Lies

Last week, I referred you to the MTT series by Bond18. This is perhaps the comment that most struck me from his series. He wrote a part about lies that you have been told in the past. Here is Lie #1:

“You can find a better spot”: What? What the fuck? Listen, any spot that’s good, by which I mean ANY SPOT THAT IS +EV/+cEV is a spot you should take. Now, are there occasionally spots that are +cEV but you should fold because they're –EV? Yes. An obvious example is folding AA in a satellite where you have a seat guaranteed. Want a better example than something this simple? Okay here’s one:

I recently played a live 3k event in Melbourne with ~440 entrants. The structure was very deep, very slow and had high antes. 40% of the field was freeroll qualifiers and probably less than dozen players in the whole field were actually good tournament players. If I was BB the very first hand with a 20k bank at 50/100 with 22, and it folds to the SB who shoves his whole 20k then flips up AKs, I would fold. However, it really does take an example that extreme to make me consider passing up a +cEV spot. SO STOP DOING IT!

After I read this, I started accepting coinflips early in SNGs. E.g. call with AK if you raise and somebody pushes. This is a call that clearly has a positive expectation: you get good odds against almost any pair, and may also be up against a bluff or a hand like AQ/KQ.

I will report on how I like this after a while. I never did like laying down these coinflips, and I am glad to have gotten an excuse for taking them. Of course it will lead to some early eliminations, but poker is and remains a long term game, and the long term profit is what I should be optimizing.

Good luck at the tables

PS: Bond18 basically repeats his point in Lie #3:

“I didn’t want to risk it on a coin flip.” This has got to be one of the most common. Here’s the simple truth with most probable coin flip situations: at the point you’re considering folding knowing you’re likely in a coin flip, there’s already probably way too much money in the pot to ever fold. If you raise AQo 3X and a guy shoves 15-20X, and you figure his range is AJ+/66+ (You’re about 43.5% against his pretty tight, never stealing range, and still basically flipping) you ARE NOT folding. There’s nothing wrong with getting it in on a flip as long as it’s a +EV one, which most are, especially once antes kick in.