Re: Basic math question
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Thank you for that explanation.
Queery: 1. Based on this figure, what hands should you raise with when it's folded to you in the SB?
Followup: 2. What would the percentage be and what hands should you raise with for a 1/2BB-1BB blind structure?
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My answers:
1) I have no idea. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] I'm still pretty much a beginner at poker, and at this stage I'm attempting to learn the math and get my feet wet a little bit in the actual game. I'm not sure that this value is particularly meaningful, or, rather, usefully translatable into a range of starting hands, as it makes some assumptions that you always have the worst hand, and so forth. I think it's more interesting as an intellectual exercise just to show how profitable blind stealing is at given structures, and for comparision to different structures as well (shown nicely in the next question!)
2) Looking at the percentage for .5 - 1 blinds, the formulas are just as simple, except that now you risk 1.5 to gain 1.5.
1.5*X=1.5*(1-X)
1.5X = 1.5 - 1.5X
3X = 1.5
X = .5 or 50%.
Which simply shows that you only need to be successful 10 times in 20 instead of 11 times in 20 to be break-even. I think the main lesson is that you need to be a little tighter on your blind steals in 1/3 SB/BB than 1/2 SB/BB, all other factors being equal. But wasn't that particularly obvious anyways?
I'll think about the starting hand stuff a little bit more and perhaps try to post something insightful later. My first instinct tells me it depends on what hands you're willing to play out of position versus one caller anyways, plus some raw steal attempts..basically, if you would "normally fold", you would instead steal a given amount of the time, totally randomly..not based on your cards at all, selected such that your opponent folds enough that it's profitable for you. Remember, I never suggested this percentage was useful; I just showed the math I suspected was used by the article the OP referenced.
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