Justifying the 50/50

Poker has always been linked with gambling. It’s ingrained in the perception of the general public that any game of chance, no matter the skill required, that involves placing wagers on outcomes of luck is gambling.

Fact is, most poker players do gamble. They’d like to tell you otherwise, but when you look at the number of times players have to make critical decisions based on odds of 50/50 (or less!), you know that gambling is part and parcel of the game… or is it?

What exactly is luck? I like to define luck in two words, short term. Placing a bet on a single number in roulette gives you 37 to 1 odds of hitting, less than 2%. Hitting the number on your very first bet just means you got lucky. If you manage to repeat the feat, say, 30 times in a row, that goes against the odds and you’re either cheating or psychic (because betting on a single number requires no skill), not lucky. Simply put, something that goes against the odds in the short term is luck.

This applies to poker. Winning with AQo against KK all-in preflop once or twice is lucky, but you can’t do it all the time. The odds are just not in your favor. Hands like 66 vs AK is a different story though. This is what poker players call a coin flip, or 50/50. Betting on odds of 50/50 is gambling, and these situations happen a lot in poker.

I strongly believe, after going through the roller coaster ride that is poker, that to be a successful poker player, you should never gamble. But does that mean you should never call an all-in push from AK with QQ? No. Simply because there are situations that justifies playing for 50/50 odds. Let’s take an actual coin flip for example. If a guy offers to pay you $2 every time the coin came up heads, and you pay him $1 if it comes up tails, you’d be foolish not to take up that offer. Statistically speaking, the coin should come up heads 50 times out of a hundred coin flips, while the rest of the 50 are tails. So if you played this 100 times, you’d be $50 richer.

But let’s say you only had $10. You play this game 10 times and it comes up heads 9 times out of 10. You would be down to your last 3 bucks and have 3 more flips before you lose all your money. Since there’s no history involved in coin flips, i.e. each subsequent coin flip is not affected by its predecessor, you have no guarantee that you will make money. What this proves is that you will need more money than $10 to withstand the bad luck (short term) so you can profit from your statistical advantage (long term).

Which brings us back to our topic, justifying the 50/50. In poker terms, betting on 50/50 (or better) is justified when you have better than 1 to 1 odds on your money. You will also need a decently sized bankroll to withstand the swings in luck, so you can profit from your statistical advantage. The better the odds, the lower your required bankroll, which in any case, should be able to allow you to lose 20-30 “flips” in a row without you blinking an eye.

There is an exception to this rule though, best illustrated by this example; You’re in a satellite to a high buy-in tournament, which offers 5 seats, with 8 players remaining. You have roughly 35 big blinds left and are among the 5th in stack size. You’re dealt pocket Qs. You raise 4xBB from early position preflop, and you get re-raised all-in by a guy who out-stacks you. You’ve seen this guy re-raise with AK several times before, so you know that you are in all likelihood up against a similar hand, and have a 50% chance to win. Should you call?

The answer is no, simply because you are roughly 60% to win a seat if you fold and wait, while you’re 50% to win if you call. If you had KK and you believe your opponent had AK, you would be a 65% favourite, and that would give you a better shot at winning a seat than if you folded, and thus would justify a call.

In closing, I’d like to give an example from a personal tournament experience. This was late in an online $11 buy-in tournament. The payout was to the top 162 players, and there were 181 players remaining. I got pocket 7s in mid position and decided to raise after action folded to me preflop. Button called, blinds folded, and the flop came 2s3d3c. I raised, and button reraised. At this point, after committing the chips to the preflop and post flop raises, I still had about 30 big blinds remaining, a decent amount to make the money. I decided I was good, and shoved all-in with my over-pair. Button called and showed pocket 10s, which held up to take the pot and knocked me out.

The right move there imho was to fold the pocket 7s preflop since my “sticking around” equity was much higher than my chances of winning with 7s since of all the pocket pairs that would call me preflop, I would only dominate 5 of them, and lose to the other 7 (lower than 50%). I would be, at best, a 50% coin flip against two over cards, or a 4 to 1 underdog against a better pair.

Hope this rather lengthy post illustrates my view on how the 50/50 “gambling” decisions are justified. Till next time, may all your poker decisions not be based on a gamble!