Demondoink

hey man, really enjoyed this series. just wanted to comment as i had perhaps been critical of your videos/play last year as i feel they had taken a bit of a dip in quality (from your normal very high standards) but i feel like you have improved a lot again, and so has the quality of your content.

always happy to be proved wrong for the sake of the quality of content on RIO increasing, and so that each member has a better opportunity to learn and improve.

see you at the tables!

Juan Copani yeah agreed. but i think that cash game players have a pretty big edge post flop, especially on the latter streets as mtt players don't play turns/rivers too often given the shallow stacks and low spr's post flop, as well as a bunch of all in preflop jams.

however, i don't think mtt's/cash skills are that transferable unless you work on the other important aspects of each game type. for example, like you said, we probably make too many icm mistakes and don't have a very solid preflop game at shorter stacks. also x raising frequencies/combos vary drastically when 20bb deep compared to 100 bigs, so it's tough to know what hands you should be raising when you oscillate between the two formats.

conversely, many mtt players hardly ever play 100bb poker, and even if they do it will only be for a small fraction of the tournament when the value of winning chips is relatively low EV. Pads discussed this well in his podcast with Bencb, about how doubling your stack in the early stages isn't worth 2x your buyin, so its best to take a lower variance approach when the stacks are deep at the beginning of an mtt. and certain play styles work well in mtts (such as opening insanely wide and blindly cbetting on most boards) but if you take this approach over to cash you are probably now the fish at the table.

so i guess its not which player is better, cos they are both much better at their particular format overall. which is why i don't really bother playing higher than $530 buyins, just don't want to spend time i could be studying cash to study a game type that i do not intend on playing very often, and that has such insane variance. so props to high stakes mtt regs, cos i could never grind with that stress haha :P

excellent video!

the hand @27:00 with the A8cc was very interesting. the bb probably perceives the turn card to be much better for his range than it actually is, thus allowing us a high EV bluff catching spot vs his turn raise/river jam line.

if we assume that he plays around 50% of the T8o preflop (which is what you are supposed to do vs a 2.5x, but that was with 500z rake so arguably it should be even lower) then he has 6 combos. he should be 3betting around 50% of his T8s pre, so arrives to the flop with around 8 combos of T8. the T8hh/T8dd should be close to pure x raises otf, which leaves him with 1 suited combo remaining, and the T8o with a heart should also be x raising fairly often, but not as often as if he were to face a block sizing. so lets say he raises 2 of the 6 combos of T8o, then he arrives ott with 5 combinations of the nuts.

so on the river he jams just under pot with roughly his 5 value combos, and gets to have around 2 bluffs. however, we actually reduce these value combos even further by having the 8 in our hand, and because it's the 8 of clubs (which is almost pure x calling otf, without a backdoor) then this has amazing blocker effects at reducing his value region and potentially allowing him to bluff too often. i'm not exactly sure how much this 8 reduces OOP's straight combos otr, but let's just say we reduce it by 1 to 4 value combinations, now cos he is jamming less than pot he is only allowed not even 2 bluffs. and given the fact that villain bluffed a combo that should be pure giving up otr (not blocking any 2 pairs/sets and blocking the FD combos of IP that are going to be pure folding otr) then we can safely assume that he is overbluffing and we are printing EV in this spot.

yeah i agree. i mean even if someone staked me in these i would never even bother playing them, doesn't really seem worth it given the extremely low edges and extremely high variance.

obviously i'm not complaining though, it's still sick to watch high stakes mtt's on here so i am grateful for that. just i was curious if anyone was making much money in these except form Linus haha

nice video, but i was curious what you thought about these fields? i mean, from watching these videos it seems like there is practically 0 fish at any of the super high stakes mtt tables. reg battling when the rake is around 3-5% doesn't sound like a particularly high EV/ROI line.

of course there are edges to be had over the other regs, but most profit still comes from playing vs weak players.

i imagine quite a lot of the regs aren't even winning in these fields, and are just playing because their ego's are too big (not saying you, of course, but some of the weaker ones).

yeah i agree. seems like we can just use Ax as bluff catchers, and use our turned/rivered straights as value x raises. so if we don't bet this hand it is implying that our river betting range is 0% (which is clearly a mistake, given the fact we now have a stronger range than IP after his turn x back).

the IP player should be pot betting some of the weaker Ax at lower frequencies, so that he can have some river calls when he x back ott. also he has rivered a ton of Qx with hands such as KQ/QJ that bluffed otf and mixed bet/x back with ott. so if we have 5x, it seems like a clear river bluff (although this should mostly be folding on the flop, given IP's sizing and the fact we have so many Ax to defend with). so i would bluff with some of my Tx and then balance with our A3/A5/QT etc.

