[Spicymoose]

I still think we want tight players in the blinds. Whenever we are playing poker, we want our villain to maximize his mistakes, and folding the BB against a raise is usually a mistakes (that is, if the player is tight, and not defending enough). Lets take a typical hand...

We raise 99 on the button and SB folds. Our mystery villain has K5s.

Now, if BB is a tighty, he will fold, and we pick up .75 BB.

If BB is a loose guy, he will call. Although we have him crushed, we now have a roughly 2.2 BB pot (depending on the blind structure, and rake structure of course), but only have 67% equity! That means that if he is seeing the showdown, he has just taken .73 BB of the total pot, and since an initial 1 BB of the pot is our own money, we only have gained .47 BB of the pot so far . Now, obvciously we will be winning the pot more often than him, so he will be giving up some of his preflop equity, but since he is loose, he is way more likely to see a showdown, and realize his equity.

So if he goes to showdown 50% of the time here, we take .36 BB of his preflop equity. But we have to remember that we don't always go to showdown. If we fold somewhere along the away 20% of the time, he is taking away .3 BB of our 1.47 "owned" BBs. Although I used the number .47 early, that number was showing our profit so far, but 1.47 is our equity. So these two effects mean that instead our instant .47 BB equity from preflop, we now have .47-.3+36 or .53 BB.

We still need to make up .22 BB from his postflop mistakes, remembering that any mistake we make has to be made up again. I don't think we can make up this difference, and therefore we were happy to have him fold outright.


This was a single hand, and so obviously the picture is different overall. I just think that with many hands our villains hold, we make far more by them folding, than by them talking away our instant profit, and having to make it up later in the hand. I used this hand because this is one where it seems we have huge equity, and want him to call, but in fact I think we don't. Perhaps my numbers were too far off though, so in fact we do want him to call. [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

Anyway, I think in summary, we either want a tight blind, or if the blind isn't tight, at least have him be a ridiculously bad player who will make as many mistakes as possible postflop.