Yesterday we took the husband out to one of his favorite places for his birthday dinner.  It was a seafood buffet restaurant.  When I was a younger lad, I loved buffets - you get all kinds of different food and as much of the good food as you wanted.  I was on the thin side between the ages of 2-6. Then we immigrated to America - the land of super-sizing, people scooters and all-you-can-eat buffets, and I never had to worry about anorexia again.

Now that I'm older, a buffet's got to the one of the worst ways to eat.  Yeah - you get variety.  But most of the food at buffets is so meh - there usually no item of food at a buffet that you can't get much better elsewhere.  The only "good" buffet I've been to is at a handful of the top casinos.  Everywhere else, the food is just way too salty and greasy.  But I suppose to the typical buffet-goer, those traits are positives.

But um... yeah - I still went up like 8 times to get more food, but that's just me.  Oink oink.  The DoubleFly - terrorizing buffet owners across the 50 states.

POKER

Recently, the topic of EV has come up a lot in the forums.  Many regulars seem to be running below EV - especially at Rush poker. There is definitely a vocal camp out there against the use of EV.  The main argument against EV seems to be that it only captures a small amount of "luck" - that you may be "unlucky" in some areas and "lucky" in others.

I personally find EV quite useful.  The main reasons are that it's readily available and it DOES measure a small part of "luck."  The standard deviation of your EV line is about 20% less than the std deviation of your winnings line.  Any time you can explain away some portion of your variance is a good thing.  Sure, 20% is not a lot (and the figure may vary depending on your playing style) - but it's statistically significant.

Whether you find a 20% explanation "useful" is all a matter of personal preference.  It's like asking someone if a glass is 20% full or 80% empty.  There's really no right answer, and I suppose that's why the same arguments reoccur every month or two.  But IMO, considering how many different types of "luck" are involved in poker, that just one item can explain away 20% of it is pretty impressive and nothing to sneeze at.

I find it comforting to know that even when I lose money, it *may* not all be due to bad play.  I always prefer knowing as much detail as possible.  But for some players, it puts them on tilt to know they are running below EV and they start playing even worse.  If you are one of those people, then yeah - turning it off on your graphs might be a good thing.  There are also tons of people who don't believe in looking at graphs or their cash balances either while playing for similar reasons.  So depending on your personality, ignorance may be bliss.