[_D&L_]

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Once you are reraised in a limit game why would you take it any further with no chance of winning? If he has called and raised a couple of times why would he ever fold instead of just calling?


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You are correct that most every human player would have entered "call down" mode at this point. But from the point of game theory, call down mode is not an optimal strategy. It acts as an overdeterrent to bluffing, and at the same time pays off big hands.

Game theory is about how you would play against an opponent playing the optimal strategy. Thus, u are correct, u wouldn't use these ideas versus a human.

A game-theory optimal player is balancing at least two considerations here. Minmaxing the EV of his opponent hands that beat him, and Minmaxing the EV of his opponents bluff hands. The more he folds, the less EV he gives to hands that beat him, and the more he calls/re-raises, the less EV he gives to bluffs.

An optimal player who is not holding the nuts would not enter call down or no-fold mode. He would always fold his hand some percentage of the time. He doesn't need to call with his hand 100% of the time to deter bluffing.

In fact, he can even make bluffing the prefered choice for a few of our really trashy hands (hands with virtually no call value), and at the same time deter us from bluffing with moderate hands (hands that get higher EV from calling, than bluffing).

Thus, against an optimal player we do continue to bluff some percentage of the time (in some cases, near zero), but never quite zero percent of the time.

Against a human player, this strategy of always coupling value bets with bluffs may not be needed on big pots. But it wouldn't keep us from stealing the human players money, we would just be less efficient at it.

Think of it as trading mistakes - we bluff at a person who always calls, but we have more value hands than bluff hands, thus his mistake is bigger than ours.

----_Dirty&Litigious_----