Hirvikalsari

Good conversation! Intuitively I also see KQJ9 being nicer hand to open from UTG than AJ98, but it's quite tough to argue against the points GT made. I guess there might be some mental leak seeing certain types of hands too pretty and easy to play and vice versa.

Also, I think the PF blocking effect could be a bit underrated concept. Specially when there is 4-5 players still left to act, it makes quite significant difference if you block aces or not for how often you face calls and 3-bets.

7665ss: Could it be better to cbet smaller? If we 3bet something like 8% or 10%, we still have surprisingly many hands that want to bet-fold and I wonder if it's better to lose a bit of fold equity but get cheaper price than full pot since he can't widen his call- or shoverange that much even against smaller size.

Thanks Phil, I've really enjoyed this series. It's nice to watch the video trying to spot situations that I'd play in different way and then hear your thoughts so it's like three opinions compared to usual two (you and the viewer).

One question: At the beginning (0:45) you were talking about your logic when thinking whether to make a looser open or not and said that you put the most importance on who is BB, then BTN, CO and SB. I'm wondering how is it because very rarely you are opening total garbage from other positions than BTN or SB, or on very rare occasions from CO. And if our looser opening hands are like range 25%-50%, I don't mind too much if BB defends much and I can play with position and only slight range disadvantage (25%-50% range has almost 48% eq vs. 60% defending range and 39% eq vs. 10% 3b-range). But if it's the CO or BTN that defends much, then the situation gets lot nastier to handle well. So at least so far I've been mostly worried who are sitting IP, after that who is BB and then SB.

Fishes usually tend to play more their own hands without thinking that much how different ranges hit certain boards. Against a good reg, there might be nice deception value if you 3b K754ds and flop is 744, but against fishes that deception is not such a big thing. Being OOP against fishes I'd like to 3b hands that hit dominating flushes, straights, 2 pairs, draws etc. and play more straightforward after the flop.

Phil checked some quite good overpairs and TPs on the flop but against fishes it's more often better to just use your equity edge, bet value and trust that they don't realise that you have a range that can't handle big pressure.

Good players usually punish if you play very unbalanced game far from GTO but against fishes it's often better to just exploit and trust they don't find out your weak spots.