Quantitating selective memory, and "aces suck in limit!"

[maynard]

I know this has been discussed before, but I am constantly amused by small stakes players who clearly think of themselves as solid players, yet make the above claim, or something along those lines. I used to hear much more of this in my local live games (Seattle area 3-6, 4-8), where often 7-8 players to the flop was standard. Yep, just too many bad players for aces to "work".

To me, the most interesting part of those types of games is psychological, and the obvious disparity between perception and reality... if you had a table "mute" button (wouldn't that be nice), an observer would see that everybody at the table is playing J3, and over time they all make their share of boats or one-card wheels to beat big pairs, and likewise they each have their share of big hands beaten by garbage holdings. Money is being passed around randomly in a given session, and eventually distributes itself by the relative quality of everybody's play, albeit in a very high-variance fashion.

Now unmute the table, don't look at the cards, and absorb the nonstop barrage of "bad-beat" stories, often from players who have built a temporary stack on rivered 2-outers and the like. But dammit, when THEY get aces, they deserve to win!! With table chat alone as evidence, it would often seem that nearly the entire table is receiving a disproportionate amount of abuse from the poker gods.

Ok, the point. I'm sure I fall victim to selective memory to some degree as well, no matter how calm and objective I try to remain at the time. In my last month of 3-6 online, I can recall, vaguely, about the same number of big hands won (unimproved or otherwise) with aces versus those lost to some slim-drawing fishy from my buddy list. And the details of the losses are generally much more vivid than of the wins. I guessed I had won with aces around half the time, or slightly more. Of course I'm happy with those results when pots are nearly always multiway. But pokertracker doesn't lie, and it tells me that, after 17k hands of Party 3-6, aces are by far my most profitable hand (no surprise), and out of 78 times I have held them, I have won the hand 81% of the time (big surprise). I'm sure this number will drop, and in general is partially a function of the number of players chasing, where in a looser game you win bigger pots but less often... I'm curious what kind of numbers others have, both in 3-6 and other games...?

Of course, I will NEVER use this type of data to dissuade my fishy friends from their typically negative thinking, which often leads to playing big hands passively and saves me $$$. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]