How does poker insurance work?

[laja]

how exactly does selling someone insurance work in poker... it is when they go all in right?

[augie00]

Lol. Perhaps you heard some bizarre home game rule, but "insurance" is a blackjack thing, not a poker thing.

[dogmeat]

In a large NL game the player with a large edge hand in an all-in pot may be offered insurance by another player, or even a player watching the game. An example follows:

Two players are in a hand where one of them is all-in (could be preflop or on flop or on turn) and the total pot is $1000.

Player A shows AA and player B shows KK
on the flop we see: 4 T Q

and player A is happy

on the turn comes a jack and player "B" picks up an open-ended straight draw - now player A is nervous -

Player "C" says, I'll give you insurance against losing to that straight. They count the outs that beat player "A" as four nines and two aces. Six cards win for "B" and 36 cards win for "A". Odds are 1 in 7 that "A" will lose. Player "C" says your cost to cover the $1000 pot is $166. (Instead of the actual cost of covering a 1-7 bet of $143, he offers 1-6 and makes a profit himself of $23 every time he offers this type of bet) Player "C" may also know something about the "real" odds, because if he had an ace or 9, then the chance of player "B" hitting his straight is even lower)

Dogmeat /images/graemlins/spade.gif

[cnfuzzd]

not true. I distinctly remember doyle discussing it in Super System. however, i dont remember what it was talking about.

peace

john nickle

[uuDevil]

[ QUOTE ]
Lol. Perhaps you heard some bizarre home game rule, but "insurance" is a blackjack thing, not a poker thing.

[/ QUOTE ]
It is a poker thing too. Doyle Brunson mentions this in SS. Basically it is a side bet on whether or not your hand will win. Say someone calls your all-in and you are a favorite to win. You can "insure" your hand by making this side bet, but you will get less than true odds, so it's not a good bet.

Edit: damn you guys are fast!

[pfkaok]

[ QUOTE ]

not true. I distinctly remember doyle discussing it in Super System.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, doyle was sayin that he musta been drunk or something, b/c he took insurance on AA in one of his pics.

[EliteNinja]

[ QUOTE ]
how exactly does selling someone insurance work in poker... it is when they go all in right?

[/ QUOTE ]

It's in case your opponent has AK, AQ, AJ, or AT. /images/graemlins/wink.gif

[cnfuzzd]

hey, i played 38K hands last month, dont i owe you an avatar? I forgot all about that....


peace

john nickle

[pfkaok]

Damn, I thought you were gonna beat me by a lot more than that, if I had known i only needed another 1500 hands I woulda put in another day last week.... oh well

i guess i'm your bitch.

hopefully i'll be over 50k this month, but I guess its not as fun now since i'm not in the challenge.

[cnfuzzd]

eh, when i heard you were slacking off, i did the same. I actually didnt include a couple of thousand pokerstars hands, and a few hundred BM, so you wouldve needed a whole nother day to tie me. /images/graemlins/grin.gif

your avatar is on the way.

peace

john nickle