Eldora

Hey irabu1
I think what you described is what many players encounter after having taken a longer break from poker. Probably you even played pre black friday before returning now and the change in the games has been so drastic that you aren't a winner anymore even at lower stakes, currently.

Based on the story you outlined above it's a bit unclear to me which stakes you have significantly beaten in the past though? Did I get it right that you beat NL50 for a reasonable amount of hands but when taking shots at NL100 it didn't work out? Or could you neither beat NL50/NL100 back then?

Hey GTO+ lovers

Krzysztof Slaski just released a new video deploying GTO+ two days ago. You can check it out here:
Studying My Game w/ GTO+ and CREV (Krzysztof Slaski)

We're keeping our eyes open for possibilities to feature more content with GTO+ for all of you interested in this type of content.

Hey Bosco

This question is not easy to tackle because it's a very general request. Did I understand it correctly that you're interested in finding content teaching you how to play more aggressive yourself?

Basically, playing poker with a professional mindset bases on the fundamental to maximize your EV in different spots and on different tables by adjusting to the unique surrounding you find yourself in. While it is true that a LAG playing style generally reflects the strategy of good and winning players, there's also situations where being a bit more TAG might profit you more. This is why our pros usually won't lable one of their videos as "learning how to play LAG" but are always thoughtful to adjust to the different surroundings and a LAG/TAG approach is usually the result.

But of course there are specific situations where you can exploitatively put your opponents in uncomfortable spots playing more aggressive than usual if you expect them to not stand up to your aggression correctly.

My advice to implement more aggressive knowledge from videos would be learning about some aggressive opportunities that come up during your play. From there executing these aggressive opportunities with balance in mind will automatically make you a more aggressive but still solid and balanced player.

In the Learning Paths NLHE you can find some especially suited topics to learn how to choose the spots when to show aggression without blowing away unnecessary money
1) 3-Betting
2) 4-Betting
3) Continuation Bets
4) Check-Raising
5) Bluffing

Here's also one specific videos covering aggressive plays that jumped to my mind but note that there will be many more on the site:

Raising Turn C-bets - Julian Kopanskiy

Besides from that just watching some Essential coaches' live play videos will give you a good feel to explore some aggressive options because our pros frequently act quite aggressively at the tables when it's the winning play. I've set up a filter for you here:
NLHE Essential Live Play Videos

But once again, be careful with just deciding that you want to be a very LAG player because while there are situations where playing LAG is appropriate it doesn't guarantee you to be a winning player if done blindly.

I believe to remember that Pete uses Starshelper but I'm not 100% sure

Thanks for pointing out this mistake Rylan grape and our apologies for the inconveniences. A new version has been uploaded with Sergey reshooting this hand with the proper analysis.

haha yes clear case of overthinking. Speaking of overcomplicating I just noticed I could've saved the paragraph by saying it your way:
"unblocking is just another way of saying we don’t block"

This is a great suggestion and we're looking forward to see Ryan approach this in detail in a video soon.

I just stumbled across this and while I know it's not exactly what you were suggesting I could imagine it has some value for you:
Stack Sizes: Actions and Opportunities (Owen Shiels) - Essential MTT

I'm sure many of you have already noticed the video but wanted to post it here as a direct reference too
Intro to Multiway Pot Theory (Francesco Lacriola)

Thanks again for the suggestions and we hope to keep the ball rolling on that topic so that the RIO library will fill with more multiway pot content soon

Hey PAPACHOSMAFIA

There are two things that come to my mind when considering higher rake environments in cash games in general:

1) Rake reduces the profitability of each hand that you play. In poker in general and in cash games you come across various situations and each situation holds different EV opportunities. For instance, if you hold a great starting hand on the button this looks like a clear ++EV spot before the hand starts because you can play many hands from the button which makes your opponents play more and weaker hands agains your actiont. So when you hold a great hand here it's a promising spot. Rake will take away a marginal amount of your expected EV in this situation but of course you will still play the hand.
However, there are also situations where the scenario becomes very close if you should enter the hand or not. In these cases rake will generally tighten your opening range compared to an environment with lower or even no rake. The very bottom of your range from each position might just become -EV and you are better off folding them. On the other hand, there is the usually weaker player pool at the micros. This in contrast can make weaker hands more profitable if very weak opponents act behind you. In most cases the extremely high rake at micros will force you to enter pots a bit more cautiously but keep in mind that special situations like a table full of weak players can counter this effect.

