QQ from upfront early in Warmup...Is this ok?

[Ansky]

Baltostar your way of calculating pot odds is wrong. It's as wrong as 2x2= 5. I just don't know how else to say it. Some things you argue about are more opinion than fact, and while you are almost always wrong about those things, at least an argument can be made. In this case, you are just wrong, no argument.

[eurythmech]

Special Baltostar forum 4tw.
This is so sick, you know before reading a thread that he's trolled in it, because there's a bazillion replies to a seemingly noncontroversial topic.

[djk123]

wow how did this thread get so long. 86bb effective plus sb and bb you can def call.

[IWEARGOGGLES]

Hey guys, what's up?

And call.

See ya later!

IWEARGOGGLES

[eBo]

OP- Please call. Villain could have ANYTHING.

Balty- How did you deduce that villian stacks off 33% of the time?

[Todd Terry]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
balto,
the time to worry about the issues you bring up is before you put the first chip in the pot. So, in this hand for example, when you raise QQ to 600 you need to consider the possibility that you will be putting in more chips than just the 600 and its implications for playing the hand. After you have put the 600 in, and the action comes back to you facing a reraise, you need to consider your immediate odds, which is the amount of money in the pot now vs how much you now have to put in. Part of that consideration of course is how likely you will be to lose chips after the flop (negative implied odds), and how likely it is you will make additional money (implied odds). You are right in that many players make mistakes BEFORE they put the first chip in the pot because they dont consider how many more chips will continue to go as action progresses. That does not change the fact that at the current decision points you cant use the money you've already put in to calculate your odds because you dont get that money back. In this example right now you have to put 1200 more and see a flop (with no risk of putting anything more in the pot before the flop), or fold and put in zero more.


To be fair to you, you are not bad at pointing out mistakes players commonly make. However, and this is why everybody including myself is losing patience with you, you constantly attribute your observations to your own brilliance at spotting the communities problems, instead of learning the fundamentals of poker well and coming to understand that the issues you are spotting have been brought up before, and talked about, and are generally grasped by good players.

[/ QUOTE ]

Please believe me, I have been diligently studying poker for 2 years, including every respected book written on NLHE (just now starting on Ed Miller's latest.)

You have to understand I have multiple degrees in math, engineering, computer science, and I've been gambling in varous forms for almost 15 years, and I can't help it if I notice serious flaws in mechanisms of thought that have become de rigeur in the poker community.

The common pattern of ignoring relative stack risk when deciding to play across an event has been bothering me for nearly all of the two years I've been studying poker. Relative stack risk as in "relative to other similar scenarios". (In my Scenarios 1,2 above, immediately prior to the event Scenario 2 has twice the stack risk as Scenario 1.)

Implied odds (required and given) and reverse implied odds (required and given) for playing across an event are badly flawed tools. You can not just rely on the calculations. And yet players routinely use cost-to-call to calculate implied odds given across event risk, compare the result to implied odds required (typically also mis-calculated), and base their decisions on it.

Either the criteria is way off or it is being badly mis-used.

For those decisions (only) where probability of achieving the most desirous outcome is *primarily* dependent on event risk, I recommend basing implied odds calculations on the total hand risk your stack is incurring. This too is an imperfect tool, but it's better than what most players are doing.

The way to test if a criteria is logical is to isolation test it. You can't involve other criteria, such as hero somehow magically deducing at a decision point that a re-raise is going to occur. (And this is exactly what hero would need to deduce to correctly calculate his reverse implied odds.)

If a decision criteria for playing across event risk is to be useful, it should not incur radical swings in validity when successively applied to similar scenarios.

In my min-re-raises example, a player is offered a sequence of propositions, each of which is logical to accept according to his criteria for playing across event risk. He therefore accepts each proposition but nonetheless ultimately finds himself significantly overpaying to participate in the event risk.

In fact, the growing stack only serves to propel him forward to his doom if he bases decisions on cost-to-call: not only is he being given sufficient implied odds at each decision point, but additionally his required implied odds multiplier is being reduced, plus his pot odds are increasing !

The only conclusion that can be reached is that the player's criteria is either illogical or mis-used.

[/ QUOTE ]

His criteria is obviously illogical, since he is not taking into account the possibility that he will be reraised, which he should. That is not an issue in this hand, period, since Shannon is closing the action preflop.

Additionally, here Shannon put in 600 chips not to flop a set but as a value bet, and perhaps to thin the field, because he believed that QQ was the best hand. Then, circumstances changed, and he was faced with a decision of whether to risk 1200 to flop a set. Even if you choose to ignore the indisputable economic fact that he's risking 1200 here since the 600 he put in no longer belongs to him (which 100% of people with degrees in economics, mathematics, probability or related fields would quickly agree with -- if you know anyone fitting this criteria, call them up and see if they agree with you), he is risking only 1200 to try to flop a set, because the first 600 was not put in to try to flop a set.

