2+2 Theory
A collection of theory and strategy posts collected across the twoplustwo.com forums... ... ...arranged and edited with little care and attention to order, with as little effort and thought put into the project as possible
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Table of Contents 3bet shoving 25bb........................................................8-11 End Game 3betting Behavior.........................................12-16 20bb to Push-Fold Play.................................................17-18 22 Flawed Reasonings..................................................19-27 Limpers and MinBetters................................................28-33 Overbet Nash..............................................................34-38 Preflop Ranges in HU SnG.............................................39-40 Push-Fold Poker...........................................................41-51 Learnin’ Dem SnGs Good..............................................52-55 MTT: Stack Size Theory.................................................61-64 Blind Stealing.............................................................65-72 Cold Calling................................................................73-76 Exploiting Short Stacks................................................77-83 Facing a 3bet..............................................................84-91 Fold Equity.................................................................92-100 Hand Reading 1.........................................................101-113 Hand Reading 2......................................................114-118 Playing Deep...........................................................119-125 Playing Limpers.......................................................126-134 Playing OOP............................................................135-147 Polarization.............................................................148-160 Reacting to 3bets.....................................................161-173 Reasons to Bet........................................................174-183 Playing Small PPs.....................................................184-192 Stack to Pot Ratio....................................................193-200 Playing Suited Connectors.........................................201-206 The Blocker Bet.......................................................207-211 The Check-Raise......................................................212-221 The Double Barrel....................................................222-230 The Squeeze...........................................................231-234 List of 2+2 Theorums...............................................235-237 Thin Value Betting....................................................238-245 Turning Hands into Bluffs..........................................246-249 Value Betting..........................................................250-260 Combinatorics........................................................261-269 3betting................................................................270-273
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2+2 Dictionary ajmargarine Here’s a list of common terms and abbreviations used in the NL forums. AKQJT - Ace, King, Queen, Jack, Ten UTG - Under the Gun, first player to act preflop UTG+1 - Under the Gun plus one, second player to act preflop EP - early position MP - middle position LP - late position OTB - On The Button CO - Cut off, player one seat to the right of button HJ - Hijack, player two seats to the right of button SB - small blind BB - big blind c/c - check/call c/f - check/fold c/r - check/raise b/f - bet and fold to a raise 3-bet - a bet, a raise, and then another raise. The third action is a 3-bet. b3b - Hero’s plan is to bet, and then 3-bet if raised. reraise - raising the PFR VB - value bet CB - continuation bet PSB - pot-sized bet PSR - pot-sized raise PFR - preflop raise or preflop raiser
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overbet - a bet amount larger than the current pot check behind - to check when it’s been checked to you, usually after betting action on previous street donkbet - either to lead into the PFR on the flop, or a tiny bet made in relation to the pot thin value bet - usually a river bet made when it’s unclear if you are ahead or not Monotone - a flop of all the same suit Rainbow - a flop of all different suits Overpair - having a pair in your hand higher than the biggest card on the board gutshot - an inside straight draw TPTK - top pair top kicker TPWK - top pair weak kicker TPGK - top pair good kicker TP2K - top pair 2nd best kicker--You have KQ, flop K72, you have top pair, 2nd best kicker (the Q) TPCK - top pair crap kicker TPBK - top pair bad kicker 9To - Nine Ten offsuit KJs - King Jack suited Ax - An Ace with any second card Kxx - refers to a King high flop Q73r - r = rainbow flop OESD - open ended straight draw OESFD - open ended straight flush draw pp - pocket pair sc - suited connector EV - Expected Value OOP - out of position FE - fold equity AI - all-in ATC - any two cards UI - unimproved TAG - tight aggressive LAG - loose aggressive LAP - loose passive sLAG - slightly loose aggressive