2) On most poker sites rake is only paid when a flop is dealt. This also includes when all the money goes in before the flop and you have at least one opponent (because the board will be dealt in this case too). However, if you raise preflop and all opponents fold you will pay no rake. In NLHE this leads to 3betting becoming more attractive than flat calling a raise because you have the chance to win the pot without paying rake if all players fold. I'm not a PLO player but what I can tell you is that in PLO there is a lot less folding to 3bets compared to NLHE due to hands generally retaining their equity better with four cards. So I assume this second effect should be much weaker at PLO because there is not much folding going on and maybe it's not even worth deviating your strategy but theoretically there should be an incentive to 3bet marginally more.

Tyler Forrester (Elite coach) has dedicated two videos to rake and its impact on strategies where he noticed that postflop strategies don't really change considerably only due to rake being a bit higher. If you have a chance I can suggest you to check those out even though it's not PLO specific.
Rake Effects at Small Stakes - Tyler Forrester (Elite)
Rake Simulation and Live Play - Tyler Forrester (Elite)

If you're interested also take a look at videos that help the shift from other games to PLO There is the learning path for PLO and then the tab -> Transitioning from NLHE to PLO providing a selection of videos on this topic. For instance, PLO essential coach Nick Johnson recorded a complete series for transitioning players and starts with preflop play which should be most interesting if you're thinking about rake:
Transitioning from NLHE to PLO (Part 1: Preflop Play) - Nick Johnson (Essential)

Of course any further advice from PLO players to this thread would be highly appreciated.

Great thread you launched R0b5ter

Daniel Dvoress dedicated a couple of videos to the concept of leading on flops and turns:

Leading Flops (Daniel Dvoress)
Leading Flops (part 2) (Daniel Dvoress)
Leading Turns (Daniel Dvoress)

Then there's another donking video where Jeremy Menard looks into situations where developing a donking range makes sense in a HH / PIO video:

Donk Betting Analysis Using PIO (Jeremy Menard)

Generally unblocking a hand can be seen as the opposite of blocking a hand. For instance, if you hold the Jh on a 3 hearts board by the river you do block quite a serious amount of villain's flushes (e.g. JhTh, Jh9h etc...). As I understand until here you're all fine. Now to finish this very simple example consider your holding not including any hearts. In this case you unblock your opponent's value range (flushes in this case). Meaning because you don't have any hearts it's not only neutral but even slightly more likely that villain holds a flush (compared to a theoretical situation where you wouldn't have cards at all). This is because you already know he doesn't have any of the two non heart cards that you are holding. If you weren't in the game he could have those cards and if you compare the two likelihoods of him having a suited heart hand it's higher in the example where you hold the two non-heart cards (or in other words where you UNblock his hearts)

As you might already know both blocking and unblocking become much more relevant when ranges run tighter. One of these situations where ranges run tight could be an extreme polarized situation on a non-flush board where there is only one possible straight and you suspect that villain would only play this way for value with a straight or sets. Lets take a board of 6 7 T K 2 . Maybe from preflop action you can disregard TT+ so that his only value range would be 98 for the straight and 66,77. If you in this case block (i.e. hold) a 6/7/8/9 this suddenly blocks a considerable percentage of villain's value holdings. In scenarios with much wider ranges blockers can still be helpful but are often simply used to find a split for calling/folding among hands that are all very similar in value regarding bluffcatching. In a case like this you of course would still go with the hand that has the blocker over the hand that doesn't even if it might only block 2-3% of villain's value range.

