STOP SAYING you are raising or betting for information!

[bluesbassman]

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What do you mean "exploiting fold equity"? It doesn't make a lot of sense to describe things this way, IMHO. When I push river big % of my equity (if not all of it), is what we call "fold equity". That is true.

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Fold equity = (probability opponent will fold) x (chips you win if he does). You made bets on earlier streets to increase the values in that equation. Hence, you were exploiting fold equity.

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However, the previous bets are not "exploiting fold equity". They are bets that are meant to build the pot as that on the river I'll have the biggest possible pot I can possibly push into profitably and win it uncontested (river is obv a bluff). However these 2 earlier bets are definitely not value bets or bluffs in any normal sense.

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I agree the bets on earlier streets are not bluffs. They are bets to increase (i.e. exploit) fold equity. Not the same thing.

That's why I said it's more useful to think about showdown vs fold equity rather than "value" bets vs bluffs.

I would define a "bluff" to be a bet that represents a hand other than what you actually have. It can be placed to exploit either showdown OR fold equity. In the hand above, you bluff on the river to cash in on your fold equity.

Sometimes, a good play is to overbet the pot on the river with a monster to represent a weak hand. In that case, you are bluffing to exploit showdown equity.

[gobboboy]

Justin, of course you can come up with other reasons to be betting and raising, but how much does trying to impress a girl affect the EV of your decision? What I'm trying to say is that you can get the same amount of value if not more and you can also lose a lot less chips if you take different actions than betting and raising in order to figure out where you are. Often checking or calling can give you a lot of information because you get to see what your opponent does next and you get to see the next card.

I'm not trying to argue that there are only two types of bets and if you don't know what one you're doing makes you an idiot... far from it. There are bets to induce raises, there are bets to affect your image, there are bets to do a lot of things but the most important thing is knowing what you want your bet to accomplish and then knowing what you're going to do with it. But raising to 'gain information' of how strong your opponent's hand is doesn't make sense because you could easily gain that information by doing other things and not bloating the pot with what is clearly a marginal hand.

It seems like people only try to 'see where they are' when they have a very marginal hand but just like to bet/bet/bet when they have the nuts, when it's just as important to practice hand reading in that scenario.

I'm not trying to stir up an argument and plant concrete rules, I just want people to know what their bet is going to accomplish in the long run before they make it.

[PrayingMantis]

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What do you mean "exploiting fold equity"? It doesn't make a lot of sense to describe things this way, IMHO. When I push river big % of my equity (if not all of it), is what we call "fold equity". That is true.

[/ QUOTE ]

Fold equity = (probability opponent will fold) x (chips you win if he does). You made bets on earlier streets to increase the values in that equation. Hence, you were exploiting fold equity.

[ QUOTE ]
However, the previous bets are not "exploiting fold equity". They are bets that are meant to build the pot as that on the river I'll have the biggest possible pot I can possibly push into profitably and win it uncontested (river is obv a bluff). However these 2 earlier bets are definitely not value bets or bluffs in any normal sense.

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree the bets on earlier streets are not bluffs. They are bets to increase (i.e. exploit) fold equity. Not the same thing.

That's why I said it's more useful to think about showdown vs fold equity rather than "value" bets vs bluffs.

I would define a "bluff" to be a bet that represents a hand other than what you actually have. It can be placed to exploit either showdown OR fold equity. In the hand above, you bluff on the river to cash in on your fold equity.

Sometimes, a good play is to overbet the pot on the river with a monster to represent a weak hand. In that case, you are bluffing to exploit showdown equity.

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Did you actually just explain to me what "fold equity" is? OK.

In any case, you can see my previous reply (which I mistakenly wrote as a reply to your reply to ZJ's post): it is obvious, also to you, that the flop and turn bets are not bluffs or v-bets in the normal sense. That's all. No need to repeat so many times on the term "showdown equity". It is not needed in the discussion of this particular simple example, and is completely irrelevant.

Trying to insist that any bet MUST be one of these two kinds, is missing a lot, IMHO. And this has nothing to do with "betting/raising for information".

