matlittle

You mentioned briefly on the Q72r7 board that most people will lack natural bluffs, so then they will end up betting river way too often because their range is stronger than it should be. That gives us a -EV turn bluff-catch scenario, so we can just fold bluff-catchers on the turn. Are there any other board types that this concept applies to in particular? Is it mainly just the super-dry boards?

If the scenario is a little different, and the board is Q72r8 bringing a turned flush draw, then you said that most 6max players are likely to bet turn with many natural bluffs (straight draws and flush draws), but will lack the non-natural bluffs like K5. In that scenario, the aggressor has more equity in its betting range than it should (more high equity draws and fewer low equity bluffs compared to solver), so then can the defender start to over-fold the turn slightly too compared to the solver? Is there some added clairvoyance benefits for the defender in that scenario, as they know which specific rivers are bad, thus adding to the EV of river bluff-catching (which can be extrapolated back to added turn EV)?

Nice video Nuno! You mentioned that most 6max players will under-estimate their showdown value with a bunch of hands. Does this mean that 6 max players playing HU will likely over-bluff the river in a bunch of lines?

Presumably they will also over-fold the flop and turn a lot too though, so perhaps this counter-acts this, given that they won't have as many weak hands getting to the river?

Thanks for the advice Gary!

I am not too worried about balance, I agree with your logic fully and that flatting here with middling strength hands is just the highest EV line. What I'm curious about is that when implemented this kind of strategy, I end up not 3betting much against the reg, so I have an unused "allowance" of non-premium hands in my 3betting range vs the reg. It's obviously not essential to fill that allowance, but I'm just wondering whether to use it or not, given that I would have to use hands that are too weak to call the BTN. I would have to consider hands like K7s, Q8s, ATo, 97s etc which would typically be too weak to do anything vs an UTG open.

Another question for you too please - if the rec is in the SB rather than the BB, are you still flatting BTN with all the mixed hands, or does the threat of the squeeze from a reg in the BB alter the EV significantly enough for you to have to rethink?

Here you spotted a rec in the BB, so you decided to call the AQo. Are you pure calling all of the middling strength hands in this type of scenario, or still mixing in a small amount of 3bet with those hands?

Can you please give a few examples of hands you will add into your 3betting range here to compensate for the removal of a bunch of the standard 3bets?

Hi Gary, very good video with some great practical advice!

For this hand you said that you wouldn't 3bet here against a reg, but you would 3bet against a recreational player. I know that recreational players call too much vs a 3bet, so previously I thought that we therefore need to be tight when 3betting them, but presumably that is wrong. Given that they don't 4bet anywhere near enough and then fold too much postflop vs certain lines, presumably that gives us way more postflop EV than we should be entitled to, allowing us to 3bet them wide preflop?

Are you going super wide with 3bets against recs, or just slightly wider than you would vs a reg?

Vs LP I still prefer linear.

I presume this was a typo then, and you meant polar instead of linear?

With the A4 hand one of the reasons you gave for wanting to shove the river was that the opponent was capped because of a timing tell which I agree with. If the opponent doesn't know that they are capped because of that timing tell, do you think that will limit the amount of time that they level themselves and call a random bluff-catcher on the river? In other spots where players are capped and they know about it, they are forced to call X% of bluff-catchers because they know they don't have sufficient nut combos to call down. But in this scenario, the player wouldn't know they are capped (because they are presumably unaware of the fact that they gave off a timing tell), so they assume they have many nut combos to call on the river and will be less inclined to bluff-catch 1 pair hands.

Yeh, fair points. I guess the line doesn't really make sense in general, especially the turn sizing, so perhaps it would be good to call here.

Could you please explain briefly why you would prefer different 3betting ranges vs EP compared to LP? Would you expect people to defend too much in EP (because they open stronger hands on average there)?

For this hand, CO vs MP 3BP, BBB, I feel like the value region is probably bigger than what you mentioned. Overpairs on this board should be an easy shove on the river for CO, because MP barely improves on this board/runout.