For unblocking it's very similar. The tighter the ranges the more sense does it make to start thinking about which hands you unblock with your holding. A common example for unblocking would be a board of A T 7 8 3 . If you hold KQ here you UNBLOCK villain's value range (e.g. J9, AT, A8s, A7s, A3s, sets) but at the same time you block some of his bluffs (KQ/KJ/QJ). Note that it's not always crystal clear into one direction. This very example might be flawless if you assume villain only value bets 2 pair +. But if he would also valuebet AK/AQ you once again block some fraction of his value range.
However, if in the same example you hold 65s you now suddenly UNBLOCK some of villain's good bluffs (the before mentioned KQ/KJ/QJ). So by not holding any King, Queen or Jack you now make it more likely villain is bluffing because he could choose his main bluffs for a 3barrel from these hands and he will hold these hands more often if you don't block i.e. unblock them.

RunItTw1ce Thanks for the feedback, I can understand your reasoning and see how a replayer format can further push the value of the video. We've implemented the format you suggested for some of Francesco's hand history videos before where we worked closely together with Francesco to build appealing visualizations.

I hope we can do this again in the future to make this video style even more valuable and your feedback is appreciated since it shows us it's worth the extra effort.

Just wanted to take part of the blame on us instead of Francesco given he is constantly putting sick effort into his videos.

Agree with Meliodas here. It's a steady and complicated process during learning but once you've figured it out thinking backwards it will appear odd to you that clustering the different board types didn't come easier to you.

While everyone learns different I personally like the approach of watching live plays and actively forecasting the pros decisions similarly to what you described. If you want to improve your perception of different flops in different situations it's very powerful to simply almost solely focus on the cbetting decisions while watching live play videos and get an instant feedback of right or wrong in a playful format by the pros line often backed up with his reasoning.

I'm personally a big fan of live play videos because they hand you the chance to focus on whatever topic you are currently studying and like this watching the same live play vid several time can have different study effects. Though, tbh with the big library there's not really the need to double watch live play vids.

Hey PoohBah since noone got back so far I wanted to share some thoughts. First off, congrats on putting your dedicated work to first positive results, it's certainly an accomplishment and as we all know getting started is often the most difficult thing. Also, beating micros is not a trivial endeavour due to current rake rates at most sites.

It sounds like a reasonable step to look for coaching and the section where you posted it is certainly fine. At the same time, I can advice you to take a look through the forums where you feel you want coaching on the most. E.g. in NLHE if you're looking for a cash specialist or likewise in MTT if you want to focus on that.

Also, some of the Run It Once pros offer private coaching. To find out if they do you can open their profile (member profile page not the video overview) and go to the "coaching tab". If you have a certain favorite always feel free to PM them on the site too even if they don't publicly advertise coaching.

The only one that comes straight to my mind for specific winner takes all content is the Poker After Dark appearance of Jason Koon which he analyzed in a three part series:
Poker After Dark $50k Winner Take All (Jason Koon)

Just linking in case you haven't seen those thread. I see that you are mainly looking for reviews and maybe coaching experiences of others so would be great if people in the community who took PLO coaching can help you out here

New Coaching Rates for PLO50 and Lower (Nick Johnson)
Coaching - Low Stakes Crusher

Hey Pomarinox
Unfortunately, there was a mix of technical and personal reasons why the next video from Uri is still waiting to be released. But I can assure you that Uri has currently started to work on his new video and we hope to release it asap. They also should release more frequently going forward

This is a valid point and we have to apologize for this never working out back then. When we announced that some more GTO+ content was to be expected we were indeed working on a video project that unfortunately didn't come to life in the end.

