A Year In Useless Stats, Part IV - Hand Values

Well, my "Year In...." posts seemed to have come to a screeching halt with the last one. Due to the fact that I got really, really busy and the subject material for this post turned out to not be as interesting as I thought it would be, it has been 3 weeks since the last post.

Luckily for all involved, it will also likely be the last.

This post is very similar to one of my previous posts about hand values (http://thepokergeek.blogspot.com/2006/05/basic-hand-statistics-after-3-months.html) but with more hands (almost 40K full ring hands) under my belt.

The following 6 hands are the only hands in full-ring that are worth more than a blind steal:

• KK: 2.015 BB/hand
• AA: 1.9336
• QQ: 1.7265
• AKs: 1.2494
• JJ: 1.0245
• AQo: 0.7699

Still quite weird to me that AA is not my best hand, but has gained quite a bit of ground from the last time, where it was actually my fifth-place hand. Also, last time I had one additional hand (AQs) more profitable than a a blind steal, but it didn't "make the cut" this time.

Here are my worst 5 hands:

• Q9s: -0.1761 BB/hand
• J8s: -0.1644
• K2s: -0.1628
• J9s: -0.1619
• 32s: -0.1567

This is far different from last time where I had 5 hands worse than -0.30 BB/hand, and my worst hand was actually a pocket pair: 88 was losing me a big fat 0.50 BB everytime I played it.

Here is my entire range as a graph, and as a table:

The graph looks pretty much the same as last time, except for the lack of the huge tailoff at the end that corresponded to my 88 and other horrible hands. The green shading in the table correspnds to hands more profitable than a blind-steal, the blue shading on the graph are hands that are profitable, but less so than a blind steal, and the red hands are hands that are losing at a rate of worse than (somewhat arbitrarily) -0.15 BB/hand.

If you look at the table, it reinforces a point that I made in the previous post - very, very few offsuit hands are profitable - and even fewer profitable by more than a marginal amount. Pretty much just A-big and KQo are the big hitters and the other two-Broadway card combinations are marginally profitable. In the suited realm, however, many more hands become profitable - most suited Aces, big suited Kings and suited connectors can be seen in addition to the 2-Broadway cards. I (evidently) have a weakness in the suited 9 category (Q9s, J9s, T9s all solidly unprofitable).

In terms of raw numbers, 47 of my 169 hands are profitable. Of these 47 hands, only 10 of them are offsuit, and all but 98o are combinations of two broadway cards.

Just for the heck of it, I'll include some 6-max hand values, although I really don't have enough hands to make them worthwhile. My 9 hands that are better than a blind steal are:

• AA: 2.8582
• KK: 2.4052
• QQ: 1.8455
• JJ: 1.3927
• A9s: 1.3029
• QJs: 1.1676
• AKo: 0.9027
• AQo 0.8986
• A6s 0.7699

That's more like it, with the 4 premium pairs being my top 4 hands (in order, even!) but there is obviously some small-sample-size issues when you see hands like A9s, QJs and A6s being in such exalted company. Interestingly enough, Big Slick (AKs) misses my better-than-a-blind-steal list in both full ring and 6-max. Interesting.

The worst hands are likely not worth looking at - all are suited hands that just due to the combinatorics, I haven't seen enough times for their averages to be representative of their true value.

Well, that's it. Now that it is finally March, I suppose I can leave last year's play where it belongs (in the past) and get on with this year's play.