Question on the Moving in Against the Blind article

[Rook80]

I just finished reading David Sklansky's article on moving in against the blinds and I have a question on how he determined the # of times you would win if your opponent calls.

I used pokerstove to estimate winning chances with the following hands.

In the first case he talks about an opponent that will call with 7s or better, AK, or AQ. There are 32 hands he could have with AK or AQ. If you have 6s your about a 54% to 46% favorite. This means you should win about 17 hands. Against an overpair your a 20% to 80% underdog. Since there are 48 of these hands you can estimate you will win about 9 of them. This gives you a win ratio in this situation of 26 to 54. In the article, David he estimated you will win 23 of the hands not 26. This is actually about T1000 chip differents in the break even EV value.

Can anyone tell me where he got the estimated # of 23?

[David Sklansky]

An overpair is a bit more than 80%. Still my numbers could be off a little. The technique is what matters.

[Rook80]

Thanks Dave,

I thought you might have eliminated split situation and just looked at wins.

[stormtalker]

I saw the word pokerstove in reference to calculating hands. What is that?

[Al P]

I use Poker Calculator (google, it's some foreign site) which is just like Poker Stove.

It will let you simulate showdowns between X number of hands and you can even say, Hand A = QQ, Hand B = S&M Group 1-3 Hand or specify your own range of hands and it will tell you the showdown numbers.

There's LOTS and LOTS of information about this concept in the 1-table tournaments forum (It's the key to winning more than your fair share of SnG's). Change the search to newer than 1 year and search for ICM.

Here is a nice article about this concept too.

[Rasputin]

PokerStove

[Mano]

I will preface this by stating that I greatly respect your work on poker theory, and that I have always found your books to be top notch, and virtually error free.

But using the numbers you have make a significant difference in the calculations you made. In the first example you will actually win slightly more than 26 of the 80 times you are called, which results in the break even point being over 40 big blinds vs. the 33 stated in the article. Likewise, in the tens or better example you will win about 23 of the 62 times called, resulting in a break even point of around 72 big blinds vs. the 53 stated in the article. I think the method is the important thing, but I thought you would be more carefull than this with your numbers, especially since you have called out other authors for making similar errors.