[Nigel]

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Sorry, I might just be dumb or tired, but this post is kinda confusing. I'm not wuite sure what the 85/50 refer to and cant figure out your point about it being hard to figure the optimal # of hands.

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The 85/50 refers to the percentage of times you choose to fold to a steal attempt. 85% in the SB, and 50% in the BB seem to be the industry standard. They are basically the numbers you end up with when choosing a relatively decent starting hand selection. The ineresting thing though, is that when playing that strategy you potentially end up with an enormous difference in your BB/hand win or loss rate than if you choose to fold pre-flop. So, it appears that we should be continuing to add hands as long as it does not bring the overall average down.

So, if you break even, on average, when you choose to defend your BB, but lose .5 BB by choosing to fold your overall avg. is, of course, going to be a .25BB/hand loss. Therefore, even if you could play all the hands you are folding for a -.49BB/hand loss (which I would imagine would be possible if you are breaking even with the hands you are choosing to defend with) you stand to improve your overall average (unless it has negative metagame considerations, but I would think, if anything, it would be the opposite). The problem becomes that blind defending situations for each individual hand comes up relatively infrequently, and each situation in itself is so heavily opponent dependent that it makes the "long run" essentially out of reach, and leaves us with inadequate sample sizes to draw meaningful conclusions from playing around with minor strategy changes.

Hopefully this clears up for you what I was trying to say, and you can see why it is not so clear cut to me as to how to arrive at the optimal number of hands to defend with.

Nigel