Flip & Go discard considerations l Strategy with Barry

We look at a simple spot many players get wrong to show that the GGPoker format has a degree of nuance about it.

Earlier this week, I made the claim that Flip & Go is not as wild and volatile a format as people think it is. There is actually an element of skill, even in the initial discard stage. 

To give you an example of this, here is a spot I've run by a lot of people, and almost all of them got it wrong. 

Which hand would you pick in the KTT spot below? KTs or TT? 

Most of the people I spoke to said they would go for KTs. This is for the reason that KTs dominates K9o and K3s (the two hands the player to the left would likely pick) by the largest degree.

This is true in a vacuum. KTs has a 73% equity over K9o, for example. TT only has a 71% advantage over K9o. 

Dead cards and multiway considerations

There are two things not being accounted for, though, with this logic. First of all, we know what some of the dead cards will be in this hand. TT has 77% equity against K9o when we know a King has been discarded. 

Second of all, there is a third player in the hand to worry about. While KTs crushes K9o heads-up, the third player can still outdraw us by hitting a 7, a straight or a flush, as well as the 9 which it shares with our other opponent. TT performs better against these two players combined. 

Using the equity calculator in PokerTracker, this is how KTs performs against the likely opponent picks, including the known dead cards:

And this is how TT does:

It's a really straightforward example that most people I have polled have got wrong. I imagine any player who would spend a few weeks looking at an equity calculator after playing the discard stage would gain a sizeable edge in this format.