Professional No-Limit Hold 'em: Volume I: 1 by Matt Flynn & Sunny Mehta & Ed Miller

Author:Matt Flynn & Sunny Mehta & Ed Miller [Flynn, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Two Plus Two Publishing - A
Published: 2007-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

Balancing Risk Versus Reward

Say you are dealt

in the big blind in a $5-$10 game with effective stacks of $5,050. The small blind completes, and you raise to $50. The small blind calls. The flop comes

The pot is $100. Your opponent goes all-in for $5,000. Should you call? Are you committed?

No, putting $5,000 into a $5,100 pot on such a threatening board is a bad idea. All you have is an overpair with no redraw (i.e., no spades and no straight cards).

What if you instead had only $50 left? Would you be committed? Yes, you would have enough equity against your opponent’s range to justify getting all-in at 3-to-1.

So what changed? Obviously the stack sizes did. But what really changed was your risk relative to your reward. With $5,000 remaining, your risk was high compared to the size of the pot. With only $50 remaining, your relative risk was much smaller.

Every commitment decision is a balance of the risk versus the reward of getting all-in. The risk is what’s left to bet, which is the remaining smaller stack. The reward is the pot.

You can express any commitment decision — the risk versus reward of getting all-in — as a simple ratio. You divide the remaining smaller stack by the current pot size.41

You want to plan hands around the possibility of getting all-in. That means achieving the right balance of risk versus reward. But how exactly do you do that? Let’s start with a hand that’s out of balance.

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