Hand Rankings

Aisthesis · #1 11-30-2003, 11:45 PM

I read the article in cardplayer on A8 (most interesting!) and glanced briefly at the "Sklansky-Karlson" rankings after some guys on UPF referred me to both in light of some calculations I was posting there. Did those rankings ever get posted in a more user-friendly format (the thread was pretty long, so I didn't go through it all)?
Also, it was unclear to me exactly what question was being answered there.

Nottom · #2 12-01-2003, 12:19 AM

Heres a link to the rankings, I'm not sure if its more user friendly or not. As for the question, its the same as with A8. If you are in the SB and its been folded to you how many SBs can you have in your stack to make going all-in a +EV play against a solid BB player.

Karlson-Sklansky rankings

Aisthesis · #3 12-01-2003, 03:57 AM

Thanks! That one is indeed much more comprehensible than the raw numbers I saw when it was originally posted. And after re-reading the A8o article, I think I now understand the question as well...

ComboProf · #4 12-01-2003, 09:18 AM

Is there a disscusion somewhere that explains how these are calculated?

Henke · #5 12-01-2003, 09:26 AM

See this thread

Aisthesis · #6 12-01-2003, 04:21 PM

If I understood the A8o article correctly, the strategy was this: All hands WORSE than the given starting SB hand are folded (at first I had some doubts about this step but convinced myself that it was correct since you'll have positive EV anyway if you're called) and SB succeeds in stealing BB. Second, you take all of the remaining hands and run the EV of your starting hand against them. Third, you see how much was won or lost altogether given a certain stack-size from SB (those are the chips with which you went all-in). Finally, you calculate what your stack-size had to be with the given starting hand in order to break even Sklansky has a formula for the break-even in the article in the A8o case--the real "legwork" in the whole calculation is running the given starting hand against all random BB hands.
What I'd be interested to know is to what extent these rankings are generalizeable. They should say quite a bit about the power of various hands heads-up, I would think. But I would think they say very little about the power of hands in multi-way pots...

Nottom · #7 12-01-2003, 05:36 PM

[ QUOTE ]
All hands WORSE than the given starting SB hand are folded (at first I had some doubts about this step but convinced myself that it was correct since you'll have positive EV anyway if you're called) and SB succeeds in stealing BB.

[/ QUOTE ]

Worse hands getting proper odds to call will indeed call if the pot odds warrent it. i.e. if the SB has a stack of 3, 22 is getting called by anything.

Aisthesis · #8 12-01-2003, 08:16 PM

ok, I like that. Would be very interested in hearing more on the question of what all this means. I started a new thread on this issue and just started refining a little on the "groups" that emerge (better than my first stab at it in the initial post, but I'll wait to post further until thinking about it some more and getting some feedback).
If we're really just ranking hands heads-up with this, what's the reason for this methodological detour? It does seem somehow "right" to me, and you avoid the complication of hands such that A beats B, B beats C, but C beats A (rendering direct comparison "difficult"). But I wonder if there's a particular reason one might be able to say that this method yields "the" proper ranking in a heads-up--or if rough heads-up rankings are just an incidental benefit the importance of which I'm grossly exaggerating...