Originally Posted by kewlJ View Post
Originally Posted by Alan Mendelson View Post
I'm a T-Mobile customer and I accidentally deleted a text message with my key to a gambling account that was holding $31-million of positive EV.
You can mock all you like Mr. Mendelson. All it does is continue to show your ignorance on the subject matter.
Is there anyone else out there somewhat confused over the discussions of EV?

With due respect to Alan and kewlj I understand both your points of view.

I also liked redietz's analogy:

Originally Posted by redietz View Post
I know nothing about this, but I'll take a stab.

Mr. Mendelson, say you are playing hold 'em, and five times in a particular day, you trap some poor boobs one-on-one into going for flushes on the river while you have them beaten if they don't catch. You lose every single time. When the day is finished, you've gotten murdered financially, yet you did every blessed thing correctly.

Since there are formulas for determining what are the right poker plays, given that you can profile people at the table, you would have tested out as having, in terms of likely income, your best day ever. Yet you actually lost money.

Now, is it more helpful to your long term poker success to think that (A) you played your best poker ever or (B) that you played terrible and should play differently going forward? Which is the appropriate advice to yourself for future poker endeavors?
And regnis's take:

Originally Posted by regnis View Post
I don't remember the exact quote that KJ made about the -$8500 being a great day. In whatever context and whatever the exact quote may be, can we all agree that losing -8500 is not a great day. And then can we all agree that we are not going to agree as to whether accumulating a large amount of +EV while losing that 8500 makes it a good thing or somehow offsets the loss.

Then can we put this to rest.
Putting it all together, "accumulating EV stories" sounds pretty darn close to "bad beat" stories in poker.

"I SHOULD have won X...I was favored to win X number of times...etc. etc."

All we can really do as gamblers is try to look for and put ourselves in as many +EV situations as possible and hope the "variance" or "luck" evens out. In our favor hopefully if the situations are indeed +EV!

That, or we can just make up stories about 'giving luck more opportunities to appear' and putting bad beats on the casinos instead for 10+ years on -EV machines to the tune of $1 million (or $984,000 or $900,000 or $750,000 depending on which post you're reading)