We are aware that many players, espcially at lower stakes, utilize GTO+ instead of PIO on the solver side of things and that it would be much more entertaining for these members to see a GTO+ sim every now and then instead of PIO. However, the main reason for content being concentrated on PIO is that our coaches have free choice of what tools to use in their videos. While we're always trying to work together closely with our pros to deliver high quality and valuable content for certain aspects we don't believe in commanding our pros what to do in their videos; and demanding them to use a specific software is one of these things we don't like. We are happy that this approach has generally shown to be sustainable because our pros do a great job voluntarily picking up ideas and suggestions both from us and the community. Unfortunately, in this very case it hasn't transformed into videos featuring GTO+.

I think there are some comprehensible reasons why it hasn't worked as easy in this very example. With PIO being around for much longer and GTO+ rather penetrating the solver market from the side of customers with a lower willingness to pay almost all of our current professional poker playing coaches are working with PIO/Monker excluding only some exceptions. Obviously, this doesn't mean that GTO+ is a poor choice for any low stakes player starting out with solvers and given the price gap exactly the opposite might be true. So as a member looking into working with solvers I'd definitely suggest not feeling obliged to get PIO just because all our pros do. Instead, once you've learned how to handle GTO+ (a skill you can gather just by watching their official and free instructional videos) it should be very easy to get almost the exact same value from a solver video regardless of what solver you use. Note that the results of PIO and GTO+ should not differ if you use the same input parameters (to my knowledge).

Still, we've just recently discussed this topic again and are open for pushing more diversity regarding the variety of software used in our videos whenever we have a chance.

Regarding OP (dukeandking) we're sorry to hear that. As Mikey Stotz already wrote, your feedback is very valuable to us and helps raising thoughts on how to improve our content so that it pleases solver and non-solver lovers alike.

I've sent you a message to possibly get more insights on any ideas you might have regarding the type of content you enjoy the most so that we hopefully can better cover your and people's whishes who feel similarly.

Got a lot of value from your forum posts and can only imagine how this will translate to your videos. Welcome!

cool happy to hear that and would be great to have you in the analysis team.

Unfortunately, the plan is lagging as I had to send in my machine for several repairs (luckily just a few weeks before warranty death). As soon as I have it back I'll follow through and hopefully get discussion started.

Kalupso This is really cool I love this studying approach. I've met some people who praised digital flash cards during studying for exams at university but never really got into it myself. But for poker that's a different story ;)

Jeff_ Thx for the advice. I can see that node-locking will be crucial for attacking unbalanced cbetting strategies I hope it can be part of the discussion in this thread.

I've posted a short reference about multiway pots a bit above but happy to updated that one of our Elite Pros is currently working on multiway pot content. On that note, thx for your suggestions Jeff_ , vegas777 and anyone who might have mentioned this before, I'm sure many more members felt the same way

Welcome to the team!

Hey vegas777 thanks for the suggestion. I agree that it would be a great addition to the learning paths to have a selection of systematic videos on how to approach multiway pots. I've started reaching out to some of our pros and hope that we can offer some great new videos on multiway pots soon.

Enjoyed this video a ton too. The unique easy going style paired with the sick knowledge and experience makes it so much fun to watch

Congratulations Goodfellahh from our side too. I'm not sure if you've made a monthly leaderboard finish yet but I think you might not. Even more so we're happy that Pedro helps us reward a very active community member for his valuable contributions like you are.
Thanks for your contributions and looking forward to the video

Chris Pimmer dives into an alternative method to memorize ranges and poker related things through memory palaces in his first video for Run It Once here. The section with memorizing starts at around 7:20. This might not be for everyone but maybe it's something you're interested in.

I believe you‘re mixing up
winnings = our payouts/cashes of any tournament
and
profit = winnings - buy-ins
For the case of winnings your statements above are correct only that I think it can vary much more than between 10% and 20% you can just make up more extreme examples.

But talking profit the exact way how we generate it doesn‘t matter. Note that profit means you pay the taxes at the end of the month for instance and not for each single win directly.

