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What’s a mathematical catastrophe in poker?  The end result of not properly evaluating your pot odds verses your chance of winning, and thus tossing a hand you would have won.  Essentially mathematical catastrophe means folding the winner on the river when facing a bet.  Now every good player will occasionally fold the winner.  If you never folded a winner, you’d be playing too loose and subject yourself to excessive value betting by your opponents.  However, folding the winner should be a rare event, and should never happen in extremely large pots.

Suppose you have AA and flop top set.  Tons of betting goes down, the pot grows large, then huge.  The turn puts three to a flush on the board.  More betting goes down.  The river puts a four-flush on the board, of which you have none.  Now your lone remaining opponent bets.  Reluctantly, you fold your set.  At this point, your opponent turns over middle set, no flush, and shows it to you!  You’re livid!  But you should be angry with yourself, because you allowed this to happen.  This is a mathematical catastrophe.

Suppose in this situation there were 20 bets in the pot and you folded for a single bet.  You didn’t compare your chance of having the winner to the pot odds you were getting.  You only needed a FIVE PERCENT chance of having the winner to justify calling here!  Against a single bettor, with such a large pot, there is essentially no hand of any value I would fold here.  Even a lone pair of deuces would be justified in calling!

The reason for this is expected value.  The expected value of having a 5% chance to win 20 big bets is one big bet.  Therefore you would break even either way.  However, if you were justified in believing that you actually had a 10% chance of having the winner, you absolutely MUST call!  This is true despite the fact that you expect to lose that last be most of the time.  But the huge pot you will win every once in a while more than makes up for all those times you lose one more bet.

Just in case you’re having doubts, always consider there to be at least a 10% chance that any given opponent is bluffing when you’re heads up.  That should push you over the edge towards not suffering a mathematical catastrophe in a very large pot.

Everyone will eventually make a bad fold and suffer a mathematical catastrophe.  It sucks when this happens, you’ll be totally pissed off at yourself for hours afterwords.  But when it happens to you, make it a learning experience.  Next time don’t turn down those huge pot odds just to try and save one lousy bet.  The mistake of making a bad call is nothing compared to the mistake of folding the winner for one more bet.  Always remember that.

PokerGuru