midori

Still playing on non-tracked sites (which are most sites these days), and doing better than before. :)

Hotkeys gone wrong, If I had to guess

People often say they folded something, and they are not always telling the truth.

On a NL table I once folded T9o preflop and the board ran like 993r A 9. After the hand was over one guy said "Damn I folded the case 9 there" and another guy told him "You're lying man I had J9o" or something.

Sometimes I wonder why they do this.

Yeah oh well, I think some of the posters ITT were just mad that ACR took out all the HU tables. And I can understand that too. I don't play on ACR, nor does my living depend on HUPLO, so I'm not really in a position to comment on that.

But still, lots of tilting posts there.

I have a question though. It seemed like you felt pretty strong that the alleged bot user was not using solver in real time "because that would be infeasible." Then what kind of botting are we talking about? I'm just curious and you don't have to answer here, but thought I'd ask you anyway.

-- midori

Sigh. I googled that NVG thread and read every post within. I can't believe I spent 20 min doing that, I should have gone to bed instead.

Tough luck man, I'm sorry to hear that ACR took such a poor action against it. This is probably a longshot, but I hope they bring back HU tables.

Oh and yeah those trolls coming out of the wood. I have been fighting against colluders for the last 2 years in online poker, and those trolls tilt me more than the colluders haha

A great video.

One thing I'd like to add, though, is that people in practicd check (back) lots of mediocre flushes on flop AND river in a 3b pot, so you can't always discount those combos when you get to the river.

January Goal

In the increasing order of difficulty:

Play 60k hands, study 15 hands, and lose 5 pounds.

This is not a terrible hand to check back flop with, for all the reasons you mentioned. If you are worried about betting the turn, try to take a XBB line instead of BXB (or BXC) line.

As played I understand your concerns, and it sucks to get it in and occasionally have 0-2% equity in a sizable pot, but against his overall range I think you have to call off. Be prepared to see lots of 7x, some 73 and other random stuff.

-- midori

First off this might be a fold preflop in this game structure. You have to be extremely tight in SB and BB when BTN can straddle.

Turn bet is fine I think. You likely have the best hand here and you block QQ. I'd bet a bit smaller because I want to get more calls from straights (mostly AK), but probably not a big difference in EV.

As played I'd fold. Can't think of a worse value hand that he's raising here with, and people just don't bluff like this often.

This is in Indonesian, if I had to guess?

And this post should be deleted I think :)

6/8, but I was way off for the other two haha

This is a good format, I'd be interested to see this for 3b pots with 100 BB stacks as well!

December Progress

Okay, I have two more days left in this month and year, but I won't count much on them. So here's how I did..

a) I played ~140 hours in this month. I will close out at 150-155, which is still a bit short of my goal of 180 but I guess I'm okay with it. I blew a few days trying to flip my sleeping schedule. My volume suffered a bit because of it, but I'm pretty happy with my daily routine these days.

b) I studied about 15 hands thoroughly, although I reviewed a ton more. Thanks to this, I improved a lot and became pretty strong in certain spots. I still think I should have studied more hands in depth.

c) I didn't put in 1 hour every day, but I spent 20-25 hours studying Polish in this month. And I feel like it's improving! Mam nadzieję, że znajdę więcej osób, z którymi mogę mówić po polsku.

d) I didn't write any post in this journal. :/

e) I also didn't work out too often. I'm getting back into climbing and it's a lot harder than I thought. Well, I can only blame myself.

f) I think I'm having a lot of fun playing poker, and also outside of poker.

g) I played some amount of 5 card PLO variants, but the games didn't run very often. I failed to achieve 8bb/100 winrate for this month. And I didn't get very lucky, I guess?

Well, I'll try hard for the next 2 days and maybe take a day off on Jan 1st.

Good luck to you all,

-- midori

I'd check back flop.

River I'd just call when I'm also blocking Qd as well. Getting called by Add is cool and will add to your winrate, but you also open yourself for getting 3b. Also, when people pot on this river, their range is quite polar and I think nut flushes are actually at the bottom of the value region of that range. If not, Q high flushes but you block those..

Also a bit off-topic question: what are the specs of the server you are using for solver sims, and how much does it cost? I'm hesitating between buying a desktop for it and renting a server (AWS most likely).

You can PM me if you don't feel like posting a reply here.

A very nice vid, Richard. I watched it at least twice, and will watch it again at some point.

I have a question, or rather comments, about the first hand A986 (I wanted to attach a screenshot but failed; please go to around 13:50 for the reference).

