Micro Stakes Holdem

This is probably a basic concept that many of you have thought about before. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I thought I’d post about it.

Consider the following HH…

100BB stacks at x stakes

You have 67 in the BB.

UTG opens for 5BB, Button and SB call, and you in the BB call.

Flop 2 8 K (20.5BB)

Checked to UTG who bets out 20, and its folded to you, do you call/raise/fold?

When it gets to you the pot is 40.5BB and its 20BB to call. According to pot odds you should fold, getting 2-1 on a 5-1 shot. However, many players call and justify it be saying they have the implied odds to make the call profitable.

But they they ever really think about it? How big exactly, are their implied odds? That’s the tricky part. It’s so dependant on many many things, but most importantly, your opponents tendencies.

Let’s analyze it.

We are going to assume for this example that if we hit we will always have the best hand and never be outdrawn - which is not true but we need to assume it for our example.

We will hit one of our 9 outs, 9/47 times. Or, approx 20% of the time.

So lets just say 1 out of every 5 times we call the bet, we will win the hand.

This means that 4 times we lost 20BB and 1 time we win 40.5BB + Implied Odds…

So our Profit…

x = implied odds value
P = .8(-20) + .2(40.5 + x)

x is such a volitile value (meaning it has a wide range and is dependant on so many factors) that we should find the breakeven point to help us figure out the approx. value we need it to be on average.

So, solving for x when profit = 0 (breakeven)…

0 = -16 + .2x + 8.1
-.2x = -7.9
x = 39.5

So we need to, on average, extract exactly 39.5BB from our opponent every time we hit.

Considering the stack sizes in our example, the pot will be 60BB after you call and there will be 75BB remaning in each stack. Out of the 75BB in his stack we need to extract almost 40BB JUST TO BREAK EVEN. We need to do this every single time we hit (on average).

It’s going to be pretty clear to our opponent that a FD is in our range, and that if we come out betting when we hit, he may not pay us off often enough for our initial call to be profitable.

Against many non thinking players (and even many thinking players) we can usually do this on average because the pot is so big. But what if the effective stacks were smaller? Even slightly? What if the stacks were much bigger? What if we remove our assumption that we will always win, and include the % of times we are outdrawn or are already behind when we make our hand?

This is a marginal spot on the flop. If we hit our hand, we NEED to extract more than half of his stack EVERY TIME we hit or it’s just a bad call. We need to use our judgement to determine this, but if we overestimate our implied odds, we can be making bad calls left and right, and not even know it.

Sometimes, its ok to muck a flush draw. Do not overesimate the value of your implied odds.

By Tickner for 2+2 Forums