SetMineUrAss I think you're quite inadequately presenting some short-term HUSNG low stakes experience in a theoretical and scientific tone which might confuse especially new members trying to inform themselves about different games.

First off, I see some of the challenges of HUSNGs that you want to point out but I think you can do a better job of raising this discussion. I've played HUSNGs myself several years ago and while I'm not at the peak of information on the current states of games wanted to clarify some things. Indeed there are three things that should be touched when entering the discussion of any game being profitable and that you largely if not completely disregarded in your statements.

1) Blind-structure:
As in any SNG the blind strucutre strongly impacts how the game will play out. For instance, there are HUSNG formats that are very slow and deep-stacked and hence play much more similar to a heads up cash game despite actually being a SNG. This is just because they leave so much room for postflop play and if the stakes are deep enough they might even provide more room for complex postflop play than a standard 100BB cash game setting.

The source the EV in a heads-up match can come from is always shared between preflop and postflop. And it's even more complex because your preflop game will carry on to the postflop situations, i.e. preflop ranges play a role in every single hand. But even if we for now consider "preflop" as spots where all the money goes in pre they occur in a 100BB cash game setting too - just much more infrequently.

And likewise for HUSNGs, just because lots of SNGs end with a preflop all-in at some point doesn't mean that all (or even most) of the EV comes from shove-folding. Even if we suppose that all players are exactly equally good entering the shove-fold stages of a SNG (which surely isn't true) with 1400 - 600 chips doesn't mean the EV you gained through your postflop decisions is lost. Indeed it gives you a much higher chance at winning the SNG, maybe it's something like 72% (note this number is made up). And only because we loose the remaining 28% of the time doesn't mean any of the previously gathered EV is lost but it's just a normal part of the SNG. Remember that a game where your Aces hold every single time is rigged and not a game where you sometimes to 73o.

2) Rake structure:
In order to decide for any game if it is beatable or not the rake has to be considered. It is very strongly linked to the achievable edges in each format which is the reason why often slowerpaced SNGs and tournaments are raked more aggressive than hyper-turbos. And unfortunately these days there indeed exist poker formats that might fall into this category and it largely comes from some poker sites exploring mixtures of poker-casino games but from a traditional and poker-healthy standpoint site operators always tried to balance the achievable EV with the rake so that every game was beatable for the best and very good players.

3) Players:
Finally the players of the pool strongly determine how profitable games are. I'm sure there is some points supporting the theory that edges in 100BB cash game settings are bigger than in the average Sit and Go but everything can shift so quickly with how the player pools are distributed. If SNG formats attract weaker players because of higher entertainment (win-or-loose setting) this might already be enough of a reason to make these games quite a bit more profitable ,especially at low stakes.
And to be honest the situation you described above where your opponent is strongly overfolding sounds like a very juicy and exploitable spot I'd be happy to find myself in.

Without assessing these three things any statement about a game being unbeatable or even deciding which game might make sense more to direct your study time towards is pretty inappropriate.

And the fact that usually HUSNGs introduce more preflop decision EV compared to cash games isn't necessarily bad. A SNG enters a high variety of different shove/3bet/fold or limp/raise spots that are very complex to play. Despite the fact that there is only two different positions (being IP and being OOP) the dynamic of stack sizes makes it complex enough.

What is your strategy with 16BB IP versus different player types? If you're just playing shove/fold you can be sure that you're not squeezing out the EV you could. What is your limp-shoving range, what is your raise-shove/raise-folding range and which hands do you maybe open shove?
What is your raise-fold range 23 BB OOP and how does it change 30 BB deep?

Do you feel comfortable in all these upcoming situations yet or do you often find yourself having no clear idea what to do in certain preflop spots? If a high-stakes reg who has studies all of this extensively sits down against the average low stakes regular even in a high-rake and fast-paced SNG starting with 20BB stacks I can guarantee you he would crush them at quite a nice winrate.