Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
Expected Value
Expected Value Everything you win or lose in poker can be quantified in terms of equity. Suppose you flip a coin with a friend and bet $100 on whichever side you want. Assuming you are flipping a fair coin, your expected value, or EV, will be zero, as half the time you will profit $100 and half the time you will lose $100. Instead of getting paid even money if you win, assume you make 2 units when you win and only lose 1 unit when you lose. So, half the time you will win $200 and half the time you will lose $100. You can solve for your EV using the following simple formula: EV = $200(0.5) – $100(0.5) = $50 So, every time you flip the coin getting 2-to-1 odds, you will win $50 in equity. Clearly, you should play that game as much as you can.
You can use the formula above to solve a huge range of problems
You can use the formula above to solve a huge range of problems in poker and determine if a play is profitable. For a simple example, if you have A-A, your opponent goes all in with 4-4 and you call, you know you are going to win 80 percent of the time. If you don’t know what percentage of the time each hand will win against each other hand, feel free to study one of the numerous online poker hand calculators until it becomes second nature. So, if you both get all-in for 10,000 chips, you can determine your equity in the hand because you know you will win the 20,000-chip pot 80 percent of the time, so EV = 20,000(0.8) = 16,000. So, you put 10,000 chips in and are going to get 16,000 out on average, so you will make 6,000 chips in that situation every time you get all-in because you effectively own 80 percent of the 20,000-chip pot.