Demondoink

excellent video as usual man :)

I doubt he plays like that in game, it will just be what the solver says so he has transferred that range in to his PIO sims. your strategy can be different post-flop to the ranges you use during your sims, doesn't really make any difference so long as you don't leave out entire combinations that are represented in one range but not in another.

of course the solver outputs will be more precise if you, like you say, 3 bet certain hands 45% in both scenarios, but I don't think your ranges should ever be so static. because if one player is opening 60% from the sb and the other one is opening 40% then 3 betting your more marginal hands half the time doesn't make any sense vs the tighter guy, and conversely doesn't make much sense either vs the looser guy. you could switch to pure call/pure 3 bet in these situations with certain combinations that would usually mix vs a guy opening a more optimal range pre-flop.

personally I think this is a complete waste of money. I use Snowie Ranges, for the most part, at 500z and they work well. I know other players who use them at higher stakes than this and they crush. $500 or $900 is a ridiculous amount of money imo for a part of the game that is fairly easy and simple to execute. you are FAR better off investing time/effort and money in to your post-flop game, that is where all of the money is made and lost.

yeah that's a good point actually that went completely over my head. well spotted.

line is probably under-bluffed but he is a fish so you can just call here and then adjust accordingly for future hands based on show down. I have seen recs here bet hands like 55 or AK as some kind of 'value' bet so I am never folding this. and I think that most recs are just c betting over pairs on this board for protection when you have either a straight draw or a FD.

and it's extremely easy for him to be over-bluffing. if he takes a random combo such as KQo and bluffs that every time then he has 12 bluffing combinations and no way does he have enough value bets to meet the required value bets/bluffs ratio if he is doing this. so yeah whatever call and see a showdown.

radtupperware xD

Kevin Rabichow lol

opening 65s :P

'that open is not gonna make us enough money that we can retire from playing poker.' looooool

Gary Chappell cheers man that's some good advice. I am upping my volume this year so I will hopefully adapt and become accustomed to the longer sessions, which will allow me to play more of an 'A' game than an A game for the first two hours followed by a incremental decline in quality with each passing minute :P

before I was playing more in the evenings, when the games are softer but when I am fairly mentally tired as it is approaching the end of the day. however, I think I am going to switch to more of a day time schedule like you have, so I am sure we will end up playing more often together, which could lead to some fun content xD

yeah it's sick. I can't manage more than 4 hours a day of zoom otherwise I start playing like crap lol

I would also question whether us overbluffing or not is a particularly
relevant concern.

I think it is more because he is unsure what his check raising frequency should be on this flop, given the fact that IP has a very large EV/Equity advantage as well as a large nutted combination advantage. I have studied similar boards and the check raising frequencies bb vs btn, what I found was that we don't really like to check raise with a small sizing and prefer to use a larger, more polarized one. around a pot sized raise. which makes sense as we do not want to start playing large pots OOP when IP has a very big EV/Equity/Nut advantage, as well as having the power of position.

iirc our range would roughly consist of very low frequencies of KQ, probably with a diamond, and then KJ, K4 and 44 with some hands such as AT/QT with a diamond as well as some combo draws and some FD's as well as some bottom pair with backdoors. so I think our combination could fit in to this range, but again, it should not be in our pre-flop range, however.

so no, I do not think you are over-bluffing with this check raise. however, I do think you are over-bluffing if you start to check raise with T9xd, QxTd, ATxd, Ad5x etc at 100% frequencies. which is why you need to be using an RNG, or have a very structured game plan whereby you know which combinations are check raising/calling/folding before you join the tables.

and yeah you are probably over-bluffing on early streets with your check raising frequencies on these kind of boards unless you are using an RNG.

okay well first off your defend is far too wide, you can't just defend ATC because you are facing a min raise, you still need to call with hands that are winning some EV. as well, i'm sure the rake in these games is pretty high so that should de-incentivise you further to defend such weak hands pre-flop. Snowie defends T7o to the min raise at $1/2, so that would also be my cut-off hand.

but anyways, as played I don't hate the check raise, the problem is you will have a ton of weaker hands that aren't great check calls either, and your value region isn't very wide here. the check raise is whatever, though.

on the turn I like the bet.

on the river I don't hate blocking tbh. you can still get some value from KQ/KJ/KT/AK/AA type hands that are extremely unlikely to fold vs 1/4p. I do not really like shoving unless the guy is a fish or a station. or both.

