Are expectations on straight and flush draws 'bounded'? |
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Posted Wed Mar 29, 2006 12:01 pm GMT by lwestatbus
I've been doing a lot of thinking about flops that give me draws to open ended straights and one card flush draws with two board cards matching my two suited hole cards. This thinking came about from some reflection of what is going on when I have a down swing that lasts for several hours of play, whether or not in the same session.
Basically, I've realized that the bigest drivers of a downswing are two factors.
1. Just not catching a normal number of starting hands and getting blinded away.
2. Having a low percentage of these big drawing hands come in. Since an open ended straight draw gives you eight outs and a 4-to-the-flush draw gives you nine outs you should be making these hands roughly one third of the time. But I will go for periods when these hands don't hit at this rate OR get beat. You can have odds and equity to call these hands pretty easily but if they don't hit you bleed away a lot.
So here's the boundedness issue. It seems to me that the limits to how much you can lose on these hands is considerably more elastic than the limits to what you can win. That is, it is pretty easy to have situations where you are correct to call on these draws no matter what the cost as long as enough people are staying in and you factor in the risk of getting beat. But when the board gives you a flush or straight it is usually screaming "Danger, Danger" to anyone with an ounce of awareness and your ability to get action on your made hand is sharply reduced.
BTW: I play fixed limit ring games.
Any thoughts on my analysis? Would you adjust your play in any way based on this analysis? Or do I need to sober up before posting theoretical musings to the Forum?
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Posted Wed Mar 29, 2006 12:51 pm GMT by Sid Lambert
so long as your pot odds and implied odds are correct, you should make money in the long run...especially in limit ring games...limit ring games should involve lots of pot odds figuring...yes, most of the time, yer gonna lose w/ those draws...sometimes it happens a lot right in a row...but if you make the right calls, you should come ahead in the end
if yer worried that yer made hand isn't going to pay off cuz the board is scary, then yer already doing something wrong...you shouldn't be playing catch up after you made your hand...the decision comes before you see the next street come down...whether or not you make your hand, you should already know if you made the right call...so if your hand is a 1 in 3 draw....and you make a call of X to a 5X pot, then you made the right call, and you should be happy whether you make the hand or not...and not be thinking "great I made my hand, now lets make it worth the risk I took"...you should be thinking "sweet, the odds caught up and I won, lets see if I can milk it for some more OR try and protect what I have"
Posted Wed Mar 29, 2006 12:53 pm GMT by Gunslinger
Are you asking if you should stop chasing draws when you have the odds to call because your draws haven't been coming in? Or because your made hand will be too obvious to pay off well?
A win of a pot that is small because everyone was afraid of the possible flush on the river > Zero dollars won because you folded a draw when you had odds that hits on a later street.
You will catch these draws roughly one-third of the time....over the course of your poker career. It is all one big session.
Posted Thu Mar 30, 2006 1:37 am GMT by snoogins47
You're pretty spot on in most respects here. Since my 'math background' is failing my Junior year of High school and not taking a course since, I have troubles really knowing in what sense you're using the word 'bounded,' but I'll try to give my thoughts on everything else.... and especially in the awesome loose-crazy 8-handed to the flop lower limit games, this is a huge cause of the dreaded downswing. When the payoffs get higher and higher, compared to what you have to risk, it becomes more and more correct to gamble on longer shot after longer shot... and when you don't hit any of them, well, better luck next week.
I'll leave the 'boundedness' discussion for folks smarter than me, but I do want to clarify a bit... when you say 'the limits to how much you can lose is considerably more elastic than the limits to what you can win' do you mean merely that these draws often don't make you as many bets AFTER you make your hand, as they may cost when when you're still trying? That's often true, but when you do make your hand, you're still winning all the money that went into the pot earlier in the hand, so... I dunno, I'm confused.
Posted Thu Mar 30, 2006 1:49 pm GMT by tame_deuces
Well, if you are holding
A  2 
And the flop comes: J 7 2
Then you better have correct pot odds, because the implied odds here are minimal.
But if you hold: 8 6
And the flop comes: 7 5 A rainbow w/the ace of clubs.
Then your implied odds should be usually be far better and you can get away with poorer pot odds.
(Ofcourse, in both these cases there may in some games be far superior options available than actually merely calling, but I used them as examples.)
Bottom line:
You lose money if you fold 'obvious' draws when your pot odds are good enough. Actually with enough callers around the table, you may actually earn more money by raising them because your equity is high enough for a bet. This is true even if you don't make a single dime after you made your hand. Also remember that you aren't play a single opponent. When you lose, you lose your investment in the pot, when you win, you win the investment of all the other players in the pot. That is also the concept of pot odds, even if you lose - you lose less than you win in the long run.
It is easier to get when we use extremes. So lets take an NL example. Imagine the pot is 1000$. We have hand 1 on my examples. Our opponent pushes the rest of his stack in.
Our opponent goes all-in for 10$. The decision is pretty easy, and will continue to be so even if we increase the size of his bet - untill we reach the limit where we wil actually have to consider his plausible hands, could he have only a jack? Then we could call of even more, because our ace is an out...does he have a set...then we have to call of less. At some point a call will most likely be non-profitable.
How should it affect a game?
You can ignore pot odds more on hidden draws, because on these people will likely call of some extra bets, or even raise you, because they don't quite see what's hitting them in the face. 3 flushdraws have zilch implied odds, 2-card Flushdraws usually better, but not so good, straight draw decent and double gutshots very good. In familiar games where people know eachother well then unlikely gutshot draws can actually have very good implied odds (because noone figures you're stupid enugh to hang around with a gutshot draw).
Implied odds are always a harsh mistress though, because they also depend on your opponent and his/her hand.
Posted Mon Apr 03, 2006 11:07 am GMT by lwestatbus
| Gunslinger wrote: | | Are you asking if you should stop chasing draws when you have the odds to call because your draws haven't been coming in? Or because your made hand will be too obvious to pay off well? |
The second one...because the made hand will be too obvious to pay off well.
| Gunslinger wrote: | | You will catch these draws roughly one-third of the time....over the course of your poker career. It is all one big session. |
I love this.
| Snoogins wrote: | | when you say 'the limits to how much you can lose is considerably more elastic than the limits to what you can win' do you mean merely that these draws often don't make you as many bets AFTER you make your hand, as they may cost when when you're still trying? |
Exactly!!
| tame_deuces wrote: | | because no one figures you're stupid enugh to hang around with a gutshot draw |
This doesn't work for me since my friends know I'm stupid enough to hang around for anything.
Some pretty good advice and analysis here. It mostly reinforces things I already knew but was having a crisis of faith due to a run of unmet expectations.
Thanks, all.
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