Weak Tight Dreams

[borges]

I've been playing poker for about 2 months. I'm going through my first
horrendous downswing (100BB in 600 hands).....I had just switched limits
a couple of weeks ago (from .25/.5 to .5/1).....so I've been having a lot of
doubts about what I'm doing. Really even about fundamental philosophy of
how do play this game.

I love reading this board. The collective poker wisdon is really intimidating for me....I read the hands......try to come up with what I would do......(usually
CALL).....read what the maestros say.....hit my forehead....say..."Of course!
RAISE THAT **$>??* "

Any statistician will tell you that reporting a mean value without a standard
deviation (or a variance) is meaningless. I wonder if sometimes our
poker philosophy suffers from a not considering the variance of our actions.
It is to say, that we have set up a value structure completely based on maximation of expected value. But, this is clearly inadequate, right? For
the sake of argument, suppose we have two courses of action. Action
A gives us an EV of 1 (with a std. dev. of 3) and action B gives us
an EV of 1.01 (with a std. dev. of 20).....Clearly (except for the insane), the
better course of action is A even though it has a smaller expected value.

Of course we don't have such clear cut decisions all the time but I would think
that when EV decisions are close (say between folding vs. calling or
folding vs. raising or calling vs. raising), the weak tit decision will lead us to
making lower variance plays.

I realize that poker awards aggession. I'm not arguing against that. I'm just
saying that after all evaluations of various courses of action are taken (say
the aggressive play nets us an EV of .02 and folding nets us 0.....I would think
that the EV is so close that we should be guided by the lower variance option).

I realize that this is heresy.......May I ask to be shot instead of burned at
the stake? [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

This must have been discussed before. I tried using the search function but
didn't come up with anything.