matlittle

At 48.26 you faced an MP 3x open and a BTN flat.

The GTOWizard ranges (NL500) for a MP 2x open and BTN flat show the BB pure folding A5o, so I'm curious as to how your ranges can be so different? Are they monker ranges, and are they for a raise size less than 3bb?

FYI the EV numbers seem to add up to 0 in all the sims, so the EV at each node is the overall EV for the entire hand, hence why some players had -EV numbers by them at certain nodes: they had already invested money into the pot on earlier streets and now caught an unfavourable runout for example.

Hello Frankie, thanks for the follow up on multi-way pots, these sims are always very eye opening and in no way resemble what I see in-game when playing multiway pots. You mentioned briefly that in a 3way pot BB/CO/BTN the CO player checks very often. I am guessing that the CO's cbet strategy is somewhat similar to a CO/BTN 2-way SRP, albeit with a reduced cbet frequency due to the added player?

Similarly, the BB checked at a huge frequency on the turn. I am assuming this should be the case on most boards due to the BB having the weakest preflop range and usually facing a stronger, mostly still uncapped range? Are there any board types you know of where the BB can be more aggressive? Is the block sizing the most common sizing for BB turn probe, even on boards that play polar?

I tried to run the AK hand on J64dd2Kd where you donked the river and called the shove on GTOWizard AI. Like you pointed out on the turn, the IP sizing should be bigger than block, but if I forced IP to have only a block sizing, then you don't get any river leads on the Kd anymore. If you look at the bluff shoving range for IP vs the river block, it contains a lot of pretty wild bluffs like T9ss/hh, 98ss/hh, 87ss/hh at some frequency - I don't think the vast majority of regs at most stakes (especially 100nl) will find these.

Or "they're all pretty bad, this ones egregious".
To answer why the play is so bad, the line-ups are basically recs, plus old school live regs that still use the same strategy they used 20 years ago. They can get away with this strategy because of the softness of the games they can play in based on their fame value.
There is also some incentive for the 'regs' to play a little looser preflop - someone playing 24/20/10 in these games would be probably be considered a 'nit' and unless they offer some other reason for viewers to watch would unlikely be invited back to these TV stream games. Some shows will track VPIP of players, shame the tighter players and praise the looser ones in order to generate more action. Some, I believe, even stipulate a minimum VPIP for regs to play in order to be asked back on the show. A large variable in live streams rather than other poker games is essentially "entertainment" value.

"It feels like an old school move from 2005" kinda sums up the play in these games.

Seemed like Yakobishvili was giving off constant timing tells. Sure, they are not 100% indicative of hand strength, but there were plenty of spots where both you and I were able to narrow their range down and remove/reduce combos of certain hand classes from their range based on how quickly they acted on that street or a previous street. Did you feel that during the match T Duthweiler was making exploits based on this? I saw one river overbet from TD after GY snap checked back the turn, and I thought that was potentially a good way to bluff and counter this, so perhaps that was a bluff but we didn't get to see it.

Most people will end up probing way too many bluffs here - any 8 out straight draw, a bunch of gutters, more of the combodraws and SDV flush draws etc. Nodelocking this gives a much increased raise % for the IP player facing this at the main exploit.

Hello Luke, glad to see you are back with some theory videos. At 44.00 you were a bit puzzled as to why the J8hh would not probe the turn. The answer is that you just don't have enough bluff allowance here to bluff every 8 out straight draw. In most scenarios you would, but here there a few things happening:
1. The large probe sizing means you are probing at a low frequency, and hence don't have a huge bluff allowance.
2. The board is 2-tone on the turn, so you now have twice as many flush draws as on a board where there is just one flush draw present. Flush draws obviously are better draws than straight draws so are higher in the probing bluff hierarchy (aside from the ones with showdown value or some combodraws as you mentioned in video).
3. This board is just about the most straight-draw heavy board possible.
4. Higher straight draws get probed less frequently here than lower ones, as the higher ones block more of the folding range.

Hello Callum, thanks for another great video!

