Please keep thinking this. Also, please start playing NL25 at Pokerstars. Good luck!
AA or 64o? Tough call.
AA 245 times. Win rate of 95.51% Up $562.00
64o 480 times Win rate of 2.08% Down $14.95.
Yep. Not much difference between the two starting hands. :rolleyes:
I’m not talking about real-world odds here. I’m talking about an online freeroll poker site that magically almost always seems to defy the odds. Tonight I was playing for an hour and usually I pay to see the flop, unless someone bets strong and I have nothing. In real money play I don’t usually do this. I played pretty even throughout, then the last two hands went like this:
I have 4s-6s. I pay to see the flop even though someone raises to 40 (blinds were 2 and 4; not exactly high stakes in any case). Most everyone else does as well, and nearly everyone has at least $800 in chips; I have about $1200 and some others also have a bit over $1K. Of the 8 people at the table, 5 stay in, including myself. Here comes the flop:
4d-Jh-6h
First two players check, third player raises 60. I’m up next, and I raise 120. Player after me sees the raise, first two fold, third player goes all in with $700+. Player 5 and I both see his raise. The turn gives us:
4d-Jh-6h-4c
Player 5 checks, and he’s only got a couple hundred chips left, so I raise him to force an all-in or fold. He sees my raise. The river leaves us with:
4d-Jh-6h-4c-8s
WINNER. Player 3 comes back after buying back in and bemoans the fact that he had…wait for it…pocket Aces and still didn’t win. I have no idea what player 5 had because he didn’t come back to the table.
Next hand, I have 10d-8s. Again someone raises a bit, most likely just to get the pot up a bit, and I pay to see the flop, as does everyone else. Here’s the flop:
10s-Jh-Qd
Betting starts with me, I raise 180. Three people see the raise, the rest fold. The turn produces:
10s-Jh-Qd-7h
I bet strong this round, but try not to bet so strong as to scare anyone away. One of the other players decides to bet strong and I see the raise (something like $670) and the others fold. After the river we have:
10s-Jh-Qd-7h-9d
WINNER. What hand did the loser have…pocket Aces.
I’m telling you, the site doesn’t use real odds. On this site you’re far better off staying in more often than not.
This has to be one of the best comparisons I have heard in months. Its brilliant. Anyone who has played ROOST or any such FPS type of game, and has also played play money online poker, sees the absolute connection in the gamer type. Not interested in the game (as it was intended), skill, sportmanship or even personal achievement. All they care about is racking up kills/points/fake money regardless of the manner in which they achieve it and the quicker the better.
I play games for the joy of doing my best and pitting myself against worthy adversaries. Whatever outcome I get, so be it. My sole reward is not “winning by points”. Also kudos to the comparison of playing basketball with little kids. You do that is all you care about is saying “I WON!”
Some may say “its fair if the game allows it”, but I think anyone with a modicum of intelligence and common sense can recognize that, this is not as it was intended.
Cuckoorex - well played sir…well played indeed.
Oh, where do I start.
The internet is full of people who couldnt make money at online poker and who blamed the “Program”.
“It wasnt because because I called 10 x BB with 4,6 and caught two pair, it was because the site doesnt use real odds”
“Its not because people vastly overvalue pocket aces, OR because they dont know when to let them go, its because its all rigged omg wtf”.
“Its not that I bet O.O.P with bottom pair, and then caught the bottom end of a straight that any King would have dominated (you know, the type of King that might have caused a PF raise, huh?) and it still isnt that somebody else couldnt drop AA with four to the straight on board, its that its ALL RIGGED. RIGGED I TELLS YA.”.
I dont really mean to be snarky, but spend enought time on boards such as “Two plus Two”, or “Cardschat” (poker boards), and you will soon get tired of people who simply werent good enough complaining that its not their fault, because they can win live. As I said, where do I start?
(To qualify, spent the last nine months supporting myself financially by playing LOW stakes online poker, and have lost with quads before, never mind a simple pair of aces.)
