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I imagine poker players don't use expected value. That's silly. You'd be all-in on a bet with positive expected value for no good reason. They use expected ret

I imagine poker players don't use expected value. That's silly. You'd be all-in on a bet with positive expected value for no good reason. They use expected returns in conjunction with size of current pot and size of current holdings. What you say about variance is right on. It involves the payout and the odds and so on ... They use something internally like the Kelly Criteria, probably tuned against their own model of what is the probability of each relevant outcome.

JoshuaDavid 4y ago
If your bankroll is small enough that Kelly vs naive EV calculations are giving you significantly different answers for what you should do, you are probably playing at stakes higher than you should be (or you're playing in a tournament, in which case the optimal strategy is indeed different than in a cash game).