CARDRUNNERS

What's Your Edge

 
Tag: whore
February 08, 2008

i cant beat 100nl at the moment.  so i'll be cashing out some of my roll from cake and trying to whore it around.

andoutsomerollcakewhore

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January 25, 2009

Poker is a whore. But I’m sure you all know this by now. I have run absurdly bad against Gus; I should be up several 100k against him, but instead I’m down several, so I’m going to be playing a little lower for a while and hopefully I can reset my luckbox. It’s all pretty frustrating though, PLO is just a really annoying game at times. Lately it’s been feeling like one step forward, two steps back. But enough of that, I’ll talk about some more abstract stuff today. I’ll continue my poker story probably in my next blog post.
 

There are lots of ideas that I have that I tend to mull over in my mind but don’t really have discussions with anybody about, since they tend to be pretty abstract or inconsequential and don’t really make for good conversation fodder, so I figure that a blog is probably a pretty good place to inform some of these meditations.  So the topic of the day is variance. Obviously, everybody knows what variance is. There are two main topics that I think I want to talk about, and the first one has more of a PSA feel to it, so I think I’ll talk about it first since it probably is more relevant to the average blog reader.
 

To put the thesis simply, variance takes a lot of forms, and people don’t really tend to acknowledge variance in every form it takes. The word we essentially use for variance in poker is “running bad” (since nobody ever cares to talk about when they’re running good; when we’re running good we either tell people we’re crushing or don’t bother to talk to other people about how we’re doing). People say that they’re running bad in a number of different situations, the most prevalent of which is when they get their money in good, and their opponent ends up sucking out to win the pot. To almost any poker player, this is what it means to run bad. The other situation when people think they run bad is when they get their money into a spot where they’re usually making money but they end up e behind. People think they run bad when they get KK vs AA, they think they run bad when they get a set under a set, flush under flush, etc. And most annoyingly, they think they run bad when a stupid program like PokerEV tells them that they’re running under expectation. Now, most of these events are reasonable indicators of running bad, quite obviously. But none of these situations are actually synonymous with running bad. Here’s a simple fact that for some reason people refuse to understand: you cannot run bad and still be winning. Period. If you think that you’re just so good and awesome that you were running bad today but you still won because you’re just so good and awesome, you’re wrong. You didn’t run bad. You may have gotten more KK vs. AA’s then you would on a normal day, or maybe you got oversetted twice and still managed to win which has convinced you that you’re God’s gift to poker, but this whole way of thinking about variance is just deluded and overly simplistic.
 

For the hell of it, let’s try to break down why exactly we think we’re running bad when we get KK vs. QQ and lose. I’ve thought about this a bit, and it seems that the simplest way to analyze this situation in terms of a basic impulse is simply this: “I found myself in a situation in which I am typically rewarded, but that reward was withheld.” Every time we as poker players get dealt KK and get all-in preflop, we of course have a very strong expectation of getting rewarded. After all, when we get KK all-in preflop against QQ, we win a buyin more than 4 out of 5 times, so it’s a perfectly rational association that we build between getting KK all-in preflop and getting rewarded. In a (gratuitously cynical) sense, we become like Pavlov’s dog – the expectation to win the pot is like salivating when Pavlov rings the bell – the sound of the bell being equivalent to getting dealt KK. And so, getting upset about losing a KK vs. QQ is analogous to Pavlov (poker in our case) ringing the bell, but not bringing us the food we were expecting. Now, I don’t know if the emotional palette of dogs extends to feeling frustration, but certainly we humans do when our expectations are so betrayed. (And of course, betrayed is an interesting word to use here – maybe our relationship to poker is a lot closer to a dog’s relationship to Pavlov than we’re ready to admit, but that’s a grimmer discussion for another day.)
 

