The illusion of the "good fold" in a large pot.

[DavidC]

I've finished reading everything but the Q&A and Hand Quizes in SSHE for the second time. I thought I'd talk a little about "good folds" (meaning bad folds that you think are awesome).

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Let's assume we've got a pot that's 25BB, and that it's one bet to you.

Given that you're putting in 1/26, 3.85% chance to win is your break-even point.

Meaning that if you have a 6% chance to win, you're throwing away almost an entire BB if you fold.

If you assume that these hands happen 1/100 hands, and that you're involved in them on the river 1/10 times, this degrades your winrate by 0.075BB/100 (pretty small).

Assume that you play a little more hands and that the pots approach this size more often, and it's significantly higher than that.

Assume that your winrate is going to be more than 6%, and it's going to be SIGNIFICANTLY higher than that. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Assume 10% to win: you lose 2.59bb by not calling the hand.

Assume it happens 3/100 hands, and that you're involved 12% of the times.

It costs your winrate 0.93 BB / 100 hands. Pretty sad, eh? (yes, I'm Canadian.).

***I think 12% involvement may be a little high, though... at 6% involvement (pretty reasonable) it would cost you half this amount.***


So, these decisions (calling for a single bet in large pots with marginal hands) do impact your winrate.

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Here's my problem.

It's really hard for me to figure out my exact winning chances when I'm on the river with a marginal hand. Really really friggin hard.

Furthermore, assume that I just always fold:

If I've got 12% chance to win, then I'm going to be making folds that look like they're working almost every time.

When I call, it looks like I'm paying off too much, every time.

Good players, when they fold a marginal hand in a big pot, that they would have won, can say, "It's just variance."

The same as folding the turn when you would have rivered bottom trips in a small pot.

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I hope it's clear that I'm not condoning folding in these pots after I just outlined how destructive it can be to your winrate.

What I'm saying is that for me personally, it's really hard to SEE the effects of calling with these hands.

How am I going to figure out if they're profitable (this is directly related to my winning chances, which for the life of me, I can't figure out how to determine).

Does anyone have any idea as to how to statistically figure out how often you're going to win in a certain sized pot with given action and a given hand?

--Dave.

[itsmesteve]

i've always been under the impression that a "rough" guess at your chances is good enough. I don't think there is a way, without being intimately familiar with everyone in the hand, to judge the difference between a 6% and 10% chance of winning. I think that the best way to approach the situation is via your reads and putting opponenets on a range of hands. from there you just try to guestimate the chance they both hold a hand you beat. sorry that the response doesn't have the same amount of thought/effort as the post, but i think you're really beating yourself up over something that can never be an exact science.

if you are really worried about your judgement, keep a little index card or notepad and keep track of the crying calls you made when you thought you had a chance <10% to win but thought a call was "worth a shot"- ie maybe 3%, maybe 6%. once you get a decent sample ( i figure its gotta be at least a few thousand, if not tens of thousands of hands) and take a look at the results.
good luck

[wabe]

[ QUOTE ]
I think that the best way to approach the situation is via your reads and putting opponenets on a range of hands. from there you just try to guestimate the chance they both hold a hand you beat.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is exactly right; given enough time, you should be able to do this in your head within a reasonable time, but this takes lots and lots of practice.

Although, in a 25BB hand, I think I will likely show down for one bet if I've gone that far.

[Aaron W.]

[ QUOTE ]
How am I going to figure out if they're profitable (this is directly related to my winning chances, which for the life of me, I can't figure out how to determine).

Does anyone have any idea as to how to statistically figure out how often you're going to win in a certain sized pot with given action and a given hand?

[/ QUOTE ]

The best learning tool is to develop hand-reading skills. Without hand reading, you can't do anything. If you can't figure out what your opponent might have, then you really can't figure out if/how often you're ahead. This article in the 2+2 magazine begins to talk about it, but stops short of giving anything that you couldn't figure out just by thinking for a couple minutes (but hold on... examples may be coming soon).

Once you have some level of hand reading (you don't need to be amazing, just decent), then you can start sitting down during your non-playing times and start doing some numerical analyses.

I was having a little back and forth today on this sort of thing, though it's not a river calling decision. Jay was trying to convince me that a flop fold is prudent, so I asked him for a range of hands. Once I have the range of hands, I can sit down and get various probabilities.

For example, how often am I ahead? In the given range of hands, there are 19 which are drawing against me and 37 which I'm chasing. That means I'm ahead 19/56 = 34% of the time (I estimated in the post, since 19/57 = 1/3). You can do similar things on river calls.

BUT NOT DURING THE GAME! There might be some people out there at higher levels who can do these sorts of counts in their head, but I would guess that such a skill is rare (there are probably many more people who do it intuitively than computationally). This is the sort of thing that you jot down somewhere as a "hand to review". After a while, you will start to develop some intuition on the probabilities and make better decisions.

By the way, you really need to keep track of hands that you should review. Then you really really really need to review them. Without studying, you're going to spin your wheels and make modest progress at best.

[DavidC]

I think that during the game you should probably make some specific judgements, like "If I have any bloody chance of taking down this pot with my hand, I've gotta call it."

The mistake that you will make by calling with slightly less of a chance (unknowingly) than you require is probably going to be smaller than mistakes that you make when you unknowingly have a greater chance than that and fold.

I'll definitely go over those posts. Thank you very much!

That being said, remember that reading hands isn't totally precise, but yes, it does really help narrow down your likeliness of winning.