[bluesbassman]

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There's more to poker and equity than just show down equity and fold equity.

What if someone has a gun to your head and tells you to bet, and you bet to save your life?



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Obviously, I'm assuming this discussion refers only to poker strategy within the rules, and the only goal being to maximize $$ equity in a tournament.

If calling 2 all-ins on the bubble of stacks which cover me with 32o will induce Jessica Alba to sleep with me, then yes, I make that call every time. And I suppose I concede defeat, for that decision has nothing to do with fold or showdown equity.

[ZeeJustin]

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but how much does trying to impress a girl affect the EV of your decision?

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Depends how hot she is. LDO

[woohoo88]

This reminds me of the debate on whether Pluto is a planet or not.

What it all boils down to (as Sherman said in SSMTT) is EV. If a bet is not +EV you shouldn't be making it. The rest is semantics.

[LearnedfromTV]

This thread has turned into total clusterfuck.

LISTEN

1. Every action we take in a poker hand is complex. We attempt to choose the action that maximizes our expectation, a singular goal, but in order for us to understand what we are doing we have to think in categories. Value bet, bluff, semibluff, are the most common ones that attempt to describe our bet in terms the relative value of our hand and our opponent's hand. C-bet, double barrel, and so on, attempt to describe our bet in terms of its relation to the pattern of prior actions in the hand. If you really look closely at any of those terms you realize that each of them captures a variety of different situations, and that trying to jam every situation in a small set of terms will cause us to miss some of the complexity. To best capture what's going on, sometimes we shift categories; we call a bet a cbet because it follows-up a preflop raise, without focusing on what degree of semibluff it is. We may call a flop bet with AA that is usually getting called by a worse pair a "value bet" and place it mentally in the same category as a river value bet, even though there are some aspects of this value bet that are different.

2. Gobbo's intent was, or should have been, to separate one small piece of the big equation - the fact that at a decision point we may gain more information about our opponent's range from one action than from another - and point out that in the vast majority of cases, this piece of the equation is not very important relative to all of the pieces that deal with maximizing expectation versus the range we believe our opponent to have before we bet.

3. He did this while making an unfortunate (but completely understandable given his goal in making the post) crude separation of all bets that maximize expectation versus a range into two categories: value bets and bluffs. Yes, it is more complex than this. Yes, the discussion is interesting. But it isn't directly relevant to his point.

4. This thread includes at least ten different approaches to drawing the lines between different types of bets, most of the people drawing those lines don't understand how their lines are different from other people's.

5. A lot of people are conflating "I get information from this bet which improves my future decisions" and "The main reason I make this bet is to receive that information." Every bet we make will be followed by an opponent response; the fact that you use that response to help make your next decision does not mean that the information you received was a main reason for your bet. What matters is the relative quality of information. The most reasonable way to define what part of your action's intent is "for information" is by comparing the quality of information from that action with the quality of information you would get from your other options. If two decisions are EV-neutral except that one will make it easier to read your opponent's hand, then you choose the action which yields better information, and that difference in information is main reason for your choice. This doesn't happen very often.

[baltostar]

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I'll even go out on a limb and say it's very rare (maybe even impossible), for a bet to be purely for value if it isn't on the river.

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This is similar to what I said earlier:

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In fact, very few pure bluffs are made, and even fewer pure value bets.

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In actual practice, you are only making a pure value bet when you have the nuts.

[LearnedfromTV]

p.s. "fold equity" is more misused than most of these terms because while it is true that (% he folds)*($ in pot) is a piece of the equation that tells us whether a bet gains or loses $, it is incredibly important WHICH HANDS HE FOLDS AND WHAT HE WOULD HAVE DONE WITH THEM IF YOU HADN'T MADE THE BET THAT GETS HIM TO FOLD THEM.

If I ever post a rant like gobbo's, it will be about fold equity.

[stealthmunk]

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but how much does trying to impress a girl affect the EV of your decision?

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Depends how hot she is. LDO

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I <3 ZeeJ's return to HSMTT!

ZeeJustin for mod!