Full House
Join Date: Feb 2009
Posts: 940
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Originally Posted by Chopper
you learn to deal with it by avoiding it when there are other games to choose from.
these tables tilt me for the same reasons. i can handle the same situations you mention well, too. however, a constant 4way on the river is horrible. and, it makes TPTK look like dogmeat most of the time. at these tables, ALL HANDS ARE DRAWS. your TPTK? it's still a 5outer. but, so is your A5s on a dry board. you play to pot odds and you play your cards. you wait for the few opportunities to isolate from lp or steal a blind from the BTN or SB. and, thats about all you get for the short-handed power poker situations. most of the time you are limping gappers, raising suited broadways, set hunting, and dragging TP to the river and paying off big pots with one additional bet in a 15bb pot. its not fun. but, it is still profitable. you just have to have a really deeeeeep roll to survive this type of poker.
however, this is when paying off the river is at most a small mistake, too. you wont have to drag many pots of this type to give yourself a decent session. if you ALWAYS fold here, you will burn off your roll really fast.
what you are describing is a rather aggressive "schooling effect" scenario. if you haven't read up on the concept, i would. and, based on earlier discussions, i would go back to SSHE, if you have it, and read all the pages on "pot equity edge." its in the index, and a few of those pages lay out WHY we raise with draws in big pots.
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It's definitely the schooling effect (each caller makes the odds for other callers better). And no, I don't generally dump good but likely beaten hands in this situation. Indeed, you'd be proud of what I took to showdown here.
And there is truth the schooling effect, though bear in mind that its expositors make a couple of big mistakes:
1. There is a countervailing force to the schooling effect, which is the more people that are in the pot, the greater the possibility that your outs are dead or are subject to redraws and that you are simply providing reverse implied odds to your opponents. (By the way, this is a reason I basically play every Ax suited hand on these types of tables. A nut flush draw is HUGE because these tables are the most susceptible to people holding onto a smaller flush.) I haven't fully worked out the math on this, but the most widely disseminated works on the schooling effect ignore it and simply focus on how each caller bloats the pot and gives you odds to call.
2. Even with the schooling effect, you need to be very careful about hands that often make second best hands, because this is a huge problem in these types of pots. With 4 players calling to the river, there will often be issues of kickers or higher straights or higher flushes or pocket pairs. In other words, you can't say to yourself "schooling effect" and start calling or raising with whatever junk you have. I missed a big pot with J2o out of position at this table (the flop came JJ2), and the pot did end up massively multi-way, but I still say that there's no odds calculation in the world that will make calling 4 bets out of position with J2o a +EV play, schooling effect or no. You have to think about what TYPES of hands will benefit most from the schooling effect. I tend to think that it is the same type of hands that play best multiway, small pocket pairs and suited connectors, as well as offsuit and suited broadways. I've stoved this in various scenarios and it appears correct.
Another way of putting this point is that the math behind the schooling effect says that in a massive multi-way pot, some of the equity donated by the maniacs and the fish will go not to the person with the best hand but to the person with the second best (and in some instances the third best hand). But that means that there are also hands in the pot that have to be big donators-- that's where the equity comes from! And since you are calling lots of bets, the big donators are even bigger than they would be if we were just talking about some fishy loose-passive multi-way pot at a home game.
So you have to be sure you are swimming in the right school of fish before you rely on the schooling effect.
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