Pot commitment doesn’t exist in a cash game.
/thread.

Ok ok, let’s try this again with a bit more explanation.

Often when discussing hands, people talk a Pot Commitment. Bad players will say “There’s so much money in the pot, and I’ve already put in 50%, 60%, 80% of my stack” so they feel pot committed. However, this is exactly what pot commitment is not: Having to call just because the pot is large or having to call because we do not have a lot of money left in our stack. Having to call because our villain does not have a lot of money left in their stack. In a cash game, where you can always rebuy, can always top off your stack to the max, and always have the option to start and stop playing at any point, you are never committed to any pot solely for any of the reasons stated above.

What pot commitment is: Calling a bet because when we compare the range of hands that our villain would play in a certain way against our hand, and given the price that we are being laid by the pot, we have a positive expectation when we call the bet. Note this has nothing to do with how much money we have in our stack, and has nothing to do with how much money we have already invested into the pot.

Let’s take a look at an example:

Hand 1: Villain has 100bb, we cover.
Villain raises to 5bb. Hero calls with 66.
Flop (10bb): AK6r.
Villain bets 10bb. Hero calls 10bb.
Turn (30bb): Ax
Villain bets 30bb. Hero calls 30bb.
River (90bb): 3x
Villain shoves 55bb. Hero?

“Common sense” here says that we are committed, we have invested half of our stack, we are getting 2.63:1 on our money from the pot, and we have a full house so we should call. However, in order to evaluate this situation we need to know the range of the villain in question. If Villains post flop continuing range (given the line that he has taken) is KK+, AQ+ then yes we are committed.

Hands we lose to: 1 x AA, 3 x KK, 6 x AK. Hands we beat: 8 x AQ. 10:8 losses to wins. Price we are getting from the pot: 2.63:1. Long term expectation: Eventual pot of 200bb * (8 / 18) – 55bb investment = +33.8bb expectation. In this case we should call.

How about when villain is checking his hold cards again on the river before he shoves, and he accidentally flashes an Ace to us.

Hands we lose to: 1x AA, 6 x AK. Hands we beat: 8x AQ. 7:8 losses to win. Without even going through the math we know that we can profitably call here as he has less hands in his range that we lose to, and still all of the hands that we beat.

How about the final case, when villain accidentally flashes a K to us.
Hands we lose to: 3x KK, 6 x AK. Hands we beat: 0! Again, without even doing any math we see that we can never be profitable here. There is no part of his range that we beat, as a result we should fold regardless of how much money is in the pot, or how much more we need to invest.

What we’ve seen here is that we have the same situation, we have the same stack size, the same cards, the same pot size, the same bet to call, the same board, but yet we are “committed” to the hand in 2 of the 3 cases, and we are not committed in the 3rd case. What we have also seen is that at no point have I discussed how much we have in our stack, but only what we have to call. It does not matter if we have invested 35% of our stack, 3.5% of our stack, or .01% of our stack.


Let’s look at another common situation:

Brand new table, effective stacks are 100bb. Everyone at the table is your standard rec villain. They all play too loose pre flop, raise a tight range, and only 3bet with QQ+ and AK. They will 5bet shove Aces and Aces only.

You raise pre flop with KK to 5bb, you get 4 callers and the SB comes out and 3bets to 20bb. You 4bet to 65bb, he shoves, and you call for 35bb because I have Kings and we have 100bb effective stacks, and therefore we feel pot committed.

Even if he literally flips his AA face up shows them to you before you act, you still have to call. There is 185bb in the pot, you have to call 35bb. You have an expectation (suit excluded) of 18.054% in the pot. The pot ignoring rake will be 220bb. You return on your investment is 39.71bb or a +4.71bb return. In this case it is correct to feel this way.


What happens if we change the situation just a bit?

You raise pre flop with KK to 5bb, you get 2 callers and the SB comes out and 3bets to 20bb. You 4bet to 50bb, he shoves, and you call for 50bb because I have Kings and we have 100bb effective stacks, and therefore we feel pot committed. How do we fare in this situation? The pot will have 210bb, we have the same expectation of 18.054%, a return or 37.91bb, but this time it has a negative return of -12.09bb. In this case it would be incorrect to feel commited to the pot.

Being pot commited is only about:
1) What is our expectation with our hand vs their range
2) What is the price that we are being laid in the pot


Bonus Homework (ignore rake and tip):
A short stack opens for 5bb, 7 people call. You have a read that he opens light, and folds easy to 3bets. You 3bet him to 40bb as a steal from the big blind with 72. V shoves and everyone else folds.

If V flips up his hand face up and shows you AK, what is the largest stack size he can have that will show you a positive expectation upon calling? I.e. what is the largest stack size he can shove with that we should feel 'commited'?

If V flips one of his cards up, and it is the A, and the second is NOT an Ace, what is the largest stack size you can call and show a guaranteed positive expectation?

If V flips up both of his cards, and shows us AA, what is the the maximum stack size that V can have that we can call with a positive expectation?

