[drzen]

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quick question - if you know your opponent is NOT using this push/fold critera (or a close one), shouldn't you tighten you push calling standards from the big blind?

Because if they are not pushing bad hands you have less equity against their range, plus you will have more fold equity in your pushes.

correct?

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SAGE is about optimal play, the equilibrium. If the guy you play against does not play equilibrium strategy, you have a better play (than SAGE).

To be precise, SAGE is not the exact equilibrium, it's just some approximation of it. If you would like to know the exact equilibrium play, or other properties (like how much such play deviates from the EQ etc) PM me (but it will cost you money [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] as there aren't many people around being able to calculate such things :P

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I want to ask you an honest, serious question that maybe doesn't look like one. Would it be worth much to me to be able to understand this post? What I mean is, I think being able to understand what you're talking about would possibly be the first step to being able to use it in some limited way, but would I truly benefit from it? I have a reasonable understanding of the mechanics of push/fold heads up, but by no means am I mathematically sound. I only play low limits, but of course I aspire to climb a bit.

Edit: Oh, and I don't mean that I don't know what SAGE is. I do.

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If you (and I suppose you do) already invested a lot of time and effort in other means to study and play winning poker then understanding this post won't worth so much to you in terms if EV. But it helps to understand more about the theory behind the game.

The theory is very powerful, but poker is also very complex game. That's why to derive practical value out of theretical stuff is slow process, and if you do it just for this purpose the reward is not so high (that's why most people that do it, they rather do it for research purposes).

But being literate on these topics I beleive is cool, as this is knowledge that is universaly applicable, to every form of poker, and to every game.

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Thanks for the response. I find that understanding the theory behind the game is mostly valuable, because, obviously, you can generalise from theory to particular spots.

I play sngs mostly, and having some (small, in my case) idea of, for instance, tournament equity helps you think about why some sorts of plays are good and others bad, which is much better than trying to learn a catalogue of plays, and I think is helping me become a better player. What I mean to say is, if I tell someone "play very tight early, much tighter than you do in other tourneys", that's good advice and they won't go wrong following it, but you can go a lot further with the idea of equity, which explains *why* you play tight, and if you do the legwork, explains more precisely why you play that tightly. (Or why I do. I suppose a very good LAG would have a different risk/reward calculation to make.)