DF_Newb

Yeah, I'd also prefer monker or population ranges for this as a default. I'd be interested to see how flop strategies change vs different 3 bet %'s as well. Feels like it would be valuable to identify boards where our strategy remains relatively constant and ones where it varies greatest.

First hand was a rainbow flop but you input a two toned flop. Could you multiply stack size and pot size by 10 in these low spr spots? on the A78 board the 30% size was rounded up to 40%. I'd be interested in seeing if 25-30% was chosen. Turn and river decisions will also be different because BB continuing range will be tighter vs that 40% size.

Last hand is really interesting. It isn't immediately obvious to me which blockers are good or bad. Do you have any opinions on how players play hands like 99 98,97 and 65,95 on the flop compared to equilibrium? Do you think his value range has 78 or only boats? I think population doesn't block bet 9x on the river as much as the solver does, so I think they'll have more opportunities to bluff with it. Especially 96. A8 also feels better than A7 to me because 7x is more likely to bluffraise flop. Even though the solver never bluff jams those bare 7x on the river, they have more opportunities to make a mistake. I could also see overfolding because I expect more 99 and 55 than the solver gets to the river with, and river raises being underbluffed in general.

I'd like to hear a little bit more about your decision to 3x btn. Even if a solver says that 3x is better vs a nodelocked strat, don't you think there is value in keeping your opponents range wide OOP where they are more likely to make mistakes? You'll also have a larger advantage on a lot of boards, allowing you to simplify more often. However, I could also see the argument that people aren't studying enough 3x btn vs bb pots.

Skipped around a bit so I apologize if this was mentioned but it rounds the cbet up to the nearest whole number. In the first example the cbet is 2 into 5 or 40%. Not sure how much this changes things. I accidentally did this last week in a huge script and had to scrap the whole thing.

Nice vid. I liked the second part of it. SB vs BB seems to get less love than Btn vs BB in pio vids. I'm not sure we can draw any concrete conclusions from the first hand. I don't play many tournaments but I disagree with some of the preflop assumptions you made. I think we can completely eliminate 22-55 from his preflop range. It also doesn't make much sense to trap with AA at this stack depth when you are continuing with 100% of your range vs his raise. The biggest issue that I have with the ranges is that I'm guessing Isildur expects you to jam much wider than this pre and therefore have much less Ax postflop.

Hey Tyler,
I like the concept but I feel like some simple PIO sims would be a good complement to your ideas of what you think the players are doing.

Great addition. Those results are insane. Is it worth trying a balanced limping strategy below 100nl/200nl or is the rake too high?

Nice video. I don't play PLO yet so please excuse the level of my questions. I don't fully understand how propokertools ranks hands.
1. Is it a problem that the range of 8%-4% that we use to 2x and then 4bet will have less AAxx than normal? Opponent can push equity by 5 betting KK72 vs this range.
2. Do you worry about the board coverage and playability of the 2x range?
3. Do these ranges change significantly the deeper we are?
4. Do you think you would gain much by having 2 raise sizes in NLHE?
Thanks!

Halfway through the vid. Cool first hand. Turn is a spot where I know for sure that I autopilot and check too often. If I were playing well I would have the same thought of J9o or low pocket pairs being some pretty sweet hands to bomb turn and river to balance some low flushes. I love when pio shits all over my intuition in spots like this. Couple questions I had while watching:

1. Do you have a general rule for how deep you have to be before you stop jamming low pairs vs the btn open? Is it bad to just ship 22-77 or 55-77 here pre? and would it significantly effect the way we play the turn if we don't have those hands?
2. Do you think pio's weird small turn bet with value/protection is something worth implementing in practice? Which strategy do you think works better vs the way people actually play?
3. In the actual hand, what was your plan on a heart river with your range? Don't we kind of get screwed here? We end up with a great hand to bluff with J9 but with but aren't we going to be at a pretty substantial disadvantage when it comes to high hearts? We almost never have the Qh here and in game I'd much rather lead lower flushes on the turn than the Kxhh.
   EDIT: Scratch most of number 3. We can definitely have enough strong hands on a river heart. It wasn't the point of the hand and I'm getting deep into the weeds here but I'd be interested in knowing how this hand should play out given your original assumptions. Opponent called you with AQ. Assuming he has no heart, it is a worse call against your actual range than Ax7h right? I'd be interested to know how light villain is actually supposed to call here both in terms of actual hand strength + removal. Still find it interesting on a heart river too. Are we supposed to check a good amount of Kh to protect our lower flushes or just accept that we have bluffcatchers with 1 psb left? Also on a heart river, how strong of a hand is villain supposed to turn into a bluff?

I think Doug picked a pretty good hand with Q9 on the 4 flush board to raise with. Q9o has some showdown value, is too weak to call, doesn't block your 6-8 high bluffs. Assuming he calls KJ, I can't think of a better hand to do this with. I doubt he is overbluffing this spot because his whole game is based on being balanced. This spot isn't too difficult to balance if he knows roughly how many Qd, Jd, 9d he gets here with.

