Quote:
Originally Posted by Barry Greenstein
Aaron,
You are making the same fundamental mathematical mistake that many poker players make. As a matter of fact, this mistake is standard in most poker literature. If the betting stopped at this point you would be right, but it doesn't.
This type of thinking would have you never folding a hand in the big blind preflop to one raise in any form of Omaha and rarely folding a hand in the big blind to a small preflop raise in hold'em. Think about it a while and you will see that your odds are going to lessen as the hand goes on.
Barry
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I don't want to misunderstand you, because it seems like I am (and feeling dumb since math is one of the things I hang my hat on), but it seems like you are disagreeing with the concept of pot odds.
Theory aside, don't we want to be putting chips into the pot when we have a positive expectation? I know that betting continues for 3 more streets, but we have the option to evaluate on each street and try to ascertain if we now have positive or negative equity for the bets we now face.
I do understand your point, that a lot of times people make bad calls and because of that it justifies future good calls. I agree that this is a leak. As an extreme example, if you call off 99% of your stack with 72, you have to call off the last 1% postflop because you are getting great odds. In the situation above, though, if you make (based on general math and player/situation-based assumptions) a good call preflop, shouldn't that be ok?
(I say theory aside because there are spots where we may want to make -ev plays on one street, be it to have the potential to bust a good player, or because we have a ton of chips and know that we can push people around or get a lot more of our chips in ahead. These situations are mainly found in NL/PL tournaments, though. In limit tournaments, I feel that unless you have a very very small stack or a very very large stack, your decisions should mainly be made based on the equity you feel you have in the hand)