$5 - Do you play this any different?

[mikeneron]

Villian was 45/0 over 20 hands. Of the 45% VPIP, 25% was from calling preflop raises.

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t50 (8 handed) Poker-Stars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com (Format: FlopTurnRiver Cards)

CO (t1155)
Button (t1435)
SB (t2105)
BB (t2380)
UTG (t2400)
Hero (t1425)
MP1 (t1225)
MP2 (t1375)

Preflop: Hero is UTG+1 with , .
UTG calls t50, Hero raises to t200, 6 folds, UTG calls t150.

Flop: (t475) , , (2 players)
UTG bets t50, Hero raises to t300, UTG calls t250.

Turn: (t1075) (2 players)
UTG checks, Hero bets t925 (All-In), UTG calls t925.

River: (t2925) (2 players, 1 all-in)

Final Pot: t2925

[hangchiong]

a weak bet on the flop,might suggest a4 or a small pocket pair,or 6s /7s
i wouldnt bet on the turn,would check/fold it.
a lot of the $5 buyin players does the min bet thing,it turns my head around esp when you are holding ak,aq,and in postion and when you dont hit,it gets worse.

[mukaka]

I would play the flop the same because of his silly min donk-bet.. he might be planning to stay in the hand for cheap like most min-betting donks.. but after he calls your raise, I shut down because it seems that he has smth.. I check behind the turn..

if you put him exactly on a FD though by reads,etc.. you played it fine..

[elitemob]

I probably would raise the bet on the flop as well (so he may fold), but out of action I think a bit differentely. Just look at the pot odds:

You're getting 475/50 -->1:9.5 on the flop, your chance of hitting one of your overs (47 unknown cards in deck/6 live outs) --> 1:7.8, so why not play a bit passive here and just call it down as cheaply as possible? Of course you gotta be cautious if another flush or straight card hits.

Suppose it's the usual 5.50$ donk, he'd probably bet 50 again (which would be a call again, since you're getting 1:11.5 on the turn and 1:7.6 for one of you outs), or check after you didn't fold to his monstrous "c-bet" *wink*

Well, just wanted to give a different suggestion for discussion.

[oskar]

+1
Just call on the flop. In this situation I would never raise the minbet on a bluff. Often enough they have something and just don't know what to bet. If he's a station, he probably won't even fold A high on this flop. I would call him down as long as the odds are in your favor. If he goes apeshit and overbets the pot on the river, well than he probably has a big hand. More likely he'll just bet 50 or 100, and you can even take A high to a showdown i you want to.

I have no idea why you would shove the turn after he called on the flop. If he had a 4, he's not folding it now.

[taipan168]

Personally I mix it up between just calling down and raising. If I have seen opp minbet and then fold to a flop raise, I definitely raise it up. Without this read, I agree with elitemob and oskar, I am calling down and trying to either spike an A, K or running clubs on the turn/river or show down the hand as cheaply as possible.

[rvrking22]

Im going to look at this from a totally different point of view...kind of...
Goin off of elitlemob, who explained the pot odds with two cards to come is 9.5 to 1 is not really correct, your looking at the immediate pot odds with the intention of calling down and having a cheap showdown...so you would actually have to look at your effective odds, which goes like this

475 is in the pot at the flop

Villian bets 50 and it appears that your getting 525/50 or 10.5 to 1
but in reality (well the way the disscussion is going) we are going to just call down..so we have to take into account the turn bet along with the river bet to get our real odds the pot is offering..

so lets say villian bets 100 on turn and then 150 on the river ( could be adjusted just throwing some likely numbers out there)

this means we would actually have to risk 300 (flop 50,turn 100,river 150 bets) to win a pot of 775, now taking these two numbers 775/300 our real odds the pot is offering is actually 2.58 to 1, but our odds of hitting an over card on either the turn or the river deduces to 7.83 or 7.66, which would indicate a fold, but if we suspect villian may check turn then it would be worth a call...so this is a very close call or fold situation using your effective odds...

hope this makes sense....