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MHIG - my hand is good MHING - my hand is no good WA/WB - way ahead, way behind IMO - In my opinion IMHO - In my humble opinion JMO - Just my opinion FYP - fixed your post OP - original post or poster tl;dr - too long; didn’t read QFT - quoted for truth x-post - post made in more than one forum at one time OT - off topic lc - low content nc - no content goot - good moran - moron nh - nice hand meh - the sound you make when you shrug your shoulders signaling indifference; not great, not terrible. pwned - owned or pawned. Usually means you got outplayed. BB/100 - # of bb’s won per 100 hands played PTBB/100 - poker tracker big blinds won per 100 hands played. A PTBB is 2xBB. ~$7 - around $7 or about $7 FPS - fancy play syndrome aggro - aggressive SSNL - small stakes no limit MSNL - mid stakes no limit HSNL - high stakes no limit NLHE - no limit hold ‘em LHE - limit hold ‘em BBV - the Beats, Brags, and Variance forum PT - Pokertracker VPIP - voluntarily put money in the pot AF - aggression factor Villian is 24/10/3(98)- Pokertracker stats indicating VPIP/PFR%/ AF (with preflop aggression taken out) over 98 hands
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GT+ - Gametime Plus PA - PokerAce PAHUD - PokerAce Heads Up Display PP - Party Poker PS, Stars - PokerStars FT - Full Tilt UB - Ultimate Bet PL - pot limit PF - pre-flop HH - hand history HU - heads up FR - full ring FT - full table 6m - 6-max NL100 - number indicates the buy-in; this is No Limit, with $1 BB’s Stop-n-Go - You bet, get raised, you call closing the action on that street, then lead out on the next street. Float - You call a bet with a marginal hand or draw, usually on the flop while in position, with the intent of stealing the pot on a later street. Semi-bluff - betting/raising when you have a draw. Stealing blinds - openraising in late position with less than premium hands. blocking bet - often a river bet made OOP when an obvious draw hits on the end, where you bet and fold to a raise effective stack - the smallest stack amongst the players remaining in the hand. trips - flop is JJ8, you hold KJ, you have trips set - flop is K42, you hold 44, you have a set pot control - attempting to keep the pot small with a marginal holding minraise - raising the lowest amount possible
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3bet Shoving 25bb Insane_Steve Situation: You are playing a hypothetical aggressive opponent who is raising his button 2/3rd of the time. Blinds are 25/50, effective stacks 1250 (25 BB). Villain makes his raise. You have: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)
2 2 A 2 J T 7 5 3 2
(for ****s and giggles)
Which of these hands are good to shove over his raise? Depends on what he’s calling with: Scenario 1: Villain is a solid (but a bit too tight) player, this is your first three bet shove, and he’s going to respect your first raise. He’s calling with 66+, ATo+, A9s, KQ. This is 10.4% of hands. He’s folding 1 - 10.4/66.7 = 84.4% of the time. You get 150 chips for free when this happens, so add 126.61 to your cEV for this move. What if he calls, though? Here’s the equity for each of those hands agaisnt this tight range: 1) 2 2 37.94% win, 61.31% lose 2) A 2 29.59% win, 66.68% lose 3) J T 36.52% win, 62.67% lose
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4) 7 5) 3
5 2
32.29% win, 67.07% lose 25.46% win, 73.82% lose
So the 15.6% of the time you are called, you’re obviously a dog. Here’s the loss in cEV for each scenario (equals 15.6%*1250 chips lost * (%lose -%win)): 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)
2 2 -45.57 A 2 -72.33 J T -50.99 7 5 -67.82 3 2 -94.30 (!)
What have we learned from this? Well, if your opponent is opening wide and calling this tight, 3-bet shoving ANY TWO is +cEV. Also, against a tight calling range, the suited connector hands play better than the weak ace, but the pair is of course the best hand to shove against a tighter calling range. This is also why raising to 3x at 25 BB effective is generally a leak -- if you raise to 100 or 125, the P(fold) chip expectation falls to 84.4 and 105.5 respectively. As you can see, in the former case shoving 32o is now bad (lol). Of course, minraises will get called a bit more often, but this post will not deal with post-flop play for now. It’s already going to be long enough. Of course, you can’t just keep shoving over this raise, because a smart villain is going to adjust, and a dumb villain is going to get pissed off that you’re shoving so much and call lighter anyways. Scenario 2: Either you’ve shoved a couple times over the villain in scenario 1, or you’re playing someone who doesn’t respect you as much. Villain is now calling 44+, A8o+, A5s+, KJo+, KTs. We repeat the calculations. Villain is now calling with top 15.8% of his hands. You still get a fold 1 - 15.8/66.7 = 76.3% of the time, for a P(fold) chip EV of 114.47. Wooooo. Let’s see how your shoving hands are holding up now if called. 1) 2 2 win 40.38%, lose 58.74%, cEV = -54.39 2) A 2 win 31.40%, lose 62.13%, cEV = -91.04 3) J T win 39.05%, lose 60.06%, cEV = -62.24
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4) 7 5) 3
5 2
win 34.51%, lose 64.75%, cEV = -89.59 win 27.62%, lose 72.44%, cEV = -132.78
Everything but that 32o is still +EV here. The most surprising find is that A2o fares worse than the low suited connecter here, and that JTs isn’t too far off the pair in equity. This is because A2o is crushed by all your opponent’s range but the Kx hands, while JTs is still doing OK against the weak aces and low pairs. Moving on... Scenario 3: Villain is tilting or just likes to gamble. He’s calling your shove with any pair, any ace, KTo+, K9s+, QJ, QTs, JTs. You know the drill: This is top 26.1%, so P(fold) = 1 - (26.1/66.7) = 60.9%. cEV for folds is 91.3. Your shoving ranges will fare as follows: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)
