Coilean and Dcifrths talk theory...

[Doctor Teller]

[ QUOTE ]
I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen everyone enter the pot on a Party 15/30 table.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not a Party regular, but I believe they have the loosest action. How many people on average see the flop in 15/30? Maybe three or four? More or less?

Just to be devil's advocate here, I just don't necessarily think you'd be losing too much if you folded aces or kings, given how many people usually enter the hands. It's a great payoff, but you can get cracked a portion of the time, proportianally by how many people enter the pot on average, and how many BB bets are put into the pot at each stage.

[Tommy Angelo]

"if you folded AA every single time you got them"

I know you said on partypoker but now you got me curious.

For me playing live it might go like this:

At 40-ish hands per hour I get aces lets say once every five hours. If I play a full 2000-hour year, that's 400 pocket aces per year. At $20-40 where and how I play let's say they are worth in hard cash $50 each. (<-- a topic unto itself.)

That's 400 pocket aces x $50 = $20,000 per year I'd lose by folding pocket aces every time.

To your percentage question ...

If I "make" $50,000 in a year, then folding pocket aces would cost me 40% of my income. But in actually, when I "make" $50,000, I really made $85,000 and paid $35,000 in rake and tips. With this accounting, folding pocket aces every time would cost 25% of my income, not 40%.

So the correct final answer to the percentage-change question depends as much on accounting as anything.

What I'm coming away with is the new knowledge that folding pocket aces every time costs less than playing.



Tommy

[sweetzer]

Before I try to figure this out mathematically, let me give a blackjack analogy, as the math is similar in many ways, among them that a serious skilled player requires 200-300 big bets to withstand the variance. In blackjack, a skilled counter plays with at most a 1% advantage, and a skilled tracker slightly higher. The key is to play only the games with the most advantageous rules, as slight variations in rules, such as hitting the soft 17,greatly affected the win rates over thousands of trials. Giving up the 3:2 payout on blackjacks renders a game worthless. This led to my investors sending me all over the world for several years whenever they heard of games with more advantageous rules. In holdem, while seemingly AA and KK come up infrequently, once every 220 hands, and at best AA wins 50% of the time, the actual expectation per hand of the game is so small that eliminating these hands would have a tremendous effect on the win rate. In short, I don't think the above figures are out of line.

[Nightwish]

[ QUOTE ]
In holdem, while seemingly AA and KK come up infrequently, once every 220 hands, and at best AA wins 50% of the time, the actual expectation per hand of the game is so small that eliminating these hands would have a tremendous effect on the win rate. In short, I don't think the above figures are out of line.

[/ QUOTE ]
Your blackjack analogy definitely applies. Those figures appeared to be out of line based on my own stats, so either my overall win rate is significantly higher than the other poster's or I don't win as much on AA/KK as he does. That's all I was trying to say.

BTW, AA holds up much more than "at best 50% of the time". It's something like 73% for me.

[Analyst]

Just a back of the napkin calculation:

You get AA about .45 times every 100 hands. Based on the chart in SSH, the average win per AA hand is ~~3BB. Fold AA, and you give up about 1.35BB/100 hands. For KK, I'd guess it's about 1BB/100 hands.

There're lots of simplifying assumptions here (ignoring free looks in the blinds, etc.), but it's pretty clear that folding AA and KK would cripple all but the elite players; even the best would be in a world of hurt as well.

[sweetzer]

AA should be better than 50% but essentially we're saying the same thing: in a game where the overall expectation is small and one wins only by multiplying the small advantages over thousands of trials, any small advantage that you give up becomes magnified and can easily negate whatever advantage exists.

[DcifrThs]

n/m

[DcifrThs]

[ QUOTE ]
If I "make" $50,000 in a year, then folding pocket aces would cost me 40% of my income. But in actually, when I "make" $50,000, I really made $85,000 and paid $35,000 in rake and tips. With this accounting, folding pocket aces every time would cost 25% of my income, not 40%.

[/ QUOTE ]

FINALLY, somebody gets this part. thanks tommy.

took me a bit too, coilean got it first.

when you pay blinds and rake (and tips live) this takes away from the total amount you make like gross vs. net.
-Barron

PS- i won the other guessing contest...when we entered the ameristar there was a guy with a gorgeous stack of chips 6 around and spiraling upwards and one down the center. he was about to leave and everybody started guessing after i asked how much there was there...he said "guess" i said "2500" coilean said "2200" and he ended up having slightly more than 2500 [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] .... now, if there was only a prize to compensate me for the 2500 i lost in the last week lol...

[astroglide]

it's not an underdog if everybody is in

[Senor Choppy]

[ QUOTE ]
At 40-ish hands per hour I get aces lets say once every five hours. If I play a full 2000-hour year, that's 400 pocket aces per year. At $20-40 where and how I play let's say they are worth in hard cash $50 each. (<-- a topic unto itself.)

That's 400 pocket aces x $50 = $20,000 per year I'd lose by folding pocket aces every time.

[/ QUOTE ]

Aces seem to be worth at least 3 big bets for good players (I'm at slightly over this and I know of another good player making over this as well), so you should be at $100+, probably around $130 or $140.