[MikeL05]

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Hypothetically, I've been wondering if you could successfully win with only 35% W$SH because assumming you are generally calling or betting a pot sized bet on the end you are getting 2:1 on your money which means it would be profitable to win anything > 33% ( considering the river as an independent event). In general though I don't hold much stock in the statistic b/c a hand that is checked around is equally weighted to the huge all-in overbet on the end. Win the big hands. Lose the small ones.

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Sort of faulty logic here. Let's assume you only play heads up. Even if you're getting 2:1 on a river call... after you make that call, you've still put exactly 50% of the money into the pot. So if you don't win at least 50% of the time, you're losing money on these hands. This is not to say it is a bad play to call. It's more saying that you, at some point, put in some money that was -EV in the hand.

You can be an overall winner with a 35% W$SD because of multiway pots, of course. You can also be a winner at 35% if you make up for the losing there by picking up a lot of small pots that don't go to showdown (think Doyle's ridiculous old Super System strategy).

But you make a good point that I was thinking about too, which is that even if you're only winning 35% of pots, as long as you're winning more of the big ones and losing more small ones, you can still be doing OK.

FWIW, my "ratio" is 5.13