aislephive

The 44 hand 7:00 in is very strange for the reason that you decide to not communicate your thought process on the hand at all as you decide to bet the flop and then overbet the river when it checks behind on the turn. Meanwhile you're narrating a trivially standard spot on another table. As a viewer I have to admit that this is rather frustrating to watch.

The AK hand 10:00 in was really interesting. I think this is one of those situations where relying on PIO is probably a mistake because he is almost certainly betting with a much higher frequency than what is 'optimal', and against what is probably a much wider range than what PIO is defending against I think AK with the Kc is likely a call given that you sometimes have the best hand and can often improve when you don't. The only hand you're in really bad shape against is AA with a club. Of course you get into some tricky river situations when you improve but I feel like all things considered you are doing well enough to peel. At the very least I think it warrants further analysis than looking at what PIO suggests and concluding that it's a fold.

35:45 in you mention that you're cbetting on the larger side because you're betting more and are depolarizing your range. I don't know if I misheard or misunderstood you but that seems very counter intuitive. If we're depolarized and betting often a smaller cbet makes a lot more sense. In this hand it seems pretty clear that we should be betting a pretty polarized range and so the sizing makes a lot of sense but I feel like I'm missing something with your explanation.

Anyways, good content as usual and I hope I didn't come across as too critical.

Always love your stuff Pete. Not a ton of crazy spots in this video as you alluded to but the JJ river decision 10 minutes in or so was fairly interesting. It's clearly a GTO call but the river sizing and the extremely safe runout makes me feel like we should be overfolding this spot considerably against most 50nl regs who probably aren't imaginative enough to three barrel that spot once the K pairs on the river. Do you agree with that but think we are simply too high up in our range or is your experience that this pool can bluff in these spots more than I am giving them credit for?

Great video once again Francesco. Always learn a lot from your videos!

That makes a ton of sense and thanks for the in-depth reply. That helped a lot!

I'm slightly conflicted here because I absolutely love these theory / concept videos, but part of me would also like to see you do a more traditional format with live analysis of hands so we can get a better sense of how you approach the game. Either way, though, I love the content and look forward to more of your stuff in the future.

Lastly, can you be a little more specific about what you mean when you say you want to have strong hands on the most common board textures? Intuitively it makes sense, but I'm curious how you apply it in practice. Does that mean mixing in a higher frequency preflop call with hands like AK/AQ that are normally 3bet, or even mixing in some preflop flats with QQ+?

Nice video Pete. How would you approach things on a site where HUDs aren't an option? It's pretty difficult to get a good read on each player's propensity to flat 3bets (as well as their opening ranges from each position), so I assume the best strategy is to 3bet a pretty linear range until you start to notice them folding a lot?

My bad.. I'm usually on point with that. it was a pretty big hand early on in the video at about 2:30 in.

In the AQ hand where we got check raised on the river, is the Ad really a bad card to hold? Like you said in the video, we probably aren't percieved to have many flushes with this action, so the Ad blocker from his perspective doesn't seem overly valuable to bluff with. He actually has far more flushes in his range than we do, and so having a blocker to his somewhat narrow value range seems like a really good thing and leans my decision more towards calling than if we didn't have the Ad. I'm not sure if that's flawed thinking on my part but that was my impression during the hand.

Dekkers, what hands are you actually folding to this 4bet out of curiosity? It's not a particularly small 4bet sizing by villain so I would think we could fold some of our weaker 3bets.

Also, what hands are you shoving in this spot? I assume our value range is AK and JJ+ with AA being discounted slightly because it is sometimes flatting. Assuming that's pretty accurate, how are you choosing your bluffs and the appropriate frequencies? Thanks.

Really enjoyed the video James. Lots of really interesting spots. My thoughts:

- I really prefer just shipping the flop on the first hand with JJ when checkraised. He shuts down with most of his bluffs unless he improves or a scare card hits, the latter of which puts us in a guessing game. Overall I just think we're making a mistake by allowing him to realize his equity, even if just for one street. I'd be all for slowplaying my nutted hands where him improving would be great for us.

- On the third hand with KJo it's important to note that the card removal elements drastically reduce his legitimate flush draws. The K, T, and 9 of diamonds are out, and of course we have the J of diamonds. That leaves AdQd and a bunch of crappy suited aces / suited connectors which are folding preflop a lot of the time so his range is going to be heavily skewed towards bluffs. Factor in that a lot of our range is going to be feeling very gross on this board and checking the turn and river here was by far the best play. wp

- 4th hand with KJs is a definite river bet for most of the reasons you outlined. I like a smallish block bet of about $60, personally. It gets value from the hands we're looking to extract from and also shows enough weakness that he might attempt to shove over the top and represent Jx, which he can do so very credibly, far more so than we can. I think this is a line you can take with a lot your range in this spot given his likely showdown bound range.

- 77 hand 24 minutes in: Flop bet size is unorthodox and interesting. It's probably very good but definitely puts you in some awkward spots on later streets. I would have bet the turn, though, even if it was only for $30-40. 

- AQ hand 30 minutes in: In this situation I'm of the belief that we should be more likely to check than bet given the backdoor nut flush draw. For starters, when we bet the flop and turn and the backdoor flush gets there on the river it's not even that great of a runout for us given that we already very likely had the best hand and may have let weaker queens off the hook. When we check we can call basically all runouts profitably and on the occasion that the flush gets there it's very disguised to him. While on the subject, I do like check calling with ace high backdoor flush draws a lot too, much better than c-betting them. If I have additional equity in terms of straight draws I'm probably more inclined to be betting.

Tom - QT / JT are reasonable donking hands in a balanced range that includes a lot of weak semi bluffs. I'm not sure why you would think otherwise.

Interesting video with some really good, practical examples shown. Well done.

I do disagree with checking the river in the T8 hand, though. While your analysis of the blocker situation is correct, he still has showdown value an awful lot here, and this is one of the few hands in our range that we can value bet somewhat confidently. I'd rather check / call with QT / JT type hands, perhaps even 78. It's a minor nitpick though, because I don't think there is a significant EV difference either way. I'd just rather be betting close to the top of my range when he has a lot of showdown value and the most obvious draws missed.