A3 seems a little thin to xr on the river, but i guess we only lose to KJ and AQ, both of which bet fairly often ott, especially AQ which could be close to pure turn bet. so it doesn't seem that crazy, but i think it will just be higher EV to bet, and will allow us to fold out some of IP's Qx when we have a hand such as Tx by the river.

there are many reasons to use a small sizing as a turn probe, a few of these include:

1. cheap bluffs. if the IP player has a very inelastic call/fold range, then using a small sizing is the best way to exploit him. as if you simply use a large bet/check then you allow him to 'get away' with folds that would be pure vs any turn sizing, and continue with his range that he was going to call regardless of sizing.

2. to put his marginal hands, such as A highs etc, in to tough turn spots and force him to defend them with some frequency, otherwise he will end up over folding.

3. to induce raises from a largely capped range, and allow you to shovel in more money with your strong hands. this is less of a concern, but of course we should be balancing some strong hands in to this range, which benefit when the IP player starts to raise too aggressively vs our small turn probes.

4. it allows us to value bet thinner, with hands that would have to x call if we were to only use one larger turn sizing bet.

nice video. you would think that, based on your insightful and thoughtful analysis in this, that you have been playing 6max your whole career instead of HU :P

that QQ line @48:00 seems like an awful river check from the IP player. I know the Jericho, as well as his play style, and he is definitely not one to over fold. so i simmed this hand and it turns out that the sb is supposed to be leading the flop around 1/3 of the time, as he has both top/middle sets at close to 100% frequency (at least in my pre flop sims) as well as many other pocket pairs. IP player has all the over pairs, yes, but his 4bet bluffs rarely ever improve on this flop to pairs.

then, if we arrive to the river this is the IP players betting range for all in:

and this is the OOP players strategy. interesting that AQ calls at roughly the same frequency as TT/99. guess this is cos we block more value combos (AA/QQ) but if IP bluffs a little more often with AK then obviously this call would become very bad, very quickly:

Gary Chappell thanks man, and yeah it's going pretty well so far this year, though my volume could always improve :P haha

it's actually kinda funny because TT gets called at some non zero frequency optimally on the river. although i agree with your analysis that it seems like a terrible combo to be doing so because it blocks some of our potential bluffs (ATs/JTcc/T9cc etc). although it never calls with a club because that blocks our bluff jams, so his call was still v bad.

think i'd prefer just pure folding TT though and calling with slightly higher frequencies of 99/88 that unblock all potential bluffs.

RunItTw1ce i no longer have the sim up but from what i remember we prefer to shove with the Ac (as us blocking the FD increases the portion of his range that will be calling, as missed A high FD's are going to be pure folds of course) and x call without. to allow him to turn the aforementioned hands in to bluffs.

87s isn't a 3bet in my preflop sims unless you are in the bb, but yeah you are pretty much just mixing between jam/half pot with AJs (even the non FD combos bet ott as this card is pretty good for our range) and the same with ATs and missed Axcc combos that are in there at lower frequencies, such as A4cc etc.

value combos are split fairly evenly across both sizings, implying that the EV's are extremely close between jam/half pot and it doesn't really matter what we do unless we have an exploitative reason to favour one sizing over the other (for example; playing vs a weaker player or vs a calling station reg would mean we should just jam our Kx+).

interesting hand with AA @40:44. not really because of the action, but because of that particular runout, like you say, we simply run out of bluffs on the K river.

so i simmed this hand and it's pretty interesting. we actually mostly check AA on the river because by betting it our range is too imbalanced towards value (due to us running out of bluffs) and our opponent could exploit us by simply folding with all of his bluffcatchers. so we use it as a x call to allow the IP player to turn his 88/77 in to a bluff.

i know that your line was exploitative though as you were playing vs a weaker player.

as you can see on the bottom right, around 42% of our range is unpaired on the river on a random 2o card.

and then compare this to a K river, where just 18% of our range is unpaired and all of these hands are basically just missed FD's, so not that amazing combos to bluff with, but we need to as we have nothing else bar a couple AJs combos.

i think this is why we also mix between half pot and all in; by using a smaller sizing otr we allow ourself to require less bluffs in our small betting range and thus can value bet more often. cos if we only had all in or check we would have to start checking hands as strong as top pair or else our value:bluff ratio would be too high and he could explo fold all of his bluffcatchers.