So essentially, the emotion of having our expectations betrayed makes us feel that we’re running bad. As I said before, these events are generally good indicators of running bad so it’s not irrational by any means to assume that you’re running bad when you lose KK vs. QQ. But running bad doesn’t mean anything unless you define it over a window of time. You can’t just run bad in a vacuum, you have to run bad over some period of time, whether it be a hand or a session or a month. Now, let’s take a look at running bad over one hand – how should we objectively (rather than emotionally) judge what it means to run bad? Well, running bad means simply running under expectation. So in the course of this hand, we have to look at what our standard expectation is – clearly, we got dealt KK and our opponent got dealt QQ, and so we’ll win 4/5 of the time. So we’re running under expectation when we lose, because in this situation we should usually win. So then we’re running bad? Yep, we sure are. Okay, let’s move on to the next window. Say we play a session, and we get dealt AA/KK five times vs QQ/JJ, getting it in good every time, and we win three times and lose two times;  those were the major hands, everything else essentially broke even.  Are we running bad? Well, again, clearly we should be winning 4/5 of the time when we get in an overpair against a lower pair, and we only won 3/5 of the time. Again, we’re running under expectation for this situation.  Now, just extend this analogy over a month – say you’re in the red with KK and AA but still ended up on the month, blah blah blah, you get the picture, running bad. So, in all three of these situations I agree that the conclusion is that we’re running bad – but why exactly are these analyses nonetheless incorrect?
 

Well, the simple answer is that they’re setting constants that aren’t really constant. Let me explain what I mean. Look back at the hand where we get dealt KK – when we analyzed that hand, we were looking at the equity of KK against QQ. But if we want to isolate how we’re running – our expectation alone, then we have to recognize that it’s arbitrary how much we decide to fix what’s constant in the hand. In the situation we looked at, we decided to fix the ranges after getting all-in preflop, and that’s where we analyzed the equity and then decided who was running bad (and this precedent of course is established by using things like Pokerstove and hand calculators and PokerEV and whatnot). But that setup is arbitrary: why don’t we freeze the hand after the flop is dealt (say the flop is Q 7 5)? Clearly in all hands where we get all-in preflop with KK vs QQ and the flop comes out Q 7 5, we’re usually going to lose, so in that situation we’re not running bad at all. That sounds a little absurd, but why is that analysis invalid? Well, you could say, “the flop comes out differently, that’s just one of the many possible flops, and since you don’t have any control over what flop comes out when you get all-in preflop, you should freeze the hand at that point.” Well, that’s the only counterargument I think that could get anybody out of the Q 7 5 argument, but that argument actually ends up collapsing in on itself too. Here’s why:  we have established with this argument that it’s okay to unfreeze a hand and move the moment of constancy (I’ll  use this term to refer to the point at which the hand is frozen) earlier in the hand. The reason that we provided was because we had no control over how the flop came out. But once we start to talk about control in poker, we set ourselves upon a slippery slope. So by this line of reasoning, if we want to move the moment of constancy up a little higher, we just have to isolate a point after which we have no control over the results. Well, let’s take a look at when our opponent flips up his hand – he shows us QQ, but we had no control over what hand our opponent ended up showing up there with. If he had AA, then our equity would not have been 80%, nor if he had AK. So clearly we had no control over him having QQ, so we can move the moment of constancy up one point – to the point of getting KK all-in preflop against his handrange (we could of course, if we so desired, recalculate our equity for getting all-in against his range in general). But we can go even farther. We had no control over whether or not our opponent would jam over us after we 4-bet him – he could have been 3-bet bluffing us and just have folded his hand, so since we had no control over the fact that he happened to have a hand worth getting it in with after we 4-bet him preflop, we move the moment of constancy up even higher; now all we have is that we 4-bet him after he 3-bet us, which of course is lower EV than getting it all-in preflop. But really, if we think about, we didn’t have any control over the fact that he 3-bet us in the first place – he just happened to have a hand. All we had control over was our initial raise in the first place. So we move the moment of constancy up again – all we were really entitled to was however much money we win when we get dealt KK and raise preflop (the average BB won per KK is like, what, 4 or something?). But then we take the final leap – we had no control over getting dealt KK. In reality, the only thing we had control over was deciding whether or not to sit out preflop. By deciding not to sit out that hand, we certainly weren’t entitled to getting KK all-in against QQ – nor were we entitled to getting all-in with KK against his handrange, nor getting 3-bet, nor getting even dealt KK in the first place. So what are we entitled to? Well, simple – whatever our average winning per hand is.
 

