Poker and Gambling

Mathematical expectation should be the most important defining factor towards the strategy that you adopt and the decisions that you make in any poker game, whether it’s a live one or an online one. This expectation (also known as Expected Value) is at the core of every decision a successful poker player makes, as it also defines the nature of this game quite accurately.

This is what most rookies get wrong: they fail to take expected value into account at all (as it’s the case most of the time) or they suspect that EV might have something to do with being successful, but they fail to weigh it in correctly, because they don’t exactly know what EV is and what factors influence it.

In order to understand the impact of EV on strategy, you need to know the following: assuming that you are (or trying to become) a professional, that is a person who makes a living off playing poker, you’ll be playing pretty much all the time (or let’s say 8 hours a day). In this case, every positive expected value play that you make will win you some money. Never mind that sometimes you get outdrawn by the fish and are subjected to some extremely humbling bad beats despite clinging to positive EV. As long as you only play such situations (as much as it’s humanly possible, of course) you shall always win a little in the long-run (I’ll explain why in an upcoming example). Whenever you play negative EV situations (the mathematical expectation on the bet is not on your side) you always lose, even if sometimes you outdraw someone and win. Remember, we’re talking about the long-run here, and that means you lose a little on every negative EV bet on average.

Let us now see an example: suppose you’re in a bet with someone, one that bears 9-1 odds for you. That means 9 times out of the 10 you win, while your opponent only wins once on average. (certainly, he can win 4-5 bets in a row, - again – we’re talking about averages here). Now then, by wagering $1 against his $1, you’ll have one hell of a positive EV. Namely, you’ll have a net win of $8 on every 10 such bets. That means you will win $0.80 on every single $1 bet that you make on average, rain or shine. Chances are though, that you won’t find an opponent as dumb as to agree to such a setup, so you’ll have to give some of your expectation up in order to make it all a little bit more attractive to him. If you tell him that you’re going to post $8 against his $1 on every one of the above named bets, he’ll certainly find it loads more exciting than before. You win 9 times, that makes for $9, you lose the last bet which costs you $8, so after 10 bets you’ll still be $1 ahead. That means you’ll be earning 10 cents on every bet, which is still not a bad deal, but it’s already starting to look bleak from the perspective of another factor we’ll discuss later.

Anyway, from the above example it’s easy to reach the conclusion that EV is influenced by the money each of the two opponents post in the pot, and by the actual odds they gat for their particular hands. These are the Direct factors that shape EV in a hands-on manner. Naturally, poker would probably not as popular as it is if it were this simple. There are other factors out there, that influence one or more of these direct quantities, which in turn end up turning the whole equation upside down. A recurring bonus like rakeback will significantly influence the hourly rate (which is the sum of mathematical expectations on every bet for an hour minus, the rake), and so will other – apparently unrelated – things like the reading of the opponents, one’s ability to manipulate them, table selection and other strategy related issues.

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