A very noble statement and the first rule of gambling, but it’s missing a vital ingredient

This will really be a continuation of the MDP thread I posted here http://my.888poker.com/go/thread/view/111146/29444839/m-d-p

Everybody knows you should only risk money you can afford to lose, but without the missing ingredient to the statement all you have is the rule that gamblers live by, it’s what drives the fish, the donks and the calling stations of poker sites, they believe they are doing the right thing because it’s money they can afford to lose, and if they can afford to lose it they are prepared to risk it! They have no need of knowledge of the maths because they will just deposit more “money they can afford to lose” if they bust, some of them might even save up just to deposit money they can afford to lose.

And that’s true of any gambling be it horses, football, dogs or poker, bookies bank accounts are full of money people could afford to lose, poker sites make their money from the rake people pay from the money they can afford to lose, and the more money deposited that people can lose the more money there is swilling around the poker site meaning even more rake for the sites, but to understand the difference between the poker sites and the book makers you have to look at both separately.

Poker sites make their money from rake paid, they do not gamble to win their money they charge people to use their service, they really don’t care if Joe from number 6 in your street has won over a million dollars, Joe is paying his rake and the site is making its money, all the poker sites need to do is constantly grow its player base and encourage people to deposit, and that’s why conspiracy theories about people being set up to lose are so ridiculous, poker sites don’t care who wins they just care about being paid.

Bookies are a totally different animal, they make their money by setting up the book in such a way that they win whatever the result, but they don’t like people constantly winning from them because they are gambling themselves, you bet with them and they then lay that bet off elsewhere but they do suffer big losses on some events, if you have ever used an online bookie you will know that if you constantly win they will restrict the amount you can bet, or they will just refuse to take your bet, that seems strange as the profits bookies make can be astounding and they are flush with “money they can afford to lose” but the fact is somebody constantly winning is beating the bookie and bookies don’t like that because they know what the full statement should read.

“I only gamble with money I can afford to lose! But I never gamble with money I’m PREPARED to lose”

If you gamble with money you can afford to lose and are prepared to lose it then you may as well sit next to a window throwing pound coins out every 10 minutes, when you collect them up later that day you may not find them all! Or you may find a couple extra! That’s the gamble.

So you can see the difference adding one more phrase to the statement makes, think about it next time you think of calling to hit your draw just because you can afford to!

Firstly we have to understand what the stop and go is! Secondly we have to understand what it does.

The stop and go is a short stacked strategy and involves calling a raise short stacked to shove any flop instead of just shoving pre flop, for example when the hand starts you have 6BB’s left in your stack and are on the BB (blinds 100-200), it folds to the cut-off who raise’s to 600 and it folds to you, you look down at Ah Qs and shove for your remaining 1000 chips, your opponent now needs to call 600 into a 1900 pot (3/1) with 5 cards to come it’s an easy call with cards he was prepared to raise with, with 5 cards to come you have very little fold equity shoving pre flop, so playing the stop and go here could improve your chances as it will give a much harder decision to your opponent on the flop.

So to understand that lets look at the example again but this time we will stop and go.

When the hand starts you have 6BB’s left in your stack and are on the BB (blinds 100-200), it folds to the cut-off who raise’s to 600 and it folds to you, you look down at Ah Qs and decide this is the hand to make your stand with, but instead of shoving here and now you just call the raise, the flop comes Kd 7c 4h and you shove your remaining 600 chips into the pot, you have played the stop and go but what have you achieved?

In example 1 your opponent needs to call 600 into a 1900 pot with 5 cards to come, he is getting 3/1 pre flop against an all in range and should be making the call if his hand was big enough to raise a short stack with.

In example 2 your opponent still needs to call 600 into a 1900 pot so is still getting 3/1, but now there are only 2 cards to come, and you may have just hit this flop or slow played a monster, it’s a much tougher decision for him and he may just fold if he’s missed or was playing a PP below Kings or an AQ AJ hand, and don’t forget statistically you only hit 1 in 3 flops!

So by playing the stop and go here we have given our opponent a much tougher decision on the flop than we would have pre-flop, and it really doesn’t matter what he does now as we identified this hand as the one we were going to make a stand with, and that is what we have done! If he calls and we lose we had decided we were all in pre flop anyway so it really doesn’t matter, but by making his decision that much harder of the flop we gave ourselves some fold equity as he might just fold and look for another spot

As with all strategies of this type overuse will soon see you being called more often as people expect it from you, so use it sparingly, you should also only use it in heads up hands as with more than 1 opponent in the hand your fold equity decreases again