Boom.  And at this point, the argument should make perfect sense. Every time you play 5 hands, your EV over 5 hands is your EV per hand * 5 hands. So every time you win a buyin over 5 hands, no matter what the situation was or how bad your opponent is, you are running way over expectation. Well, you might think that this sort of thinking doesn’t allow room for being able to play better or worse affecting your expectation – in reality, the games you’re playing in, the opponents you’re up against, and the quality of your play at the time all have an effect of your EV per hand. And you’d be right in that regard – but you have to recognize the extent to which we have control over these things. It’s important to realize that at any moment you’re playing, the set of all strategies that you’d use in response to a any situation is already embedded in your brain – in a way, you don’t have control over that. That is, you can’t suddenly “decide” to use a strategy that you don’t know is a good strategy, or “decide” to not make a mistake in a spot where you’re already predisposed to make a mistake. So, for example, if you tend to call too many 3-bets with weak hands, in that moment you have no control over this leak of yours; it’s a part of your average EV in that moment. Over time you can change these predispositions and make your game slowly stronger as you gain more and more good habits and break bad ones, and your EV per hand will slowly increase over time. But in any moment, the factors over which you exert genuine control as a poker player are actually surprisingly small. I think they are limited to these three things – one, how hard you choose to table select. Now note, this is not choosing the table – it’s meaningless to analyze the EV of yourself in a game with 5 superdonks, because you had no control over such a table existing; you only had control over your table selection standards. So you’ll have an average EV per hand for a certain threshold of table selection. The second thing you have control over is your tilt / self-awareness. This is quite obvious – no matter what game you’re playing in or how much you’re up or down, you always have control over whether to take a short break, whether to get somebody to talk to you to get your head back on straight, whether to quit the game and cool off, or even just take a moment to re-analyze the game and yourself and reset your clarity. This is what decides whether you’re thinking through every hand or simply auto-piloting through. And then the third thing you have control over is just when you play, and for how long (which overlaps somewhat with the other two). These three factors are the only things that you as a poker player have genuine control over – everything else is out of your control. Who you play, how bad they are, how long the fish stays, how many KK vs. AA’s or AA vs. KK’s you get, how many times you soulread the fish, and how many times you bluff off a stack to your table nemesis – these things are only in your control as much as these three factors are in your control. Everything else is simply permutations that were already there, they are simply one of the many possibilities that could happen given the set of your intuitions about poker and the way you react to different scenarios. So, to put the point simply, your EV over any session is simply whatever the EV is of:
 

  • You playing with your game selection standards
  • You playing in whatever state of mind you’re in
  • You playing when and however long you play

And that’s it. Thinking about what your EV was when you got all-in with KK vs. QQ, or what your EV was when you played heads up with that huge fish, or what your EV was when you made that monstrous soulread, the simple fact is that none of these analyses actually tell you your true expected value. And certainly your PokerEV graph doesn’t. The reality is that your EV is going to be, on average (with the three aforementioned factors presumed constant, which they aren’t) whatever your winrate is. That’s it. If you’re winning 50 cents a hand, and you played 1000 hands, then your EV was on average $500, give or take based on those three factors. So, if you won $1000 over that session but you lost two stacks with AA, you were still running good, because you were simply fortunate to run better in the scenarios you were given other than the two AA stacks. Same thing if you’re up 100k over a big sample and your PokerEV graph shows you’re supposed to be up 20k more, there’s a pretty good chance that you ran good on the whole to have gotten yourself into enough positive scenarios beyond the ones where you got your money in good and lost.
 