This is not meant to be a nitpick, because I don't think it matters too much either way, but the solver seems to favour a bet with our actual hand -- this hand is both in the pot betting range as well as 1/3 psb range.

I haven't been able to check if this hand also shows up in the checking range, but it was quite interesting that solver puts it into the betting range when it checks about 80% of the time.

My guess is that having a straight blocker here is somewhat relevant, but also that OOP is (probably) supposed to bet again with lots of strong hands on the turn.

If you still have the sims results, could you please let me know:

a) How often OOP is barreling the turn;
b) If IP has a wide bet/folding range vs. OOP check;
c) What solver wants to do with our actual hand (i.e. does it check sometimes? do we bet/call or bet/fold?)

Cheers again, and please make more of these vids!

-- midori

Great update. Good to hear you had fun at home game!

Just curious, is it QeenOfDiamonds or QueenOfDiamonds?

Okay, so.. I've been taking a break off poker for about 10 days now. I was busy traveling and dealing with people, but I can't be like this forever.

Let's start with this -- somehow this almost always worked for me.

December Goal

I'll keep it simple. I will close out this year by:

Putting in 180 hours of playing poker
Studying 30 hands thoroughly
Studying 1 hour of Polish every day
Writing 4 posts in this journal
Working out 3 times a week
Having fun in general

And I'll also try to:

Play more 5 card PLO variants
Achieve 8bb/100 winrate
Get lucky I guess?

Good luck to everyone in this month.

-- midori

You told me I have a gift for writing -- oh well, right back at you!

I'm glad that you are now cancer free, and I hope you keep riding the good side of the life variance from now on. Welcome to the site!

-- midori

A very interesting video, I really enjoyed watching it. Thanks!

I have two questions about the last hand (KJT7sss on J87cch 2h A board):

a) On the turn, do you think an average opponent pots here too often that this becomes a call? I think people tend to bluff less often with the obvious blockers (TT/99 here) when there are 2 FD's on the board, and lots of his draws have merits for checking back and realising equity, rather than betting twice and possibly getting jammed on.

If this is true, the remaining draws he pots here with will have a significant amount of equity against our 2p, and this will allow him to empty the clip on the river pretty often. There are very few "blanks" where we can even consider bluff catching again on the river, anyway.

A more general question would be, how should we approach the hands that are slightly ahead/way behind on very draw heavy boards?

b) On the river, you said your actual hand is rarely a (pure?) call and his top pair hands are rarely a bluff, and then you went on to explore the exploitative pair strategy.

That was quite impressive, but here I think you were specifically targeting his Ax (one pair) hands, and I just don't think they will make up a large part of his triple barreling range because of the constraints -- i.e. it shouldn't have a pair by the turn, it should usually have combo draws, etc.

If so, aren't we risking a bit too much on this call? I mean, if this is close to a 0EV call at equilibrium, he should significantly deviate from it for this to be a reasonably +EV call, and how he plays a narrow part of his range (Axxx) doesn't seem to be a very heavy factor to tip the scale.

Or, do you think everything adds up and should be considered when the decisions are close (=nearly 0EV at equilibrium), as you mentioned in the vid?

Once again, it was a very cool vid and I'm much looking forward to seeing more vids like this!

-- midori

Thanks, man. And yes, I'm coming back!

40k is extremely small, yes. First of all, you can put in that much volume in less than a month (even on US sites). Second, below are the simulated downswings for a 5bb/100 winner:

As you can see, you'll break even for 30k or 50k hands about 34-47% of the time. I mean, you roll a dice and if it lands on a 1, you'll break even for 100k hands.

As such, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to look at one's result during 40k hands and say much about his/her game.

Anyways, I hope your WSOPc goes well, and try to play the cash games while you're there -- they tend to be very lucrative. Also, try the PLO event :)

-- midori

Not to belittle your effort into PLO games, and I know it's not easy to put in a ton of volume on American sites, but 40k hands in any form of poker are considered an extremely small sample. Just because you have a winrate of -10bb/100 or worse during those 40k hands doesn't mean you are actually a loser in the games.

I don't know anything about your current BR or financial needs, so take this with a grain of salt, but if your primary concern is to quickly build a stable roll, you have to be very selective about your game. This is often times way more important than working on your game itself, or putting in enough volume.

Try to play in the games where your hourly will be the highest, whether this means the highest bb/100 or the highest (bb/100 * # of hands). I'm not sure if live poker is an option where you live, but if it is, you should definitely try the low limit games too, like 1/2 NL.