lospollos thanks mate, appreciate it and glad you enjoyed the comments thread as well. some great input from other posters!

yeah thats a good point that i was kinda thinking about, i wanted to check how wide the IP player has to defend vs a small 2-3x sizing, but i'm behind on my study on various other spots i've been focusing on recently so haven't gotten around to more in depth study on this monotone subject yet. but if IP starts having to defend hands such as K high no spade then obviously we could start getting a large overfold, which would lead us towards heavily favouring the smaller raise sizing.

like i said, gonna investigate this further in the coming week or so :)

Daniel Dvoress no prob. always good to learn from our mistakes, though!

Jeff_ did you node lock that sim to IP cbet 100%? perhaps it prefers to use larger sizing's on this board cos the As is already on the board. though i am just clutching at straws and i have no real clue if this affects the sizing choice haha.

i'm gonna mess around with different monotone boards/sizing's in the coming days and will comment back if i notice anything of note.

hey Ben. excellent video and really insightful. despite the depth and complexity of the data we were attempting to absorb, i felt as if you simplified it in a manner that was somewhat digestible. also, the audio quality was good again.

with regards to your node locking and the low EV loss from the range bet, could that not have something to do with the fact that you only allowed for a larger x raise sizing? from the small amount of work i have done on monotone boards, i kinda figured that if the IP player was range cbetting we could start using very small raise sizes. this would allow us to have a much higher xr frequency and subsequently punish IP's strategy more. as our continuing range is pretty inflexible as the OOP player (we kinda need at least a pair or a FD to continue) then we can't increase our calling freq vs a range bet, and if we start x raising at a high freq for the 75% sizing we just face too strong of a range cos he gets to fold a bunch vs this sizing.

where as if we raise 2x-3x, we can have a much higher xr frequency, expand our value range and decrease the EV of his air/medium strength hands to the extent that the IP player probably wants to introduce a checking range again. which is what we are trying to do; punish our opponents exploitable strategies by decreasing their EV as much as possible when they opt to deviate far from equilibrium.

Qing Yang yeah you could be correct, i haven't messed around that much with various 3bet sizings (i just sim the sizings that i use so that i can have accurate ranges for game play).

but clearly it is something to do with the 3bet sizing, or the 4bet sizing that is making big's sims appear in such a way. small tweaks in a sims inputs can result in large differences in their outputs.

@22:00 yeah i agree, i thought even on the turn the hand would be close in EV's between bet and x (cos we don't mind checking back and snap calling vs flop floats from OOP with hands such as KTo with a club etc) and our hand was far too weak to be able to go for 3 streets with unless we boat up otr.

on the river i struggle to think of many worse combos that can call. pocket pairs such as 5s-8s are going to enjoy raising the flop pretty often, and the bb is going to have flushes, some boats as well as some better 9x (such as A9/K9o with a club or w backdoor spades) and the odd trips combo. and he is going to be able to x jam a bunch of his Acxo combos as bluffs as well, that took the passive route to the river.

so i ran a sim and here are the results. the ranges won't be perfect as i don't have a 40bb sim (only 30, so i just added back in some of the stronger hands to the calling range that won't be 3bet jamming any longer).

the EV of check with Q9dd was 1449 chips and bet 1200 was 1177 chips. so seems like a pretty large mistake. it actually had a slightly higher EV to jam than to use the smaller sizing. and even if the argument was that there was 'exploitative reasons' to bet thinner on the river in this spot, this doesn't seem to hold true because 22 should actually never even arrive at this node (it raises half the time on the flop and always on the turn). and a ton of his medium flushes are also pure raising ott. so if anything he may have an even stronger range in this spot compared to equilibrium play.

and here is the bb response to our smaller sizing:

in my sims JTs/T9s are around 80-90% 3bets from these positions, but not pure. pure 3bets from the bb seem to be only 'value combos' consisting of JJ+ and AQs+. hands that are good enough to either flat or jam vs a 4bet. JTs and T9s have to pure fold vs a 4bet from the co.

so my only guess is that you gave the IP player too small of a 4bet sizing, allowing these hands to flat profitably vs a 4bet, and thus allowing them to now become pure 3bets.

