[baltostar]

My intention wasn't to coach anyone, per se.

What I am good at is standing on the periphery of something and spotting self-reinforcing patterns that have become an objective unto themselves even as their benefit to the real goals have become marginal or even negative.

It does seem that on these boards the following pattern have pervasively embedded itself:

When directions a hand could go become murky, there is this total concentration of effort on figuring out how play the hand optimally **in the context of that hand only**.

Perhaps it is better in certain hands in which uncertainty regarding how it might play out and associated risk have both suddenly widened well beyond initial expectations to switch gears and play the hand with risk mitigation as the sole objective ?

In most cases, doing so would be EV-, and apparently that's taboo on these boards.

An analogy from trading:

Sometimes a setup looks very solid but once you put the trade on you become aware of small but significant risks that could cause the trade to go wildly wrong.

There is one camp of very good traders who will choose to dynamically respond to the situation as it unfolds, and they are very good at this. But the approach often involves scaling their trade size.

However, there is another camp of very good traders who prefer to immediately hedge out the extreme scenarios they just became aware of, and not touch the trade after that until targets are met. In doing so, they give up a good part of their anticipated profit, but they also avoid outsized risks.

And by doing so in many cases the trade does become relative EV- for them in the sense that its return on capital becomes less than some super-low-risk bread-and-butter trade they can put on at any time.

These tradres know that most likely in the very near future will come comparable setups that very likely will not become an ugly hydra as soon as they put them on. And they know their capital is better utilized on those trades.