07-28-04, LearnTexasHoldem:

Odds With Regard To Folded Cards

Question: Here's my question:

I don't want to beat an old horse to death, but this just bugs the hell out of me;

When I see the writers like sklansky talking about "odds" and "implied odds"

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I can't understand how do they arrive at their figures? What I don't see is anyone taking into consideration the cards that are already dealt, but are now dead. (players hole cards that folded)

I no this isn't scientific, and only based on 100 hands dealt, but..... I pulled 2 nines out of a deck to represent my hand, then randomly dealt 16 cards to represent 8 players who folded their cards,leaving my hand to go heads up against the 10th. player.

45% of the time....no nines dealt.

35% of the time....1 nine was dealt.

20% of the time....2 nines were dealt.

The same holds true with flushes and straights.

My point is ...How can the percentages / probabilities be close to being accurate without all the information available? Using this example more than 50% (using both the 35% & 20% ) of the time a nine was already dead so my true odds of hitting either on the turn or river would have been 0%.

I'm no mathematician, (actually hate math) but is there just way to much emphasis on "odds" and percentages, or am I just not seeing the whole picture clearly?

Thanks,

PT.

Answer: I understand your point. I think their reply to it would be something to the affect of: It is equally likely that someone folded a card that didn't help you as much as they folded a card that did and since there is no way to know if they did fold a card that helped you or not then all unknown cards should be treated in the same way.

Obviously, if we could look at all the folded cards our odds would be much different but since we can't we have to make due with the incomplete information. We can only positively account for what we have in our hand and what we see on the board and the rest of the cards are all equally unknown. What I would be interested in is if someone came up with some theory or strategy based on what he thought people might have folded preflop.

I'm not sure how far you can go with that line of reasoning but I am sure there are spots where you could glean some extra info. One spot I've found is when everyone is in preflop in a normally tight game. That's the time when I like to have small suited cards like 53 or 46 since my guess is that a lot of the good cards are already out. Other games like Stud has a mixture of hidden cards and exposed cards which allows you to use that information when calculating draws. If you see your cards have already been dealt out or mucked then it definitely changes your play.

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