blitzing on third and long and the problem with poker forum advice

[pete fabrizio]

A friend and I once had an argument about blitzing on third and long. As an avid reader of TMQ, he was convinced that this is usually a bad idea, and instead you should play cover. He cited all kinds of statistics about average gains, frequency of sacks and interceptions, etc: If you put all of this together, blitzing is -E.V. relative to covering. I agreed with all that. And of course my friend is not stupid, so he understood that you have to blitz sometimes to keep your opponent from exploiting your overall strategy. Fine. So where was our disagreement? He insisted that covering is the "better" play.

This is exactly the kind of thing that happens in poker forums: Someone posts a hand, and after a certain amount of discussion there is frequently some kind of consensus as to what the "best" play is, as a matter of e.v. The majority of posters will just regard this as the "answer," but a significant minority understand the idea that sometimes you may have to play differently in order to keep your play varied and to keep your opponents from being able to exploit your predictability. But most of these people still think that the consensus play is the "best" play, and that other plays should just be thrown in to mix things up, usually at some small interval.

My friend and all of these forum posters are wrong. For every difficult situation against even slightly observant opponents, the "best" play is the optimal mixed strategy, not any one of the plays that it contains, no matter how much more +e.v. they may be than others.

While this may seem like a mere semantic distinction, it has very specific consequences. E.g., in the optimal mixed strategy, the most +e.v. play may not be the play you should make most often, or even often at all. A very simple example of this is trick plays in football. Many of them have enormously high e.v. compared to run-of-the-mill passing and rushing plays, but only when they are used very very sparingly. Undoubtedly, if various football situations were posted as hands on 2+2, the responses would always say that you should run a half-back pass (or the statue of liberty). An example in Omaha might be the lone-ace bluff. The times that you run it, it should be a very profitable play. But if you do it every opportunity (or even a majority of opportunities), it will lose its value and create some very profitable situations for observant opponents.

While posters make this kind of mistake in all of the forums around here, I think it is a bigger problem in PLO since very game-theoretically complicated situations come up more often. Finding the proper solutions to these situations can be very difficult, and is not as clear-cut as analyzing hand-ranges and finding the "best" move.

[Silent A]

I think I may be one of the regular posters here whose posts may fit your above description. However, I always assume when we say "the best play is _____" we're talking about the standard play around which we build a mixed strategy.

That said, there is a near complete lack of explicit mixed strategy discussion here. It usually only pops up (indirectly) when different posters suggest different, but individually reasonable, lines.

[CallYNotRaise06]

nice post.

[Troll_Inc]

[ QUOTE ]

That said, there is a near complete lack of explicit mixed strategy discussion here. It usually only pops up (indirectly) when different posters suggest different, but individually reasonable, lines.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's mostly because people are lazy. It takes a lot of time to consider the range of hands that your opponent has in that exact situation and then calculate the proper EV based on that.

Also, most people here, their eyes glaze over when you start taking game theory, deception, etc....

With that said, this is a very useful forum to learn basic poker/PLO strategy.

[pete fabrizio]

[ QUOTE ]
However, I always assume when we say "the best play is _____" we're talking about the standard play around which we build a mixed strategy.

[/ QUOTE ]

"standard" seems to have several different meanings around here. e.g.: 1) the play you use most often in a mixed strategy; 2) the play you use without any special "reads"; or 3) the dead-obvious play that some idiot made and posted either b/c he lost or b/c he thinks he's bril.

[pete fabrizio]

[ QUOTE ]
Also, most people here, their eyes glaze over when you start taking game theory, deception, etc....

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree with this. Many people here play stakes at which these things are hardly important because most of their opponents will never ever adapt to anything they do. But even the best high stakes players/posters are surprisingly clueless.

[Sarahanj]

good post. Among all the really bad posts at twoplustwo this is the stuff im here for

[gergery]

standard

-g

edit: woo, i crack myself up

[gergery]

Funny you should post this. Second time I've been thinking alot about something just as you post on it.

So we if agree that the best approach is a mixed strategy, how do we decide on the weightings your choices?

as example, let's take dry ace bluffing in plo. how often should you do it? which factors and in what ratios are most important? You've got the following to consider:

how often you're:
dealt dry ace
dealt "wet" ace
have other strong hand on the board like set
how they'll play weaker flushes/sets
how you've been playing recently
how they play recently
how light they'll call
etc.

-g

[The Gift Of Gab]

Pete,

This is an excellent post. Much of the reason for the uselessness of the HSNL forum is that there's little discussion of balance and adaptation, which are essentially the entire game at high stakes and especially in short-handed games. I understand why this is true: a long time ago I stopped wanting to tell my opponents how I was adapting to their play.

My only quibble with your post is that in a game as complicated as PLO no one knows what the optimal mixed strategy is, and that in practice what you're playing is your best guess at the optimal mixed strategy against your specific opponents. This is often a strategy that you know is exploitable but that you guess your opponents don't have the information, knowledge or courage to exploit. In a big bet game where showdowns are rare, everyone is groping in the dark.

Taking your example a little further, imagine you bluff too often with the dry ace and people start noticing. This drives up your profit when you actually have the nut flush and allows you to start value betting big non-nut flushes harder since now you're getting called by small flushes or even two pair. Maybe you make more money even though in isolation your dry ace bluffs are unprofitable. Like a loss leader in a supermarket.

I don't think I'm telling you anything you don't already know, but talking about these things keeps the game interesting to me.