So ultimately, what’s the point of this big long rant? Well, the point is – let’s simply define running under expectation as winning less than you ought to, and running bad as actually running significantly less than you ought to. Under these definitions, and referencing the fact that of course variance for everyone has grown tremendously in the last year of poker – if you’re winning at all, then you’re not running bad. Ask one of the many extremely good players who are genuinely running bad, losing over large samples of hands, over months at a time,  but who are still much better than you and have higher genuine edges in the games that they play – they are fucking running bad, and let’s reserve the word for those people out of respect for how nice it is just to not lose money. Lots of people don’t appreciate winning 1/10th of what they consider to be a good month, and allow me to set those people straight by saying that those people are bitches, and if they actually ran bad (or remembered what it was like when they ran bad), they’d appreciate just not being down and would suck it up.
 

So, all-in-all, if you’re not running bad, then shut the fuck up and be grateful. Poker is a whore, but she’s like one of those whores in a movie or something who everybody thinks is stupid and doesn’t know anything but actually knows all of the secrets of life if you ask her. Even whores have something to teach if you’re willing to learn.
 

Well, there was another topic I wanted to talk about, but this ended up taking me way longer than I expected. So I guess I’ll post that later (lol). Procrastination FTW. Next post I’ll try to make the continuation of the previous blog post though. So, until next time.

Read More
pokerwhoreis a

Jan 25, 09 23:51:35

Wow,

Just wow. Great post. Really makes me think about running bad differently.

Great to have you on the CR team...

xlengthy





Jan 25, 09 23:53:57

blog to long

Your blog is interesting but way to long for the everyday reader.

TristranThorn





Jan 26, 09 00:07:51

Love your blog, but help your readers out with some paragraph breaks. Yikes!

Przytula





Jan 26, 09 02:20:42

best blog post ive ever read!

tuckstone197





Jan 26, 09 02:45:06

wow. I am fucking running bad.

IAmDestroyer





Jan 26, 09 02:57:29

blog more often

gods gift to poker instruction... P.S name three items commonly on a smorgasboard

maxel100





Jan 26, 09 03:21:47

Really good content, but I have to admit it was somewhat hard to read and follow. But I like it that way :)

seriouschris





Jan 26, 09 03:35:36

Thanks a lot for writing this.

overbet56





Jan 26, 09 03:51:31

I really enjoy listening to your thought processes. I constantly throw mental kleenex to my NLH opponents when they are whining... I've been playing slightly +ev PLO over the last 6 months and am down 300k. No one understands variance until they try 6 tabling 5/10-25/50 6max plo.

quAAdzillAA





Jan 26, 09 03:53:05

def best line: Even whores have something to teach if you’re willing to learn. you're a poker muse bro, keep it up!!

quAAdzillAA





Jan 26, 09 06:16:04

Good read

I was happy when I saw this topic. Learning about variance from such a greater player.

I'm down like 18k the past three weeks and I'm on my worst run ever. Or, you could say that I am break even for the last five weeks. IMO running bad is like you state, something that people often use to excuse their bad play/habits.

I really like the part about table selection. For instance, let's assume that my EV per hand is 50 cent when table selecting and 25 cent when picking tables randomly. The effects of a cold deck is incredibly dependant on the players you play. For instance, I know that I haven't been table selecting well the past weeks. So when "I think" I run bad, I'm actually not running that bad. If I had been table selecting better I would have been payed more the times I had hands and I would have lost less in the spots where I ran good hands into better.

The "bad run" is therefore accelerated by the frustration that comes with ignoring table selection and such.

LOL this is getting long but I agree with your post.

NitramLetsGo





Jan 26, 09 06:33:36

I really hope all the people with their stupid all in ev graphs read this and realize once and for all how dumb and what a waste of time using those are!!! Thanks for writing this, keep up the original and interesting content!

acsutch





Jan 26, 09 07:34:03

I guess only I disagree

EV is based on starting hands because it is quantifiable and objective.

Going down that path you could keep going all the way to site selection and training site and screen size and clothing choice for the session, Think about it.

These variables all do account for something but they are all by in large subjective.

Also I don't agree with the 'variance victim' bug going around, but I also don't think players better than me are all running bad because of our skill disparity, it is all relative, otherwise they should play weaker comp
IMO

LesW





Jan 26, 09 08:53:14

thank you.

