The impact of QQ-AA on your net earnings

[Jonny Melon]

I was digging through my poker tracker database (30K+ hands -- mostly 2/4) and uncovered an interesting statistic:

--100% of my net winnings can be attributed to QQ-AA.

That is, all the other 165 opening hands just break even after paying the rake (which pains me to see how much rake I pay, but what can you do).

This signifies the importance of playing the big pairs well, but also the importance of playing the other hands (from strong to marginal) intelligently, to ensure that big pair profit is maximized.

Do others see similar results? Just curious.

jon

[Gravy (Gravy Smoothie)]

I remember reading in WLLH that those big hands make up like 60% of your winnings. 100% seems a little high...

[cov47]

Looking at that sort of statistic is inherently misleading. Say we have a player who plays 100k hands of 2/4, and just barely is better than breakeven. He wins, say, $1000 for that stretch. Over that time we'd expect him to get dealt AA something like 450 times. If he can win even a modest 1BB/hand with his average pair of aces, he will have won $1800 with AA. Would you say that 180% of his profit came from being dealt AA? I guess you could, but it doesn't mean anything useful.

If you wanted something slightly better, you could look at all the dollars you won with a particular starting hand, ignoring the cost of the blinds and rake for those hands. Compare that to the number of dollars you netted with all hands (again, ignoring the blinds and rake), and you'll be able to see how that hand figures in your profit potential. (You could of course still find hands that would net you a loss even after the blinds and rake are ignored. This would skew this statistic, but it would at least give you an indication on some hands for which you may need to reconsider your strategy.)

[joey_qz]

Jonny, you are completely correct.
Remember though, that when you factor in how much you are paying for the blinds, the earn of AA-QQ accounts for far less than 50% of your profits. That is, you actually aren't starting from a 0 earn, but rather from a -7.5 BB/100 hands earn due to having to play your blinds. So all the other hands essentially make you about 7.5 BB/100 hands, whereas you can think of AA-QQ as making your profit. But what you state is correct: All the other hands essentially pay for the rake. And as you state, playing both AA-QQ and "all others" are equally important because they both go toward offsetting the -7.5 BB deficit due to paying your blinds.

-joey