In this hand you correctly noted that your opponent should be using a bigger sizing here. I see this a lot in the games I play - regs snap betting for the small sizing on these boards in 3bet pots (often a weaker reg). I assume some/most are doing this as a range bet but it's of course impossible to know for sure. What is your advice for countering such strategies?

Also, on turn you do get to have a reasonable shoving range here, AQ with Qh seems a high frequency candidate because, as you mentioned, the Qh should unblock villain's bluffs/high equity draws as villain's Qh bluffs should give up turn more often than other combos.

At ~9.50 we saw T Duthweiler min cbet A82ccc. You mentioned at the time that you thought this sizing down meant he was cbetting range, then we saw him Q9hh hand and it further supported that idea given that this is one of the prime check-back candidates on the flop. I have seen this increasingly often from regs, especially those playing higher stakes. From my sim, with a min cbet sizing, the solver is only betting 35% frequency on this board. It seems a pretty wild stretch to go from 35% to 100%. IP EV drops from 2.64 to 2.58. So I'm quite confused as to why I'm see this type of strategy so often. Does the player pool respond to this bet size so poorly in a bunch of spots that it makes for a very easy way to exploit player tendencies? Even if I nodelock in BB folding more and raising less than they should, I still only get a cbet frequency of around 55%.

Congrats on hitting the jackpot! Funny that you knew exactly what the player had. I lost with AAATT yesterday and was sat there trying to remember whether the minimum hand was AAATT or AAAJJ. Also was trying to work out whether other criteria were met - both players using both hole cards etc. Nothing appearing on screen. Then bang, $5700 in my account. I got slowrolled by the GG server lag which caused the animation to be delayed! Certainly added to the suspense, would recommend! Do you have any idea how often a typical reg will hit these jackpots? They are of course extremely rare but do in fact account for a huge amount in terms of "rakeback".

I am a little confused by the 15% cbet sizing in the first hand on A72ss. It's a lower EV choice than a bigger sizing (around 50% seems to be optimal), but at the same time it doesn't allow you to range bet, so there is no benefit of simplifying your strategy here.

Yes I was thinking the same, and my sim suggests betting this AT combo with both of the good suits blocked. As for other similar hands, it depends on your flop cbet sizing. If you cbet 75% then AT can bet here ~40%.

I am also wondering whether the fact that we will likely face a turn probe more often in reality than in a sim would skew us towards cbetting this hand more or less?

I was a little surprised to see this sim (above) at 51.40 with so many continues from the hh region on A33r. Sounds like you were in the video too. Tried to replicate it on GTOWizard and my sim looks fairly different:

hh only hands:

Curious as to how your sim could end up being so different?
I tried to replicate your BTN calling range somewhat.
Worth noting that I get 0% raising range once the sim is simplified from multiple from sizings to just the one 20% sizing. (With multiple sizings it's only 2% though also).

Phil's come a long way #WhiteMagic

The downside to capping your check-back range would be that your opponent can make very large bets for value and punish you in that way. Also they will have the ability to value bet thinner. Both of those would include more bluff allowance too overall, which is bad for your hands wanting to get to showdown. I don't think recs on average are able to recognise that you are super capped or are able to work out how to punish you for being so.
Another thing to consider though is that the sim pictured above includes GTOWizard playing the river perfectly as the rec. If you check back the turn, the rec in reality is gonna fire way too many bluffs on the river, and also bet random middling hands for absolutely no reason, so calling river bets with QQ, JJ etc will be much higher EV than in the sim.
A final thing to add to the mix is that recs will donk the river way more often than the sim expects after calling a turn barrel. That would presumably hurt QQ, JJ and push them closer to checking the turn (unless of course we have data suggesting this river donking line is way over bluffed).

Yeh, for sure the downside of this nodelock is that GTOWizard will play river perfectly as the "rec". For this nodelock I had the rec calling 75% of JJ and TT which seems to punish IP's merged bets as they are barely folding out better hands.

Curious as to which of these plays from the video you would/wouldn't do against a recreational player? Would imagine they are calling too many middling 1 pair hands, but also too many weak draws on flop and turn. I node-locked the turn on the first hand to try to replicate this - calling most JJ, TT and all flush draws, along with the occasional naked gutter. Node-locked on the left and original on right:

Looks like more of a linear strategy and value betting much thinner, with less merging. Still a few merged hands in there too though but nowhere near as much as before.

