Why did he originally go in with 18000 chips on 6 3 though? He was first to play, I had AK obviously I just called the 18k (dont know why I just didnt go all in). Left me with 400 chips. Its the initial bet of over 3/4 of his stack with 6 3 os I dont get.

Thanks for your reply King Spew, but I'm a relatively new player. I haven't really mastered the equity side yet. Still learning. I'm also unsure what Equilab or PokerStove do.

They tell you your equity, which is your current share of the pot.

If there are N players in the hand including you, then Equity = P(win) + P(two-way tie)/2 + ... + P(n-way tie)/N

I look at this an entirely different way, and it applies to any competition, not just poker. I can boil it down to one sentence:

In any competition, especially when money is involved, serious players will do all they can to get an edge.

Getting a chair in a major orchestra is as difficult as making it into the NFL. I know of an oboe player who had an oboe custom built to fit the size of her hands.

My cousin got a full-ride scholarship to college when she won 5 high school state track championships (two mile run her senior year and cross-county all four years.) Her edge was that she got free coaching from her father, who three times finished in the top 50 of the Boston Marathon.

Yes, people buy things, they get coaches and they use technology to get an edge. All competitors do that, whether it's poker or sports or the National Spelling Bee. I have done that as a runner (one marathon and a lot of shorter races.) I got private music lessons that helped get me into an army band, where I played and sang for 23 years. I use technology (an online coaching site and Holdem Manager 2) for poker as well.

I see no reason to call it cheating because it's poker, when we would never say that about football or a spelling bee. I play a lot, I study 10 hours a week, and I will continue to do everything that I can to get an edge at the table.

The real reason poker is a dangerous form of gambling is because it is not mathematically possible to determine your edge. So you don't have a proper idea of whether you're running bad or playing bad. You mostly have to use your own intuition to determine whether you have or don't have an edge.

*Unless you get PT4

I would say that this is partly true.

You can never determine your exact mathematical edge against another player, but you can often get a pretty good idea, sometimes with technology and sometimes without.

Using technology: The first thing that Katie Dozier, aka Hot Jenny, looks for are VPIP and PFR numbers no more than 5 digits apart. When she sees a 16/12 she assumes that she's playing against a pro until she has evidence to the contrary.

No technology: There is an online tournament that I play almost every day and I make it to the final table more than half of the time. When I do make it to the final table, there is another player who is there with me about half of those times.

I don't need technology to know that I probably have little to no edge against this player. In fact, without any communication, we've figured that out about each other, and yes, we respect each other's raises. When the two of us are heads up in a hand it feels like my evil twin is trying to take my money. Mostly we just leave each other alone and pick on the weaker players.

If you are a good player and manage your bankroll well, poker is not a dangerous game. Multiple good decisions over a large sample size make you a winner.

I looked up my evil twin. It looks like we both play about 3 tournaments a day, almost every day. Let's say that over the course of a year we both play 1,000 MTTs. I would be very surprised if either of us lost money in 2018.

Even in roulette, you will have better chance of winning... 48.6% chance of winning in roulette

Well YES IF you are significantly worse then other poker players you would probably have a better chance at a game of pure luck.
IF you were totally knew to poker and played a 100 games vs the best pros in poker your chances of showing a profit in those 100 games would probably be well below 5%

You could argue this for a great many sports. Think about the years and years of money and training required in order to be able to competitively ice skate, play golf, tennis, etc- and you may never even become a top player. Talk about a gamble...

Again I point to any other sport, where these guys develop all sorts of physical maladies while pursuing an occupation which only the elitist of the elite will succeed.

Variance hits everyone the same in the long run.

Then why play?

I could turn any life event into a gambling scenario. I got in the car, drove to work, some guy rear ended me. The chances were against that happening, but it happened. I GAMBLED by going to work and it bit me in the ass.

Frankly, it's a stupid way of looking at it. It's a cynic's way of abusing confirmation bias to excuse away their poor results. It's an argument which can't be defeated because it's true at its core- but which is fallacious because it ignores the reason of why you were driving in the first place- to get to work.

In roulette you're playing against the house with a fixed edge against you in the game. In poker if you bring any sort of knowledge to the game against the general breed of mouthbreathers sitting at the 1/2 games, you have a much larger edge than the roulette wheel you gave as an example. So yes, the two are very different and one is worth playing and maybe the other isn't. Irony, eh?

@thegull I think its pretty safe to say that the op would consider the greatest chess players in the world nothing more than lucky guys.
He has also demonstrated an utter misunderstanding of how the math of poker is within a standard deviation given a large enough sample size.
Last but not least NOT everyone who plays poker seeks to earn a living at it.
For some its leisure time, for others its a hobby (and an inexpensive hobby for the better players) for others its a side job and yet for others its a profession.
Its NOT uncommon for people to aspire to be Pros and then not own it when they cant make the cut.
SO FEW PEOPLE OWN it. They cant accept just Not being that good. Its Never their fault its all luck etc etc etc = Text book defintion of a loser. There is Nothing worse then a guy who buys his own BS or who is to ignorant to understand the truth.