Analysis Presentation: Flop Characteristics and their Effect on EV

This post was originally published on January 17, 2020, on my personal website, Lukich.io. I have since consolidated all of my poker-related content by reposting it onto Solver School.

Yes, I know… a riveting title. While I’m sure that alone will draw in the masses to this video, I also decided to put together a 45-minute lecture on some of my analysis investigating how different flop characteristics affect our expectations throughout a hand. This is a lot of what I spent my time working on in the first half of 2019. And after shifting to some other interests in the 2nd half of 2019, I have since picked it back up.

Much of my work is centered around better identifying my EV advantages based on my formation and the flop characteristics. I believe that identifying a flop texture properly makes it much simpler to visualize my ranges and effectively plan for the rest of the hand.

In this video, I show the data-driven approach I used to try to quantify the effect of these flop characteristics - such as the suitedness, connectedness, high-card, and other variables - on the overall EV of our range. For the analysis, I looked at a scenario where the CO raised preflop to 4 BB and the BB was the only defender. The pot size is 8.5 BB and the stack sizes are 100 BB (note - this is actually the one thing I wish I had done differently within this analysis. But for the 1st half of 2019, I was using a computer that had fewer resources, limiting my ability to study deeper SPR scenarios).

I estimated ranges for the CO and BB and entered them into a solver. I then generated a data set of 184 flops (using PioSolver’s 184-flop sample) using GTO+. This included the Equity and EV of both ranges across all of the flops. Utilizing this data and the flop characteristics, I created a linear regression model to quantify the effect each flop characteristic has on the overall EV of the board.

If you have any comments or thoughts, please feel free to leave any comments below. You can also contact me at [email protected] or reach me on Twitter or YouTube through the links in the footer below. Thanks for watching.

-Lukich