CardSharp

I would venture a guess that even most winning poker players don’t put enough thought into the ultimate effect of their win rate on their gambling career.  Some work I did on sports betting recently went a long ways towards clarifying this for me personally.  I realize this isn’t a sports betting blog, but I want you to follow along anyways because I promise this will get back to poker eventually. Read the rest of this entry »

In this series I discuss topics that are well known within the gambling community, but that may be new to players who come to the game of poker from a non-gambling background.

Maybe you’ve had this experience –  I know I have.  You’re studying some form of math, and you’re not quite clear on why it works the way it does or what it has to do with anything – someone’s just stuck this formula in front of you.   And then you go back and read about why it was invented in the first place, and suddenly you realize you’re holding the answer to everything, or at least a much bigger chunk of everything than you originally thought. Read the rest of this entry »

Something rather silly happened on rec.gambling.poker today. One of the group’s less observant participants claimed that if you play 1/3 NL or bigger in a casino, the effects of the rake and other expenses are minimized. Fact is, that’s far from the truth. You have to play MUCH bigger than 1/3 NL before the rake and your other costs don’t have a major impact. To illustrate the point, I put together what I think is a fairly conservative list of expenses for a 1/3 NL player, and looked at what that did to your win rate. Read the rest of this entry »

Sunk costs are a concept from economics that applies directly to poker. A “sunk” cost is a cost that has already been paid, and that you can’t get back. For example, if you ran a restaurant, your city licensing for the year is a sunk cost. Even if you stopped running the restaurant, you couldn’t get that money back. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a concept from economics that should be near and dear to the heart of ever poker player – opportunity cost. Read the rest of this entry »