Quote:
Originally Posted by tringlomane
Accurate as in how?
It's obviously 100% accurate in what it is designed to calculate, which is your winnings after adjusting wins in all-in pots to the EV you were expected to receive in the pot.
How accurate it proves you are a winning player? It's better than using actual winnings since it smooths out the all-in variance, but there is still plenty of variance that this statistic cannot smooth out such as the cards you get dealt and how boards connect with your cards.
And people seem to run -EV more in posts because people like to whine when they run bad. They will ignore the times of rungood as luck and post about those times on the forum less because they expect to typically run that way.
Copy pasted this from another sections
The problem with using E.V. to test how 'lucky' or 'unlucky' you are is that E.V. is affected by the size of the pot. Therefore big pots will effect your E.V. graph in a larger way than small pots.
So, for example... if you get sucked out on in a couple of huge (say 10 buy-in sized) pots whereas you suck out on a few small pots (e.g. against short stacks) you could be running 20 buy-ins under. Your E.V. graph would look terrible but the cards would have fallen as expected.
Also found this which i found good reading
The Truth About the EV Line
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The EV Line
The following article is my personal opinion about the All-In EV line that is shown on poker graphs. The cliffs are that I don't like it.
It Only Measures One Small Aspect of Poker
A lot of people view the EV line as some clear indicator of how good or bad you are running. Although in some cases it can be a marginally accurate indicator, in most cases it simply is not. It's just one small part of a huge equation, and it's a bit like trying to see an entire forest by looking at only one tree.
You can run good or bad at every single aspect of poker, and it all factors in. First of all, when you sit down to play, you run good or bad with your game selection. The games might be extra juicy that day. You might end up with position on the fish or keep finding only seats out of position. Maybe your waitlists keep dropping you in good seats, or maybe you keep arriving just after the fish busts.
Once you are playing, you might get dealt a lot of good starting hands. You might get all sorts of playable hands and good spots, or you might just get a bunch of garbage. Perhaps everyone folds to you and you get to open a lot of marginal steal hands, or perhaps it is constantly opened or reraised in front of you and you have to instead constantly fold marginal holdings. There are a huge variety of ways you can run good or bad preflop before you even make a single action.
Every time to you flop a good hand, you can run good by having your opponent flop something worse that can give you action, and run bad by having your opponent whiff and give up, or by getting coolered. Every time you bluff, you run good or bad depending on whether or not your opponent happened to hit that particular time. Every time you make a thin call, you run good or bad depending on what part of your opponent's range you run into. You might decide to cbet and run a triple barrel bluff in a bad spot, yet end up hitting the perfect turn and river bluff cards and succeed and thus run good, or conversely it could be a good spot but the board runs out terribly for you.
You can even run good or bad regarding your opponents mindset. They might be distracted or tired or tilty on a given day, or you might run into them when they are playing their very best.
I've listed a few examples off the top of my head, some minor and some major. There are countless more that I'm not going to write out. I could go on and on forever, but the idea is this:
You can run good or bad regarding every single aspect of every single hand, from the most obvious all the way down to the tiniest detail, and it all matters. There are many, many factors that come into play regarding our success at poker, and while all-in EV is one of those, it's just one component of a very complex equation.
Even the Line Itself can be Misrepresentative
Suppose you play 10 hands, and in each of those 10 hands you are dealt AA and your opponent is dealt KK and you get it all in preflop. Let's say you in 6 of those all ins, and lose 4 of them. Well, you just won 2 buyins total in 10 hands, and ran very hot. However, according the the EV line, you should have won 8 of those all ins, and you actually ran extremely poorly to run 2BI below EV in just 10 hands. In my opinion, you did not run poorly at all. Your opponent, who ran way above EV, is actually the one who ran very poorly in this scenario, and the EV line is totally misrepresentative.
Now's let's suppose you open QQ UTG, and an extreme nit 3bets you in UTG+1. You decide to 4bet your QQ, and he shoves on you. You make the crying call, and are very relieved to see him turn over AK. Although his range is very heavily weighted towards AA/KK, and rarely does he show up with AK, you got lucky this time and got it in as a flip. Your EV line records this situation as a flip, but in reality you put yourself in a very -EV spot, and the graph has no concept of this.
If we again have QQ and get it in against an extreme aggro spew monkey, but unfortunately run into his KK and lose, the EV line only shows this as running very slight under EV. However, against this crazy opponent that is open shoving every hand, we were in a huge +EV situation, and actually ran very very poorly in this case.
The line has no concept of any of these things, and as a result of very often mispresentative as to how we are truly running. Again, there is a lot more to say on this matter, but I'm just providing a few brief examples to illustrate the point.
Why it can be harmful to your mindset
For me personally, when I am constantly looking at my graph, I am not playing my best. I am too focused in on overall results, and not focused enough on the situation at hand and playing my best. There have been times that I have been way under EV, and I would constantly look at the graph and feel sorry for myself, or show it to other people to try to garner sympathy. I could have spent this time being honest with myself about my leaks, and working to improve my game, but instead I just wallowed in self pity and tried to tell myself that I am amazing at poker and don't need to improve, and that someday I will magically stop running bad and then I will be a crusher.
Also, by making ourselves keenly aware of that fact that we have been losing or that we are under EV, we put ourselves in a mental state where we are much more prone to tilt. When we are not upbeat and focused on the task at hand, it is much more difficult to play our best poker. Sometimes if we are over EV, it will undermine our confidence. The more fixated we are on our past negative results, the less successful we will be at the tables. The whole process can lead to a defeatist attitude that destroys our passion and drive to improve. Again, there is much more to be said about this and the poker mindset in general.
Conclusion
There are times when the EV line actually does a pretty fair job of summarizing how we ran over a given stretch. Usually when we are under EV, we feel this is the case, and when we are over EV, we feel like the line is misleading. On the whole, it tends to only tell a very small portion of the story. It's not a good representation of how lucky we have been, and can have a negative impact on our mindset.
Just turn it off and don't look at it!
This is all just my opinion on the matter. Some people will have different opinions, and that's fine. It's a complex subject and it's hard to say someone is 100% right or wrong about the matter. I'm hoping others will share their opinions on the topic, and this will lead to some good discussion.
Cheers!
EV misleading ?
