[Ed Miller]

If I understand your point, I don't agree.

Imagine that your opponents never fold postflop while you fold whenever it seems correct. That greatly reduces the probability of winning with (say) ATs and can easily make the preflop raise negative EV. Of course you are getting rich on the postflop play but that could have been achieved by just calling.

That's not quite what I'm saying. Of course you are correct... but assuming that your opponents never fold, while you fold every time it is "correct" to do so is a silly assumption. That's just not the way poker is played. You can't introduce a "folding factor" and subtract it from your hot-and-cold winrate without thinking about how often other people will fold when they would have won.

Furthermore, you are ignoring two other postflop effects:

1. With a hand like ATs, it's significantly more likely that your opponents should fold than you should. So even if your opponents play loosely postflop, they might be folding more than you simply because their hands are that much weaker than yours.

2. The size of the pot changes the frequency that your opponents will fold. Believe it or not, many player will fold in an unraised pot, but not in a raised pot.

My objection is that this Flawed guy basically took the worst-case scenario (well, maybe not the worst, but he picked out anti-raising factors and ignored some pro-raising factors), plugged them into a "simulation" (god knows what went on under the covers of that), and told me that I was wrong.

If you are going to run simulations and achieve results from them, I think you have an obligation to make some estimate as to the ERROR of your simulation. Error can come from several places:

1. The estimates that you used when you developed the sim. For example, Flawed says that he "looked at PokerTracker" and decided what hands people limped with and what they didn't limp with. That adjudication is a source of error.

2. Errors in the simulation software itself. If you are running hot-and-cold simulations, then if you coded them correctly, you should have no errors of this sort. But if you are running simulations where people bet, raise, and fold (i.e., TTH), then you get errors here... potentially very large errors if you aren't extremely careful.

3. Factors that you ignored. If you consider how often you have to fold, but you assume that your opponents never fold... well, that introduces a systematic error into your result.

These errors can REALLY add up to a sim. In fact, I bet that most people who run sims (I don't know anything about Flawed, so I can't say this about him one way or the other) get results that are essentially meaningless. They don't understand poker well enough OR their software well enough to reduce and adjust for the errors. They just set something up, tell it to run a million hands, and read off the results as if they are gospel.

If you are going to run sims and get real results that you are going to argue about, you have an obligation to estimate the error of your results.