In my OP I noted that the two numbers we are usually worried about when deciding if most poker decisions are +EV are our risk-to-reward ratio and our chance of winning. Then I gave these three questions:

Quote Originally Posted by spoonitnow
1. A lone Villain bets into you on the river and if you call you'll have a 25% chance to win. Should you call?
2. On the river you're out of position against a lone Villain. If you bet pot and Villain calls, you'll have a 25% chance to win. Should you bet pot?
3. You have a 12-out draw on the flop and a lone Villain shoves the flop. Should you call?
Some of you picked up on something, and some of you didn't: in all three of these questions given, you need more information to find an answer. I'm going to list the basic ideas in each and go on to something else.

1. If you are getting 3:1 pot odds (Villain bet half the pot) then you break even. If you're getting worse, you can't call profitably.
2. Here we don't know how often our opponent is folding or how often we win a showdown if we check, so we can't determine if betting is +EV.
3. Like the first question, you don't know your pot odds. Of similar importance though, we don't know the composition of our opponent's range, which could swing things a little either direction also.

Fairly often we see hands posted for suggestions with little or none of the poster's own analysis, and if you can't do this analysis away from the tables, you certainly can't do it while you are playing. I started off with these three questions to show why things like calculating your pot odds and putting your opponent on a range are so important: they give you the proper information to base your decisions on.

What I'm trying to encourage with this post is the following:
  • The active accumulation of information (ie: consistently putting Villains on ranges instead of playing like a robot)
  • Evaluation of decisions based on that information (ie: considering all of the relevant information, not just okay I have [insert hand here] so I call)
  • Becoming engaged analytically away from the tables as well


Now what does this have to do with +EV decisions? The ability to identify them and act when the time comes.