The pretend (preflop) blinds and the real (position based) blinds

[MDMA]

Uhm, I strongly advise people not to even try to argue against Pokey here. Basically everything he has written so far is non-debatable.

Also, LearnFromTV, as in regards to exploitable/unbeatable, your last reply pretty much stated exactly what Pokey had already explained in his previous posts. Unbeatable is by definition that no counter-strategy will yield profit against OUR strategy (which is game-theory wise optimal), and it is blatantly obvious that an unexploitable strategy isn't the same as an optimal strategy, which Pokey already stated as well.

I think you believe he meant something else than you did, but he did not.

[LearnedfromTV]

[ QUOTE ]
Uhm, I strongly advise people not to even try to argue against Pokey here. Basically everything he has written so far is non-debatable.

Also, LearnFromTV, as in regards to exploitable/unbeatable, your last reply pretty much stated exactly what Pokey had already explained in his previous posts. Unbeatable is by definition that no counter-strategy will yield profit against OUR strategy (which is game-theory wise optimal), and it is blatantly obvious that an unexploitable strategy isn't the same as an optimal strategy, which Pokey already stated as well.

I think you believe he meant something else than you did, but he did not.

[/ QUOTE ]

He said "When I say it is unbeatable, I mean that no counterstrategy can have a positive expectation against the "push aces, fold all other hands" strategy." I agree with this but it is different from what I said.

What I said is that this strategy is not the best possible strategy if opponents are playing badly, i.e. other strategies will make the most money. If the entire table plays the aces strategy, this is not true, but if one really bad player opens to $100 every hand, four good players play the aces strategy perfectly, and the sixth player plays poker against the bad player every time none of the other four have aces, guess who wins the most money? And any one of the four aces-strategy players could improve his expectation (beat *his* current strategy by choosing a different, better one for the game conditions) by joining the bad player and the other good player. This is what I meant in the original post by "beatable," and it is different than what Pokey said. It was a poor choice of words by me in the initial post because I agree that the usual meaning of 'unbeatable' for a poker strategy is the one you and Pokey had.

Also, yes, obviously the blindless game is an exaggeration and in practice it would never spread because it's silly, but the fact is that a large chunk of the money available for good players in a NL game comes from the mistakes made by bad players in deepstacked situations, and the size of those mistakes is often more a function of stack sizes than blinds. Good player vs bad player headsup, does the good player have a higher expectation in a 3/6 game with $2000 stacks or a 5/10 game with $1000 stacks? I'm not saying the answer is clear (or always the same, it obviously depends on the players), only that it isn't obviously "the larger stack game" or "the higher blinds game."

[Leviathan101]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Uhm, I strongly advise people not to even try to argue against Pokey here. Basically everything he has written so far is non-debatable.

Also, LearnFromTV, as in regards to exploitable/unbeatable, your last reply pretty much stated exactly what Pokey had already explained in his previous posts. Unbeatable is by definition that no counter-strategy will yield profit against OUR strategy (which is game-theory wise optimal), and it is blatantly obvious that an unexploitable strategy isn't the same as an optimal strategy, which Pokey already stated as well.

I think you believe he meant something else than you did, but he did not.

[/ QUOTE ]

He said "When I say it is unbeatable, I mean that no counterstrategy can have a positive expectation against the "push aces, fold all other hands" strategy." I agree with this but it is different from what I said.

What I said is that this strategy is not the best possible strategy if opponents are playing badly, i.e. other strategies will make the most money. If the entire table plays the aces strategy, this is not true, but if one really bad player opens to $100 every hand, four good players play the aces strategy perfectly, and the sixth player plays poker against the bad player every time none of the other four have aces, guess who wins the most money? And any one of the four aces-strategy players could improve his expectation (beat *his* current strategy by choosing a different, better one for the game conditions) by joining the bad player and the other good player. This is what I meant in the original post by "beatable," and it is different than what Pokey said. It was a poor choice of words by me in the initial post because I agree that the usual meaning of 'unbeatable' for a poker strategy is the one you and Pokey had.

Also, yes, obviously the blindless game is an exaggeration and in practice it would never spread because it's silly, but the fact is that a large chunk of the money available for good players in a NL game comes from the mistakes made by bad players in deepstacked situations, and the size of those mistakes is often more a function of stack sizes than blinds. Good player vs bad player headsup, does the good player have a higher expectation in a 3/6 game with $2000 stacks or a 5/10 game with $1000 stacks? I'm not saying the answer is clear (or always the same, it obviously depends on the players), only that it isn't obviously "the larger stack game" or "the higher blinds game."

[/ QUOTE ]

This is very true. This is basically the entire concept of swapping mistakes for NLHE:TAP. The theoretically optimal strategy may be unbeatable, but it's also less profitable.

In a game where the blinds are extremely small in relation to the stacks, say 1000bb, raising to 40xbb preflop DOES NOT make the game like a 100bb game. This is because the amount lost by the blinds folded is not the 1/4 of your raise. Therefore the cost of waiting is far less than if it was a 100bb game. Open raising far larger than the blinds is a huge mistake regardless how big the stacks are.

v good thread

[LearnedfromTV]

[ QUOTE ]
In a game where the blinds are extremely small in relation to the stacks, say 1000bb, raising to 40xbb preflop DOES NOT make the game like a 100bb game. This is because the amount lost by the blinds folded is not the 1/4 of your raise. Therefore the cost of waiting is far less than if it was a 100bb game. Open raising far larger than the blinds is a huge mistake regardless how big the stacks are.

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree with this. We're not talking about a linear scale where the blinds are irrelevant and you can double everything but the blinds and have the game stay the same, because fighting for the physical blinds is a key part of determining hand ranges, especially preflop. But double everything but the blinds and the "effective ante", or the amount of money to be fought over between winning players, goes up because the bad players have more to lose. And because postflop mistakes are much more a function of stack sizes, if bad players are sufficiently deep larger raises would seem to be optimal (though not proportional to the increase in stack size; that would be overkill. Indeed, b/c the pot size increases exponentially, subtle changes, like slightly larger opening bets and slightly larger flop bets have a large effect on final pot size).

[MDMA]

Uh, he wrote "though not necessarily optimal (given the strategies of our opponents)", which is EXACTLY what you said, only in fewer words.

[thedustbustr]

well i got up to aejone's dad post.

dan's op has to be a joke. no other explanation.

[LearnedfromTV]

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Uh, he wrote "though not necessarily optimal (given the strategies of our opponents)", which is EXACTLY what you said, only in fewer words.

[/ QUOTE ]

Jesus Christ. I know. I was clarifying the semantic difference because he thought I was saying that the aces strategy wasn't unbeatable in his sense.

Also, wtf is the point of poker if not to focus on optimal strategies given our opponents' strategies.

I apologize for elaborating on what I thought was an important and interesting point. When I've used too many words for MDMA I know I've gone too far.

[Pokamastah]

I can't believe so many here have such huge basic misconceptions at MSNL...

[Requin]

[ QUOTE ]
When I've used too many words for MDMA I know I've gone too far.


[/ QUOTE ] QFT