Costly
Decisions Matter Too
Decisions costing a significant amount
of money, while not occurring often, are very important.
Suppose all the cards have been dealt, and your opponent
bets into a fairly large pot. If you call when you should
have folded and your opponent wins the pot, that's an error,
but not a critical one. It cost only one bet. But if you
fold the winning hand, that's a grievous error, because
now the cost of that mistake was the entire pot.
We're certainly not
advising you to call every time someone bets on the river.
But remember: Calling doesn't have to be correct too often
to pay off handsomely over time. If the cost of a mistaken
fold is ten times the price of a mistaken call, you need
to be correct only slightly more than ten percent of the
time to make calling worthwhile.
