Quote:
Originally Posted by andyfox
Reading through the responses to Mason in the several threads, it seems to me that many of you are missing his point. Which, if I am understanding him correctly, is that there can be situations where not raising preflop can help you win the pot where raising could have hurt.
Hi andyfox:
You're correct. But a better way of stating it is to say "there can be situations where not
reraising preflop can help you win the pot
more often where
reraising just makes your strategy on the latter streets a shoot out.
I want to quote from my page 12 of my
Gambing Theory book:
Quote:
From Gambling Theory and Other Topics: Suppose you make a trip to Las Vegas, walk up to a craps table, and start betting $1 every time you roll the dice. You do this for 10,000 rolls, and then suddenly on the next roll you pull $1 million out of your pocket and put it all into action. Now how many times have you rolled the dice?
Now I'm pretty sure someone like dead..money would say the dice were thrown 1,001 times, but I suspect that you (as well as me) would say the dice were thrown only once. Thus, when you can have an occasional big swing, such as occurred with my "Hand to Talk About," it can impact your long term results.
When reading these threads, I constantly see the word equity. This is an important idea in poker and applies well in many situations. But equity is not the same as the "probability of winning the pot." Now it would be the same if everyone was all-in, but there are occasional hands, which usually occur in big multiway pots where unusual plays can increase the probability of winning the pot. However, they do come with a price and that is you often give up expectation on an early street, but you hope to make it back plus some on the later streets. However, this is a statistical idea, and statistical ideas can sometimes lead you to conclusions different from mathematical ones.
By the way, it's my opinion that thinking statistically is something very few poker players understand how to do even though they throw around statistical terms like expectation, variance, standard deviation, and even maximum likelihood estimators. And for those who don't know, I can say this with authority since I did have an 11 year career as a professional statistician.
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Dead Money's response here is an example. Mason hasn't automatically assumed someone had a Q.
This is correct. But dead..money, in his zeal to prove I'm wrong, conviently forgot about someone having an ace. So even though a queen or an ace didn't have to be out, and even if they were it doesn't mean the player holding one of these cards would have automatically called for one bet, but it's my experience that in loose games when the pots are big these cards are frequently out and they often do call for one bet when holding one of these cards in a situation like the one I described, but much less likely for two bets.
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He's saying his TT is vulnerable to overcards and not raising preflop can help eliminate opponents who might have one.
A slight correction. It's not
reraising preflop. My call preflop was only because we have been talking about this stuff in some threads here.
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He's not saying they "have" to peel on this flop, he's saying they're more likely to (correctly) do so on the flop for one bet if he had swollen the pot preflop than they would be for two bets in a smaller pot.
This is absolutely correct. In the two jacks thread, someone estimated that their expectation of making it three bets before the flop was to add one-half of a small bet. In this hand with the two tens, my estimation of not making it three bets before the flop may have been as much as two small bets which corresponds to approximately a 15 percent improvement in the probability of winning the pot. And if some of you think that the 15 percent number is too high, 7.5 percent would be one small bet, and 3.75 percent improvement would be one-half a small bet.
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Assuming nobody has AQ or KQ in this game in Vegas is also not necessarily correct. I recently played a hand in which 2 opponents didn't raise preflop with AQ at the Bellagio 20-40.
I see this as well. And based on many of the posts in these threads, I guess the games in Las Vegas must play very differently from the games every place else.
Best wishes,
Mason