RunItTw1ce perhaps in the future you can ask your questions in a more respectful, and less confrontational manner if you are looking for a serious answer. if you are looking to become a good player at poker and are judging someones poker skills negatively off the back of two videos cos they got stacked a couple of times, then that shows you are the one with a very big mental leak.

i do agree that Sauce makes some preflop mistakes, but based on this video the 500z regulars were making much larger post flop mistakes (which Sauce pointed out several times). the QQ snap call vs the bb river stab, some of the large sizings they were using in spots where ranges were either not polarised or they lacked bluffs, and the KK x call in the 3bet pot when it blocks all of the bluffs and doesn't even contain a diamond. and not only did we see that the x call was losing, we could see that the KK was betting most of the time ott and always otr in the bb's shoes. so the bb made mistakes on almost every node of the game tree bar the obvious 3bet pre and cbet on the flop. Sauce plays the hand perfectly and yet you criticise him because he lost the pot?

i play in these games and i much prefer Sauces post flop approach to the vast majority of other regulars; he tries to find bluffs in most spots and attempts to play somewhat balanced. so if you are doubting his play i am saying that for sure most of what he is doing post flop is very good, but that his errors are mostly just preflop (but i believe he has his reasons for his higher VPIP, smaller rfi sizing in the sb etc).

i am taking a few days off poker and kinda bored atm so will reply to your various time stamps:

@1:50- i agree, we can bet these hands ott but the reason that he checks back with top pair ott is so that he has some snap calls vs river bets from either OOP player. if we have no top pairs in our turn x range then either OOP player can start overbetting with any weak top pair+ on the river in a x down pot. also, we don't wanna get x raised with this hand, as it's one of our weakest TP combos and has no additional equity/doesn't block any of the OOP x raising combos (which are mostly gonna be consisting of sets/straights).

@2:00- he explained his exploitative reasons for calling with A8o ott; the bb had shown down some crazy hands at showdown. were you not listening to any of his commentary?

@9:40- again, exploitative reasons cos he is playing vs a weak player who is likely vpipping far too high. if he rfi's 50%+ then you would not start to adjust your preflop ranges? also he is likely to make far larger post flop errors, and Sauce is IP as well and the guy only min raised.

@13:25- again, you don't seem to actually listen to what he says. he says that he WANTS to block Qxss/Qxcc as they are potential value overbets for the OOP player ott. the TT doesn't do a good job of blocking any value combos ott, and unblocks turn draws which are going to realise their equity much better on the river. thus making it a decent folding candidate.

Sauce can have Qxcc, Qxss (such as AK/AQ/AJss etc) and AQ/KQo with a club that floated vs a flop xr. as well as all of his sets/ 2 pairs/overpairs and flush draws that would be much better continues. we get to fold over 50% of our range ott, and as flush draws, Qx, overpairs etc are all far higher EV continues, coupled with the fact that the bb x raised fairly large ott (thus eliminating our low EV flop floats such as a hand like AKhh from our T range) then we are near the bottom of our range in terms of EV/equity ott with TT.

@27:00- KJhh is a mix between bet and x ott, and then otr as this is basically our nut low hand we have to always bluff with it. also, the bb should be folding 80% of the time (as shown in the sim) as they are incentivised to value bet with their stronger hands to put IP's bluff catchers in to 0EV bluff catching spots and not just allow them to show down and then face a polarised river betting range with a hand that was strong enough to v bet (which is why KK should always be betting either ott or otr if we get with it to this line as the bb).

just because you check 0 full houses on the turn here doesn't mean you can apply your same logic to Sauce. checking a FH at some frequency ott here is extremely standard. as shown in the sim AQ checks close to 0% here ott as the IP player. again, did you actually watch/listen to the video or just skip through it quickly so you could construct an angry rant in the comments section?

@33:30- we need to defend only around 40% of our range when Daniel starts overbetting, and tbh i think he does it too often and i am not a big fan of his strategy really. it may look cool but it almost certainly isn't the highest EV/optimal sizing and that he just likes to button mash big bet pretty often.

with that being said, TT is one of the worst combos to call ott as it blocks OOP draws (such as QTs, T9s) and has no redraw equity. 77 would be a much better call (unblocking bluffs and having higher equity vs a hand such as TP).

based off of your comments it barely seems that you listened to what he said in the video, and in certain parts (such as when you suggested IP player needs to x back AQ ott on the QTxQ board, like PIO suggests) yet he hovers over the AQ betting tab in PIO and its pure betting lol. it's good that you question the coaches and don't just put them on a pedestal, but at least listen/watch the video and ask questions in a respectful manner if you are going to do so.

