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Sharks - Getting value in poker and litigation

By Shawn Matlock

Knowing how to value your cards, and perhaps more importantly, your opponent's is a basic core concept of poker. The first lesson of poker is to reduce betting on bad hands while recognizing good ones. The same is true in court. If you know how to value your case, not only as a whole, but in piecemeal, you can strategize accordingly. In poker, the terms of "pot odds" and "expected value" are used to determine the relationship between risk and gain. There are three things to consider here: the amount of the raise or call, the likelihood of success, and the size of the pot. The same concept applies to litigation. The poker analysis is perhaps best analogized as follows: the amount of the raise/ call (or what you are willing to "give up" to stay in the hand) is the offer to settle...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Matlock Blog on June 01, 2008 (boomark / email).