MentalRunUp

That said, I played after I moved to Baltimore. Maryland is on the banned list, something I didn't even know until 6 months later when Ignition took over and I tried to convert over.

It sounds like they have no response at all, to be honest. Your account being disabled is on them, and probably the responsibility of someone else in Ignition, so the customer facing department is spit balling a response. I work for a 20 person company and communication among them can be horrible. I can't imagine what it's like for a company that has as much money moving in and out of it as Ignition. Departments don't communicate fluidly.

Hey Doug, always a pleasure to read through these. Please post some report of some kind on the rest of your Foxwoods trip!

The stacks were 10k sorry about that!

See I think it's a fold too, but then villain showed up with KJo and I'm left wondering if I took the best possible line. I wouldn't ck/call multiway with gutshot to a straight flush draw. You're flipping against basically anything and every person that folds is folding away some equity that's handed to you and whomever calls. I would prefer leading or ck/raising. You're definitely right it's too hard to play this from the SB. I should have folded preflop.

Hey Doug, just trolling through your recent stuff for a second.

For Bayesian Inferences, apestyles goes over it a bit in "Why Apestyles Is Right" but only briefly. If you still have it, listening to him talk about it in the beginning for a few minutes may be fruitful.

The example he gave was something like, only having 30 hands or so on someone but seeing their RFI stat was 4/5. If your population consists of 10% regs who RFI 50%, and 90% who RFI only the top 10%, you can kind of calculate the likliehood of both. (this is a very extreme example)

You'd say a nitty guy RFI's 10%, so 10% x 10% x 10% x 10% is basically zero.
You may think it's far more likely they're a nit on a heater since 90% of the population is nits and not regs, but the probability that you have a nit (90%) AND the probability you have 4 of 5 RFI's in your sample (basically just 10%^4th) is super super super low.
You can infer that you have a reg on your hands.

Good luck Doug!! I'm glad it seems like both of us have vast improvements on our lives happening the last few months. Nice job battling your way through it all.

Thanks for replying. I expected to get called by TT-KK, 99, and like AK exactly. The 4x preflop leads me to think it's more likely to be pairs based on weak population reads.

The river typed in bet makes me think he has a weak value hand and isn't stabbing as a bluff. I think the opponent shouldn't bet/call those hands fwiw. I think the weakish bet is to prevent them from facing a decision for additional 17bb, but then will they call the shove with those hands?

Seeing as how it's been a couple of days I'll post results.
The opponent bet/called it off quickly with TT

Thanks for the recommendation. I've studied a lot of 3bet math, but it's all for like...25bb situation. Any deeper and I'm doing it almost off guess work based on how wide people open and how much they fold, both preflop and postflop. I stopped playing for like a year and now I'm really lost on 100bb deep poker unless I'm against the easiest of loose passives.

I'm folding even if you know he's a nutcase. You'll be able to 3bet shove over in spots, or just shove yourself in spots. And each time there's an all in, you're making money. You have a ton of chips still. 15bb is nothing to scoff at

Fair enough I see your point. I don't play on stars as I'm in America, so it wouldn't even matter. Plus any effort spent into trying to perfect strategies against actual opponents at microstakes is almost certainly better spent studying how to play so you can get out of that stake.

What I'm referring to is looking at opponents that you have tons of hands on so we can come up with a strategy for how to play against that TYPE of villain. Basically working on your and my "how do I adjust to this" skill set. I even said to make it anonymous because the villain information doesn't help.

Again iterating, this isn't to get really good at defeating "2NLZONEVILLAIN" it's for learning how to play against whomever happens to be playing with numbers like what we look at.

for anyone looking at this, please don't waste time trying to collude to beat micro villains haha.

Could you clarify what you mean by " And even if he calls it leaves you with ~55%, which is definitely not the situation when you want to bloat the pot. " ?

