[OSUGreg1983]

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Alright, all joking aside, here's the deal:

After BB 3-bets all in on the flop and BTN calls there is $43 in the pot. You need to call $19 to win $43. This means that for this call to be profitable, you need to have a bit more than 30% equity in the pot. Roughly speaking, that means you need win the hand a little more than 30% of the time. (There is also the matter of split pots in equity calculations but we won't worry about that here.)

Think about it this way: If you win $43 30% of the time and lose $19 70% of the time, your expected winnings are:

.3*43 + .7*(-19) ~ 0.

Now we need to decide if we will win more than 30% of the time here. We have 9 outs to the nut flush, and 3 more outs to a straight (not counting the 2[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img] twice). When we have 12 outs we have about a 44% chance of making our hand by the river. You multiply the number of outs by 2 to get the chance to making your hand on the next card, and you multiply by 4 to get the chance of making your hand on the next two cards. (Here we subtract the number of outs over 8 that we have - which is 4 - from the final result ie 12*4-(12-8)=44, but we won't get into that either since multiplying by 4 to get 48% is an OK approximation.)

So if we win every time we make our hand, then we have 44% equity, which is way more than enough to call. However, there's a small chance we might not win if we make a straight, because someone might have 56. There's also a small chance that if we make our flush the board will also pair and someone will beat us with a full house. So we probably don't have 44% equity, but if we put our opponents on a range of hands, our equity is definitely more than the absolute worst case which is 28%. Sure we can be up against the worst case hands here occasionally, but the point is that more often than not we are not in a worst case scenario, so from our point of view our equity is well over 30% and this is a very easy call.

Sorry for making fun of your posts and please don't leave the forum. Just don't take it so hard when people poke fun at you - they are used to people making posts pretending not to know much when they really do, and since you already had 100 posts it looked like this might have been the case.

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Very helpful thank you. Here's my deal, I've been a profitable tournament player (live and online) for the past 3 years. In tournaments, the math of poker isn't as crucial since every decision you make doesn't come out of your pocket book. Tournaments are all about endurance and chip accumulation, as I'm sure you all know. I'm taking a concious effort to bring my game to the next level and am placing my concentration purely on cash games. I joined CR 4 days ago and purchased PT last week.

It is hard to justify putting up with phucksticks on 2+2 when you can post something on the CR forum and not only get genuine feedback, but its also feedback from other players who are paying a fee for the same service which leads to less of this 2+2 whoring around to find the easiest player to poke fun at.

I appreciate the input on the mathematics of the hand, since I have obviously been confused on the exact interpretation of draws, odds, and equity. Cheers and gl.