What if you knew everyone's hole cards?

[SossMan]

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I have a feeling that Greenstein or Sklansky or Reese or Ivey might eventually be able to figure out that something was up.

They might not know specifically that you are ALWAYS seeing their cards...but they will eventually observe that you are somehow taking every pot where you stay in (although you could counter this by actually intentionally showing-down a losing hand every once in awhile I suppose).

If a Chan or Greenstein or Sklansky is at your table then they are going to come up with some sort of appropriate 'all-in or nothing' strategy to try to counter your advantage.


Even without someone coming up with a maniac strategy to counter your x-ray vision....it's 6,000 freaking players.
And we're talking about winning the whole freaking thing.
I'm saying 50%-ish and you're saying 90%-ish (which may be closer to correct, not sure).

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by the time they figured out something was up, it would be too late. After day 1, nobody is going to have enough chips to ever bust you. You will end day 1 with probably over 200k in chips, maybe more. You will lead wire to wire. You will go to the final table with probably over 90% of the chips. Imagine your advantage on the bubble. On the final table bubble. Even if they had some sort of all in or fold strategy against me, I would have two advantages...
I would have a huge stack and would be able to eventually bust them w/ a 75%+ favorite preflop
and
I don't have to play against them. I could avoid them until I had a huge advantage and pick on everyone else.

Think about it. You would never make a mistake. You could blow people off medium sized pots at will. You would never make a river error. You could resteal everytime anyone stole. You could call every raise when someone has AK or AQ and you had two garbage cards and play a flop...a turn...a river perfectly. You would be able to execute perfect squeeze plays. You would accumulate so many chips with so little (virtualy no) risk that you would be impossible to stop. It would take a monster run of terrible beats/cards at the final table for you not to win. That will happen maybe once in twenty or thirty trials. No more.

[MicroBob]

Yeah...I suspect you might be correct.


I am naturally thinking of the fact that it's 6k freaking players over 5 days (or whatever it is) and we are talking about somehow not winning THE WHOLE THING only 10% of the time.


You might be correct that by the time any expert figured out that something was going on that my advantage would be too insurmountable.

Additionally, since I would likely have SOOOO many freaking chips they would probably just try to steer clear of me and see if they can get into pots against the other players.

Playing for 2nd place would have to be better EV for them than taking maniacal shots to slow me down.


I'll agree with your 90% figure.


Man...this would be FUN!!!
I want to do this. Somebody hurry-up and make some X-Ray glasses for me.

[curtains]

[ QUOTE ]
Suppose you are an above-average player in WPT-type, four-day, 500-or-so player, NLH events. Suppose your expected win rate is about once in 250 events (twice the average).

Now suppose that you are given the magical power of knowing the hole cards of every player at your table for every hand throughout the tournament. Nobody else has this power and nobody knows that you have it. What would this do to your expected win rate?

I've thought about this off & on for a few days without coming up with an elegant or comprehensive way to approach it. My instinct is that you'd increase your chances by a factor in the 3-5 range. The most common recurring benefits would be to keep you on the proper side of all the 55/45-type decisions that arise, and to make you bluff-proof. Only rarely would you get away from the wrong side of set-over-set or know to call with your pocket 3s when someone move-in preflop with pocket 2s.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how to approach this, or any intuitive reactions about the likely answer?

Bob Feduniak <font color="white"> </font>

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I think you would be virtually unbeatable. You could know with perfection when to steal postflop. You would fold preflop if anyone at the table has any kind of hand that they might even dream of playing against you, at least you can do this later in the event. Ok someone might try to make a move on you every now and then and youll fold, but in general if you are constantly raising when the table has NADA preflop, you are going to win very easily

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Post flop this gift would be fantastic.
But would you fold your JJ everytime you knew someone was holding a bigger pair just ot be on the "safe" side?

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This goes to a point that I don't think anyone has addressed yet. This ability would be exceptionally useful postflop. So you simply try to see absolutely the maximum number of flops possible without committing a significant % of your chips preflop. Limp in late position with 72o every time. Call even moderate raises with any 2. Don't worry at all about being dominated. Then once you see the flop you can steal from others who have missed their hands, which will easily make up for the chip spewing preflop, and get absolutely maximum value whenever you have the best hand. You can do this with very little risk by structuring betting amounts so that you're never committing more than half your stack or so until the river unless your opponent is drawing dead...even if this means folding a better hand early when it's likely that your opponent will put you all in before the river. You'd almost never get checkraised or 3-bet except on pure bluffs, so you'd have tremendous control of pot size.

Of course this becomes less useful as blinds escalate and preflop betting gets significant fractions of your stack in. But by then you should have so many chips that you can gamble a little in good spots.

[Punker]

Assuming you don't run into a wild maniac table with lots of heavy preflop raising, you should win almost every time I believe.

An underestimated factor here is being able to know 23 cards on the flop rather than 5 in calculating odds. Assume you flop a flush draw; in a normal game you are thinking you have 9/46 outs. Knowing all the cards, you may now know you are 9/29, or that your opponent is drawing much slimmer than he thinks in situations. eg, you have AK, he has 66, and both sixes are dead, while all AK are live; this changes from a coin flip to 68-32 in your favor. Alternatively, if you have the 66 and all the AK are dead, the 66 becomes a 91-9 favorite.

Assuming you play safe until you build up a big enough stack, you should win barring something insane happening.

[Iconoclastic]

I think the edge would be larger in higher buy-in events with lots of play than low buy-in events where it's harder to isolate.

[kutuz_off]

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I think the edge would be larger in higher buy-in events with lots of play than low buy-in events where it's harder to isolate.

[/ QUOTE ]

Indeed. In an UltimateBet Ultra-turbo tournament, seeing all hole cards would increase your EV from 1.1x to perhaps 1.2x buyin. Maybe not even that much [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Once your stack is 3x-4x the average for your table I think it's virtually impossible for you to lose. I think it'd take a seriously freakish occurence for you to lose at that point. I think you're like a 999-1 favorite to win in any event that goes more than 500 or so hands. At least.

[Zetack]

I agree that the advantage would be freakishly huge, and you could just about win tourney's at will. I was incredibly conservative in my earlier post.

Ok, suppose that randomly, but on average once every 10 hands, you could see all your opponents hole cards. (your x-ray specs need to recharge between uses like my digital camera flash and don't take a consitent amount of time to do so).

How big an edge now?

I'll take a stab and say that I think I win a 3 day 500 player tourney 20-30 percent of the time.

--Zetack

[Boris]

I think if you just avoid putting all your chips at risk early. Then it won't take more than 3 rounds before you have at least a 3:1 chip advantage over anyone at your table. No that you have big chips you can "risk" putting your money in as a 4:1 favorite. Once you get to the final table with a big stack of chips you would be invincible.