Hey Luke, solid advice throughout! There were lots of timing tells here and some good exploits provided. At one point in the video you advised the player to size up from the BB when 3betting and use to a polar range. Is it possible that regs at these stakes are calling too much vs 3bets and so a linear 3betting range might work better from BB?

On the games that I play however I personally never saw a regular with such tendencies as you mentioned, most just have a standard RFI sizing and don't really deviate from it

We are playing the same games sometimes and there are for sure regs who do this kind of stuff. Usually the "lesser-skilled" regs, shall we say. And of course the fish do it

For this board at 11.43 you pulled up the wrong sim. The board was T99T not TT99. On the T99T board you get to donk the turn way more often, presumably because you call more TX on the flop than 9X, and also your improvements on turn are to top boat rather than 2nd boat? For the river bets being small rather than overbet, I think its partly to do with the fact that the smaller bets (like 50% with TX) force the BTN to call a bunch of hands dont beat the board and are just hoping to chop, so you get value that way, and perhaps the high frequency of small value outweighs the low frequency of big value?

Hey Luke, what did you make of this spot where your opponent went for 2x pot DCB sizing here? I understand that they are probably very polar here and a big sizing is appropriate but 2x pot seems pretty large. Usually when I see this my opponent has 66 but perhaps at 2knl there could be something your opponent could be trying to achieve with this bet size?

One thing I noticed when studying heads up was this lack of range bet scenarios compared to 6-max, so it was good to learn about the theory as to why that happens! When playing other 6-max players at HU its often the case that my opponent will just range bet almost any board/scenario for 33% pot. Presumably players that do this are vulnerable to flop raises? Also in 3BP I should probably call the flop pretty wide in order to stab turn and generate a big over-fold? I would imagine a player with this kind of strategy just has a really high rate of check-folding the turn.

Similarly, I would guess that your average 6 max player playing HU does not find anywhere near enough 4bet bluffs, mainly because they don't know the exact types of hand to pick and the relevant frequencies. Would you agree with that too? If so, then would you recommend increasing our 3bet frequency vs this type of player too, on the same logic - you don't get 4bet off the pot/your equity as often as you should, plus you get more postflop spots as the PFR and an uncapped range?

My suspicion was that 6 max players would be under-3betting a lot on average when playing HU, so its good to hear you point that out too. You suggested opening wider on the BTN than the solver, but could we also size up our opens too to 3x? If we don't get 3bet enough it's not as expensive as it should be with regards to folding preflop, plus we get a favourable postflop scenario (IP as preflop raiser) more often than we should.

As someone who is forever asking you to compare HU to 6max I strongly approve of this series! Great first video!

Hello Pedro,

Really in depth review, picked up a bunch of tips here! Wanted to ask about these stats you covered for 3betting BB vs BTN opens. You correctly pointed out that vs bigger opens in theory we are supposed to 3bet more often. Also you said that recreational players are more represented in the 3x BTN RFI size, which I agree with too. Based on those 2 factors you said that the student should 3bet more vs the bigger 3x opens than vs the smaller sizes. Another thing to consider though is that the 3x sizing is usually a stronger range than the other sizes. That's true for recreationals, but also for some regs too (there are plenty of regs that get excited when they see a premium hand and size up their raise). How much weight would you put into this third factor when considering these stats?

Great video Pedro! You highlighted a bunch of mistakes that players are likely to make in these pots, and I have a few follow up questions about further potential adjustments/exploits and what you think of them.

1. We saw that the BB should not XR much on most boards, because the initial raiser was completely uncapped and would raise the flop very often vs BTN stab and BB call. From my experience, the BB doesn't play like this, but will instead raise most of its strong hands on the flop. Given that the data shows that the initial raiser doesn't raise enough facing BTN stab and BB call, do you think this is a good adjustment from players in the BB with their strong hands? Would you recommend midstakes players to continue to XR their sets, or do you see downsides, e.g. BTN barrelling aggressively to exploit you.

