Re: Player Discussion
Can you tell I'm a fan of Caro? I am really pleased that he's come out and put a new article in the poker world in this month's BLUFF. I suggest you read it if you haven't: seriously, do you think that you can possibly use this level of mathematical information at the table...ever?! No, of course not! Sure it's of academic interest to know whether JJ is marginally better than AQ in certain highly contrived situations, and discuss it for hours, but the results are so minimal in influencing your in-the-hand decisions! Trivial even! Like I said, the discussion should centre around whether you should be calling a pf reraise with AQs in the first place. When we look at questions like this we have to consider that it's a TERRIBLE decision, without a read on the villian, to be doing that: too often you're dominated, and though you have position, there are VERY few flops that will come for which you'll be supremely comfortable getting into hot action. Most of the time the flop will completely miss you, and you'll be folding to their good continuation bet...UNLESS you have a read on them and decide that they're bluffing, or will fold to your semi-bluff. Thus, it's not the intricate mathematics of this discussion that sway your decision, it's everything ELSE. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that math has NO place in our decisions at the table, but you don't need to know much more than the few memorized odds that we all know of hitting our draws, or our villians drawing out on us, that we all know. What's far more important is the concept of implied odds and the coupling of that with reading your opponent. So, the math itself actually doesn't get you as far as most like to think.
|