Knowing your math. Basic draws.

[Wolfram]

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No, we're losing $44.


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Nope.
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4.1:1 to hit, 40:120 to call, we need 40:164 for the call to be neutral EV, if we assume 0 implied odds and that we have 9 clean outs.

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This part is true, but for some reason you're not giving us any equity in the extra pot size.

There's 160 in the pot after we call. We win 20% of the time. We have $32 in pot equity. We paid $40 for this equity, so we lost $8 in EV.

If we were getting 120 : 30, then we would be break-even. We're overpaying $10. But we still win 20% of the overpayment pot, so we don't lose all of that.

Try this thought experiment. There's 0 in the pot. We're a dog at 49.9% to win the pot. Our opponent bets a billion. We're wrong to call anything here, but we certainly don't lose a billion dollars by making this call.

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Bah, I suck at teh maths and you're right.
But.. it's very misleading to say we're losing "only" $8. $8 is 2PTBB and if we keep making this type of call it would really cut into our winrate.

We need to be confident that we have a fair amount of implied odds, and that we're not getting ourselves in trouble with dirty outs or even drawing dead.