[elitemob]

Im going to look at this from a totally different point of view...kind of...
Goin off of elitlemob, who explained the pot odds with two cards to come is 9.5 to 1 is not really correct, your looking at the immediate pot odds with the intention of calling down and having a cheap showdown...so you would actually have to look at your effective odds, which goes like this

475 is in the pot at the flop

Villian bets 50 and it appears that your getting 525/50 or 10.5 to 1
but in reality (well the way the disscussion is going) we are going to just call down..so we have to take into account the turn bet along with the river bet to get our real odds the pot is offering..

so lets say villian bets 100 on turn and then 150 on the river ( could be adjusted just throwing some likely numbers out there)

this means we would actually have to risk 300 (flop 50,turn 100,river 150 bets) to win a pot of 775, now taking these two numbers 775/300 our real odds the pot is offering is actually 2.58 to 1, but our odds of hitting an over card on either the turn or the river deduces to 7.83 or 7.66, which would indicate a fold, but if we suspect villian may check turn then it would be worth a call...so this is a very close call or fold situation using your effective odds...

hope this makes sense....

Sorry to correct you man, but I think you overlooked a few things. UTG postet BB, which was 50, hero raised to 200, UTG called 150, rest folded, which leaves: 200 from hero + 200 from villain + 25 from small blind = 425 in the pot when flop comes. villain bets 50 making the pot 475 (as I already wrote), you need 50 to call, so 475/50 is right. That are the POT odds, not the card odds. The card odds I explained above are for the TURN ONLY! So on the turn there is a chance for an A or a K, 6 live outs (since you're holding an A and a K already) 47 cards remaining, which gives odds to hit either an A or a K of 1:7.8 (47/6)
You have to do the same thing for the river again (as I tried to briefly illustrate as well, how the odds would be at another bet of 50) If villain would bet 100 this would be a clear fold b/c of the odds BTW, pot would be 525 after turn, bet of 100 would be 625/100 -> 1:6.25 while you only have a chance of 46/6 to hit one of your overs ->1:7.7.

I did not use the card odds for turn and river combined!

Hope that helps you understand my calcs a little bit

cheers, elitemob

[rvrking22]

Im going to look at this from a totally different point of view...kind of...
Goin off of elitlemob, who explained the pot odds with two cards to come is 9.5 to 1 is not really correct, your looking at the immediate pot odds with the intention of calling down and having a cheap showdown...so you would actually have to look at your effective odds, which goes like this

475 is in the pot at the flop

Villian bets 50 and it appears that your getting 525/50 or 10.5 to 1
but in reality (well the way the disscussion is going) we are going to just call down..so we have to take into account the turn bet along with the river bet to get our real odds the pot is offering..

so lets say villian bets 100 on turn and then 150 on the river ( could be adjusted just throwing some likely numbers out there)

this means we would actually have to risk 300 (flop 50,turn 100,river 150 bets) to win a pot of 775, now taking these two numbers 775/300 our real odds the pot is offering is actually 2.58 to 1, but our odds of hitting an over card on either the turn or the river deduces to 7.83 or 7.66, which would indicate a fold, but if we suspect villian may check turn then it would be worth a call...so this is a very close call or fold situation using your effective odds...

hope this makes sense....

Sorry to correct you man, but I think you overlooked a few things. UTG postet BB, which was 50, hero raised to 200, UTG called 150, rest folded, which leaves: 200 from hero + 200 from villain + 25 from small blind = 425 in the pot when flop comes. villain bets 50 making the pot 475 (as I already wrote), you need 50 to call, so 475/50 is right. That are the POT odds, not the card odds. The card odds I explained above are for the TURN ONLY! So on the turn there is a chance for an A or a K, 6 live outs (since you're holding an A and a K already) 47 cards remaining, which gives odds to hit either an A or a K of 1:7.8 (47/6)
You have to do the same thing for the river again (as I tried to briefly illustrate as well, how the odds would be at another bet of 50) If villain would bet 100 this would be a clear fold b/c of the odds BTW, pot would be 525 after turn, bet of 100 would be 625/100 -> 1:6.25 while you only have a chance of 46/6 to hit one of your overs ->1:7.7.

I did not use the card odds for turn and river combined!

Hope that helps you understand my calcs a little bit

cheers, elitemob

Yeah I understand where you were coming from....thanks for the clarification with the Pre flop betting....I did this example not because you were wrong or that I disagreed with you, but when we are faced with these situations about going to the end for a cheap showdown we cant really look at our immediate odds, we have to take into account the turn and river bets as well ( hope that makes sense), so I was trying to model to show that, kind of messed up the math but it should look something like this now...

