that you now know going forward (assuming our opponent doesn't adjust his range) that in a similar situation in the future you should call with TT. You confirmed your read.

But that isn't an independent justification for the play in the first place. If you didn't have some information that led you to believe your "any pocket pair" read was correct, you made a mistake by calling. But once you know it, you know you made the right play, which should affect our FUTURE actions.

The reason people are so quick to say people are being results oriented in threads here is that we are talking about a PAST decision. So its not useful to someone in the hero's shoes making the decision a the time to have that information. It IS useful to help figure out who was correct and to make adjustments for the future.

To me, whether you are being results oriented is all about what you are trying to do with the information. Are you justifying the past or adjusting to the future? "I called with TT because I thought he could have any PP. Look he had 44, so i was right!" is results oriented. However, "I had a read that he could have any PP so I called with TT. I confirmed that read at showdown so I will continue to exploit that in the future" is not.

Your thinking is correct insofar as you're applying it to the future. And you're unfortunately right. Its much, much harder to disprove a read than to confirm it.

This is correct. But I think they are fairly important semantics because they get the core of how we adapt and how we justify our actions.

What you've said here is actually damaging to your game and way of thinking. By doing this you'll justify bad decisions/undermine good decisions based on the results.

To give an extreme example: You just sat down at an unknown 1/2 table with 100bbs everyone has you covered. You're dealt A7 in the BB. It gets folded round to the button who 3x raises and the SB folds. You then shove 100bbs in and the button calls you with 24o.
Given the results we can tell that the button is a station gambler and that shoving A7 is absolutely the correct play vs this guy.

Does that mean that our play was good? Absolutely not.

Or in another case to the detriment of good play: You 4-bet all in preflop with KK. You get snapped off by AA. You later learn that the player doesn't 3-bet light, and doesn't call all-ins with less than KK. Was your play bad? Of course not.

The point I am trying to make is that you shouldn't say your play was good/bad based on the results, just criticize it based on the information at hand, as that's all you have to base your decision off. With the results you can use that information and say "how should I play an identical hand in the future based off the new information".

You can use results to back up your reads, but you cannot use them to retroactively justify/nullify your play in the hand.
As you said, poker is a game of incomplete information, and should be treated as such when being critical.

In any semi-philosophical debate like this we're going to need to make sure we're working with the same premises, and these are premises that I'm willing to accept (albeit with some slight editing that I'll get to at the end); I was actually going to propose a similar dichotomy myself before reading this post. So I don't disagree with you in the abstract. When discussing hands in hindsight, as long as you're willing to totally divorce your post-hand thought process from your thought process during the hand, I don't think it matters exactly which dataset on villain (all the data you had at the time of the hand, all the data you had on him by the end of the night, all the data you have on him now that it's 6 months later, etc) you use, as long as you're consistent throughout the analysis. Practically, this forum has by and large selected "all the data you had at the time of the hand" as the pertinent data set used for all analysis, and I think that's the most reasonable one to choose for 2 reasons: it allows us to critique that moves OP made during the actual hand, as we have no more or less info than what informed them; and it excludes the results of the hand in question from the dataset, preventing posters from overestimating the importance this one data point (ie weighting the villain's actual hand too heavily into their range because we know they happened to have had it), as they would be prone to do. So pragmatically I think the system we have is in place for a reason, even if theoretically I don't see much problem with your model.

One thing I do wonder is why you seem to have carved out a special space for the results of the hand we're analyzing. To me, just knowing what villain had is not enough to know what a "correct" play would be; to me, a "correct" play differentiated from every other incomplete dataset would imply that we have all of information there is to have on villain (which is obviously impossible). I don't see the difference between learning what villain had in the hand we're talking about and, for example, seeing him play more hands later in the session, or hearing a story about his past play from another reg, or whatever; it's all just extra data points. So "all the information we had right after showdown," while certainly a valid data set to choose, seems like a pretty arbitrary one to focus on.

We absolutely should be adjusting to the fact someone is calling raises with 34o, but we didnt know that at the time. That is the very definition of results oriented.



I never said for protection, I said to deny our opponents odds to make a correct call against us. If they want to call us allin with TT and AJ that's awesome. But what I dont want to do is get 5 people calling me, have the flop come 569r, I'm first to act so I cbet, then get minraised or jammed on and curse myself for setting up the perfect scenario to get stacked.

You have misinterpreted again, probably my fault for being somewhat vague in my reasoning. We always want to get called by worse hands, however if someone calls us with a worse hand they arent necessarily making mistake. AA > 67s, but if you minraise AA utg and there are 6 callers to me on the button, then am I making a mistake by calling with 67s? Of course not. IMO what hero did with JJ was incorrect, even though he had the best hand.

