Because it really deserved its own thread.

[Jaran]

For those of you who might normally avoid statts posts, I thought this post from Aaron deserved some discussion in it's own thread.

-Jaran


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I think the key is to look at W$WSF and W$SD in tandem. With all this aggression you fold out a lot of people before it ever gets to a showdown. I've been running at 35 percent W$WSF and I thought that was good.

My W$SD has been drifting down from 51.5 to close to 50 and I've been wondering if I should care and looking for places where I should back off. Too bad you don't have a larger sample size to really show if you can sustain a gaudy winrate with a W$SD in the mid- to upper-40s.


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I was thinking more about this last night. How much should those 'extra' river calls affect your BB/100? If you go to the showdown 35% of the time you see the flop, and you see the flop 20% of the time, then 7% of the time you see a showdown. If you call an extra 10% over what you "should", that affects only about .7% of your hands. If you say that a mistake of that type costs 1.5 BB (a loose turn call and a loose river call, but sometimes you win), then the error seems to be on the order of .1 BB/100. (That's 1.5 BB lost once every .7/100 hands.) This is a mistake, but not a very large one. (It's not a large mistake if you don't have the chance to make it often and it's not an expensive one. Losing 1.5 BB less than once every 100 hands isn't a big mistake).

Calling on the river isn't a big mistake, as long as you're calling down with decent hands. As I thought about it more, I don't make many 'tough' river folds. If I find myself having to think hard on a river bet, my inclination is to just call it.

Here's something from SSH (p. 217):


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[O]n the river, even though you freqeuntly will not like the results, if your hand has some value, your chips will often need to go into the center of the table.


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Most of your money is probably made by building up big pots early with the best hand.

Here's a simple example: Suppose you have two opponents on the turn. They have a combined 10 outs against you. This means 78% of the time, you're going to win the pot. Suppose further that they will only bet the river if they make their hand AND you will always call them (even though you know you're beat). To make things worse, they will NEVER call missed draws on the river, so you can't make any more money off of them.

EV = 78%*(2 BB) - 22%*(-2 BB) = +1.12 BB

So even in this bad condition (smart river play by opponents, dumb river play by you), you are still quite profitable. The size of the error of *NOT* betting the best hand on the turn is about the same as the size of calling the extra amount on the river (within 1 SB of each other), but you see more turns than rivers, so failing to make this bet is more costly than calling those extra 10% of your hands on the river.

I hope this spurs on more discussion. Too bad I won't be around for it since I'm gone this weekend. I leave in a couple hours (11 AM in California), but I'll check back at least once before I go