Pot is 425 (thanks elitemob)

Villian bets 50, appears that were getting 9.5 to 1 (475/50) but as I was saying we need to account for the turn and river bets, so lets assume villian would bet 100 on turn and 150 on river like in the last example...so we are risking, 50+100+150 (flop, turn, and river bets)= 300 to win a pot of 725, making the real odds on the flop 2.42 to 1 (725/300), and the odds of us hitting our hand is (47/6) or 7.83 to 1, making this a fold, unless we were at least 75% sure villian would check the turn and thats read dependant ...does this make sense now?

[mikeneron]

Sorry to correct you man, but I think you overlooked a few things. UTG postet BB, which was 50, hero raised to 200, UTG called 150, rest folded, which leaves: 200 from hero + 200 from villain + 25 from small blind = 425 in the pot when flop comes. villain bets 50 making the pot 475 (as I already wrote), you need 50 to call, so 475/50 is right. That are the POT odds, not the card odds. The card odds I explained above are for the TURN ONLY! So on the turn there is a chance for an A or a K, 6 live outs (since you're holding an A and a K already) 47 cards remaining, which gives odds to hit either an A or a K of 1:7.8 (47/6)
You have to do the same thing for the river again (as I tried to briefly illustrate as well, how the odds would be at another bet of 50) If villain would bet 100 this would be a clear fold b/c of the odds BTW, pot would be 525 after turn, bet of 100 would be 625/100 -> 1:6.25 while you only have a chance of 46/6 to hit one of your overs ->1:7.7.

I did not use the card odds for turn and river combined!

Hope that helps you understand my calcs a little bit

cheers, elitemob

Why did you leave out the BB?

25 (SB) + 50 (BB) + 50 (UTG) + 200 (Hero) + 150 (UTG) = 475 on the flop. So odds to call his weak bet on the flop are 475+50/50 = 10.5 : 1

Also when you are calculating your odds of 47/6, it is 7.8 : 1 and not 1 : 7.8...there is a difference.

2 : 1 = 1 in 3
3 : 1 = 1 in 4
7.8 : 1 = in in 8.8

[elitemob]

Uagh, thanks mike ... I thought the whole time villain was the BB, sorry 'bout that. You're right about the odds thing. Don't ask me why but I tend to turn both around for readability *ducks* *corrects post*
Sorry I "shoved over" you rvrking.

Ok, back to "work". I know now what you were getting at rvrking, instead of going for the immediate decision about the flop bet you want to make an educated guess about the whole hand and if it is worth it to draw with the assumption being villain bets 50 on the flop, 100 on the turn, 150 on the river. Pot odds advising to fold to the turn bet.

First of all I think I have to correct a little thing again ... you wrote, that we have to risk 300 chips to win a pot of 775. I respectfully disagree, because you would fold to a 150 river bet if you didn't hit. Also the pot is not 775, you have to count in your already lost money as well.

I think the best approach to get what you were aiming at is if you think like this about it:

assuming: flop bet 50, turn bet 100

pot on the flop is 475 (thanks again mike), 150 to call to the river
that is 625/150 -> 4.17 : 1

your chance to win is by hitting one of your 6 live outs on the turn OR the river (source: http://www.flopturnriver.com/chart_pot_odds.html):
24.1%, which is 1/0.241 -> 4.14 : 1

Meaning this would be a call-through(!)

Here's another thing I've been thinking of:
If you hit, you get another 150 river bet at least (you'll probably raise the river to get more chips, so he either folds or calls)
If you do not hit, you'll not call the 150 bet but fold instead, saving 150 chips.
But that would make the math too complicated to work through while in a hand I suppose.

Anyway, now with got an interesting "discrepancy" here.

In my opinion it's kind of counter intuitive, because poker is based on the immediate decision. Now we'll have to compare the too strategies to see which would perform better ... This will take some time, so I'll make an extra post for it.

What do you guys think?

