Horsing (more suitable to live play environments)

[DavidC]

At a club, I've witnessed people "horse".

Two players agree to give eachother chips out of pots that they win. I.E. Each time player A wins a pot, he gives some cash to player B, and vice-versa.

Players make all sorts of agreements, but this generally results in either a flat rate ($5 per pot at a $5/$10 game), or a percentage of the pot (5%-10%).

I'd like to discuss these agreements a little (FWIW I don't take part in them).

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Part 1: Who wins at Horse?

Now, at first, this agreement might look like it doesn't really do anything. Then, it might look like the tightest player wins. As a result, I've found
that one of these two ideas is generally the prevalent opinion on "horsing" (i.e. most people think either one or the other). Neither of these is
necessarily true, though, and I THINK I have the answer.

Firstly, if both players play exactly the same this has the result of reducing hourly variance by allowing them to take a cut of eachother's wins. If the
two players are doing a X% percentage-based horse, then the sample size increases by about X%, I think. I don't know if this would work out to exactly X%,
or if it would be slightly less than X%, though. If it is slightly less than X, then the bigger X is, the greater the difference between X and it's effect
on sample size will be. If the two players are doing a flat horse ($5 per pot), then the sample size will increase by X% or about X%, where X is the
percent of the average pot that equals $5.

If one player is tighter than the other and all else is equal, then the tighter player makes money from the deal. However, if one player is tighter, but
is more aggressive and wins a large amount more pots than the looser player, the looser player may surprisingly make money from this deal. On a flat horse,
what matters is the % of pots (per hour not per VPIP) won by each player.

Supposing two players did a % based horse, and they played with the same VPIP, but one player was significantly more aggressive without winning significantly
more pots. Suppose both players had an identical BB/100. The player who was more aggressive and thus created larger pots would lose in this deal.

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Part 2: River calls and Horsing.

Here's something that I've been stewwing over for about a month (seriously), and I'm even less sure about my opinions on this being correct than I am about
Part 1 being correct. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

If you're HU with your horse on the river, it's a 10 BB pot, and he bets into you (11 BB in pot), how do you evaluate that bet?

Well, if you weren't horsing, you would say, "Hmm... there's 11 BB in there, it's 11:1, if I'm good 1/12, I should call."

Let's say the terms of the Horse was $5 per pot at a 5/10 game (0.5 BB / pot).

Now the first thing that you might think, if you think about this pragmatically (since a lot of people will do this with their friends and play their normal
game) is, "Hey, if I call, I win at least $5, so my odds on this call are really 11:0.5, or 22:1, therefore if I'm good 1/23, I should call."

(Now, adjust this to 10.5:0.5, or 20.5:1, or 1/21.5, because the $5 can't really be in the pot if it's already in your stack or your horse's stack, right?)

However, I don't believe this is true, and I'll show why:

Let's stretch the example a little bit:

Now it's a $5/$10 game, and you have a $15 horse agreement. This time, if you use the "natural" math above, all the sudden your river bet costs you -$5.
That would mean someone is PAYING YOU to call? Meaning that if you had 32o unimproved and he turned over AA before you called, you should still call?
No way! (Well, unless there's a straight on board or whatever, but you know what I mean...) Something kind of funny is that this would actually give you
negative pot odds.

Clearly you shouldn't call if you know that you're going to lose, because you lose less money if you just fold.

This leads us to seeing that we should evaluate the river call based on the current bet size. Since we aren't really competing for the whole pot ($5 is
either ours or our horse's already), we should subtract that amount from the pot size when making our calculations.

Thus, with a $5 horse prop bet at a $5/$10 game, in an 11BB pot, you have 10.5:1 odds, and thus must be good 1/11.5 of the time to break even.

Unfortunately, this applies to all river calls (because if you win, your horse gets a reward).

How would this apply to river value bets against your horse? Well, if you know that they aren't taking the new pot size into account when making their
decisions, your value bets will be more lucrative than they would normally be, because he'll be paying you off when the pot doesn't justify him to do so.

[detruncate]

[ QUOTE ]
If you're HU with your horse on the river, it's a 10 BB pot, and he bets into you (11 BB in pot)

[/ QUOTE ]

Take a swing at him?

Freud might have something to say about this obsession with horses.

[DavidC]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
If you're HU with your horse on the river, it's a 10 BB pot, and he bets into you (11 BB in pot)

[/ QUOTE ]

Take a swing at him?

Freud might have something to say about this obsession with horses.

[/ QUOTE ]

Holy [censored], I'd totally forgotten about that! Thanks. [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]