You're not chasing when actual equity > required equity. If a decision is +EV there is nothing more to it.


The king is not the inshore best case scenario. A king is our "Eject and parachute to safety" or "Get out of jail free" card. It should go without saying, but the cards that provide our greatest IO's are potentially the biggest RIO cards as well. It is a balancing act. When I picture our turn call, this is how I am thinking about it:



We have to look at the hand as a continuum and not 1 trial. The outcome of any one hand has no bearing on the strategy if you think the strategy is long-term +EV.



Gilmore, you said yourself in my AA vs. AKs thread the following:

You are basically advocating for the same thing. Playing a deceptive range and sacrificing some immediate short-term +EV for a potential jackpot. We are all mostly aware that vs. non-droolers some of our biggest wins and losses are when the villain shows up with a completely unexpected hand. To play a jackpot hand in a non-cooler situation, there is going to be a greater element of risk and RIO, but that doesn't automatically make the strategy bad.

Some aspects of poker have binary decision making: yes/no good/bad etc. but given the level of strategy discussed in here I think it's clear this is not one of them.



Gilmour, to be clear, this is an area I have only begun to explore after dropping down from 2/5, and I'd say a situation presents itself maybe once every 3 sessions or 25 hours of live-play where I feel the stars align properly to get involved like this.



We all know value betting is the bread and butter of LLSNL, but it is also the low hanging fruit. It doesn't take long (subjective statement I know) to figure out bet sizing, it should be the first area any new player looks at. But it also adheres to the law of diminishing returns.



So at some point we need to start branching out and finding new ways of capturing value. If we know NLHE to be a game of small edges then we need to find ways to capitalize on smaller edges that our opponents aren't going after. This appears as good a place to start looking as any since most were fairly dismissive seemingly oblivious to our actual equity.



These concerns were covered at various points in my last post:

It's pretty irrelevant if this is the first time villain has played with us. Unless we have value bet the nuts 5 times within 100 hands I doubt he knows what our betsizing tell means. And it's more irrelevant by the fact that in this circumstance we are trying to achieve a desired result based upon the hand thus far. There may be a time next hand vs this same player where we will value shove 100BB on the river. This is simply not one of those runouts.

You're obviously convinced you've made a brilliant play and I'm convinced it's not. No amount of back and forth from anyone will convince you otherwise. So my question is why post it?

The problem isn't so much that this is a tell of ours as it is considered a 'standard' tell that most players with an experience expect from an unknown. It doesn't take a genius to know that someone who bets 1/4 pot is looking for a call. Even bad players in my games can get away from their hands in this situation.

There was no "play" to make. I've gone so far as to say calling the flop intuitively feels correct/standard even if we accept we are making an -EV choice on an early street (which I've shown the math on) for a potential greater +EV payoff on later streets. You obviously feel differently which is fine, but I posted it to generate discussion which it has.

The crux of the hand in my opinion is the following question:

Is it worth sacrificing small -EV on early streets for the potential to reach the river with a positional, skill and equity/phantom equity advantage?

In this case, a 200 BB pot with 160 BB effective stacks remaining.

The spot that you find yourself in on the flop is not a great spot in terms of expected value. I don't think it is winning to call here and either bluff certain cards or call again if our hand improves or picks up equity. The thing is that you have to do it sometimes if you are going to limp/call pre flop. It's too easy for our opponents if we give up when we flop something that's not very good every time.

This is why I think raising pre flop is a superior play. Limp/calling is just not extremely profitable unless you have great post flop reads. But if you have great post flop reads, why not just raise before the flop anyway, giving yourself position probably, and the initiative. If you raise pre flop it's much easier to play the hand.

I don't think you should be worried about getting 3-bet and having to fold. You have just jack high after all.

results?

no. the small -EV takes this into account, in theory anyway. There were a few who advocated a flop call. They are assuming we win big often enough to make the flop call a (presumably) small +EV.

I don't understand all of the theoretical workings of EV, but how can it take into account future bets? Say this hand plays out identically in back to back orbits and we hit a winning hand both times, betting $200 on the river in one and $400 in the other and the villain calls both times.

I would think either 1) you can't calculate flop EV until the duration of the hand or 2) flop EV doesn't take into account future bets or 3) we are incorrectly using the difference between (hand equity - required equity) as +EV or -EV when it means something else instead.

This

We refer to them as leaks.

For the record there are players I absolutely would continue against on the flop. But you established a range. And against that range this is a fold otf IMO.

Four's has the right of it.

You're disconnecting EV on streets but also saying that you can't consider one street in isolation. That doesn't make any sense.

Either the flop call is +EV or -EV. That takes into account all possible outcomes in he future. You may calculate -EV for direct odds on he flop but if your implied odds for futre streets make up for it then it's actually +EV. It's the exact same concept as set mining. When I call the flop vs. a nit UTG open I'm getting the worst of it right now, but the implied odds of hitting my set make it a +EV call. It's not a -EV call followed by a bunch of +EV stuff on later streets. It's all just one big complicated mess of a calculation.

We differ in opinions on what those future profits mean for the flop. I think there's no way you get paid enough, don't get "coolered," and bluff successfully to make up for the flop loss. You do.

This is a fairly simple question to answer, I think. I sort of laid this out in my RIO thread, but let me try to take a crack at it again now.

Your flop call was $55. After you make this call, the turn pot is $195, which, for the purposes of future bets, I will call dead money.

