Agreed. The chance of me having a boat are fairly unlikely, so I think most flushes and all boats will call and the rest probably fold to a smallish raise anyway unless its like a min-raise, and I think my EV of shoving is a fair bit higher.


Ok, I want to try to put some thoughts together on EV. Every time I hear people complaining about running below EV I tend to feel a bit guilty. See, I tend to run above EV so far. Not always, I've had my bad spells, but over all hands in my DB I'm running significantly ahead, over this year I'm a couple buyins ahead, and I was well ahead erlier this month, although right now I'm about break even only slightly ahead.

Heres the thing, some people do just run horrid. I think I saw irisheyes at $20k below EV at one point, you see people running 20 buyins behind over large samples, stuff like that. Thats really running below EV. Kmind tells me he lost 9 flips in a row, if they were proper flips (around 45-55% equity imo) then thats running bad. In my personal experience though, EV isnt that simple. I tend to run above EV when I get my money in good, and below EV when I get my money in bad. Basically because my good hands hold and my bad hands dont improve. Lets take a basic example:

Playing 100nl I get dealt AA three times in a row and get ai pre v's smaller PPs each time. I'm 80% to win each hand and I hold up each time. My EV is actually $240, but in fact I've won $300, so I'm now running $60 ahead of EV. LIkewise if I had JJ in each of those 3 hands and got it in v's bigger PPs each time and lost then I've lost $300 but my EV is only -$240, so I'm running behind EV.

So what I tend to do, is look at my equity hands. In my HEM sessions tab I just sort by Equity % and review them. In reality, I'm more concerned about how often I got my money in good v's bad. There are exceptions of course, but if I have more Equity %'s above 50 than below I'm happy, however my EV went. Around that 40-60% mark I dont care a lot since I'll almost always have had odds to make it correct anyway. If I have a lot more red than green lines in that area though, then I figure I've run bad, and if more than 1 or 2 in the > 60 or < 40 where I ran against probability then I either ran good or bad also.

So EV is an interesting stat, and I think the bigger the sample, and the larger the deviation the more meaningful it is in a 'run bad' or 'run good' kind of way, however I think its also important to be concious of whether you're below EV because you keep getting your money in good and losing, or whether you're getting your money in bad a lot and not improving as much as you should. That sucks, but perhaps you should avoid getting your money in bad so much if thats the case.

Something to think about anyway.