Except, I wasn’t complaining that I didn’t win…I *did *win. And I won because I observed that there were many, many times that I would fold with 2-6 and I would have won with a 2-3-J-6-6 and someone else would end up winning with the pair of 6s and an Ace high. So I realized, it’s not real money, so people are MUCH more likely to bluff, and hey, almost every time I fold with what looks like a shit hand, I watch it play out and realize I would have had a straight or a full house if I had stayed in. So I did stay in, despite a weak opening hand, and won, big time. Maybe I’m wrong about the rigged aspect. Maybe I’m not.
In fact, I was complaining about people going all in on every hand, and more often than not, going all in pre-flop. And either because they paid the premium price to have extra chips or whatever, it’s not just a few hands that they do this on, it’s well over an hour sometimes. And like I said, my iPhone battery gets drained quickly.
Well, you say, since you seem to have the magical ability to win with 2-6 anyway, why not call them on their all-in? Well, first of all, I like to play as if the money is real, otherwise “risk” means nothing and there is no such thing as betting strategy at all. I want to enjoy myself and learn to be a better player, but I don’t want to do so at the cost of real money.
Maybe I just need to find a better online poker site. The most real money poker I ever play for is a $20 buy-in table with some buddies once in a while. I’m not pretending to be Mr Big Shot poker champ. I just want to enjoy the game as I feel it’s meant to be played. Good for you if you’re able to support yourself through gambling. Whatever floats your boat.
The first thing to remember is that a pair of aces is just that: one pair. Sure they look pretty in your hand, and they are a big pre-flop favourite, but post-flop you need to be able to let them go. At low stakes, most players simply arent that good, and so will lose their whole stack sticking to the end with pocket AA. I have skills and weaknesses as a poker player, and one of my strengths is keeping track of betting patterns. I keep notes on a lot of players, and very often I can tell if somebody is holding pocket aces, just by their bets. (For example, a lot of people have your mentality, thats aces are always beaten, so they bet big PF. For many people I play, a 10 xBB raise PF just screams aces to me)
So if I know they have aces I should fold right? Hell no. If I have low pocket pair, or mid-range suited connectors, or even suited 8,5 - 8,6, I will see the flop. Why? Because though I am behind PF, the implied odds if I hit the flop are massive. If I hit my set, or my two pair, then the chances are that you will be all-in for your whole stack. If I miss it, I can let them go, no problem, move onto the next hand.
So thats your opponent, but what do YOU do with Aces? At low stakes, up to say, 25NL, you have to ask yourself, am I good enough to let them go if I think I am beat? Do you have a good read on the other players? Can you spot the hands that are beating you? If you raise the flop, and somebody goes over the top re-raising you all-in, can you fold those pretty aces? Quite simply most people cant, not at those stakes.
So what to do with aces? Just go allin PF, thats my advice and it works for me. If you get a call (and you are very unlikely to get more than one call), then you will be a massive favourite. If everybody folds, just pick up the blinds and move to next hand. Sure, there are more profitable ways to play aces, but you have to be a good player, and have good reads, to utilize them. Can you be honest with yourself? Are you good enough? My guess is no, you are not.
Cuckoorex, I have read all your posts in this thread. To be blunt, this idea you seem to have that poker sites “favor” less optimal hands. :rolleyes:. It isnt true, and as I sit here I honestly feel that I would be going around in circles trying to explain why, and I have neither the time nor inclination for that. So I will just say this. The cards play out the same online as they do in Live play. Do people play differently live as compared to online? Hell yeah, but the sites arent rigged, and the odds are constant.
Quit the play money tables, read a few good articles (Cardschat.com is an excellent resource), and play more hands. LEARN the game. Bad beats will still happen, but at least then you will understand WHY they happen, and they wont bother you much any more.
Yeah, I never claimed to be some kind of poker god; I readily admit that I am, on my best day, an average player. Which is what makes me question my success on this online site, because I know for damn sure that most of the time if I would stay in on 2-5 in a real life, real money poker tourney, I would get my ass handed to me. There’s SOMETHING about the online play that just doesn’t add up.