once you check and get jammed on you have a pure bluff catcher, you are not beating any of his value region. sure, it seems like a good hand to call with but he needs to be turning a hand such as AK in to a bluff for you to be able to call profitably. and in my experience players just check these hands back as they also have a bunch of EV to x down, and then jam flush+.

as played, I would x fold on the river. we don't need to defend 1-A here, as we developed a polarized raising range on the flop and bet twice in to a player who is un-capped and has to call very tight on the turn especially. so his range is very tight and not conducive to having very many bluffs, bar the odd AQ/AT with the Ad. but they can also check down for some EV as well, and may not always bet on the flop (especially AQ.) i'm sure if you put this hand in to PIO it would MAYBE call with this combination on the river, but PIO is able to find bluffs where us humans cannot, and if they cannot find them they FORCE them. I think this call is definitely not winning and not even 0EV imo.

just x fold, he will x back a ton of hands you beat, so when he bets he has you crushed and you can comfortably fold.

yeah I know what you mean, it seems like we would want to check raise without a club in order to increase the likelihood that IP had a flush draw himself. however, if you use PIO somewhat often you will see that it prefers to develop more of a polarized turn betting range in most scenario's, and with low SPR situations it is pretty disastrous when we bet a hand such as JTcc and get jammed on. where as if we have JThh we can comfortably bet because if we get jammed on we can just snap fold.

so a hand such as JThh won't have much equity at all as a check back (mainly hoping to spike a pair vs an AK type hand and then x down) and we will have a bunch of sets/two pairs/straights/over pairs etc so we have tons of value hands so we of course want to develop some bluffs as well. JTcc on the other hand has a bunch of EV as a check back, it gets to realise all of it's equity and also bluff sometimes when x to and we brick. also, like I said, it suffers greatly from a x raise so is happy to check back and take a free card.

so assuming that we are checking back FD's more often than we are betting them on the turn, and that we are betting more of a polarized range with suited combinations that do not interact with the board (hearts and diamonds and one club/spade AK/AQ type hands) then JJ with a club does a good job of unblocking these combinations, and benefits from a bunch of protection by check raising. as well as folding out hands that may have bluffed us off of our hand on certain run outs but now have to fold.

Is it to potentially bluff flush completing rivers?

this is also a possibility. on a river card such as the A/Kc then it allows us to have some bluffs, although I think that the aforementioned points I mentioned were more of the reason that PIO would check raise with JJxc combinations as opposed to other ones. but this could certainly be a small factor/theory behind taking such a line.

good question imo :)

excellent video, really enjoyed the variety of different spots you went through in PIO.

with regards to what you said about how both yourself and Patrick discussed ways to counter the high rake structure of these games, and primarily of lower stakes, there are a few issues with this strategy in my opinion.

1-you have to play a tighter range when you open between 2.5x-3x+. if you are a good player and have an edge over most of your opponents, you are for sure missing out on bunch of EV when you fold marginal hands that could open using a smaller sizing, let's say min raise-2.2x, as you are now playing less often against weaker opponents who are going to be making mistakes and pretty much every node.

2-you do not get any practice in certain scenarios. our aim should be, given the fact that we are all either RIO members or coaches on here, to improve and move up in stakes. when we avoid certain scenario's, let's say flatting from the sb for example, and choose to only 3 bet or fold, we are not getting any practice on how to play in this iteration. we may also avoid having a flatting range IP, so we don't get any practice playing in this situation either. so how are we going to be able to randomly show up at 5/10 and then be able to compete when we suddenly need to develop a flatting range from all positions and we have never had any prior experience of having one? this seems like it would be a bit of a struggle imo.

3-more rake is actually BETTER :))

but in all seriousness, I of course can see the benefits of playing with larger opening sizes and avoiding flatting ranges for the most part, especially at 100nl and lower where our aim should just be to move up to where we can have a decent hourly and not pay 15bb/100 in rake. however, I thought I would point out some of the cons and perhaps open other peoples minds to maybe 'sacrifice' a little EV (could also increase EV, like I said, if you are on of the better players at the stake) in order to improve your game and win some more 'future EV' than you would have were you to play a tighter and more efficient, rake conscious strategy.

haha maybe he only 3 bets JJ :P
but yeah if the board comes low he will probably play very poorly, and if it comes Axx and he has a pair such as KK-TT he will also play very poorly and un-balanced, so I would just be looking to exploit him when he takes passive lines and obv snap fold when he c bets over pot hahah.

I think you can call based on two factors:

1-he made the 3 bet sizing too small. when a player 3 bets OOP to less than 4x, you can call pretty wide, and should be doing so with the vast majority of your suited combinations. vs this 3x sizing I would be folding some hands such as AT/A9o, QJo etc but pretty much continuing with any suited combo, and this hand would fall in to the calling category.

