Some maths for folding KK preflop

[avfletch]

The topic of folding KK preflop "because you *knew* he had aces" has come up loads recenty and so I'd just like to share a little bit of maths with you.

You will have KK preflop 1 in 221 hands.

When you hold KK someone else will have AA 1 in every 205 (rounding up) hands.

Playing 6max there are 5 other hands so that's 5 in 205 or 1 in 41.

So you expect to run KK into AA every 221 x 41 ~= 9000 hands.

Let's assume the worst case scenario where he has both your suits covered and he wins ~83% of the time. So assuming you started with 100 big blinds it costs you 83 big blinds.

83BB is 41.5 PTBB which, spread over 9k hands is less than 0.5 PTBB/100.

So even if, by some awesome force of zen poker, your opponents don't return the favour and get their KKs allin preflop with your AAs ever then this is costing you a pitiful 0.5PTBB/100.

Moral of the story: It only seems important because it's so brutal. One of your biggest earning hands gets butchered for a stack and you feel that you could've saved some money if you'd been able to lay it down. Then it happens in reverse and the guy who has KK to your AA only has 50BBs instead of the 100+ that you lost.

You have bigger leaks. Stop thinking about it. Stop worrying about it. Stop posting about it. /images/graemlins/smile.gif

Edit to add: There's a couple of KK preflop threads going atm. Just wanted to point out that this wasn't directed at anyone in particular, just sharing some general thoughts.

[Triggerle]

The thing that makes this brutal is that you can't expect to have 9000 Hands in between every time this happens. There are some people who have this never in their first 50k hands and then there are some with much higher frequencies. In the long run, of course it evens out to about 9000 hands per incident but the long run is very long for an incident that happens only every 9000 hands on average. Given that most posters here probably have less than 100k hands you can sort of expect to have this topic come up every now and then.

I know that last time I counted I had my first 10k hands under my belt and had this something like 8 times.

Knowing that I'm in for the long run I, of course, still don't lay them down. I think that dealing with short time variance is one of the most important things to get under control.

[spacetime]

bottom line is, with normal stacks, don't fold kings preflop.

[Bowlboy]

Avfletch, you bring some logical points about this issue up. It's kind of like set over set. It happens so rarely that even though there is usually 100+BB on the line in that particual hand there are 100's of marginal decisions that we are faced with over and over again that only cost us a few bets each time we err, yet consitently making those mistakes costs us far more than calling with KK when we are beaten or for that matter laying down KK when we are ahead. It's like timing out on a straight flush. You have the nuts and folding can cost you a huge pot, but you can only make this mistake rarely so it really is insignificant in the long run.

I've folded KK preflop once. I was right that I was up against AA, as another shortstack was all-in for the first raise that villain put in PF. I had a 500 hand sample of villain with 10/3 stats. There was no way this guy was 4betting without either AA or KK. He would have just called my 3bet queens or jacks. So against his range of AA-KK I was a pretty big dog. So I folded knowing that his AA would be flipped up. That is the only time that I really felt I could justify a fold based on stats. I've had my KK run into AA quite a few times, and although I havent been keeping track, there was a few situations where I got 4bet and said to myself, 'this guys got aces'. Of course I called anyway but I got stacked.

If you could tally everytime you thought it was AA and it was infact AA and came up with a 75% accuracy over say 20 hands, could you confidently fold KK preflop if your intuition was telling you that you're beat?