If you answer any of these in the thread, put them in a spoiler please.

Nice post. Someone once said "I'll fold the second nuts in a 200bb pot for a one dollar call, if I know I'm beat.". That said, we can rarely range our Vs that accurately, because even OMCs have a small percentage of the time that they just spazz.

This is very true and something important to consider in general.
And the hardest thing to separate when discussing commitement in my opinion.

However, when we input a spaz range into their hand selection, all we are doing is changing the range that we are comparing our hand against.
The reason the we would often feel commited in many situations is (take the second KK example) is that we only need to introduce a small spaz factor for the call to be correct. And most people are not robots. And most people spaz sometimes.

But in actuality, "bad" players are correct in most of these scenarios.

The reason why commitment exist in a large pot is simple, if you have committed 80% of your stack in a HU pot, you are getting 180:20 on turn or river, 9:1!

In majority of cases at this point, calling is a given, not a decision. Decisions should have already been made prior to committing the 80%, not lamenting the remaining 20%.

I suppose you will go into pot odds later.

Undisputable.

Yes it does, unless you're simply ignoring all the decisions points prior to the one where you're all-in.

If it's a mistake to put in the remaining 20%, then much bigger mistakes had already taken place in previous street(s).

Decision point #1 - why did hero just call instead of other options?

Decision point #2 - why did hero just call?

Decision point #3.

IMO, decision #2 > #1 > #3.

In other words, the most important decision was made on the turn, followed by flop, and river is not much of a decision, but more of how reliable one's read is:

If the read of V is that he will never fire river without top of his range, then this is obviously an easy fold.

If that's indeed the case, pot commitment has no bearing on the decision. Our supreme leader gracefully put this idea into words in another thread:

Allow me to highlight "read" in your example:

Read is that the weakest non-FH hand in his range on the river is AQ.

Read is that the weakest hand in his range is Ax and presumably he's not shoving river with less than AQ.

Read is that villain is never shoving without FH.

With perfect read, you are correct.

Yes it does because of a simple and only worthwhile matter: pot odds.

*insert venice's quote.

I think the issue here is that you are mixing two ideas into one:

-Hand reading
-Pot odds

It is why there are some misinformed players out there who think they're "working against math" when they make a fold in a pot committed scenario.

Problem of these so-called "bad" players is that they don't actually know how to hand read, so they put themselves in a position where they're playing against a nutted range and drawing dead.

And btw, another term for pot commitment is SPR (yes I am aware it is a flop concept), and the idea is quite similar and effective. Let us not forget, it is very hard to make a pair, let alone very very strong hands.

The first answer to this is Table Stakes.

If players could reach into their pockets in the middle of the hand, then you might never actually want to play in a way that is committed to the pot, because you don't necessarily know what the next bet size could be.

However, since you can do all the pot odds math (and if you can have a good estimate of your implied odds), then pot commitment is not only correct, but IMO, its most +EV.

The second answer is to consider that interest in the pot, aggression in the pot, bluffing frequencies, and spew potential, all go up (sometimes WAY up) as the pot gets bigger. So not committing to the pot with your value hands (or perhaps your bluff catchers), is probably going to be -EV in almost all situations.

It is an old saying in poker, the larger the pot, the more inclined you should be to call.

The thing about pot commitment is that you generally use it when you have a made hand vs. a villain (or multiple villains) who are most likely drawing.

Assume you have TPTK on a KT8ss flop. You are pot committed because your hand is stronger then V's range which is mostly draws (count the possible combos of better made hands vs. draws).

You commit to the pot because it allows you to maximize the pot size (usually) by just taking a bet/bet/bet line, without worrying about which draw gets there.

~~~~~~~~~~~

So you face a turn that makes the board ugly... KT87ss. Since you're committed to the pot, you keep betting.

You have no way of knowing whether V now has taken the lead, missed his draw, or picked up more equity with a 1p+SD type hand.

But it doesn't matter -- you're pot committed so you go with it. And since our opponents are bad, they called the flop and they'll call the turn, hopefully paying too much.

Slowing down now would be a horrific mistake. Using pot commitment helps you avoid this mistake.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now -- when does slowing down go from being a horrific mistake to being the right line? As RP said above, Stacks to Pot Ratio, is how we decide.

Using my example, assume we're 200bb effective when we bet 20bb which is 2/3 pot OTT in the KT87ss hand, and we're raised to 80bb. Before we bet, we had a SPR of 6.7:1.

This is the start of the grey area where we don't really want to stack off here with TPTK.

There might be a really good chance that V is bluffing us OTT with that huge raise. But without an excellent read, we really hate that raise, and almost certainly cannot continue.

~~~~~~~~~~

If we were 100bb deep, and make the same bet and faced the same raise, with an SPR pre bet of 3.3:1, we're quite happy to stack off here -- in fact, we were trying to get stacks in so we could maximize our EV in this pot.

It's been too long since I read it, but Miller et al talks at length about commitment in PNLHEv1.

