spoonitnow's 5000th Post: Game Theory and Poker

[spoonitnow]

The antes are also P/2 units, so you would have to write them as PU/2, and then the pot would be PU.

Hopefully now you see why that's not quite right.

In general when studying fixed-limit games, we set the pot to be a variable (in this case P) and the bet size to be 1.

When we're studying big-bet games like NLHE or PLO, we set the pot to be 1 and the bet size to be a variable (usually B or s).

I hope that's helpful.

[daviddem]

The antes are also P/2 units, so you would have to write them as PU/2, and then the pot would be PU.

Hopefully now you see why that's not quite right.

OK, maybe I got silly-confused because you said "P/2" and not "P/2 units" in the OP.

Whichever way, I like to use variables in my formulas and not numbers so that I can change things around later without having to rework everything from scratch.

Could have called P the pot and B the bet, would have looked prettier I guess.

Who wants to bet "units" anyway? Next time use $P/2 and $1 in your questions, this way even Chinese and Belgians (and Gizmo) will understand what you mean.

[spoonitnow]

OK, maybe I got silly-confused because you said "P/2" and not "P/2 units" in the OP.

Whichever way, I like to use variables in my formulas and not numbers so that I can change things around later without having to rework everything from scratch.

Could have called P the pot and B the bet, would have looked prettier I guess.

Who wants to bet "units" anyway? Next time use $P/2 and $1 in your questions, this way even Chinese and Belgians (and Gizmo) will understand what you mean.

You don't need to use both P for pot and B for bet, which is the point. Any bet to pot ratio can be achieved by the conventions normally used that I reference above. Using only one variable for this instead of two makes life so much easier when you start to look at different bet sizes and pot sizes.