Do you look at your EV line on your graphs?
You shouldn’t be.
The EV line is not what you think it is (unless you have done lots of work on it, and understand it completely).
Here is a hand I played a long time ago and made a video about it while I was still a CFP student.
The game is NL HU, stacks are a bit over 100bb.
I raise preflop with AQo, and Villain makes a 3-bet with 99.
Given how the board played out, it would be reasonable (as you will see in a minute) for both of us to go all-in at any point in the hand.
If you know anything about the EV line, you know that it pretty much only matters when you go all-in, right?
Basically, how it works, is – you and your opponent go all-in, and both have some % of the equity in the pot, assuming you’re not on the river already.
In my example, 99 has 55% equity, and AQ has 45%.
That means 99 expects to win 55% of the time, and AQo expects to win 45% of the time.
In practice, one of these two hands will win the all-in right now. And the other one will be “screwed” out of its % share. The loser doesn’t get 45% or 55%; if you lose the all-in, you get nothing. Winner takes it all.
When that happens, the EV line will show the winner that he should not have won it all, and it will show the loser, that he should have gotten some of this pot. In other words, the EV line will make both players believe that the poker gods will make things right in the future all-ins, where the loser will be compensated, and the winner will have to give some of it back. So that over the long run, both get close to the 55% and 45% share (assuming they repeat this all in long enough).
And this is as far as players usually think on the subject. Since I have never met anybody overly-focused on his EV line when he is winning all the all-ins, let’s talk about the more commonly heard complaint: “I am running below EV”.
The simple logic goes: If I am below the EV line, I am being unlucky, and I am ENTITLED to get luckier because of it in the future.
The first danger of this logic is, that the longer you are still “unlucky” or below the EV line, the more cheated you might start to feel.
“How is this possible?! When is it MY turn to win the all-ins?! Of course, standard – I lost again. I never win with KK, they always hit the ace.”
That is what I call a loser mentality. If you have thoughts like this, you have fallen into the loser’s mentality. I’m not saying you are a loser, but you are thinking like a loser.
Thoughts translate into action, and soon you will start acting like a loser and make bad moves on and off the tables. You will start skipping coaching sessions, get lazy with your homework, and sloppy with posting and commenting hands on the forums. Your game will suffer, and your results will go down – confirming to yourself, that you are destined to lose.
That is a big problem, and if you fall for that trap, you will not win, no matter what. On the contrary, bad results will linger on, your mentality will drop even further, and you are locked in a vicious cycle.
So I present to you here a way how you can get out of it – and it all starts with the EV line. This is for all of you who have EV lines on your graphs and regularly look at them, thinking that they are telling you something when, in fact, they are probably just reflecting your own mindset back to you.
If you have read Jared Tendler’s materials, or even watched the videos I suggested a few weeks ago (LINK), you know that one approach to dealing with mental issues is to try and rationally understand what is going on. His argument is, once you understand the EV line, and understand that the long run in poker is really long, your attitude about being “unlucky” or “running bad” will change. The truth shall set you free, so to speak.
My approach here will be different, in fact, it will be the opposite.
I am here to tell you that you should not try to understand the EV line, but you should instead realize that you DON’T understand it as well as you thought you did. In fact, you might even conclude you have no idea what the EV line really tells you about your game. Once you reach that point, you will start to see the EV line as it is – meaningless.
And here’s why.
Let’s go back to the example of 99 vs. AQo.
As said, if me and the villain go all-in preflop, he expects to win 55%, and I expect to win 45% of the time.
The pot will be around $140, meaning he should get on average $77, and I should get $63.
Fast-forward to the river: I lost, and he won $140.
So, I am $63 below EV in this hand. In the future, I should somehow get this $63 back, right? Not so fast.
We did not actually go all-in preflop. So let’s take a look at the flop.
As you can see, on the flop I am a 93% favorite to win the hand – if we go all-in here, I should get $130 on average. Since I lost the all-in and got nothing, I am actually $130 below EV.
Her we can already pause and think a bit about what the EV line is telling us.
Same cards, same board, same opponents, we go all-in both times, and same turn and river come. But in one scenario my EV line will say to me I was unlucky for $63, and in the other scenario, it will say I was unlucky for $130.
But the hand is the same, and it would have played out the same no matter what I did on the flop or preflop (assuming villain doesn’t fold his 99 at any point on the flop or preflop, which is a reasonable assumption in any kind of aggressive HU match).
The hand takes another twist on the turn when the 9 hits, and I become a 14% dog to win the hand. EV changes again if we go all-in now.
Pause and think about what this all means in practice. What is the EV line really telling you about how much you are supposed to win or lose in poker?
If you think long enough and forget what you think you know about the EV line, you might reach the Socratic point of wisdom and realize you, in fact, do not understand the EV line in all of its complexity. You only see the tip of the iceberg in the orange line on your PT4 or HM2 graph, and YOU give it meaning.
It has no meaning. You are not lucky or unlucky. There is no such thing. There are just different ways to measure the outcome of what happened. EV line is one of them, but it is useless.
I will tell you which one is NOT useless… The GREEN line.
Why?
Well, I don’t have to tell you that, really. Because it’s the one that pays the bills.
The green line buys things, the EV line is irrelevant.
So that’s the measurement you should focus on. That’s the only REAL way to measure your poker game and results.
EV line is just an excuse. You see it, you don’t understand what it really means, but you tell yourself a story about it. That story has nothing to do with the reality of how the game of poker functions. It has EVERYTHING to do with how you think and act in your life, whether at the tables or away from the felt.
So do yourself a favor.
Watch the video above, understand that you do not know what the EV line really says about your results, and how to account for all the possible variations of it even in one single hand – let alone thousands, tens of thousand, and hundreds of thousands of hands…
And then remove it from your PT4 and HM2. The green line is all that matters in this world.
P.S. If you are a 6-max player (or playing any game where 3 or more players can get all-in), it’s not just a meaningless stat – it’s actually incorrect, for different reasons. It’s not calculated correctly for 3 or more players getting all-in, but that’s a different story altogether
