marginal but +EV moves whilst deep

[sh58]

an interesting juxtaposition of posts occured today.

i had been reading the sick hand of the day

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showfl...=0#Post13078301

and then i was reading seabeasts well post from the SSNL master sticky, and he recomended this hand as very interesting

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showfl...rt=all&vc=1


it got me to thinking about marginal decisions when you are very deep stacked and how it affects your risk of ruin


i'm not very good at maths so someone will have to help me with the calcuations (by help, i mean actually do them)

say we are in the set of 888's hand and we are the villain (who held KKK). now imagine that villain is samoleus and benzoor is bldswtrs. samoleus shoves the river with air repping a set because he believes that bld is good enough to lay down 888 or 444 in this spot.

and i know this isn't entirely accurate but imagine it was a PSB. so basically sam has to get his opponent to fold his set 1/3 of the time to break even.

so imagine that bld is good enough to fold the set, and that he will fold it around 40% of the time.

so this PSB is clearly +EV for sam




so my question is: because we are 500BB deep then this play may be too risky to do as it massively increases our risk of ruin (say we have a 20BI bankroll, we have just risked 1/4 of our bankroll in 1 hand)

does everyone agree with my analysis?


what implications does this have when you are playing deepstacked. should you avoid marginal +EV gambles unless you have a massive bankroll?

can someone do the maths and work out how big a bankroll you would need in the example to have an acceptable risk of ruin (say 1%, or 5%, doesn't really matter i spose)?


sorry if my post wasn't very well written, i just rushed it out w/o thinking it through carefully

[sixhigh]

Interesting thoughts, _but_ if sam bets/raises the river pot sized with air representing the nuts and knows bld is always having a set he needs him to fold it at least 50% of the time. - He's risking one pot to win one pot.
Bld on the other hand only needs to be good 33% of the time to make the call +EV.

Deep stacks and big pots often narrow both ranges a lot. But I still wouldn't count on my opponent being able to fold a set without straight or flush possibilities on the board. You're basically asking him to lay down the 3rd or 4th nuts.

Obviously if you find a player weak enough to make lots of hero laydowns, maybe because he's playing with scared money, bluffing and threatening him becomes very profitable. But in this case you'd find tons of better spots to throw him off a hand.

And yeah when playing deeper stacked you definitely need more of a bankroll than just 2k BBs. But it doesn't necessarily mean only the nut hands go to showdown. For example if you find someone who very frequently shoves the river you will lower your calling standards. So tightness and efficiency of big bluffs don't only depend on the size of the stacks, but also very massively on your opponent and on the flow of the game.

But having said this, I believe most regular players aren't used to play with 300+BB effective Stacks and they're probably overadjusting down to an extremely tight level once the get big. Not necessarily because they fear some kind of increased risk of ruin, but because a 600+BB pot suddenly looks freaking big and they just have no experience with those situations and how their opponent adjusts to those stack sizes.

[sh58]

ooh. yeah i think i got it the wrong way round. so sam would need bld to fold more than 50% of the time.

i was just using that as an example of a marginal spot, i think the circumstances would have to be pretty weird to try something like that

i was also using the 20BI as an example. but assume we are using a professional 50BI bankroll playing 100BB games and end up playing 500BB deep. then you should change your strategy should you, both the take advantage of how your opponents change theirs, and because some +EV decisions may become too high variance for your bankroll?

just throwing out some ideas really...

[Keyser.]

who plays with only a 20 BI bankroll these days?

anyway, your points are definitely valid, like trying to make people fold sets for 500bbs is going to cause some volatility, but in general I think deeper games actually have less variance.

I'm not certain about this, but I have been thinking about it lately. Basically while 200+ bbs deep you're rarely flipping preflop. Like with 100bbs you'll be getting it all in with AK vs. QQ and vice versa a bunch, but since deep a greater percent of the stacks get in post-flop where (ideally if you're a good player) your equity will be well above the 54% or whatever it is when you flip with QQ.

[sixhigh]

Knowing your opponent just switched to weak tight mode for the big bets gives you massively +EV spots.

I guess this is more of a psychological question. Probably both players would just like the opportunity to do business once the money is in the middle [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]. But you'd definitely need a higher tolerance for variance once the stacks get deep.

Let me state it this way: A player is mentally used to his level of variance in his game. Say he plays NL200, then he might be used to a standard deviation of $150/100h. Whatever being used to a standard deviation means. Now with increasing stacks the SD also increases (basically linear). If our player finds himself playing with $600 stacks he might have a SD of $450/100h if he played optimally. But his risk aversion might dictate him to play with a lower SD and the only way to do that is giving up close gambles or to refuse to get more than a certain amount into the pot without the nuts. Say our player is mentally set for a maximum SD of $300/100h - in this case he'd refuse to do anything that increased his SD above this level. He wouldn't risk more than that w/o certainty.

Just throwing some ideas [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img].

[sh58]

[ QUOTE ]
who plays with only a 20 BI bankroll these days?

anyway, your points are definitely valid, like trying to make people fold sets for 500bbs is going to cause some volatility, but in general I think deeper games actually have less variance.

I'm not certain about this, but I have been thinking about it lately. Basically while 200+ bbs deep you're rarely flipping preflop. Like with 100bbs you'll be getting it all in with AK vs. QQ and vice versa a bunch, but since deep a greater percent of the stacks get in post-flop where (ideally if you're a good player) your equity will be well above the 54% or whatever it is when you flip with QQ.

[/ QUOTE ]

i think you are right to a certain extent thinking about it. because of how agressive the games on party are and me having a pretty aggro image usually, i am flipping ALOT preflop. to normal players i am pretty much not folding AK+, QQ+ ever, and often get it in with worse for value or as a bluff. also the amount of preflop flips for 50BB and less is pretty high.

so i can well imagine the overall variance may be lower. i think mixing in your thoughts with the other poster, a good agressive, fearless player could absolutely crush bigstack games if his opponents play too weaktight because of the stacks.

obviously my 20BI comment was merely an example, i don't think any serious player/professional would have such a small bankroll at NL100+, i was just showing that just 1 massive pot is eating a large portion of your roll

[Keyser.]

[ QUOTE ]
a good agressive, fearless player could absolutely crush bigstack games if his opponents play too weaktight because of the stacks.

[/ QUOTE ]

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