And if villain turns over a set are we still proven utterly false?


See the whole problem with this entire line of thinking is what ANL kinda touched on. People arent completely random. Everybody who plays poker has some rudimentary understanding of the game. There are some ranges we can universally apply to basically everyone with a high degree of success. In situations where we have very little information on our opponents we can still assign hands to them just based upon our experience and human nature. However 34o is not one of those hands. Under no circumstances should we ever be thrilled about getting it in with JJ when someone shoves on us because we think they might have something as bad as 34o. This was a ludicrous call by our opponent, and represents the absolute fringe of holdem players. It is valuable information to use against him moving forward, but at the time it was an impossible read. Our most logical hand range to assign him still beat us in every possible way, so all we were doing was saying "welp we're beat now, gotta lose that money!".

There's no argument being brought against you, you asked why people sometimes accuse you of this so I cited an example. I still think you were being results oriented in that post, and I think if I came up with a kind of "double blind" study where I posted hand histories, some with results, some without, that you would have a very obvious skewed response line between them. It's human nature, most people simply cannot help themselves but to use the information given to bias their responses.

you dont know the resulta when you are making a decision in the hand, thats why you dont care about th results.

in the future you will have to make decisions without knowing the resilts as well, so you should learn to make decisions without knowing future info or including it in you analysis because yoi never have that info in real game decisions

Yes, this is the whole reason I made the thread. I want to know what people's meaning of the term "results oriented" is. That is obviously all about semantics.

There is no difference. It's just that in most hands on the forum, the results are the only data point given. When the OP gives other past hands as more data points I use those too.

What I was really asking in this thread is this. I think these 2 scenarios are different:

1) We get it in with KK and lose to A4s. Being results oriented is saying "I must have done something wrong because I lost the hand". The right thing is to say, "I got it in with KK as a 70/30 favorite. I made the right play." I think this is not controversial, right?

2) We get it in with A8o and lose to T2o. (This has actually happened to me.) To me, being results oriented is saying, "I must have done something wrong because I lost the hand". But in this scenario a lot of people would now reverse what I said in scenario #1. They would claim that even though we got it in as a favorite against this guy's range of any two, we still made a bad play because we are supposed to be behind a "normal range" when we get it in with a hand as bad as A8o. They would then say that taking into account what the opponent actually did is "results oriented" and I should have folded to his raise instead of jammed.

It sounds like people here are claiming this: that whether getting it in with A8o is good depends not on what Villain's actual range is, but on what we think it is at the time we make the play. Is that right?

Bingo. You cannot apply results info to the range you assigned previously except to critique your ranging at that time. You can say that your information was more incomplete than you thought, but you can't say your decision based on that information was incorrect (unless of course, you did make a bad decision, but we're assuming I think that you made a good decision based on current info).

There's a difference between saying my range was wrong and saying that the decision I made based on that range was wrong. If someone open shoves AA 50 times in a row and limps KK 50 times in a row, I'm not wrong to range their next shove as AA, but when they show up with JJ the next time, I can say that my 100% AA range was inaccurate, but my decision at the time was rightly based on a 100% AA range.

Well I assume if you're getting it in with A8o you must have some history with your opponent to know this is a good play. Otherwise you'd have to be an idiot to go allin with A8o vs an unknown or an "average" player.

The simple definition is if your answer changes based on what your opponent had, then you are being results oriented. If getting it allin with A8o is a good play when you are ahead, and a bad play when you are behind, then you are being results oriented. Poker is a game of limited information, so as long as your play is good with the information you really have, then you are not being results oriented. If you get it in with A8o and villain turns over AA but you had information to suggest this was a good play anyway because he's been shoving random hands the last 20 times then it is still a good play. Our answer doesnt change because he turned over AA.

Well, neither is exactly right, but it's certainly closer to the latter than the former. Whether a play is "correct" or not is, imo, determined by what the most reasonable range to construct would have been given the information we had at the time. Putting opponents on ranges is certainly a skill, and better players will be able to construct more probable (note that I said probable and not accurate) ranges for their opponents than will weaker players, even with access to the exact same information. To hand waive away poor range analysis as "nothing I could have done" is a huge leak.

As far as the actual results factor into this: when you see the player's holding, it becomes one more poker life experience for you to draw on when constructing ranges in the future. It's possible that it may make you rethink your exclusion of certain hands from the range you had just constructed for villain, but onthe other hand, sometimes hands are outlandish such that there's no way a reasonable player would have included that holding in villain's range, so I don't it discredits the previous range analysis (and eventual poker decision based on it).

But basically the crux of my stance is that "what do I do in hand X where I know Y about villain" and "what do I do in hand X where I know {Z+the results of hand X} about villain" are two entirely different puzzles and should be treated as such.