Now there are finitely many turns that can come up. For each possible turn, your EV from the turn onward is going to be some amount, probably some but not all of which are the same. For example, if you catch a card that has your opponent drawing dead, your EV is going to be the pot plus whatever you can extract. If you try to bluff and get called, your EV is negative whatever you bet (adjusted for the possibility of a river suckout or successful river bluff). And so on. For example, you know on a low black card that you will fold to a bet, and given the range you assigned, you know one is coming; so the EV that comes from those turns using this model is 0.

So you'd take all of those finitely many terms, multiply each by the probability of the turn coming that leads to that EV, and add/subtract it all.

Since you called 55 on the flop, you need that total to be more than 55 for a flop call to be +EV.

When people (including me) are saying that you should fold the flop, essentially what they/I have said is that you're overestimating your EV on various turn cards in a way that makes it extremely hard to recover the $55 you called off.

For example, take your backdoor flush draw. After you turn it, your EV is a separate calculation from when you called the flop. And it's probably positive. However, once you compute what it is, you have to multiply that EV by the probability of you turning that draw to see how it contributes to your flop EV.

The "tricky" cards that I and others were harping on, though, were not diamonds, but instead hearts, jacks, and tens. For example, on a jack, you will only sometimes win the pot, and when you do, it's not clear how much you can extract. But other times you lose the pot and you lose more money. All of those possibilities sum in a weighted average to see how much a J turn contributes to your flop EV. It might be positive, but even if it is it's not as big as you probably want to think it is. And because you have so few outs for your hand to improve, a drag on your EV on a J turn is a HUGE profitability killer.

The same goes for trying to bluff a heart turn. If it works, you win the pot. But if it doesn't work, you lose money. So you need to figure out how much you can win from Villain folding right away (195 times his fold %), how much you can win if you get him to fold to a river barrel, and then also how much you lose if you bluff and it doesn't work. They sum in a weighted average, and so, even if that sum is positive, it's probably not enough to help you get to the $55 you need, especially when you multiply by the probability that a heart falls on the turn in the first place.

If you play around with some numbers I think you will start to see why people are saying it's hard to get a reasonable-looking sum that gives you back the amount of your flop call, with the flop range you assigned.

So then it stands to reason that EV is strictly a function of effective stack depth and the solution likely involves pioSOLVER or something of similar computational power and we are all kicking tires since the true answer is infinitely more complex than any of us believe it to be?

If it is your belief that our nut outs are worth nothing more than the pot and our Jack and diamond outs carry more reverse implied odds than implied odds then I can at least see your position more clearly now as I didn't quite get it before. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I at least see your point of view.

If too small of effective stacks don't carry enough IO and too deep effective stacks carry too much RIO then logically there has to be a stack depth where we can continue with our exact hand? If the EV of this flop call follows a normal bell curve distribution then there must be a +EV point along that line for our assigned range, correct?

What makes you think it's not -EV at EVERY stack depth?

I believe plenty of the people responding understand how complex it is to estimate the EV of the flop call. Even when we make significant simplifying assumptions, we're still talking a lot of variables. I'd throw out the concept of true answer though. It would take quite extensive interviews of hero and villain to nail down the entire calculation.

Yes, the EV varies by stack depth. But if we graph estimated EV of the flop call with the x variable being stack depth (LOTS of assumptions, this is just theoretical) it doesn't follow that the peak EV on the graph must be positive. It might be, depending on our assumptions.

wow, when did this thread become a PHD thesis?

bet the river small imo

I'm guessing hero bet $300'ish, villain hemmed and hawed (likely hollywooding to save face) and folded, leaving hero to wonder how much he should value bet when he sucks out like this.

Thread is a cluster ****


Don't think we have too many hands that want to bluff river so I'd choose a smallish sizing.

Perhaps but given read in op I think small is a mistake. maybe I'm wrong but I see this v bluff catching busted hearts enough.

Not to mention I'm fairly sure $150 isn't enough to justify our flop call that you advocated.

If we think villain only calls a small river bet, then hero folding the flop is even more clear. There's no way hero wins enough with perfect turns and rivers to make calling profitable.

True, busted hearts makes up decent amount of combos. This runout is better for us so maybe bombs away is the way to go

In the 13 outs you list, I guess you mean "3 Kings".

But of these outs, all except the non- kings are dirty. And even with the kings, sometimes you're just chopping with other Tx.

The majority of your listed outs are for hands that will allow you to bluff at the pot OTR after V has shown interest. Though you'll I'm sure disagree, V still has these outs for himself, in his range too.

This hand is a catastrophe in LLSNL where most Villains are incapable of folding 2p+ to a 4 straight, and sometimes even when the front door flush hits.

I missed in the thread where you stated effective stacks with the remaining villain, but IMO, betting small now is horrifically bad. You got your $$$ in bad all the way. At least, you can try now to exploit your V by seeing if he's capable of folding here to a big bet (like you were planning to do should hit).

Full pot at least. Maybe shove depending on exactly what we have remaining. I would shove if remaining SPR is 1.5 or less.

Pot is $415, effective remaining stack is about $810.

Results

Since nobody commented, I'd like to point out that CallMeVernon's post #112 was an excellent attempt to explain in words what we mean when we say a flop call is + or - EV. I recommend multiple rereads for anyone who's not clear on how that math works.

As far as Villain mentioning AK, a stuck Villain facing a gross river card could get some pretty muddled thinking, which is hard to unravel in the moment. Would expect a frequent "call" coming from that confused state though.