2-he is a weak player who is going to play too straightforward OOP, you can take advantage of this and bluff certain flop textures when x to, or exploit certain lines that he takes as he is going to be playing pretty face up. when he applies lots of pressure, be prepared to let your hand go, but exploit his checking and attack these lines as opposed to calling him down with second pair.

sure, your hand will be dominated a bunch and he is probably 3 betting too tight, but you can still make a flush, trips, two pair, out flop QQ/JJ with top pair etc. so imo you still have to continue with this hand 100% of the time, and you can sometimes 4 bet him, but vs a tight guy I would only be doing this very occasionally with this combo, and would more likely just 4 bet AA/KK and very few bluffs.

generally these low suited Ax are not getting flatted pre-flop, if you look in Snowie we prefer to flat mid pocket pairs, some suited broadways and then flat some of the slightly stronger Axs that can flop strong top pairs.

if both players are pretty weak, which it seems like they are, then I don't mind a flat, to keep in the fish and then you get to play in position with a decent hand. however, like you mentioned about your table reads, it looks like all parties involved are fairly weak, so I would probably just go ahead and take the free money by 3 betting.

you can't just always 3 bet these suited Ax though, and believe it or not, they are okay to fold sometimes pre-flop, especially vs EP opens and MP flats, both of whom have very tight ranges and your hand plays pretty poorly when the flop goes 3 ways with a low spr. you either flop a crappy top pair, a very weak bottom pair, or air, with the odd FD. most of the time you will just flop air and they will have a range that is mostly stronger Ax as well as mid-strong pocket pairs.

so yeah, in some cases you can also fold, but not in this one. personally I would 3 bet, but don't mind flatting as well.

usually I would prefer to 3 bet this hand than call, but multi-way and with the relative short stacked nature of the other players involved, I don't really like 3 betting here. I think a call is marginally winning, but only if we use our position effectively and bluff when checked to on various board textures that are good for our perceived range. because if we play this hand based on it's raw equity, I think it is losing as we have an 8 high, multi-way, that is going to flop a bunch of dominated draws/pairs.

lol this is an ancient hand but I seen that some guys have commented on it recently so I will also give my 2 cents.

on the flop I think you wanna size down, when you c bet so large you are kind of condensing his range to the extent that on a turn such as this, he is gonna have a pretty strong range and a fairly low folding frequency. we can get a ton of folds by air hands such as Q/J/T high's by using a smaller sizing, imo this would be much more efficient.

on the turn this is an excellent card for the bb, he has some 2 pairs, some straights as well as a ton of flushes, we bet on the flop so our range is going to be much wider than the bb's, so he ends up with a much higher flush ratio in terms of a % of his range, as well as more straights/2 pairs like I said, so we should have a pretty high checking frequency on this turn. as a result we should be checking back with some Ahx combinations, because we end up having quite a lot of then-AQ/AJ/AT/A9 with the Ah as well as the aforementioned combinations but with the side card a heart. then we have QJo/QTo/JTo etc so quickly it's pretty evident that we can end up way over-bluffing with all of these combinations on the turn.

I think villain realises this, and exploits us by raising with a weaker flush in order to bluff catch a river such as this. we do have to bluff sometimes, because a nut flush is still a clear value jam, and we will have full houses which the bb will never have, so we have to still jam sometimes. and if we always just check back with our busted Ahx combinations, villain can exploitably x fold 100% of the time because we are never bluffing, so we don't get any value with our nutted hands.

so I would end up bluffing this combination some kind of low frequency, perhaps 25% or so, in order to keep the bb honest and make sure that he knows I can bluff this spot.

gotta be cautious on the turn though, it is very good for the bb and thus we should have a high checking frequency, and work in some hands such as this in to that particular range.

this is a bluff, on the turn he can certainly check call as he has top pair, the gut shot and the FD, however all 3 of those 'qualities' are fairly likely to leave him with the second best hand.