Taylor





Jan 26, 09 09:30:45

Excellent entry.

knox828





Jan 26, 09 10:11:59

How do you know what your true winrate is?

Zaitsev





Jan 26, 09 10:24:30

ty

ty

alexo18





Jan 26, 09 11:09:59

excellent post, something everyone should read

Stinger885





Jan 26, 09 12:07:26

This was facking great... Wow.... just wow...

eyedunno





Jan 26, 09 13:00:22

I have often thought of this concept and tried to tell it to people when they are downswinging or tilting. While it makes perfect sense to me and I'm actually quite familiar with the idea, it never really helps me or my friends from being frustrated after a bad day. All it does for me is help me wake up every day and know that "I will earn exactly what I deserve" today. No need to hope for 10 BI upswings etc. etc. Just play well, don't sweat the small stuff and success will follow.

SixPeppers





Jan 26, 09 13:04:02

TL;DR = Too Long, DID Read

Zimba





Jan 26, 09 13:14:17

are you seriously 18? wtf?

really well-written, articulate post.. that was dope as hell..

gordo16





Jan 26, 09 13:55:37

you own

ardani





Jan 26, 09 15:32:39

I guess I am outclassed here

Will read again give the thought some time to digest awesome post either way

LesW





Jan 26, 09 16:06:28

Awesome

Good to see a CR pro put some serious time into their blog.

borow028





Jan 26, 09 17:05:15

I also disagree

First of all, I really enjoy your vids and blog posts. I was also considering hiring you as a coach back at dc, how's the coaching deal now that you're here at cr?

However, unlike most of your other disciples, I have a few objections to some of the points in this post.(I disagree too, LesW!) I do agree that most people don't realize that there are a lot of ways a poker player can run bad, and that all-in EV-graphs are overused by many to justify that they're running bad.

I completely disagree, though, with your statement that you can't be running bad if you're winning. Maybe edges are so small in high stakes that it is unlikely that your running bad and still winning up there, but obviously you can run bad and still win! I refuse to understand.

The only reasonable definition of running good/bad is running significantly over/under your expected value. Obvisously good and bad are vague terms that need individual interpretation. we could say that running good/bad is when you're taking out more variance than 50% of the player pool. So if your EV is 10 and 50% of players have deviation under 3, you are running bad if your actual value turned out to be 6.99 and running good if you earned 13.01. Defined this way running bad is only related to excpected value and variance, and can be applied to any event that has an excpected value, like poker.

The problem is that there is no way to estimate the actual EV of a poker session. If you knew your true winrate under a set of conditions, you could use that to estimate your EV. You could estimate a range for your true winrate based on your earlier actual winrate, confidence intervals and such, but over time the conditions you played under will change so much that this probably won't be very useful either.

There's only one form of EV in poker that can be 100% reliably calculated and that is the all-in EV. To completely disregard your all-in EV and don't use it just because it doesn't give you the full picture is just as ridiculous as defining running good/bad as variance from your all-in EV only. It's like saying "OK, this chick is sick hot, but she might be stupid and a lousy lay. Being a poker nerd I can never talk to her, and I will most certainly never get her in the sack. Therefore I can't assume anything about her, and I will never look at her again."

The total EV of a poker session is a function of several subparts that all have their own EV. Most of these EV's can only be estimated, some in better ways than others. For example you could say that the EV of playing 4 tables of 2/4NL FR saturday night is 3.2 donks per table. If you sat at these tables and only found 4 donks, you were running bad. If you sat down the next weekend and got 6 donks/table you were running good. And over the course of 2 weekends you ran pretty much as expected. Of course terms like "donk" doesn't quantify that well and then there's the problem of translating your donks/table EV to real \$ EV.

Some of these subparts are completely random and out of our control, others are responses from ourselves, the poker player. For example we could elect to find and sit down at a table full of donks. That choice would make us a better player and increase our EV. A player of otherwise same skill that randomly picked a table would probably get a tougher table and therefore has a lower EV. We increase our EV in all the spots we have a choice.

