sam farha vs. (unknown) day1 wsop

[Jordan Olsommer]

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This post makes no sense. The idea of EV is that the risk is already taken into account in the calculation itself. The calculations greg did TAKE INTO ACCOUNT the fact that his set could get redrawn on. It' STILL +EV. No, he likely didn't do the exact EV calculations, but so? If he was right he was right, whether it was intuition or calculation is highly irrelevant. Also, it would be even larger +EV if Anthony Curtis had 14K instead of 10K (which is how much he had according to his description of the situation). If he has 14K it's far and away an easy call and in fact a fold would be terrible. The risk = 1/22 of your stack (1K), reward = ~14K.

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This post makes no sense. Consider the "St. Petersburg Paradox", wherein somebody offers you a proposition based on flipping a coin until a head appears; you win 2^n dollars, where n is the number of flips it takes to finally produce a result of heads. So first flip comes up heads, you win $2. First tails, then heads, you win $4. If eighteen tails come up in a row, then one heads, you win $524,288.

You certainly wouldn't put up your entire life's savings just to play this game, but according to your reasoning in your post above, you should - this proposition has infinite EV ((1/2^n)*(2^n) = 1, and the sum an infinite number of ones is, well, infinite.)

Or surely if somebody offered you a proposition for your entire life's savings where you have a 1% shot of winning 10 billion dollars and a 99% shot of losing everything, you'd take it, right?.....right?

You are not at all considering the fact that you have a limited bankroll in tournaments - in these cases, EV is not everything.

*edit: By the way, "If he was right he was right, whether it was intuition or calculation is highly irrelevant" is also nonsense. It would take a superhuman intuition or superhuman calculating ability to get an answer of +63 EV and to be certain of that answer. It is much, much more likely that the thought that went through Farha's mind when he called Curtis's $1,000 bet was "if I flop a set and he doesn't flop a third ace [or king], I'm going to get all his chips."