I hate to say it but this is one of the few videos of yours that I didn't get much from. Usually you'll have a couple of cool points that change my perspective. Low stakes no limit being too tight and passive is not a groundbreaking idea. People have been exploiting this fact for years. Even at the mid-high stakes the biggest winners tended to be on the looser side with high 3 bet stats. We all know this. It's just difficult to do it well.

Everyone in poker has that dream of being unexploitable. Printing money slowly but surely. Sure, I could make more by trying to exploit people but I'll have this strategy that will clean up in a home game or the toughest games in the world. I'll never have to watch another video or read another book. It is easy to see why people would dedicate years of their life to achieving this. They've come to you because they think you have it all figured out. You have a $2000 course called "PIO UNLOCKED" and make videos for the elite side of the most prestigious poker training site. It feels a little disingenuous for your lesson to be that true GTO strategies are impossible to implement and we should go back to what we were doing before because the games are still exploitable.

I still think piosolver is a good tool to get a big picture understanding of what is going on. We've learned lessons about proper bet sizing, the value of protection on certain boards. It gives us some clues about how to construct our ranges in a more balanced way. The issue is when we try to get too precise. Maybe we'll have to wait for the next iteration of solvers that can give us more pure strategies in patterns that we can understand. For now I like Doug Polk's strategy. He uses a pseudo GTO strategy that is hard to exploit in conventional ways. He rarely deviates much from this strategy and has made millions of dollars doing it.

Nice vid. I like the spots that you've chosen to analyze with PIO. Consensus used to be to look at wide range, late position stuff because they happen more often and are therefore more important. That led to too many spots where every single hand was a mix and left us guessing why PIO slightly preferred some hands over others. Turning this into a 2 street game with smaller ranges and lower stack to pot ratio gives us a much clearer picture of what is going on.

I learned quite a bit from this video and I plan on studying trees like this. I had a bunch of questions while watching this video that I'll explore on my own. How big of a difference does it make if we have CO fold all of the 2 undercard to a J hands? Would we gain EV by using a closer to geometric bet size to get all in by the river? Does it make much of a difference if we increase our aggression on an A turn by adding all of our AQ and just adding more pure bluffs?

I was confused by the low turn bet on the 3s. We had a decent advantage on the flop, villain gets to the turn with almost 100% of his range and we have to slow down on a blank? I can understand turning the 6x hands into a bluff on the higher turns but why does it like betting 68s here?

Went back and skimmed the other video, input the same ranges into pio to compare. pio cbet the flop on both boards almost always but raised the cbet much more often on J95r than 943r. ~17% vs ~3%

It bets over 70% on the turn so our river continuing range is quite narrow. It seems to almost always call with hands up to QQ vs a half pot bet. Occasionally raising smaller with the tiny slivers of KK/AA that it checked back, preferring KK, because AQo makes up a big part of oop's bluffing range and jamming with 76s, 99 and bluff jamming a small amount of hands that block combos of those 2 hands.

Thanks for this video. I've been struggling with these issues for a long time and I'm sure there are plenty more out there like me. I have this sort of irrational fear that I can play very exploitively up until I get to certain stakes and then I'll have to essentially learn poker all over again to be more GTO. Why not start with a sound strategy and make small deviations along the way? It seemed to work for Kanu or OTBRedbaron. I don't think this is completely unreasonable. I used to be a big midstakes winner and currently struggle at ssnl. In 2006 I had my highest winrate by raising 100% from the btn and 75% in the co at full ring and exploited the hell out of regs playing 10/7. As we see these obvious edges dry up and I see myself become a regfish, it makes sense to want to move towards a perfect strategy that I'll never have to relearn. I also struggle with how to use PIO in better ways. I spent a long time playing this pseudo GTO passive style, trying to keep strong hands in every spot and protecting myself. Then I realized I was giving up way too much money against passive opposition. I started to wonder if it just makes more sense to just bet thinner for value and protect myself with slightly weaker holdings at the same frequency. I think this range vs range interaction is very important but I feel like it defeats the purpose of using PIO in the first place. Aren't we getting to the turn with an artificial c-betting range? Wouldn't we get the same info and faster by using something like equilab or flopzilla? I think the most useful information I've gotten from PIO is about bet sizing. I'll watch OTBRedbaron play and he is a genius at betting amounts that benefit a large portion of his range and tends to split his sizing in ways that make sense intuitively. I think it is worth looking at equity distribution instead of just overall range equity and betting amounts that make sense in that context.

Hey Gogol. Great video as always. At around the 16 minute mark I was surprised to see you bet the turn with JJ on Ac 5c 3c Ah. When I try to figure out what I'd do with 66-JJ with a club on this board I'm having a hard time figuring out if I should be more likely to bet 66 because our range is so strong and this hand needs the most protection or JJ because he might call with worse. You mention you could have KQ with a club but I doubt you call that pre. Go easy on me. I haven't played 100bb poker in years and I'm just getting back into it. Thanks.

Also, inb4 sauce would definitely call at 27:30