I think "pot commitment" is one of those pseudo-concepts that ends up being close to true but for the wrong reason.

In the first example given, that's more of an issue of absolute vs relative hand strength. All you should consider there is "what's his range, how much of it do I beat, what are my pot odds"

The others are just straight up pot odds.

The takeaway seems to be, generally it's okay to call relatively small (to the pot) bets and raises with strong hands, and the actual reason for this is because of how equity and ranges work (it's hard to make the nuts, and people spaz sometimes) but if you go through poker believing in commitment you're not going to lose too much outside of the few occasions where villains range actually is {the nuts} and nothing else

I *think* I'm ahead lifetime on "**** it i'm getting 4:1 and this makes no sense unless he spiked gin" calls. And when I call there I'm not thinking I'm "committed", but that V only needs to show up with some random hand 20% (or less) and I just guess it's possible.

TL,DR.

I don't have time now to go through it, but pot commitment is a more important topic on early streets than later streets. A related topic is how do we get our villains to feel pot committed when we have them crushed.

Skimmed some responses but RP really hit it well.


Pot commitment is related to stack but only in that it changes the math that you demonstrated very well. It's a difference in thought process. Sometimes the good and bad come to the same conclusion but one is far superior.

One example of commiting villain is if you don't think he'll call a river shove, but will bet if checked to. Quite often the V will commit himself on accident by not being able to fold to a river raise for whatever he left back. In this way, you can bet all in without actually Putin him to that decision.

Autocorrect showing its teeth there spike. Did you piss it off somehow?

I tried to edit and now its disappeared.

Hah. Oops. Deleted your message not mine.

Pretty sure Putin is betting if checked to...

Abuse of mod privileges ITT.

Nice post, really sums it up well.

edit: oops I grunched this and didn't see the second post, will have to read.

I'm in RP's camp on this one, especially his statements on how bigger mistakes on prior streets have set us up for a fairly trivial given (not a decision) at this point.

Gcommitmentisnotamirage,imoG

Let me see if I can boil this down to one basic truth that PNLH states explicitly that I've been meaning to reiterate here for quite some time.


If you find yourself in a position where the math says call for the rest of your stack and you're likely behind, you made a mistake somewhere at a previous decision point.

This is not to say that because 75% of my starting stack is in the middle, I have to call.

It's simply that the math is the math is the math. However you got there, it isn't going to lie to you. The key point is learning to make the math work in your favor instead of against it. IR2M is emphasizing that last point. RP is making the point that once you're there, it's just math. What we need to focus on is planning around commitment.

"Do I want to be math committed?"
"How do I get my opponent pot stuck?"
"How do I avoid being committed if I have decided that I don't want to be?"

Let's talk about those questions and where exactly commitment happens. That's where this thread is going to show some value.

I don't agree with this at all; you don't control the run out of the board.

Tonight I had a pot where I 3bet aces pre, villain donked the flop with what I thought was a flushdraw and I raised. Turn he checked and I bet as much as I thought he'd call with what would have had to be a naked flush draw and he called. River brought in the flush and he went all in giving me over 3 to 1 on the call, but I folded. I am fairly certain if I'd gone all in on the turn he would have folded, so where was my mistake?

Books like PNLH are there to give answers, and in order to do that in a poker book it is necessary to dumb things down to where the author can give a definitive answer. This is how stuff like pot commitment and "SPR said I should do this" come about. When actually playing we have much more info than any situation a book could reasonably write about and all of that info should be thought about when making a decision.

You are never actually pot committed.

You were getting 3:1 but you had ranged him as flush and flush only.

This scenario has nothing to do with commitment, because you had zero equity...

Even PNLHE states that there are exceptions, and as always poker is all "it depends". But those exceptional cases should be rare, and not the default of which pot commitment is built around.

Duke said something in DGI's thread recently that really struck a chord with me, in that a lot of Villains at this level are just spazz clicking buttons. I'm sure we've all seen enough WTF plays such that there should be very few cases where we can deviate from the norm and be totally happy making big laydowns on the river when we really we've already committed ourselves.

GspazzclickingbuttonsG

I knew this was coming and intentionally left the door open for it. GG then answered it for me.

Yes, there are exceptions. I'm speaking in generalities with your quote. I'm not saying folding the river in your hand is right or wrong. It depends on the math and your ranging of V. IF he absolutely HAS the flush then of course you fold and you're not committed. I think the PNLH boys were referring to spots where people are like, "Oh wait, I guess I have to call now that I think about it." It's those situations where stepping over that commitment line happens by accident that need to be eliminated. In your situation, you were aware of the odds and the math didn't surprise you at any point. At least I hope that's the case.

PNLH explain this very well. I recommend that book for everyone. You really don't even need much else in regards to improving your game. just stick to PNLH

Maybe it is just a semantics issue or something. There are not exceptions, because it is never the case. I play every hand for max value, and every street gets played for max value. Had I called this river because I ranged him on enough bluffs that I could profitably call, then I am still making the +ev play.