hey Ben, nice video as per usual.

it was very interesting that you decided to focus on deep stacked play in this video, cos i don't reset stacks so can get very deep stacked as well and get in some tricky spots. i think that most 500z regs play fairly poorly when deep stacked, especially compared to their 100bb games. not realising that their cbetting/3betting/opening ranges/strategies are all affected by the increase in effective stack sizes.

i have one question; i have noticed that some regs expand their 4betting ranges when deep (which makes no sense, as you alluded to by the flatting of KK pre-flop, which would be a thing 0% of the time at 100 bigs). of course they are not getting more value hands, and their stack off range is going to be much tighter (they can't 4bet/call QQ for example, or even AK any longer). which would imply that their 4bet range is consisting largely of bluffs, such as Axs etc. what would your strategy be to combat an increased bluffing frequency? i imagine if i simmed this we would start clicking back with hands such as QQ/JJ/AK etc in order to get value from his imbalanced range and avoid playing OOP vs a polarized range in a 4bet pot, whilst also keeping our range uncapped. and perhaps we would also just flat more marginal hands from OOP that don't want to face 4bets (such as 99/TT etc). what do you think?

for example, last night i was almost 400 bigs effective co vs btn with a spewy reg, i 3bet A8s (which is obv standard) and he quickly 4bets just over 3x. this was around the 4th time that he had 4bet at this stack depth in the session. i have seen him 4bet tons of Axs crap in previous hands we have played together, when deep. i decided that my hand needed to continue 100% of the time here and that i would only fold some of the weaker suited combos and off suit combos in my range as his range is:

1-far too wide and weak
2-i have positional/skill advantage imo
3-i have a nut suit

i think clicking it back could have been better, but i decided to call and we both flopped a pair and showed down after 2 small bets and he had K5s lol. obviously this is never a thing, even at 100 bigs this hand is just a pure fold. so after seeing this hand how would you adjust your strategy vs this player?

i hope this isn't pushing the envelope, i only asked this question as it was related to the video and i think it's an interesting topic.

Mario V. you just have to pay the difference

you need to buy a computer imo. i got mines a couple of years back, and it was actually slightly cheaper than the price of a Mac (cost around £900 for the tower). it is night and day between the two machines. i am able to run scripts with multiple sizings on each street no problem. i just went in to some random PC store and asked for the one with the largest memory/ram etc.

in terms of memory for your database, you can never have enough tbh. if you want to save large trees this will take up A LOT of space. but even if you wanna run/save a script with small tree saves it still adds up to a lot of memory.

buying a decent computer with a lot of memory is the best investment you can make as a poker player. that, and a comfortable chair :D

haha nice try :D but unfortunately i only show it to my close poker friends. if i wanted validation i would post it (which sometimes i hear my ego seeking) but i am not going to do so.

yeah that is definitely an issue that could come from making videos on specific players. they are now aware that everyone thinks they bluff/overbluff so they can do the opposite at the expense of the EV of other regulars.

i guess it's not really an issue for Sauce as he isn't relying on grinding 500z as an income source though, so he can afford to publicise his reads without much negative impact.

i think it would be a good idea to anonymise the player Sauce is reviewing and just go through the hands instead. cos it really doesn't matter who is making a particular play, it's the play they are making that we want to learn from.

appreciate the honesty in your response! yeah that's fair enough. shame about the timing of these personal issues though as the games are so soft atm, but sometimes other things are more important than poker :P

fwiw i actually thought you had improved quite a lot recently, the PIO study seems to be paying off. so i thought it would have been a strange time to walk away from the game haha.

see you again at the tables soon!

nice video. the addition of the PIO analysis at the end is a big positive imo.

where are you playing nowadays? barely see you on Stars grinding any longer. guess you are on Party or something where you actually get rakeback :D

and it sounds as if you should probably not check your results if you are altering your strategies cos of a 10k hands breakeven stretch. this is completely normal and is probably a sign that you just have fairly low winrate in the pool. imo it is possible to win most sessions if you are one of the best players in the pool, but if you have a lower win rate then your graph will contain a lot more breakeven/losing stretches.

just keep working on your game and improving and you will be fine.

yeah Ben's sample size is pretty tiny so this graph can look like there is a lot of variance in it (with the upward/downward trends) but if he were to play 500k hands this 'breakeven' stretch would not even be noticeable.

yeah i think that different solvers slightly favour certain combinations. i was using SPF fwiw.

yeah that's similar to what i have