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Poker Video: MTT/SNG by AMT (Micro/Small Stakes)

first

really enjoyed the video series... thanks

Nice vid! First time I've heard my nickname pronounced in English, haha cool!

I do have a question about the desperation shove:

Would it be a good strategy to shove wider on the button with 3-4BB than Wiz suggests because we need to make a desperation shove within the next few hands?
So actually this means we make a desperation shove on the button because we have the least opponents and the most fold equity(?). I was wondering if it would hurt to shove ATC with 3bb on the button like always.

lol, hope I didn't butcher the name too much What language did it originate in?

-I do think it'd be good to shove really wide in the 3-4bb button spots, and yes perhaps even quite a bit wider than wiz suggests (as we mentioned in the video, we are inherently wider than wiz suggests because ICM cannot calculate future fold equity and its importance for subsequent hands). A couple of things to note about that, though:

1) You do have several more hands to find a non-complete garbage hand to open shove with.

2) People expect you to be shoving the widest on the button, generally speaking. Especially in times where you've been active pushing with 8-12bb's, when you get to open a pot in lp with 3-4 bb's, anyone paying attention is not likely to give you a ton of credit.

3) Donks with big stacks like to call loosely, especially in the blinds. Sometimes we get to open a CO or btn with 4 bb's and have 83o and the big CL whose a huge loose donk in the BB. It's just a bad shove. This general principle goes for observant regulars too, actually, albeit for slightly different reasons.

So in the end, I'd argue that we don't necessarily have the most fold equity in every situation simply because we have fewer opponents to push through. It's going to be a good play a lot of the time for the reasons we've all mentioned, but there are absolutely trash hands with very short stacks that we can and should justify folding in the name of waiting for a few hands. Sometimes it's even better to find that J6o utg with 4 bb's to shove if the situation hasn't been right, and sometimes we have to suck it up and take our micro stack into the BB even.

Hope that makes sense. If you still have questions about it, I encourage posting hands with some context so that we can hopefully work out the rest of the desperation shove mysteries for everyone.

That makes alot of sense, thanks. I'll take this in my hand reviewing and maybe find some interesting hands.
Oh and the original language of my nickname is Dutch btw

I like the format of the video. Maybe you guys can combine it with Hey Van!

do you actually know what "wixman" means in german?

do you actually know what "wixman" means in german?

Babel fish translator has failed me. I hope you'll tell us!

hi will u guys be making a series that is simply dedicated to 6 max sngs not turbo or do the 9 mans strategy work out quite the same anyway??
thanks

We prob won't do a reg speed 6 max series unless we get a ton of demand for it. Turbo strategy is almost exactly the same.

Babel fish translator has failed me. I hope you'll tell us!

Yeah, I've been getting some stick at tables about my name. i had no idea, but in german 'wixen' means 'wank'. so I'm guessing 'wixman' means like 'wank-man' or something. Hilarious imo and something I totally welcome.

As far as your discussion of running bad, saying that running bad is a fallacy is, well, a fallacy. Consider a simpler game than poker--flipping coins repeatedly. You count the number of heads over time and get $1 when you win (heads) and -$1 when you lose. Obviously your long term ROI should approach 0. The probability of losing a game is 1/2, so the probability of losing x games in a row is (1/2)^x. The probability of a 10-game downswing is 1/1024, so for any given session of coin-flips, flipping ten tails in a row is very unlikely. The gamblers' fallacy comes in when someone assumes, *because* he is running bad, that he is "due" a win. If you've experienced a 10-game downswing, the probability of winning the next coin toss is the same as it always was, 1/2. It's also fallacious to assume that the probability of having another 10-game downswing, directly after the current 10-game downswing, is more or less than it was before. Hence the probability of a 20-game downswing, given you're on game 11 after a 10-game downswing, is 1/1024.

So to translate this to poker, let's say you're playing tournaments and in the money 1/4 of the time. Then the probability of not cashing x times in a row is (3/4)^x. So the probability of having a 20 game downswing is (3/4)^20 = .00317.

So how do you tell if you're running bad? It's easy. How many 20-game sessions have you played? Solve .00317x = 1, which gives x = 315. If you've played more than 315 20-game sessions, then you're not running bad. In fact it's *normal* for you to have terrible losing streaks like this if you've played more than 315*20 = 6300 games.

So in order to tell if you're really running bad, you can just use an equation. Let m be your estimated ITM %, let n be the number of games in your downswing, and let t be the total number of games you've played. If t < n / (m - 1)^n, then you may just be running bad. Otherwise, an n-game losing streak is to be expected at some point over t games.

shai hulud: Quite the first post, you have clearly thought about running bad and probabilities. I think your mathematics there are mostly sound, but quite unusable in poker tournament context. As a tournament player, I am not that interested in knowing how many tournaments I can brick in a row. It does not tell me the depth of downswings I might expect. I might brick 5 in a row, mincash, brick another 5, mincash ten times in a row to be in a 45 buyin downswing.

I think you are making an error when you are just multiplying the odds of the downswing to get to 1. Let's take the coin out for a flip again. If we have infinite amount of flips, we will definately get at least one heads. But even if we flip it 1000 times, we can not be completely sure that we hit heads one single time (of course - if I would be flipping a coin 1000 times and not get a single heads, I would suspect that I was being cheated...). Probability will approach 100%, but it will never get there. An example:

1 flip, possible outcomes

H
T

We get at least one heads 50% of the time.

2 flips, possible outcomes

HH
HT
TH
TT

We get at least one heads 75% of the time.

3 flips, possible outcomes

HHH
HHT
HTH
THH
TTH
THT
HTT
TTT

We get at least one heads 87.5% of the time.

This is binomial distribution and we would need to use it to find out when it's probable to have a straight 20 game downswing. You can use a binomial distribution calculator at http://stattrek.com/Tables/Binomial.aspx .

For your 6300 game sample, you would get one or MORE 20 game straight downswing 63.2% of the time. So it would be probable. You would exceed 50% at 219 * 20 game sample (4380 tournaments). Of course, this is more like possibility to get 0 points for Battle of the Planets leaderboard for 20 straight games, when playing a game with approximately 1/4 chance to finish in the money (like playing 18-men SNGs with good ROI).

To analyze possibilities of downswings in a meaningful context for tournament poker, we need to know a few things: our own expected ROI and tournament structure. A player with a positive ROI will have similar downswings from his expecation than a breakeven player, but the player with positive ROI will have smaller monetary downswings. I could write a longer post about this in the future when I have time to write it in understandable English.

Yeah you are right now that I think about it some more. I was using Bernoulli trials but it's not really accurate. Binomial distribution is correct but harder to calculate.

I really just wanted to show that running bad does happen, but it's not unusual. And in fact it's even less unusual than my post indicated.

I do appreciate the correction, though. I majored in mathematics in college but I'm pretty rusty!

Haven't watched this vid in awhile, but I imagine our point was that while you may have run bad, you aren't running bad. You are not currently in a 200 (or whatever) game session, you are in a 1 game session. By allowing yourself to think that you are currently running bad, you let the assumption of impending failure into your mind. This is poison to your psyche and will create all sorts of issues.

ty

v

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