[rvrking22]

Yeah I was thinking about the river bet after I read my post through a few times....and it obv makes sense not to call the river bet if you dont make your hand....but after thinking this through I think I may have messed up a few things....First to calculate our effective odds we have to add up all the calls we will make, assuming we play til the end, to determine the total amount we will lose if we dont make the hand. Then compare this figure to the total amount we should win if we do make our hand....This total amount is the money already in the pot plus all future bets we can expect to win, excluding our own future bets...So let me just run through this one more time...I feel like im being very redundant...

Ok, step one: Add up all the calls we will make:
- In our example we said that we would have to call a bet of 50 chips on the flop and 100 on the turn...we will not call a bet of 150 unless we make our hand, and in that case we will be raising to get value...

So we would risk losing 150 chips

Ok step two: calculate the total amount we expect to win if we make our hand
- Ok so 475 is the pot on the flop, so 475+50(villian bet on flop)+100(villians bet on turn)+150(villian bets on river)+200(villian calls our small raise), so that would equal 975 we would win if we made our hand...

Ok, step three: compare final values of steps 1 and 2:
- 975/150 or 6.5 to 1, those would be the odds we would be getting from the pot...im almost positive this is the correct way of figuring this problem out, so sorry I messed up the first two times...so if the odds of us hitting our overcards is 4.17 to 1(thanks elitemob), then this is an easy call which is pretty obvious now that i look back at the hand...this sitution takes into account that villian will call your raise on the end however....

[mikeneron]

your chance to win is by hitting one of your 6 live outs on the turn OR the river (source: http://www.flopturnriver.com/chart_pot_odds.html):
24.1%, which is 1/0.241 -> 4.14 : 1

I think 24.1% actually equals 3.14 : 1

I know the way things get represented is confusing (2:1 / 1 in 3 / 33%).

Think of it like this:
When you flip a coin it is a 50/50 proposition. This is the same as 1 : 1 OR 50% OR 1 in 2.

So if you use that as a reference:
2 : 1 = 33.3% = 1 in 3
3 : 1 = 25% = 1 in 4
3.14 : 1 = 24.1% = 1 in 4.14

Ok, step three: compare final values of steps 1 and 2:
- 975/150 or 6.5 to 1, those would be the odds we would be getting from the pot...im almost positive this is the correct way of figuring this problem out, so sorry I messed up the first two times...so if the odds of us hitting our overcards is 3.14 to 1, then this is an even easier call which is pretty obvious now that i look back at the hand...this sitution takes into account that villian will call your raise on the end however....

[elitemob]

Ok *phew* finished evaluating. I've written a small program to compare both strategies by doing a statistical evaluation (number crunshing essentially). It helped me find another mistake we all made about pot odds when I modeled the pot odds strategy in my program (shame on us, but I think this one's gonna stick, at least for me, because I just spend the last 2 hours calculating):

All of our pot odds are still wrong ... here's the thing:

pot when the flop comes is 475:
villain bets 50, then we have to calculate the following:
if we hit the turn we will (at least) win the pot of 575, because we will win our own call-chips back, so it is: 575/50 --> 11.5 : 1 --> call

This also completly turns the turn (pun intended) around:
575 when the turn comes:
villain bets 100, so it's 775/100 --> 7.75 : 1 (card odds were 7.67 : 1 for river) which makes this a call too!

Otherwise the numbers don't add up (I found out because to confirm I implemented the pot odds strategy correctly, I set the pot size to the break even point of our calculation, but it was not the correct one till I realized the mistake ...)

To clearify another small example:

pot on flop: 150
villain bets: 50
pot odds: 250/50 -> 5:1
20% chance to win -> 5:1
which is break even if you run the statistics


The result of the evaluation is, that what we worked out is really nothing more than an educated guess. Pot odds is much more "accurate". If the assumption you make about the following villain bets is correct, then pot odds will deliver you the correct answer anyway when you are faced with said bet on the turn. (You know what I mean?)

It was very interesting to examine though So pot odds is still "king", we just have to do it right ("half-knowledge" for the loss ... of money)

cheers,
elitemob

[elitemob]

your chance to win is by hitting one of your 6 live outs on the turn OR the river (source: http://www.flopturnriver.com/chart_pot_odds.html):
24.1%, which is 1/0.241 -> 4.14 : 1

I think 24.1% actually equals 3.14 : 1

I know the way things get represented is confusing (2:1 / 1 in 3 / 33%).