If I understand you correctly, you're saying we don't want to put money in out of position on the turn with 55% equity vs villain's calling range, which I guess would be because you don't want a difficult river decision? Maybe I misunderstand you, because that doesn't really make sense to me as I don't expect villain to then bluff river with QJ, nor do I think they'll necessarily value bet KJ, so you can comfortably check fold and expect not enough bluffs for it to matter that you fold AA there.(blank rivers of course) It basically leaves their range for river bets as just value, assuming you won't see them turning the bottom of their range into a bluff because it appears like sdv.

Coming back to defending the 3bet, I think it really depends. We don't have any stats on this villain. Vs unknowns at microstakes, villain's who don't like to fold, I don't see anyone raise/folding QJ off suit preflop after opening in the cutoff. They're getting slightly better than 3-1, have position, and spr is high.

If the table is full of passive players who will call you down the line, I think you should just shove. The pots 17% of your stack preflop and you can't complain when KQ or AT fold to a shove instead of calling you. However, if you were in late position, you're more likely to get played back at by wider ranges because everyone's stack is probably resteal mode. You don't need more information to play this hand, you're already doing well for the situation. If your table is aggressive and will take it from you preflop, then raise/calling is the way to go. However, I'd probably just open shove anything you want to play because raising and check folding off a 15bb stack in early position leaves you in a bind when the blinds go up a few hands from now after you've been hit. So you go from 15 and an excellent hand and preflop decision to like 7-8bb. It's not to avoid postflop thinking. It's that this short stacked your highest EV play is most likely just rip it.

Calling short stack tournaments a shove fest is sort of cool because bad regs (absolutely nothing toward you, I mean this very generally) all think this amounts to incredible luck and no skill, which couldn't be further from the truth. On top of there being explicit mathematical decisions to be made almost irrespective of anything else, saying that just implies there isn't a point to studying push/fold and 3betting.

and at 25NL, will you really see villain bluff with JT after hero takes bet bet check line? I don't think they're ever ahead, but wouldn't they rather check back because they think they have showdown value?

Excuse my tone here, but where are you getting 16 combos of worse hands that call on the turn? QJ and KJ alone is 24 combos and at 25NL I don't think you'll see those fold to a 3bet IP.

The more I look, the more I think this a fold. 22+, T9s, suited broadway, A2s+, ATo+, QJo+ is about 18% of hands and probably as wide as they're going to get. They're unlikely to open suited connectors as a steal here because it's SO likely someone shoves all in, even if everyone's being tight (99+ AQ+ alone means they're getting shoved on at least 25% of the time by players behind).

Against that range, KQs has 47% equity, you still have 2 players left behind, and even if you knew they were DEFINITELY folding, you'd be making a slightly profitable all in play. It looks like you'd make about half a big blind. Maybe that's enough. Idk. Your tournament life this late in a shallow stack tournament is huge and you can make money in lots of spots if you study push fold.

Could you post what your HUD's max display looks like for an opponent with that many hands? You can of course cover up their names. I'm a statistician/database person by trade, so I might be able to provide insight on how your villain's play from that. For example, if you have someone you claim as a fish but don't have a categorical explanation for how they give you money other than "they're a fish", we can discern some info from it. If their vpip is consistent across positions, we know they're positionally unaware. If their vpip is high, then their call flop cbet is high, we know you can't really bluff once and you have to value bet turns wider. That kind of thing

I'm guessing villain had like AT?

Personally, with zero fold equity, I'd just muck and take -EV shoves when folded to if I have to. If villain is opening wide to take advantage of the extraordinarily tight nature of everyone else given so few players are left, then they're adding in all of the suited ace combos. The price they get is too good for them to muck, though they probably should (or just not open with those hands), but I imagine most regs are opening too wide in situations like this one. The pots like 14bb and it costs them 8bb to call, so theyll probably call with all aces, all pairs, and fold like suited connectors that may have been opened.

If villain is opening the correct tighter range (Everyone is short, so its very likely villain has to make a call or fold decision vs a shove preflop) in this spot, then they're likely not folding anyway. This is my intuitive feel after doing a LOT of preflop <20bb study, but it's been a while since I've really brushed up on it.

