Hey guys,
Pretty sick hand, although the hand itself is not too important. MP was basically a huge fish so hero ripped in those 300bbs for value expecting to get called by reasonably wide range despite the ridiculous bet size.
$0.05/$0.10 No Limit Holdem
6 Players
Stacks:
UTG Hero ($27.38) 274bbbb
MP MP ($34.55) 346bb
CO ($11.08) 111bb
BTN ($46.90) 469bb
SB ($7.12) 71bb
BB ($10) 100bb
Pre-Flop: (0.15, 5 players) Hero is K♦ J♦
Hero raises to $0.30, MP calls $0.30, 1 fold, BTN calls $0.30, 1 fold
Flop: A♦ 8♦ 7♦ ($1.05, 3 players)
Hero goes all-in $27.08, MP calls $27.08, BTN folds
Turn: 7♥ ($55.21, 2), 1 all-in
River: 6♣ ($55.21, 2), 1 all-in
Final Pot: $55.21
Hero shows
K♦ J♦
MP shows
7♠ 7♣
MP wins $52.45 (net +$25.07)
dandy6929 lost $0.30
Hero lost $27.38
So the important thing here, and hopefully to most of you it will be obvious, is that we got the money in good here. True, it's pretty sick to lose 300bb to a bad beat, but we are not in control of that. We did our part by getting the money in good so we should not be in slightest bit affected by the outcome.
It's pretty easy to say this when we get the money in good. We have our all-in EV line to comfort us, we can go around showing of all our friends how bad we run and how we would be crushing if people didn't keep sucking out. But what happens when we get the money in bad and lose? It's a little bit harder in this instance since our all-in-EV line will plummet also. Perhaps we get 2nd set all-in against top set. In most cases this will be a cooler and we should expect the EV of the play to be positive even if all-in EV is negative. Again, if we are in control of our mindset, this shouldn't bother us.
One thing should be able to learn from this is that all-in EV really only measures one type of luck and is overall really not that useful. For example imagine if we get 99% of the stacks in with 98% equity and our opponent sucks out on the river. When that last 1bb goes in our tracking software will show us that we got our entire stack in bad, when we can clearly tell without any calculation that the overall exchange was +EV. Also imagine we get deal top set vs our opponent's 2nd set 10 times in the space of a 500 hand session but it gets cracked twice. Our all-in EV will show us that we are running bad, when it's really quite clear that we are running good.
So two main things to take away from this post.
1) All-in EV is useless
2) Variance is big in poker, and it doesn't matter in the slightest if we repeatedly lose so long as we are getting involved in +EV situations. It will even out in the long run.