Think of it like this:
When you flip a coin it is a 50/50 proposition. This is the same as 1 : 1 OR 50% OR 1 in 2.

So if you use that as a reference:
2 : 1 = 33.3% = 1 in 3
3 : 1 = 25% = 1 in 4
3.14 : 1 = 24.1% = 1 in 4.14

Ok, step three: compare final values of steps 1 and 2:
- 975/150 or 6.5 to 1, those would be the odds we would be getting from the pot...im almost positive this is the correct way of figuring this problem out, so sorry I messed up the first two times...so if the odds of us hitting our overcards is 3.14 to 1, then this is an even easier call which is pretty obvious now that i look back at the hand...this sitution takes into account that villian will call your raise on the end however....

OK, this is starting to really confuse me. If I didn't mess up my implementation (which I'm pretty sure I didn't) this would mean that we have to compare:

pot before flop: 150
villain flop-bet: 50
pot odds: 250/50 --> 5:1

card odds: 20% chance to win = 1/0.20 --> 1 in 5 or 4:1 (the latter not being humanly comparable to the above on first sight)

so you have to compare the first number of the pot odds to the last number of the card odds *laughs* good that we figured that out. I don't even want to know how many ppl do that wrong out there.

To be 100% correct (both mathematically and when doing the comparison).

I hope we finally sorted through our initial "garbage".

cheers, elitemob

[drmcboy]

cliff notes?

[kmind]

cliff notes?

yeah agreed.

without reading i'll say this is fine because we have the best hand here often + outs.

[elitemob]

So we would risk losing 150 chips

Ok step two: calculate the total amount we expect to win if we make our hand
- Ok so 475 is the pot on the flop, so 475+50(villian bet on flop)+100(villians bet on turn)+150(villian bets on river)+200(villian calls our small raise), so that would equal 975 we would win if we made our hand...

Ok, step three: compare final values of steps 1 and 2:
- 975/150 or 6.5 to 1, those would be the odds we would be getting from the pot...im almost positive this is the correct way of figuring this problem out, so sorry I messed up the first two times...so if the odds of us hitting our overcards is 4.17 to 1(thanks elitemob), then this is an easy call which is pretty obvious now that i look back at the hand...this sitution takes into account that villian will call your raise on the end however....

I wanted to continue your thoughts a bit as well ... you cannot simply only look what you might win, you have to weight it against what you will loose ... what would lead us to something similar to ICM, only without equity in the price pool, just for tournament chips:

numbers coming from the flop bet + call + initial turn bet if turn hits and same method for river:

0.241 * 975 - 0.759 * 150 = 234.975 - 113.85 = +121.125 in the positive, which brings me to another idea, can't we do that for pot odds too, would be more accurate, right?
0.1277 * 675 + 0.1304 * 1025 - 0.7419 * 150 = 86.1975 + 133.66 - 111.285 = +108.5725, +EV too

interesting, pot odds + ICM combined, too bad it 's a bit too much math to do in a hand and after the hand it's worthless since you know what villain bet.[/b]

[elitemob]

Ok cliff notes:

rvrking22 suggested that we use a different approach for for calculating odds to either call or fold the hand under an assumption about villains betting pattern. We pretty had some few theoretical problems with pot odds in the process (I suppose a lot of people do it wrong) and I wrote a computer program to evaluate/compare the effectiveness of the "new strategy" against that of the pot odd strategy.

[rvrking22]

Elitemob I really like how much you have put into this little discussion and I think the math plays it self out either way we put it....and if you are faced with a bet with two cards to come and plan on at least seeing the river then my assumption is correct in using effective odds and not using just pot odds...im not going to crunch anymore numbers, even tho this was kind of intersting to see how it played out....but I think you went a little over board when comparing this to ICM problem, which it most certainly isnt one, Also effective odds play a huge roll with two cards to come....believe me...I do not disagree with you when it comes to using pot odds over everything else but I would advise you to at least implement effective odds into your game to get a better picture of what your actually being offered from the pot...anyways it was fun to crunch some numbers and see where we ended up...which was IMO pretty obv, but we kind of had a few errors here and there, but whatever....
hope people reading this thread have learned a thing or two from elite and I...lol....

[elitemob]

Well, you're welcome
Glad to be of help (and learn a ton myself in the process :P)