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The goal of poker is to have the winning hand and rake in the big pot, right? Well, actually, no. This is not the goal. The goal is to make good mathematical decisions, regardless of whether your hand is best or not. In fact, the goal is to make better mathematical decisions than your opponents; and this, in part, sometimes means calling with the worst hand.
One of the counterintuitive facts about poker is that you often have to call when you are 100% sure you have the worst hand. This is because you don’t have to have the best hand in order to make a profitable call or a good mathematical decision. If the pot odds are larger than the hand odds, a call is often warranted; and that means you will call a lot when you are sure you are beat. Until you get that ingrained in your very poker soul, you will never be a great player.
There is a very simple and common demonstration of this concept that comes up in No
Limit Hold’em tournaments all the time. Your opponent goes all in and everyone folds to your big blind. Now, your opponent is all-in for only twice the blind, so you have to call one bet. Even with no antes, you are getting 3.5:1 to call. Let’s say the big blind is 100, the small blind is 50. and your opponent bets 200. That makes 350 in the pot for your 100-chip call. Do you even need to look at your hand? Absolutely not! Even if you look down at 7-2o, the very worst hand in poker, you are still obligated to call. This is because two random cards are going to win much more often than one in every four-and-a-half tries.
It is very rare that any two cards in poker are more than a 3.5:1 underdog against any two other cards. While you may feel that a hand like 6♥7♥ is a hopeless underdog to a hand like A-A, it is actually only about a 3:1 against. A-Ko versus two random undercards is merely a 2:1 favorite. And if you are lucky enough to be in a situation like A-8o vs. Q-
9o, the Q-9o is only about a 3:2 underdog. Then there are the times that you are even money, or even a favorite, against the all-in player. This means that over the range of possible match-ups, 3.5:1 is going offer you a huge overlay.
The fact is that, if the pot is laying me anything big like, say, 9:1, I will generally call if I have any hope of winning, and so should you. If the pot is that big compared to the call, you would have to know that your hand is the worst over 90% of the time to warrant a fold. I don’t know anyone who is right that often; certainly not me. But when the amount of certainty required to fold a possible winner is so high, you should just call, even if you think there is a good possibility your hand is no good. The fact is that, if you are getting 9:1, it doesn’t matter if you think your hand might be no good 80% of the time; you are still making a good mathematical decision to call and it is still a good choice to run your opponent down.
Poker is not about knowing when your hand is the best and when it is not. It’s about knowing how to extract the maximum amount of money when your hand is best, and knowing when it’s correct to call, even if you think your hand is the worst. Sometimes the worst hand sucks out. Sometimes a hand you thought only had a glimmer of hope wins, and you were smart enough to call because so much money was in the pot at the decision-making point. As long as you know when the pot is big enough to warrant a call, you will be on your way to outthinking your less math-savvy opponents, and that will translate into profits
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