Another subpart could be how often you were dealt AA. If you played your 2000 hand session and got AA 25 times, you ran good. If you were dealt AA only 2 times, you ran bad. The EV for this event can be very easily calculated and tracked in itself. Converting to \$ EV though is just as impossible as the donk EV. This is just one joint in a long if-then-chain decission tree.

Another example of a subpart is how well your brain works. If you're always playing your A game, your EV is 100% brain and the deviation is always 0. It's all good, you can't run bad at this subpart! If you're mostly playing your A game but sometimes you play when you're too tired, we could say you're running bad if you misclick every 5th hand and time out every 10th, but you're running good if you're on your A game. (If you're a taco head we could say you're running bad when you're dumping half your roll taking shots at higher stakes when you have already taken waaay too many shots of tequila causing total braindeath, and good when you're playing sober at your regular stakes).

Many of these subparts are interconnected in chains, that all lead up to your total EV as a poker player. Our EV is given by brain selection, game selection and actual table play. A chain that ultimately contributes to the EV for a session could be:
1. deciding to play
2. finding a table with a donk.
3. raise the donk out of a few pots w air, again a conscious choice.
4. get dealt AA few hands after and
stack donk.
We got it in as an 80% favorite and held. Here we could say that we ran good because a donk was seated and played well cause we found him. Then we used a strategy to tilt him(well played!) and then we randomly got dealt aces(ran good) and held up(ran over expectation but not "good"). As simple as this example is we can't quantify it or calculate our EV for this period of hands, the only subpart we can do that for is the all-in EV of the last hand played against donk.

If we do run significantly under expectation in all-in pots, of course we are running bad. In all-in pots. We could be running bad in lots of other subparts as well and still be winning. We could be running like gods in all spots, and still be losing cause we're the greatest donk the world ever saw, but just don't realize it. But if you look at your all-in EV seeing that you are way under expectation and still winning, you should definitely not jump to the conclusion that you have to be running good at all the other subparts. Same thing if you run like god in all-in EV and still lose, you can not automatically credit your losses to running bad in other subparts.

Another argument for using all-in EV to is that a lot of the other subparts that you are actively making decisions in will ultimately lead to a spot where you get the money in good. If you consistently get it in good, you are probably doing something right, regardless of whether you're winning/losing and regardless of whether you're running over/under expectation.

I dont really agree with the 3 factors making up your total EV either. I think there is an EV for a poker player at any given time, and there are decisions that he makes in different spots that results in his total EV. The decisions being made are:

1. Brain selection: Will i play well enough to even bother? Playing well including game selecting. Not playing at all means EV is zero at the time, which might be higher than a player that doesn't brain select and goes ahead playing when -EV.
2. Game selection
3. Clicking buttons and possibly sizing bets

Decision 1 and 2 should obviously be re-evaluated continuously.


I guess this response got way out of hand, at least it made me think :)

tacohead75





Jan 27, 09 05:27:16

Wow...honestly it's so obvious how smart you are...pure genious! Cardrunners is really lucky to have you on board! Thanks so much. :)

desirae07





Jan 27, 09 06:01:48

Are you kidding?

You are only down like 2-3 buyins and you say you have been running "absurdly" bad.

navila





Jan 27, 09 09:57:23

Interesting

Enjoyed the read though its very absurd to think you cant win whilst running bad...if your "reading" big pots well, you can take them down, ie, win before running bad. You only run bad when the river is dealt and a showdown takes place...how often does that actually take place? I am a HU player and know that maybe only 6 or 7 hands reach showdown per 100. Therefore, you may run bad over those 7 hands BUT you can still win the other 93.

I am grateful for your post but I cannot help but think you are trying to be smarter than you actually are. A lot like the other millionaire poker kids!