[baltostar]

Responding to a bunch of different posts:

-- I'm not really commenting on this hand specifically.


-- Implied odds calculations are not facts, they're frameworks which you have to build-out. You have to decide if stacking an opponent is realistic, or some smaller max payoff. You have to decide the likelihood of achieving max payof if you hit your set. If tweaking a framework solves a problem then why not consider it ?


-- We're testing the validity of a criteria, not a player. We can't test a player unless we had a zillion rules describing the player.

The criteria supposedly tells us whether we have enough potential reward to justify taking additional risk. However, the min-re-raisers test clearly shows that successive applications of the criteria ultimately produce an undesirable result.


-- As I stated earlier, I agree that any previous cost-to-call belongs to the pot, not the player.

However, the problem with not considering total stack risk to participate in an event is that players tend to not consider relative stack risk for any given opportunity.

The importance of relative stack risk considerations become apparent if you scale up the scenarios:

Imagine a tournament where every time you limp or call to play for set value you are not raised.

Now imagine an identical tournament but where every time you limp or call to play for set value you are min-raised and you call the raise (because you calculate your given implied odds based on cost-of-call and they always exceed your calculated required implied-odds).

In the 2nd tournament, on avg lose you twice as much stack utility each time you miss your set. You are much more likely to do well in the 1st tournament than in the 2nd.

Now play 1000 type 1 tournaments, and a 1000 type 2s. All else equal, the type 1 tournaments have significantly larger $EV.

The real problem with only concentrating on cost-to-call is that players tend to get pulled into assuming excessive relative stack risk. Opportunities tend to look better than they really are when rated on a relative basis.

If you have some other way to adjust for this problem, more power to you. What works for me when deciding when to play across events is to consider total chip outlay in relation to max payoff.

[NYWalker]

Todd,

Excellent post!


[ QUOTE ]
You are faced with a decision as to whether to put in a specific number of chips, 1200.

The "implied odds",... are what you expect to win if you hit, multiplied by the percentage that you hit. It's really that simple. And flopping a set or better is 7.5:1...


[/ QUOTE ]

(edit: faucoult had mentioned this to me last year when I asked about AA runs into set on the flop...)

My play on the flop is very different, so I'm not going to discuss that. But, I call pf here.

[Proofrock]

balto -- I think everybody here understands the point you are making. However, I think you may be missing a point that everybody is trying to communicate to you, so let me give it a shot.

The idea you're outlining here is important when you're initially deciding to enter the pot. Since poker is a game of incomplete information you estimate whether it's +EV to do so based on a number of factors, including, among other things, how much you expect to get paid on average and how often you'll be raised preflop. This should be taken into consideration before you first enter the pot. However, if it does get raised (which you've previously estimated will happen x% of the time), you are now faced with another decision. You now ask yourself the same questions: given the amount that is ALREADY in the pot and the amount you HAVE LEFT in your stack, as well as what the action that's taken place indicates about expected future action, what is the best decision NOW.

Effectively, it's the same decision process at each point, except with every further action you have more information to refine your evaluations.

In your thought experiment in which you're sandwiched between minraisers, after the first iteration you should realize that your likelihood of getting reraised is HUGE, cutting way down on your odds to continue, so you fold unless you have a monster.

However, this thought experiment doesn't apply to the case at hand.
(1) When initially raising QQ it's not just for set value -- you will definitely be called by worse hands, and the vast majority of the time nobody has KK+. The raise the first time around includes the unlikely possibility that you'll be reraised, but it's relatively insignificant.

(2) After getting reraised, you need to re-evaluate: What are the pot odds? What range of hands do you put Villain on? Given this range, what is your equity? What are your (newly-revised) anticipated implied odds vs. this range if you choose to continue with the hand? How do the actions of folding, calling, and raising compare now given all this new information.

The differences between (1) and (2) are that the amount in the pot is different, the amount in each of your stacks is different, Villain's range has changed, and this time you're closing the action. The thought process is the same, but several of the variables have changed.

[dumbndumb]

[ QUOTE ]

The "implied odds", which is really the implied expectation, are what you expect to win if you hit, multiplied by the percentage that you hit. It's really that simple. And flopping a set or better is 7.5:1...


[/ QUOTE ]

Does this mean if villain had you covered you would call mostly any amount as long as there were 7.5:1 ratio of what you can win and how much it is to call? This can't be right.

I am trying to develop a shorter hand way of figuring out when to call with small pairs for set odds (I only play live so don't fiddle w/numbers as much as I should). How does your stack and villain's play come into this equations (I realize with smaller stacks and w/a villain that won't stack off w/1 pair calling is less desirable, but how do you account for them mathmatically?).