The profitablity of a bluff

[Shandrax]

I disagree with Aaron for one simple reason: You don't need precise calculations based on pure assumptions to get an approximation for the correct play, because this is where your experience will bail you out. A good player will recognise a really bad play and won't make it. Once it's a close decision between two plays though, you usually cannot make a substantial mistake.

The decision process on problematic hands where you cannot make a substantial mistake cannot be improved by guessing, because guessing wrong may result in an even bigger mistake. In other words, if you are working with a small margin of error, you shouldn't add additional uncertainty by starting to guess. You would simply have to guess right way too often.

[Abbaddabba]

At the river it's a fairly simple of a calculation.

But your assumptions are limited.

You need to factor in the times that you would either chop or win the pot if you check through. You arent comparing the value of a bluff to a situation where you lose 100% of the time, even if you likely will lose nearly 100% of the time in the example you used in your original post.

You also need to consider the times you get called by worse hands, or hands that will chop. Again - that is nearly 0% for the hand used in the example.

Also there is the times that you get check/raised by a worse hand and fold something that would have won if you checkraised. Once again - in this example, virtually negligable.


That's about the extent of the considerations you need to make for a river bet when in position.... assuming you exclude metagame stuff. THOSE are basically impossible to compute.

[AaronBrown]

[ QUOTE ]
I disagree with Aaron for one simple reason: You don't need precise calculations based on pure assumptions to get an approximation for the correct play, because this is where your experience will bail you out. A good player will recognise a really bad play and won't make it. Once it's a close decision between two plays though, you usually cannot make a substantial mistake.

The decision process on problematic hands where you cannot make a substantial mistake cannot be improved by guessing, because guessing wrong may result in an even bigger mistake. In other words, if you are working with a small margin of error, you shouldn't add additional uncertainty by starting to guess. You would simply have to guess right way too often.

[/ QUOTE ]
I agree with this, and it's an important truth to avoid quantitative tunnel vision. But there's another important truth as well.

Your logic makes the most sense for one-dimensional situations. Someone goes all-in on the river and you can call or fold. The EV of folding is, of course, zero, so the question is the EV of calling.

You could make a lot of problematic assumptions to turn this into a math problem, then do a lot of calculations to come up with a number. This is pointless. Either there's a clear right answer one way or the other, in which case precision is unnecessary, or it's a close decision, in which case the error in the calculation is much greater than the likely + or - EV. Spending a lot of time guessing and doing math is only likely to distract you from the clear right answers, and it won't help you in the close calls, in fact there's not much help possible there. Either decision is about the same. You should be concentrating on subtle reads, not numbers.

But in more complex situations, precision is useful. It's folded to you on the button and you have garbage. Sometimes you raise to steal the blinds. A lot of things can happen after that. You could win the blinds, you could get raised and fold or you could get called and either hit or miss the flop. Writing down specific numbers about how often you expect each to happen and, more importantly, deciding what you'll do in each case, is very useful. It will tell you if the strategy is sound or unsound, something that is very hard to learn from experience. It will also give you something objective to help your game, either the hands will play out as you expect, or they won't. If they don't, you can adjust your strategy.

There may be some players who can do this by intuition, without formal calculation. But most cannot.

Getting a bad approximation for the correct play in a one-dimensional situation is useless. You can do better relying in experience. But in complex multi-dimensional situations, getting a precisely correct strategy for approximately the situation you are in is very useful. You know it might be right, while experience may give you strategies that cannot be right. Moreover, if your approximation of the situation is so bad that the strategy is bad, you can figure it out very quickly, and know why it is bad. If you rely on experience, you have no clue other than your overall profit and loss, which has noise from all your other strategies and random chance.

[deep-pocketed]

I think, that it doesn't work at all. You just cann't play using such trivial calculations of profitability of a bluff.

[AaronBrown]

[ QUOTE ]
I think, that it doesn't work at all. You just cann't play using such trivial calculations of profitability of a bluff.

[/ QUOTE ]
If you mean doing a calculation is not enough to play good poker, then I agree. If you mean that the calculation is useless for improving your understanding of the game, I don't agree. It may not help everyone, some people have such good intuition they don't need it, others may not have the feeling for math to profit from it. But it does help a lot of people.