You CAN WIN AND RUN BAD...JUST WIN MORE POTS B4 SHOWDOWN!

iplayer1





Jan 27, 09 10:22:37

Thanks for the post! My friends and I always enjoy reading everything that you write. Keep 'em coming.

krestniy





Jan 27, 09 13:05:29

A+

carrotallan





Jan 28, 09 04:38:15

thought about same things last week.
nice to find out something you were close to, but would spend time to get it.
+1, A+

sorrygg





Jan 28, 09 07:01:41

An excellent post.

It certainly puts things in to perspective.

Looking forward to some more thought provoking posts.

razboynik





Jan 28, 09 07:01:56

An excellent post.

It certainly puts things in to perspective.

Looking forward to some more thought provoking posts.

razboynik





Jan 28, 09 08:59:00

I just wanted to say I agree with virtually nothing in this article. To say that, 'if your poker EV graph says you should have won more, well then you're probably running good in other ways' is beyond ridiculous. The two are mutually exclusive events, they cannot have any bearing on one another: unless that is you believe in some kind of continuous probability?

That plus a million other things in here that have physically tilted me this morning while playing and thus caused me to write this so to get it off my chest.

grogheadflow7





Jan 28, 09 15:03:18

love the post.

altho i agree with most of your points here i think you can still run bad and win. but i understand the general point you're trying to get across and it's a great way to think about poker. (makes me wanna play right now actually lol)

also wanted to add that there is another thing that's within your power to control when you play and that's how many tables you're playing. i know if i autopilot a bunch of tbls then i'm definitely playing worse...

DrSatisfaction





Jan 28, 09 21:56:48

Interesting concept. I think the concept really works mentally if you can estimate your avg winrate.

Great post.

For the detractors, I think they have one level of thinking, that of course, you can estimate ev from a poker session.

but it's impossible to quantify the avg expection of session.

joefriday29





Jan 28, 09 22:00:13

edit: meant distribution of session ev not avg expection of a session

joefriday29





Jan 28, 09 23:39:48

grogheadflow7

His point was dependent upon the fact that if you're up overall more than your average win rate even though you're running below ev in all in pots, you still ran above expectation overall. For example maybe you coolered people constantly or they alawyas had air when you 5 bet bluff this time etc.

FabledHero





Jan 29, 09 01:42:39

Nice....

Great blog! I love how the other idiots complain about the length or paragraph breaks....when what they should be focusing on is the actual content.

Serious poker players will read this again and again....because we are trying to improve. The mental aspect or when we think we are running bad....when in actuality we aren't. To understand that is HUGE.

Thank you for taking the time to write this.

hitman247





Jan 30, 09 21:18:17

Excellent post man. A+

Ari123





Jan 31, 09 01:40:41

you make my smile:)

wordhappy





Feb 1, 09 10:07:40

This is an interesting and well-written post but I think there are many different elements to running bad. When most people say they are running bad, they mean they are either taking beats (getting money in ahead and losing) or running into the top of their opponent's range more than would be expected in the long run (eg: your opponent's fivebet shoving range is QQ+, AK+, AKs+ and your Kings run into Aces four times in a row). Getting dealt a poor run of cards is also part of the equation (eg: seeing AA twice in 2000 hands).

I can see your point but your logic is hard to apply in reality because it's virtually impossible to know what your "real" EV is. Even after 200k+ hands, it is quite likely that your winrate is still some distance from your "true" winrate, whatever that may be.

LingXY





Feb 8, 09 20:50:31

i will bitchslap the whore out of poker

thesteeez





Feb 8, 09 20:50:36

i will bitchslap the whore out of poker

thesteeez





Feb 12, 09 14:40:59

this has to be a record for the most comments ever on a CR blog

yimc17





Feb 19, 09 14:40:35

I also think you can add another factor to this in that if you in fact study your hands and opponents then the next time you play them if you use the knowledge you learned in the periods in between you will be +EV, and if you do not use what you learned then it'd be -EV thus adding another variable to the overall factor. If the knowledge you used helped you completely define their range in spots and you still lose getting it in good then you are running bad and vice versa.

Hokulea





Feb 24, 09 04:33:43

Hokulea... I am completely and utterly forced to agree with you. Well done, sir :)

Greg_McGuire





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