Intresting proposal

[BirdieLongSocks]

First of all sorry for all spelling errors and grammer mistakes that will occur.

My friend made me the following proposal yesterday. We would play a texas holdem NL sit and go he would control 9 hands and I got 1 hand. Each hand has its own stack, so he would start with a total of 9 times more chips then me. The game would be played by me going all in every single hand to my advantage I got to see all of his hands and I got to pick which single one that I would race HU to the river.
He said he would pay me 5 times what I would bet on myself to win If we played 10 matches, no more no less.

I took upon his challange thinking that in the start I wold out kicker him and when he had fewer hands left I could afford some badluck.

So to the question, is the odds with me or against me?

[Siegmund]

Assuming you are going all-in preflop, your friend is going to get rich.

To win, you have to survive nine consecutive all-ins. A dominated-hand matchup like AK vs KQ is close to a 75% chance; pair over pair is close to 80%. The only time you will do better than that is when you're so lucky as to be dealt a pair AND catch an opponent with a third card of the same rank.

Winning nine 80% shots in a row is a 13.4% chance (6.4:1 against).Nine 75% shots in a row is a 7.5% chance (12.3:1 against.) If you succeed in busting out several of his hands, towards the end you will have a very small selection of opposing cards to choose from and be forced to take some 50% or worse shots. I would say a fair payoff to you for these rules is in the neighborhood of 20:1.


Your friend could give you an even more generous proposition -- "I'll deal you a hand. You choose any two cards you want from the rest of the deck for me to play." -- and I think he'd still be getting the best of it if he only offered you 5:1 to play nine hands in a row.

[Derek in NYC]

[ QUOTE ]
To win, you have to survive nine consecutive all-ins.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is not correct. If he wins the first allin, he will have all chipstacks covered and can lose the next allin without going broke.

It is a very interesting proposition bet, and I dont know the answer. A more interesting question than the 5:1 odds your friend offered, is the following: "What odds must be offered before this bet is EV neutral?"

One initial problem that comes to mind is not so much the fact that you must win later allins, but you must win the first allin. You have a RH, but you can choose your RH against 9 others and choose the worse one of the 9 to play against (ideally one you dominate).

[FishHooks]

One minor question, you said you play 10 hands, but really your saying 9all in's just ten total hands on the board, of which one is yours, right? making sure i got this correct.

Sounds like a +EV bet on the surface to me.

[reubenf]

Not quite. As was already mentioned, he doesn't have to win 9 consecutive all-ins. Further, he should sometimes get better than a normal dominating hand since he knows as many as 16 mucked cards.

[BirdieLongSocks]

Well we played it 10 times and I won none.

Would you have taken this deal? To me it felt right.

[BirdieLongSocks]

If I win the first all in I will afford to lose 1 since I will have twice as much as the rest of the stacks.

[elitegimp]

[ QUOTE ]
Well we played it 10 times and I won none.

Would you have taken this deal? To me it felt right.

[/ QUOTE ]

what was the fewest hands you got him down to? Can you describe how long the typical match lasted? Something like "I won the first hand, lost the second, won the third, the lost the tourney when I lost to the same hand I lost to before"

[BirdieLongSocks]

I got him down to 2 hands twice.

The problem was in the begging 1st-5th hands(I busted out before 5 hands in 6 matches), after that phase it got intresting because some of his stacks was larger then the rest.

My strategy was to double up without busting any more of his hands, then I could afford more badluck when they got fewer. It did really have some intresting deep and I think my strategy could have been better, but as sudjested 5:1 is not good enought odds.

[housenuts]

i feel like running this simulation myself. i don't know if it's +ev but i think you should definitely win a few out of those 10