it's late, so bear with me.
gary carson talks about bet odds, ed miller calls it pushing your equity edge, whatever. it's the same thing.
basically, if you expect to win this hand a certain proportion of the time and you are putting in less money in the pot proportional to your opponents, you should be betting/raising to push this edge.
if you have a 20% chance of winning (4-to-1 against) and have five opponents (so you're each putting in 16% of the money, which means your bet odds are 5-to-1), you should be betting/raising since your bet odds are higher than your equity.
here's a thought, though.
we don't always go to showdown. this is most applicable preflop and on the flop. we can be betting/raising all day heads-up if we expect to win even 51% of the time, but if there's the possibility that we might fold before showdown, is there a better way of thinking?
one example that comes to mind is defending your big blind with a small pair (e.g. 4-4) when a strong player opens in MP/LP.
one argument for calling/raising/whatever is that you're generally a coinflip against overcards equity-wise but your effective odds are better than 1-to-1.
the opposing counterargument is that you don't just magically go to showdown right away, and you have reverse implied odds since your opponent can check or fold when you beat him but bet/call/raise when you don't, so you lose more money when you're beat than you win when you're not.
anyway, i don't really want to get into that debate again, but i was wondering...
is it better to push your edge when you have an edge with just the next _street_ to come rather than assuming this hand is getting shown down?
(this assumes the betting doesn't leave you all-in, of course.)
so, for example, 33 vs AK is 50/50 roughly showdown-wise, but 65/35 flop-wise (this definitely doesn't take into account flush draws, straight draws, etc. that AK might flop, so i'm not sure how to incorporate that...).
alright, i'm getting tired and i lost my train of thought.
i can't think of a particular situation where the following might be true, but again, bear with me, i'm getting delirious:
hand 1 vs hand 2
showdown-wise, hand 1 will win 60% of the time whereas hand 2 will win 40% of the time.
next-street-wise, hand 1 will be best (or favored to win) on the next street 45% of the time whereas hand 2 will be best (or favored to win) 65% of the time.
i don't know if this is even possible. maybe it's not possible in hold 'em but some other game it's possible???
anyway, in the above example, using conventional thinking, it would be best for hand 1 to bet/raise all day long (again, though, assume you will never reach all-in) since he expects to win more than 1-to-1 by showdown. but, would it actually be better for hand 2 to be betting/raising all day long since he expects to be favored to win on the next STREET more than 1-to-1?
just wondering if i'm flat out wrong or if this is possibly true in some scenarios.
aseem