I’ve been watching and reading up about player ranges, percentages of certain cards mucked or still in the deck and EV/GTO play based on those outcomes but I’m yet to find anything about the cards the dealer mucks on each street. I’m sure some people take this into account but would it really impact the outcome much or is there a flaw in some theories dismissing this aspect?
It must have some influence on the game surely?
If you mean the burn cards, they do have an effect, obviously. For example, if the burn cards are all aces, there are less aces in the deck, but this also applies to those cards that will remain undealt, because these too will be unavailable.
But all we can know is the number of aces remaining in the unseen cards. We have no real way of knowing where those aces are. They might be in someone else’s hand, they might still be in the deck, they might have been burned or in that part of the deck that will never be dealt. We just can’t know.
The best we can do is center our predictive models on a normal distribution bell curve. This just means that we base our decisions on the most likely distributions.
There are, however, many modifiers to this. These include player tendencies, depth, effective stacks, relative positions, ICM, and so on. For example, a tight player who open jams from early position probably has more aces in their range than one would expect from a loose player open jamming from the button.
It’s not that people dismiss the idea that the burn cards remove some cards from the deck, it’s just that there’s no way to know which cards have been removed, so there’s little point in worrying about it.
FYI … In On Line Poker there are No “Burned” cards
It doesn’t change the odds because you don’t see them just like you don’t see everyone’s hole cards, which have also already be removed from the deck. When the turn card is dealt there are 47 cards you haven’t seen in either case.
It’s used in live games because the cards may be flawed or marked and someone may be able to recognize what it is. By burning it they will still know an ace is removed from the deck but that’s much better than them knowing and ace is the next card coming.
It would serve no purpose in online poker.
Hey thanks for all your replies guys
Should have specified I was focusing on live games but good to know that there are no burn cards online.
Yes there is no way of knowing for sure. The thing that sparked my thinking was a poker commentator mentioning the odds of a certain card appearing on the board at the river due to how many players had folded their hands with that card in there (obviously we can all see their cards in the game) and I just thought about the burn cards he didn’t mention as a factor.
Well…back to watching some Phil Ivey action
At least you learned something