An issue with calling can be you call flop, villain bombs all blank turns and you have no fold equity because the pots 25k with 41k behind or something. But if villain bets half pot, may fold to rip if they think youre only playing sets that way. But I don't necessarily think raising has to be the highest EV play at any point. I just assume youre against a strong range here and youre getting the right price to draw against it.

Fair enough on misreading :)

Yeah raising can't be -$EV because even against the tightest range we're probably flipping and there's enough money in already that make up for this, assuming the btn folds 100% when we raise (not true, but its helpful for math). But as compared to calling, it can be bad. Like if the villain isn't making a mistake by getting all of the money in, we're not really benefiting by gii, even if it makes money. My thought is that by calling, the turn opens up more options and allows us to do better than the situation at hand. If a villain will bet/fold an overpair on different turns, then for sure it becomes way better to just call flop.

Over 60 hands, villain's tendencies aren't too revealed. 1326 different hands means you can't really do a ton to reduce his range to a mere 10-20% or whatever. Think that villain could have even just had a lot of off suit combos garbage in the 60 hands you've been there. Your reads could still be right, based on what you have seen, but I think there's still a ton of room for villain to open up without you knowing since your read is so restricted. I wouldn't be surprised to see A2-A5s in there, and while I'm not looking out for monsters under the bed, and I pay off too often, but there are more hands in there. Another combo that could play this way is 87dd, right?

If his hand is flipping ( I can't check the math, but 4 set combos, at least 12 combos of top pair, at least .half of an out is gone), wouldn't calling be the best option here? You're flipping 230 big blinds to get your share of the pot, which is only about 20-25 big blinds. Just seems like there could be a better option here. If your villain is reggy, then both calling and raising gain EV because there will be more hands that fold to a raise/more hands betting in general. You're losing to AQc and AJc.

I don't think it's obvious but to me it seems like calling is better. I assume button is folding 80% of the time no matter what you do. He's only going to have 4 sets and he probably has a lot of suited connectors that whiff.

prelfop the call of the 3bet seems too loose in general. It's pretty close to the bottom of your opening range, you're probably going to the flop 3 ways in the middle, etc. Even though it retains its equity vs the 3bet range once the flop hits, you still have to take into account your probably not going heads up, and your equity gets demolished adding another hand in, pretty much no matter what it is.

James, could you take a look at my comment below? I'd like to hear your thoughts on the check/raising and cbetting ranges I came up with, because your comment about the TT bluffcatching got me thinking about my cbetting range being easily killed.

I like the check raise even against unknowns. Villain has some overpairs that will shut down on most turns, (88-TT= 18 combos), 66 which will probably shut down on the turn (6 combos), and then some draws (A2-A5d, ATd, not sureally sure how many to give here but they all will probably check the turn behind if you check/call flop. It's just easier for them to realize their equity that way. They had a chance to get a fold on the flop, but once you call, a checked through turn means they got the correct price to draw to their flush usually. If you check/raise overpairs you're probably doing it too much and I'd rather check/raise good diamond draws (there aren't many), and just keep the cbetting range full of overpairs and other flush draws. However, I see James is concerned with having part of the range too focused on bluff catchers that can't stand too much heat on bad nonflush run outs. I'd hate to cbet all the combos of overpairs and an ace or king or queen turn making my hand a lot harder to play.

I think the highest EV line is going to be bet flop bet turn check river with the intention to fold vs a raise. I believe this because villain being in the cutoff getting good odds at 25nl is probably going to peel the 3bet with KJo, QJo, which are more combos than TJs, QTs, KQ, AJ. All of the hands with pair and a J are going to call a turn bet, but QJ and TJ are certainly folding to a river bet if you took a bet/check/bet line. I assume villain will check behind with TJ QJ and value bet top pair+, and villain calls with TJ QJ KJ.

good luck. this has been fun to read the last few days. do you have any opponents with more than 500 hands yet? i'd be really curious to see what those stats look like.