1- if he make a flush it is extremely likely that one of the two opponents will have a higher flush.
2-if it goes xxx on the river then it is very likely that one of the other two guys either has a stronger Kx or a set of tens.
3-if he makes his straight he is never going to get any value and conversely may feel inclined to call down vs a flush, a line which is probably significantly under-bluffed 3 ways. and if he hits a 9 then one of the other 2 guys can have QJ with a heart, or again the aforementioned flush.

so the check raise makes a little sense. however the mistake that he made was pre-flop, this is a clear fold, you can call this hand from the bb without a straddle but definitely not with a straddle behind, you are OOP to 2 players and your hand never makes the nuts (as you can see here, it almost always makes a hand that is dominated by both of the ranges combined, especially by the pfr.)

the river bet is nonsensical, because BB either has a strong hand like a 2 pair+ or a missed FD, and your hand is FAR too strong to bluff with. so you gotta x the river and mainly x call, and then bluff with a hand such as what the straddle had, QJhx or AJhx etc. you basically got slightly better Kx without a heart to fold on the turn, so the check raise achieved this mission on the turn, now you gotta x and I would almost always x call this hand, probably 100% tbh as we unblock on A/Q/J high FD's.

congrats on becoming a new RIO coach man.

on a side note, you putting in 1 million hands since the start of last year has put me to shame, I have only played 200k hands of cash in that space of time lol. need to up my game!

Jeff_ haha I think that's just because it is MTT content xD

I usually get enough :P

excellent video as usual man.

does anybody else have the problem of drifting off to sleep for a moment whilst watching poker training video's or is it just me?? haha. nothing to do with the quality of the content or anything, just always seems to happen :P

therapist yeah I do agree but the thing is they are poker coaches and not actors, so I guess so long as they are providing quality content then it is up to us to be able to absorb that content effectively.

when you speed up the video I think it is pretty easy to listen along to and take in imo.

nice video man, seemed a little dry at the start but was very interesting the longer it went on. looking forward to the next part!

I would recommend watching it at 1.25/1.5x speed, though :)

Ben Sulsky

I just want to make sure it's clear that at equilibrium every combo
plays to its highest EV line. In practice many hands are mixed
strategies (like A4hh here) and we can decide either to randomize our
best approximation of GTO, or cheat one way or the other by some
amount.

i'm not quite sure that I can wrap my head around this, if this was the case wouldn't we just be over-bluffing/betting too often in almost every single spot? as well as not protecting our ranges sufficiently by checking some combo's a certain % of the time?

I am currently looking over a sim of bvb play in a single raised pot. the flop is AA2r and we are the pfr in the sb. if you look at the EV of c betting with AA for the block sizing it is 89, where as the half pot or check options both have an EV of 88.9, so slightly lower EV. so why do we then only c bet for the small sizing 81% of the time instead of 100%, because this would clearly be the highest EV play?

maybe I am mis-understanding your point, but I would appreciate being corrected if I am indeed way off with this haha.

It's not the case that playing explo with a given hand class decreases
the EV of our range, unless there's an assumption of clairvoyancy
which obviously there isn't in any real hand of poker

but you can just check the HUD stats of a particular player, so it is almost possible to become somewhat clairvoyant of a players strategy when you look at the HUD and they c bet 95%+ in 3 bet pots on the flop, or that they c bet a similar figure IP in a SRP vs the bb. quite a lot of players at mid stakes just now are looking to play very simplified and easy to execute strategies on the flop where they are betting range, or at least extremely close to it, on many board textures vs the bb. so if we are to study the counter to this, of course increased check raising etc, then we should be able to decrease the EV of villains hand were he to choose an optimal c bet sizing.

to me this is an exploit that they are employing (as villain isn't defending enough vs the bet either by raising/calling more often, and it allows them to focus more on flop/turn nodes that they have probably studied fairly efficiently to this line) that is extremely clairvoyant and if the OOP player were to play somewhat close to equilibrium vs the particular strategy then the EV of this block bet with range should decrease vs the 'correct' c betting strategy using perhaps multiple sizing's as well as mixing combinations between bet and check.

Patrick Sekinger cheers man :)

yeah of course, I was thinking the same thing tbh and i'm guessing that most people were haha. like you said, if OOP's range is very polarized and is gonna fold a lot then betting our air here should be winning a bunch. however, it's very easy to forget what we would want to do with other hands in the same kind of situation as humans are innately biased and we will usually play our hand to the highest EV line as opposed to our range (even though we like to think we don't haha.)

I guess this spot is kinda similar to how a lot of players approach dry Axx boards, we can have a +EV c bet with range here vs the bb and thus our air combo's like to bet because they are making money doing so. however, our hands such as KK/QQ/JJ and 2nd/3rd pairs, K highs etc suffer a lot from getting check raised, so this leads to IP checking back too 'strong' of a range that doesn't include enough air and then betting all of their air along with some strong hands. this clearly leads to problems on later streets with a very unbalanced and wonky range that is extremely face up, as well as being exploitable on the current street to small check raises because our betting range is too air heavy.