I'd also avoid MTTs by all means. MTT variance is the worst of all, and it's not uncommon for the top pros to break even for 6+ months. Well, I guess you can still mix in mid-sized MTTs such as the ones on Ignition, because the field is softer and you can make it to FT way more often than you can in Sunday Millions, but still, MTT variance can be very sickening.

It's true that NLHE games tend to have lower variance (=smaller standard deviation) than PLO, but this usually comes at an expense of a smaller edge. And a smaller edge means more variance, so in the end these two factors kind of even out.

Just some food for thought.

-- midori

Wow it's been so long I completely forgot about this thread.

I just read some of my old posts again and thought I should resume writing about poker.

So I'll do that from tomorrow on. Right now I'm a bit sleep deprived so I'll try to catch some sleep first.

Yawn.

I just found this thread. I'm a mid stakes PLO player too, so I'll drop by and post some random thoughts every now and then.

Good luck in your journey, man.

Also, one thing I didn't emphasise because I kind of forgot but is nonetheless important:

It's 50 PLO, you can't really rely on them folding out flushes often to our double barrel. Our bet-bet line might be "theoretically sound" if we choose the right sizing and put other hands into that range as well, but it can quickly turn into a very -EV play if we run into opponents that just don't fold often. And my guess is that these types of opponents aren't uncommon at 50 PLO, although I haven't really played 50 PLO in years.

Richard Gryko Sure, there are hands with SDV and Ad blocker that we want to bet in this spot. I was talking about this specific hand with which I don't see a compelling reason why to bet the turn. Let me elaborate a bit on this first.

Mostly, we block lots of non-flush hands with our top two and the Q, and his flop XC range will have lots of Kdd, Qdd type of hands, so in this exact spot with our exact hand, we are looking at a lot of high/mid flushes in BB's range. Sure, he can have hands like AKQT or KQJT without FD and it's nice to deny those hands of realising equity, but he will have more flushes than those (wraps are fewer combos than FD's in general anyway).

(Btw God_of_War said 1p hand can have 30% equity against us, but that's like the worst case scenario for us and I don't see him having many combos of those after flop XC.)

And if his range mostly consists of flushes, I guess we have to take either bet 2 streets or XB and see the river. Betting the turn and checking back river would be burning money if he doesn't have lots of non-flushes; on the other hand, betting 2 can be a pretty costly play against high flushes because we have little equity (10% ish) and need to mostly rely on FE, which we might or might not have on the river.

Checking back turn and getting bet into OTR kind of sucks but I don't think BB will bluff here often, let alone have enough air, so our decision shouldn't be too hard. Checking back and raising river is an option too, although most opponents will see it as so FOS and snap off with whatever flushes.

Okay, so now.. although our specific hand doesn't really gain much from betting the turn, there are hands that you still want to put in this range (bet turn bet river), and I mostly agree with Richard Gryko here. There are a few issues though.

One is the bet sizing on the turn which you briefly mentioned. I haven't done the work, but I wouldn't be surprised if you are supposed to split your sizings with different Ad blocker hands here -- for example, bet small with SDV + Ad hands, and bet large with not much SDV + Ad hands, etc. If this is the case, we'd need to do a lot of work constructing our ranges properly, and that is, well, a lot of work. And this likely means that we also need to split ranges with our actual flushes -- Add, Kdd, Qdd, etc etc.

It is possible that we can gain a lot of EV by putting in this work and splitting the ranges accordingly, but I kind of doubt that. More realistically, it is quite possible that we can get carried away with overdoing this and costing ourselves quite some EV.

Another is that we can still have flushes in our turn XB range, so it's not like he can attack a lot OTR and auto profit or anything. If we wanted to, we can even put the nut flushes into turn XB range (I'd pick the ones that block a lot, say AKdd with pair blockers, etc.) and raise river. And if we do this properly, we might not have to bet too much with SDV + Ad hands.

Also, if we are concerned about being able to have boats/quads on board pairing rivers, we can just pick sets over 2p and bet with them on the turn, with or without Ad blockers. Sets still need protection against SD, but they have more equity when our bet gets called.

-- midori

"After calling the turn a flush is very likely" and "check-back and realise SD value against his 2p, busted SD, and OP" are almost contradicting each other.

By the way, how can villain have OP and busted SD when we take this line?

The last paragraph is self-contradicting.

I don't see a compelling reason to bet the turn. Ask this to yourself: is he x/folding a lot on the turn? If so, do you really want to fold out those hands? And if not, do you really want to turn your hand into a bluff on the river?

Tbh this looks like a spot where we end up overbluffing and getting snapped off by K high and sometimes Q high flushes on the river.