Betting Reciprocality

I've been reading an article by Tommy Angelo. Its talking about reciprocality, which is something I go on about all the time but don't really realise it. I tend to call it "where's my edge?". One of the things he talks about is betting reciprocality, that is taking a hand and imagining that the roles of you and the villain are swapped around. How would you have played this hand differently? How would your opponent have played it differently?

Doing this, you can then decide if you 'won' the hand or not. For example, the 3 examples of KK AIPF vs AA that happened to me today cost me $850 of actual money. However, doing a reciprocal analysis I can see that in reciprocal money terms the hands cost me nothing, and won my oppenents nothing. This is because any time I have AA, and they KK, the hands would have been played in the same way. Basically, there's no way anyones folding KK pf 100bbs deep.

So I've decided to look at a few middling $ amount hands from today and perform this type of analysis.

Hand1: This was virtually my last hand of the day, played a few minutes ago, and the hand which made me realise that I was on megatilt and should stop:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?3265098

There are two ways of looking at this. First of all, PF I perhaps saved money by flat calling rather than 3betting, as my opponent may have simply 3bet this hand with a view to get it all in. I think its more beneficial though to look at the postflop actions.

Flop: He cbets, I float oop with my AK hi. I think that in this situation the villain would do the same thing, so nothing lost nothing gained.
Turn: Villain checks behind. I think in this situation I would have bet, but given that I would have folded my AK, the net reciprocal amount won and lost is still 0.
River: I decide that my hand looks very much like QJ, KJ, AJ, therefore I want to get folds from his middling pocket pairs. I bet, however he raises. At this point my tilt takes over, and I can't imagine a hand he has and call.
Reciprocally, villain would probably just check fold river. If he had decided to bet, he would've folded to my raise. Therefore, he would have saved himself $60. So therefore, in playing this hand as shoddily as I did, I cost myself $60 in reciprocal money.

Hand2: In this hand, I get decent value from TPTK by betting all 3 streets strongly. Villain calls down with Tp weak kicker.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?3265150

Preflop and flop: I think I play same as villain preflop and flop, call his raise and his flop bet. Reciprocally though, he probably bets less on the flop as I bet full pot. Therefore I earned myself a few reciprocal dollars.

Turn: I bet virtually full pot, $28. I think the other way around villain would bet less, so say I earned myself $5 reciprocal dollars or so. In villains shoes, I think I call another bet.

River: I bet nearly full pot $72. This is the part of the hand that I think has most reciprocal value for me, as I think facing this much aggression versus someone who knows not to double and triple barrell such rubbish cards with air I would find a fold here. Instead, villain calls, costing himself $72 in reciprocal amounts.

Therefore, allthough my actual amount won in this hand was $115, reciprocally I earned myself probably $80 based on the fact that his and my actions would have been different.



I may do a few more of these analysis after each session as I think it important to know where exactly your edge lies in poker, and at the minute I cannot for the life of me see where mine is.

dan