[baltostar]

[ QUOTE ]
balto,
the time to worry about the issues you bring up is before you put the first chip in the pot. So, in this hand for example, when you raise QQ to 600 you need to consider the possibility that you will be putting in more chips than just the 600 and its implications for playing the hand. After you have put the 600 in, and the action comes back to you facing a reraise, you need to consider your immediate odds, which is the amount of money in the pot now vs how much you now have to put in. Part of that consideration of course is how likely you will be to lose chips after the flop (negative implied odds), and how likely it is you will make additional money (implied odds). You are right in that many players make mistakes BEFORE they put the first chip in the pot because they dont consider how many more chips will continue to go as action progresses. That does not change the fact that at the current decision points you cant use the money you've already put in to calculate your odds because you dont get that money back. In this example right now you have to put 1200 more and see a flop (with no risk of putting anything more in the pot before the flop), or fold and put in zero more.


To be fair to you, you are not bad at pointing out mistakes players commonly make. However, and this is why everybody including myself is losing patience with you, you constantly attribute your observations to your own brilliance at spotting the communities problems, instead of learning the fundamentals of poker well and coming to understand that the issues you are spotting have been brought up before, and talked about, and are generally grasped by good players.

[/ QUOTE ]

Please believe me, I have been diligently studying poker for 2 years, including every respected book written on NLHE (just now starting on Ed Miller's latest.)

You have to understand I have multiple degrees in math, engineering, computer science, and I've been gambling in varous forms for almost 15 years, and I can't help it if I notice serious flaws in mechanisms of thought that have become de rigeur in the poker community.

The common pattern of ignoring relative stack risk when deciding to play across an event has been bothering me for nearly all of the two years I've been studying poker. Relative stack risk as in "relative to other similar scenarios". (In my Scenarios 1,2 above, immediately prior to the event Scenario 2 has twice the stack risk as Scenario 1.)

Implied odds (required and given) and reverse implied odds (required and given) for playing across an event are badly flawed tools. You can not just rely on the calculations. And yet players routinely use cost-to-call to calculate implied odds given across event risk, compare the result to implied odds required (typically also mis-calculated), and base their decisions on it.

Either the criteria is way off or it is being badly mis-used.

For those decisions (only) where probability of achieving the most desirous outcome is *primarily* dependent on event risk, I recommend basing implied odds calculations on the total hand risk your stack is incurring. This too is an imperfect tool, but it's better than what most players are doing.

The way to test if a criteria is logical is to isolation test it. You can't involve other criteria, such as hero somehow magically deducing at a decision point that a re-raise is going to occur. (And this is exactly what hero would need to deduce to correctly calculate his reverse implied odds.)

If a decision criteria for playing across event risk is to be useful, it should not incur radical swings in validity when successively applied to similar scenarios.

In my min-re-raises example, a player is offered a sequence of propositions, each of which is logical to accept according to his criteria for playing across event risk. He therefore accepts each proposition but nonetheless ultimately finds himself significantly overpaying to participate in the event risk.

In fact, the growing stack only serves to propel him forward to his doom if he bases decisions on cost-to-call: not only is he being given sufficient implied odds at each decision point, but additionally his required implied odds multiplier is being reduced, plus his pot odds are increasing !

The only conclusion that can be reached is that the player's criteria is either illogical or mis-used.