Basketball Math

Basketball Math

It used to be a fairly common superstition (belief?) that high stakes poker players could look into your eyes and read your soul, and that is how they decided what your hand was. The truth is that this superstition was most likely started by the high stakes players themselves to keep amateur players from figuring out what was really going on: a fairly straight-forward logical process of reason to deduce what holdings an opponent could have, and how likely each of those holdings are. Each of these subtopics have to be approached individually, and here we’re going to take a look at the “how likely each of those holdings are” part to see how poker math goes to work in hand reading.

Let’s use an example. Suppose that in some spot, you hold QQ on a board of 8922A with no possible flush draws, and your only opponent makes a bet. You have deduced that you think his range is made up of 88, 99, TT, JT, or A9. Since you are facing a bet, you would like to know how often you are winning when you call so you can decide if you should make the call or not. At this point, most players who don’t have a good understanding of poker math would say that since we lose to three hands (A9, 88, and 99) and only beat two hands (TT and JT) that we should fold. Though this is an extremely common approach, it is terribly incorrect, and here is why.

If we take a moment to look at how many possible ways our opponent could have been dealt each of these hands, we quickly realize that this is probably a really easy call. Of the hands that beat us, there are nine combinations of cards left that we haven’t seen yet that could give him A9, and similarly there are three ways he could have 88 or 99 each, for a total of 15 hand combinations that beat us. Now of the hands we beat, there are six ways our opponent could have TT and sixteen ways he could have JT, for a total of 22 hand combinations that we beat. So again, if our opponent’s range is 88, 99, TT, JT, or A9, we are winning against 22 of the 37 total hand combinations, or about 60% of the time. Poker math comes to our rescue and proves that we have a profitable call here.

Read More At How To Do Easy Poker Math [http://www.spoonitnow.com/wordpress/index-of-posts/]

Math Question… A Basketball Team sells tickets that cost $10, $20, and $30 for VIP seats. The team has sold

A basketball team sells tickets that cost $10, $20, and $30 for VIP seats. The team has sold 573 tickets overall. It has sold 184 more $20 tickets than $10 tickets. The total sales are $10,460. How many tickets of each kind have been sold?

let x be number of $10 tickets, y be number of $20 tickets and z be the number of $30 tickets

given conditions:

x+y+z=573

y-x=184

10x+20y+30z=10460

now solve these equations and you would get:

number of $10 tickets: x=163
number of $20 tickets: y=347
number of $30 tickets: x=63