You guys might find this thread interesting...

[Randy Burgess]

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I'm not saying that raising 22 UTG is more than a $2 mistake in a 2-4 game, but it is wrong to say that it cannot be more than $2.

[/ QUOTE ]

If we're going to squeeze ourselves onto the head of the pin right next to all those angels, then strictly speaking, you can lose more than the original limp even with 72o - after all, you'll occasionally hit a flop (e.g. 2 pair) that keeps you in yet ultimately loses for you.

I think Ed was on his way to accounting for all such quibbles when he postulated that making a preflop mistake with 72o "might get you into a situation where you make more mistakes and lose more... but the ORIGINAL mistake costs at most $2. Remember, you can always fold."

This distinction between preflop and postflop costs would seem to become less useful the better your hole cards, since postflop involvement becomes more and more likely. Even so it don't we often think this way when considering the cost of a draw?

E.g. with Kxs, if we flop a King our risk has jumped way up, but that wasn't what we had in mind when we limped it after many loose limpers - we were thinking that the majority of the time, our cost is limited to the initial limp if we play properly.

Aside from that I found the offsite thread mildly interesting but mostly very basic. What this says to me is that like many studious but untalented hold'em players I have a much better handle on preflop play than on postflop play.

[Ed Miller]

Randy,

TheDude is right. He is saying that you cannot evaluate the "Raising vs. Calling" mistake (from UTG) in quite the same way that you evaluate the "Calling vs. Folding" mistake.

For the "Calling vs. Folding" mistake you CANNOT lose (on average) more than the cost of the call due to that error alone. It's mathematically impossible to have an expectation lower than the price of the call.

In the "Raising vs. Calling" mistake, it's very unlikely to have an expectation differece between raising and calling bigger than the size of the raise... but it is POSSIBLE. Calling could be wildly profitable, and raising could chase out everyone who would have given you action if you had just called. So calling might possibly be +$3 and raising +$0.

Now in reality, that's simply not the way poker works. If calling is worth $1, then raising will almost certainly not be worth less than -$1 (again, in our $2-$4 game). But I asserted that it is a certainty when it isn't.

Now what is true is that raising can be no worse than two bets of expectation worse than folding. So if you KNOW that calling is break-even, then you can set a hard limit on the size of the raising error at -$4.

[Randy Burgess]

Somebody slap me till I'm awake. I COMPLETELY misread his post.

[The Dude]

Ed, as an interesting aside, I played in a live 3-6 game the other day where it was very possible that raising 22 UTG was correct! It was borderline, but the game was juicy, to say the least.

What I mean to say is, it is usually only a small mistake to raise w/ 22 UTG in most 2-4 games.

[Ed Miller]

What I mean to say is, it is usually only a small mistake to raise w/ 22 UTG in most 2-4 games.

I definitely agree with that. This was really the point of my example... that failing to raise ATs is a major error (as is folding AQ), and the "giving extra action" errors I listed were all much smaller in magnitude (if errors at all... notice in the column I didn't label them "errors," I labelled them "plays"... at least I think I did.. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] ).

My post where I estimated EVs was just intended to give people who are brand new to thinking about poker this way a quick "back of the envelope" introduction to estimating this kind of stuff. That's why I used three different methods to estimate (random hands, pokerroom.com data, and capping losses). Yes, some will misapply these techniques, but I still think they should be exposed to them. People light up when they hear for the first time about raising because you'll win more than your share. Many of these people think raising is for "getting the garbage out" or other stuff... and those reasons never quite rang true for them because... well, because they are mostly nonsense. [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

Also, I don't want people to get too lost in the numbers. The actually numbers are VERY hard to nail down because there are so many variables. But thankfully you don't have to nail the numbers down to get most poker decisions correct. A little logic and intuition will get you to the right place often enough to smash any small or medium stakes game.

This is another reason I'm not a huge proponent of running sims. 5% of the effort will get you 90%+ of the answers. And the answers it won't get you are close in nature anyway. Yet most people are still struggling with that first 90%. So the large majority of poker players have little need for sims... because they still need to learn how to get what they can just by thinking things through.