Why The Best Online Poker Players Make Decisions At Random

The numerous randomized elements of poker online are a huge part what makes the game so strategically complicated.


We will never know with 100% certainty what cards our opponents have, or what cards are going to be dealt on the flop, turn and river. So why in the world might anybody want to add extra randomized elements to the game?

Believe it or not, the exceptional online poker players in the world make a few choices at random-nearly like rolling dice to see how many squares you get to move in Monopoly.

Before going into how-and why-they do it, I need to explain frequency-primarily based decision-making.

Optimal frequencies (usually) require a mixed strategy

When constructing an 'optimal' real money poker strategy, we try to make each choice at a positive frequency (e.g. you must call with at least 33% of the hands in your range when you're getting 2-to-1 pot odds).

In certain scenarios, it is most desirable to choose different actions with the exact identical hand at differing frequencies.

Why might we want to try this?

Believe which you are playing poker online in opposition to opponents, participant A and participant B, in a 3-surpassed cash sport.

Participant A always makes the identical choice with all combinations of a specific hand. By way of comparison, participant B uses a 'mixed strategy', wherein she can now and again blend up her selections with special combos of the same hand at certain frequencies.

Players that rent an effective combined method are difficult to overcome because we can't make as many definitive assumptions about their tiers.

For example, you open from the button and player A is in the big blind with A♠Q♦. AQo is some distance robust enough to a few-bet for price against a button open, so participant A will always 3-Bet it.

Participant B might method the spot in another way. she will still try to extract value with AQo a massive majority of the time-say 85%-but will also call the improve at some frequency-the remaining 15%.

we can completely eliminate AQo from player A's variety whenever he calls our open. This information permits us to put extra pressure on him while the flop is something like A-Q-2 or ok-J-T. participant B's blended strategy helps protect her range on such boards.