Hello Frankie, really liked your take on merged betting. It's a topic that isn't discussed that often and is generally poorly understood so it was a great area to cover. In the past I would over-estimate the showdown value of middling hands and wouldn't merged bet the turn, but these days I am moving away from that and having more success in these spots. One of the advantages of merged betting that you mentioned was "prevent being put into a tough spot". I think this part of it is very underestimated, and more than just a human reason for merged betting. As soon as we face a bet from our opponent, our middling showdown hands often become close to 0EV hands, e.g. the 77 hand in the first example on K96r. Whereas if we barrel the turn with this hand it generates around 9BB in EV. Avoiding facing a polar range with middling hands is often a good idea in different parts of the game tree.

Found the analysis of the last hand very useful. For years I have attacked this river IP block bet sizing with the reasoning that it almost never makes sense as a bet size and is very often just a greedy 1 pair hand trying to squeeze some value out of you. Calling bluff-catchers seems rough as I have always felt this range is very top pair heavy. So then I would opt to check-raise bluff here very often under the logic that I am uncapped and they have a very capped 1 pair heavy range. The low bluffing frequency of this IP block range removes a bunch of snap folds, coupled with players levelling themselves into calling means that this spot seems to be well under-folded vs the check-raise. It's good to hear that your data backs this up so that I can stop burning money with check-raise bluffs!

Would you consider calling the JJ in this hand instead, or is the block sizing under-bluffed?

I think I have seen other coaches advocate for using the block sizing on the river IP with thin value hands to bait your opponent into check-raising way too many bluffs, and then calling any value hand that you bet. According to your data, would this be an effective strategy? Is the answer different for regs vs recs?

In the first hand on J96t we saw that the BB does not cbet too often given the large sizing, and as such, many draws opt to check instead of betting. If you suspect your opponent will in fact cbet most of their draws here, what exploits would you use vs them?

There is some argument to recs value betting AX too thin, but this is what I get when filtering this spot for A high boards. Small sample, but still statistically significant at the 95% confidence level under binomial distribution. Also, once you factor in the showdown bias for strong hands it is more significant.

My H2N data for this spot (rec BB vs SB, bet/bet/bet 50%) shows quite a substantial over-bluff: 45% instead of the optimal 25% frequency. My default assumption for this line is that it is massively overbluffed by recs.

Hello Callum, solid advice throughout as per usual. I'm curious as to what the result was in the first hand with the A5s that happened before the video. My suspicion here would be that your opponent would be likely to just 3bet shove the flop with a hand like TT after taking such a line. They don't really rep many VERY strong hands, so you are right that their line doesn't really make much sense, but my feeling would be that this is likely a rec wanting to shovel money into the pot now with a middling pocket pair so that they don't have to play future streets.

At 16.30 was interesting to see you pot the turn on table 1 with J4 on 953t5. Can you talk me through the ideas here with this strategy?

Hello Max, enjoy hearing your ideas as usual. At 1.30 you decided to pure 3bet the 97s vs a tighter player. Is the reasoning here that this player won't 4bet enough and won't defend postflop enough, so your EV will be increased? Would you pure 3bet this hand vs a really really tight player, e.g. playing 14 VPIP or less?

You made a very good point about adjusting your raising strategy in the BB vs SBs who don't 3bet the flop enough. If I suspect my opponent won't 3bet the flop enough, what hand class(es) benefit most from being raised more often in the BB?

When looking to open wider SB vs a recreational player in the BB, what are the characteristics you are looking for? Is it just a low 3bet %, or are you factoring in other stats/observations before opening wider?

At ~10.00 on the AT79A I was interested to hear that you wouldn't consider bluff-catching here. Is that based off MDA research, or just your experience in seeing recreational players value bet too thin here? I completely agree that they are likely to value bet too thinly here, but I would have thought that the amount of junk in their range (and random nonsensical hands) would make it a somewhat close spot, especially with TX?