You know this for sure? Cite? When I play real life poker, I rarely ever see a straight win, when I play online it seems a straight comes along every 4 hands. In less than a half hour of play I once saw three straights win, and I’ve never seen anything like that in real life. Sure, it could happen. But it just seems very rare that online poker on this site ever ends up being high card or pair wins, which happens a lot in the real life poker I play.
I’m sure this is good advice, and I will check out the site, thanks for the recommendation.
Sorry, when I wrote that I was in a mindset of speaking to a generic “you”. Didnt want to suggest you specifically were a bad player, more that generally at the lower stakes the standard is quite low.
Do I know it for sure? This is a subject that has been rehashed a million times on poker boards. A lot of players now have tracking software such as “Pokertracker”, or “Holdem manager”. This software keeps track of every hand you play and displays that information as a resource for assessing your play and identifying leaks. WITHOUT exception (to my best knowledge), over hundreds of thousands of hands, the statistics show that online the hands fall as expected according to the probabilities involved.
Even in this very thread Frostillicus was able to display his stats on pocket aces, from tracking software I presume,
"I just checked my poker database: I have gotten pocket Aces 242 times since last summer and have won the hand 95.87% of the time. "
His stats say that aces win MORE often than they should against any two cards? Others, such as SisterCoyote say that
“I play poker online on Puzzle Pirates, and I have never won on pocket aces. Ever.”
Who should I believe? I think I will go with the people who have the hard data, and the resources I mentioned are full of examples that support this. It might seem that a straight comes along every four hands, but collected data suggests otherwise.
Please remember that you will play an order of magnitude more hands online than you ever could live, so yes, you will see more straights, full houses, sets, etc. Play enough hands live, you will see them there too.
Possibly, because of the way that free money changes the way people play, it changes the likely outcomes. IOW, in live and real money play, you don’t see straights win because the people who would have got the straights folded. 'Cos they didn’t want to risk their real money.
Yeah, I was thinking about that after I posted last night. With freeroll a lot more people are going to stay in to see the river even if they start out with unsuited 2-5, because you never know what’s going to turn up.
There’s an old adage in wargames: “Paper soldiers never die”
Thus there is a tendency for every battle to be a bloody battle to the death, well past the point where any reasonable (or even drugged out completely insane) army would have broken and run.
We see this in D&D too. Enemies always fight to the death, even when it’s hopeless. Heck, they always attack too, even when it’s absolutely ludicrous to contemplate. The idea is so entrenched that I’ve seen multi-decade players become incensed at the idea that the enemy won’t stand and die, if the GM decides to have them run.
Paper (or electronic) chips aren’t real. There is no risk, there is no loss. Hence the actions of the players using them cannot be relied upon to be reasonable and realistic. If you lose them all, no big deal, just a couple of clicks and you’re back in business.
As a learning tool, it cannot be relied upon.
This is the sum total of the average freeroll poker player’s thinking. Folding isn’t playing poker to them, so they never or rarely do. You simply can not, not, not take free roll or play money poker games seriously when the opponents don’t know each other. And even then: I once witnessed this hand, live:
Player A raises 3xBB
Player B calls
flop QT5
Player A bets 1/2 pot
Player B calls
Turn T
Player A bets pot
Player B calls
River T
check - check
Player B flips over QQ.
Player A flips over T5.
If that had happened online, people would scream bloody murder about how it was rigged, the best hand never wins, etc. etc. But if you play enough hands, you see some crazy things. Now, A probably never folds, because that’s just the way he was playing (this was like one of 10 times he caught hands with garbage, and bet super aggressively, so you could never put him on anything), but B made a major mistake not raising preflop or on the flop (with this better pattern, I wouldn’t have raised on the turn, since you’re about 99% to win, and it’s better to have the other guy to put his chips in). Most of the time when you see something like this happen, the player with the best hand has made some kind of error like this, but it’s more fun to blame it on the cards. Whenever I run back through the bad hands for myself, I can usually pick out something I’ve done wrong to give the other player a chance to win.
Yes, I use Poker Tracker. But I give up on trying to convince people that AA really is a better preflop hand than 64o.