2. In midstakes games, BTN seems incentivised to stab flop really often and then barrel extremely aggressively across turn and river. BTN won't face as many raises as it should do from the initial raiser, plus the BB and initial raiser will likely call many hands that should fold the flop (because they are too weak), and will end up folding turn or river vs further bets. Lots of players will pure call the 2nd pair hands that we saw the solver mainly fold or raise in a number of scenarios. BB will likely not be uncapped as it should be too as it will raise too many strong hands on flop, so again will be susceptible to folding vs further aggression. My uncertainty with this suggestion is that players calling too much on flop might end up calling too much on turn or river too because of their lack of understanding of multiway pots and the increase in hand-strength required to continue at each node compared to a heads-up pot.

In this hand I think your opponent's logic could be that most players UTG will cbet too many flush draws here, then will raise too many on the turn. For my sim, UTG is supposed to check around 1/3 of its flush draws on flop, and then should call 70% of its flushes on the turn even vs the block sizing.

My guess is that most humans will cbet too many FDs and will definitely get greedy on turn and raise most of their flushes vs this small sizing. So then a human playing UTG will be way more capped than the solver, and the 3x pot sizing is quite punitive for them.

I agree on this hand Frankie , villain line is a little wonky to me; c/c / b33/ over-bet

Probing small and over-betting river seems fine to me. The solver will play like this too, although with a smaller river over-bet (plus other sizes of course). Even if I give the solver a big and a small probe size on the turn, it will just use the block size. Then on the river, you will of course have a bunch of hands that want to over-bet, especially given that the turn probe size was small.

Thanks for sharing the screenshot. I guess your sim just has a much wider BB calling range, so then you are allowed to cbet more overpairs for this pot sizing, and it is a more natural cbet size to utilise.

In this hand (BvB SRP), Present Luke chastised Past Luke for mixing in some bets on the turn with the Q9. I think Past Luke was right though, you get to bet this just over half the time, even if you are 200bb deep.

You mentioned after that you are pure betting 99-QQ on the flop with this sizing, and almost all of KK, however my sim for this spot says you need to check around half the time with those hands on the flop if you pick the pot cbet size

This hand was SRP BTN vs BB. There are many choices for cbet size here that are very similar in EV, I'm curious as to why you like the pot sized cbet here?

Hey Luke,

Here at 5.00 it was checked-down pot and you decided to pure fold vs this river bet, because you decided villain was likely under-bluffing here. You didn't mention why you thought that though. Was there something in the HUD popup that made you think that, or was there another reason?

Here your opponent limped, then checked the flop. You debated a big over-bet on turn but decided not to use the part of your game-plan to attack capped checking ranges here. Was that because you only quads by doing so, or do you expect recs to call down light with A high on paired/tripped boards? My hunch is that this is one of the few board types where recs call down often enough after checking back flop, given how many A high call-downs I see on this board type, but I could be wrong on that.

Here at 24.26 I am kinda torn. I understand that by min 4betting your opponent will basically never fold. But I also assume someone using this 3bet size will not fold anything to most 4bet sizes here, so I think there could be merit in sizing up too? Do you think giving the rec extra rope will generate more value than you would generate by sizing up the 4bet?

Hey Callum, wanted to ask about this hand where you 3bet BTN vs CO, then opted to check back the flop. You do get players to make some mistakes by checking back, but at the same time you concede a bunch of equity by doing so. In this instance you got a random bluff raise on turn, but then lost a good sized pot to a hand that had equity and would have probably folded the flop if you had cbet.

I think players will also make big mistakes vs the small cbet here too - namely calling too many mid strength hands (e.g. middling pocket pairs), and end up over-folding vs the turn cbet.

Also having the hearts makes your hand less vulnerable, but it also increases your equity and nut equity, so I would be very keen to cbet that hand class too given that you dont want to cap the pot when you make the nuts on a large number of runouts.