[Buzz]

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Interesting how well the A44Hd hands score. They seem to have a favorable scoop component.

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Hi Mack - Yes. I noticed that too. Interesting.

I don’t generally like playing hands with low pairs because you can take a bath when you make a full house. You’ll generally be stuck in the pot because you’ll have a hard time telling if your opponent who is betting has you beat for high.

It’s been a while since I ran most of those hands. I didn’t keep track of how they fared for specific types of high hands. I’ll re-run A44Kd because it might be interesting to see how the hand does with respect to “high hands held” possibilities. Wilson lists all the various categories of high hands and how often the test hand won and lost when the best high it could make fit into a particular category.

First the new totals are a bit different, as expected.
hand......high.....low....scoop.....total
A44Kd.....496.....604.....772.....1872 ....old
A44Kd.....453.....606.....755.....1814 ....new

When I re-run a particular hand, I generally average the totals for the old and the new, and that’s what I’ll do here for my main data bank. But for this post, I’m going to use the new values.

What I really want is how often the best high made by A44Kd wins and loses. Here’s the data:

• one pair ....... 1 win ..... 2468 losses
• two pair ..... 64 wins ....3118 losses
• trips ......... 149 wins, ...1280 losses
• straight .... 205 wins, .....299 losses
• flush ......... 803 wins, .....563 losses
• boat ......... 370 wins, .....581 losses
• quads ........ 92 wins, ......... 1 loss
• st. flush ....... 6 wins, ......... 0 losses

The total is 10,000, as it should be.

The total number of wins for high is 1690. If you look several paragraphs above at the whole pot equivalent totals for the hand, it wins high 453, and scoops 755, a total of 1208. There’s an obvious discrepancy of 482. This is due to two factors. (1) When the hand ties for high, the tie is listed as a win in the data for “high hands held,” but the tie counts as a fraction in the data for “totals.” (2) When the hand doesn’t scoop, but wins the high (and may also win part of the low), this also counts as a fraction in the data for “totals.”

I don’t generally like playing hands with low pairs because I don’t like losing with low full houses. For example, you make a full house with A44Kd roughly 9.5% of the time, but only win 370 while losing 562 against a full field.

Losing with a low boat can be brutal because you’re generally stuck in the pot, not knowing whether the opponent who is betting is just driving with the low or has you beaten for high (or both). Meanwhile, your own low is counterfeited and you’re generally playing for only the high half the pot.

Even when your boat ends up a winner for high, you’ll generally miss a bet on the end because you’ll only be playing for half the pot and can’t usually very well tell if you have a winner or not.

A44Jd does end up more with a flush than a full house - and it wins more and loses less with a flush than with a full house. In addition making quads or a straight flush is obviously nice and there are some wheel and Broadway possibilities. Thus I’m going to want to see the flop with A44Kd, even though I hate that low pair. Someone might suggest folding when the flop has a four, but that’s probably not the best way to play the hand. If you’re going to play a hand with a pair of fours, then I think you have to play your low set if you flop one. But it can be a tough play!

And the same goes for playing non-nut flopped lows. With a deuce or trey on the flop plus another low flop card, you’ll have the second nut low draw. That particular second nut low draw is going to encounter the nut low draw about half the time in a full game. And that makes it tough to play.

I’m not saying play A44Kd or don’t play it. I’m just saying some flops can be tough to play. What to do in a real game “depends.” The game is Omaha-8, but you still have to play good poker. If anyone has difficulty playing a flopped set of fours, maybe they need to learn to play better, but maybe folding is their best course of action until they learn to do that. However, if they’re going to fold a flopped set of fours, or if they’re going to fold a flopped second nut ace-four low or second nut ace-four low draw, then A44Kd is obviously worth less as a starting hand for them than the sims indicate.

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(I notice that your total number is a simple sum of high low and scoop. Have you ever considered weighting the high and low by dividing them by 2 to give extra emphasis to scooping.)

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Yes. However....

Wilson has already divided the high and low wins by at least 2 in order to convert them to the equivalent of whole pot wins, and....

I think dividing by 2 again (using a factor of 0.5) is too much. My current thinking is that maybe a factor of 0.75 or 0.8 for high and a factor of 0.6 or 0.65 for low gets closer to the correct relative value for real game play.

So I’m not sure how to do it exactly, but clearly my “totals” need tweaking to give scoop possibilities the greater consideration they deserve.

At any rate, thanks for your suggestions.

Buzz