2 2 win 43.8%, lose 54.97%, cEV = - 54.59 A 2 win 32.1%, lose 53.3%, cEV = -103.615 J T win 31.12%, lose 53.09%, cEV = -107.38 7 5 win 37.08%, lose 62.05%, cEV = -122.04 3 2 win 27.95%, lose 71.06%, cEV = - 210.70
Yikes, now only the pocket pair is profitable against this range. Let’s add a stronger but not amazing Ax hand to this mix: 6) A
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win 41.98%, lose 47.75%, cEV = -28.2
A ha! Against a wide calling range, a middling A-rag hand fares pretty well. Better even than that low pair. Let’s do two more examples before I get to the point: Scenario 4: Villain is a drunk monkey. He’s calling that shove with any pair, any ace, K7o+, any suited king, Q8o+, Q6s+, J9o+, J7s+, T7s+, 97s+, 87s, 76s. This is a whopping 39.7% of hands! You only get a fold 1 (39.7/66.7) = 40.8% of the time, and only have 60.72 in +cEV in folding. Let’s see how your hands fare. I think I’ve convinced you that connector hands are bad against a wide call range, so I’ll throw out 75s and 32o, and show 22, A2, A8, and JTs, along with a slightly better pair (55):
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1) 2) 3) 6) 7)
2 2 win 45.71%, lose 53.04%, cEV = -54.242 A 2 win 41.24%, lose 49.54%, cEV = -61.42 J T win 43.56%, lose 53.39%, cEV = -72.74 A 8 win 48.88%, lose 44.41%, cEV = +33.078 (!) 5 5 win 51.81%, lose 47.26%, cEV = +33.67 (!)
You can now 3-bet shove A8 and 55 type hands for VALUE here, never mind the small chance you have of a fold! The difference between A8 and A2 and 55 and 22 is HUGE if villain is calling you mega-wide! One more example: Scenario 5: Villain is tight from the button. He’s only raising 25%, and calling the same range as the villain in scenario 1. The equity calcs are the same, but your fold EV drops a lot: P(fold) = 1 - (10.4/25) = 58.4%, cEV of a fold is 87.6. Against this villain it is wrong to 3-bet shove A2, but not JTs. Hmmmmmm. Your edge against this opponent comes from him playing mega-passive on the button, of course. What have we learned from this example? 1) Against an opponent you suspect is not calling your 3-bet very often, your edge in 3-bet shoving comes from FOLD EQUITY. On the off-chance you are called, it is best to have a pair or a middling suited connecting hand than a bad ace. 2) Against an opponent you suspect will call your 3-bet shove somewhat wide but not a lot, your edge is still in your fold equity, but suited connector hands drop a bit in value, and marginal aces increase in values. 3) Against an opponent you suspect will call with a lot of his raising range, your EV in shoving comes from the fact that a middling Ax hand or a low-ish pair is a FAVORITE against whatever trash he’s calling with. Suited connectors should not be shoved against these opponents. 4) 3-bet shoving any pocket pair over a 3x raise with 25 BB effective is almost never a mistake.
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end game 3betting behavior Skates Preface: Hi everyone! Here is a sample article from the manual about 15-30BB play I was intending to write. I would appreciate if you kept any chatter in this thread strictly about the article and not about the manual that is no longer happening. If you are reading this and missed out on the debate, check out the HUSNG Regs thread for more info. Here, I discuss, in-depth, something that happens between 10-20BB for most players, and give an outline of something that happens between 2030BB for almost all players. X-Posted from HUSNG.com, without further ado... Skates Points: Critical Points of Villain’s 3-Betting Behavior These are the critical effective stack depths at which your villain makes dramatic adjustments to their preflop ranges when facing a minraise. A good, balanced player should not have these, but most do. Before explaining why, I should define them. There are two: 1) Skates Calling Point (SCP) - This is the effective stack depth at which your villain switches from an all-in or fold strategy to one that incorporates calling. When facing a minraise at 2BB, your villain can only go all-in or fold. At 5BB, nearly all villains will either go all-in or fold. At 10BB, some will mix in calling with some hands. The effective stack depth where the calling frequency becomes significant is the SCP. 2) Skates 3-Betting Point (S3BP) - This is the effective stack depth at which your villain switches their 3-bet sizing from
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always being all-in (or committing) to having a significant fraction of their 3-bets being non-committing. At 15BB, if a villain 3-bets when facing a minraise, they will almost certainly go all-in with the majority of their range. At 22BB, some villains will keep going all-in, but others might switch to smaller 3-bets. The effective stack depth where the frequency of the noncommitting 3-bet size becomes significant is the S3BP. When I say “majority” and “significant”, I am referring to a range that does not incorporate AA and KK. Many players play in unbalanced ways with those two hands, and in this case, we would like to remove them from consideration. Some people, when you minraise at 10BB, will flat or min-3-bet with AA or KK and only those hands. This is not what we are looking to isolate. When talking about SCPs and S3BPs, it might be helpful to refer to them as “hard” and “soft”. A “hard” SCP is what most players have. If Mr. StandardVillain has been reading 2+2 for the past year, he might have learned that when facing a minraise at less than 20BB, he should either go all-in or fold. At 20BB though, he should start to call with most hands because he does not want to risk more than 19BB to pick up 2BB. This means that StandardVillain has a hard-SCP of 20. This is a very common behavior among weaker players and mediocre regs at this point in time. Historically, I think this is because the average hero often had a very wide open % (say, 80%), and a very tight call % (say, 12%). Playing the way the StandardVillain played was incredibly profitable. Now, the average hero at higher stakes might still open very wide, but has often adjusted to having a wider calling range, neglecting the primary source of equity won by StandardVillain. As such, many of the stronger players today do not have SCPs at 20, but rather closer to 15. If instead of having a hard-SCP, StandardVillain were to start gradually incorporating hands into a calling range at 18BB, he would have a soft-SCP at 18. Very strong players have softSCPs that are very hard to define because they adopt mixedstrategies (they do not always play a given hand the same way). S3BPs are almost always extremely hard (non-gradual), and are usually in the range of 22-25BB. Sure, StandardVillain might always jam 33 if hero limps into him, but the rest of StandardVillain’s 3-bet range is likely to have a 3-bet size
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between the range of 4BB to 6BB. Most people have a fixed 3-bet size that they switch to when the first incorporate noncommitting 3-bets. I can not think of one villain I have come across who does not. Of course, we ignore behavior with AA and KK. Now that we’ve defined these... can you think of any forum members or coaches that have well-defined SCPs or S3BPs? Are they hard or soft? How many of them that have easily recognized hard-SCPs play high-stakes? The answer is probably close to zero, and here’s why: If I can notch you into a box, I can read your frequencies and exploit you. Over the course of a match or series of matches, a good hero attempts to best understand the frequencies with which their villain takes each possible action on each street, then utilizes that information to make estimations of villain’s range on each street, then utilizes that information to come up with a maximally exploitive strategy to combat those ranges. Although I would be happier putting a lot of caveats and footnotes in there, that is some very rudimentary poker theory. As a consequence, anything that allows the hero to get a better estimation of those frequencies enables the hero to make more precise adjustments to better exploit their villain. ************************************************* Stop here, take a breather. You should be able to extrapolate the rest of this article from what I’ve said already. I will walk you through it, but I strongly encourage you to step back and not continue reading until you try to figure it out on your own. *************************************************** Hello again! If you play within a well-constructed set of rules, or box, your easily observed frequencies no longer tell a part of the story; they tell the whole story. If after one game with you, I observe what I think to be a hard-SCP at 20, I am immediately estimating a 3-bet frequency I think you have at each depth below that. If I’ve played many games with you, I can just look at my database and pull the information directly. Then, what do you think my adjustments look like? Fix a stack depth and
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consider a range of villain 3-bet frequencies. Take a moment to try to come up with my opening range with respect to those frequencies on your own. *************************************************** And here you go: If your frequency is lower than 50%, I will raise any two cards. I’m not going to spell that one out for you. If you don’t see why that is the case, you need to step back and think about it more. If your frequency is higher than 50%, I will raise any hand that I am also calling a jam with, and fold all hands I would fold to a jam with. So what is the result? I have a raise/fold range if and only if I think your 3-bet frequency is less than 50%. *************************************************** Now... here is where things really get interesting, despite the simplicity of the topic. Notice that my adjustment is not continuous; I don’t gradually add hands into my opening range. Since you are playing within this box that you have defined for yourself, my adjustments are effectively in the binary. I either raise everything, or I raise my calling range, and which strategy I adopt is dependent solely on your 3-bet frequency. (Of course, the size of my raise-calling range will vary based on your 3-bet frequency and the effective stack depth). If I think you 3-bet all-in with 50% of all hands at 15BB, then my raising frequency at 16BB is likely to be 100%, but my raising frequency at 14BB might be something like 40% (and raise-calling my J9s ). If someone were to isolate my hands from 14-16BB, they might see my raising range at something like 70%. Do you see why their adjustments might be mistaken or flawed? Do you see where I might be able to pick up an edge from this? Do you see how difficult it is for someone with a hard-SCP to compete with me? So what about S3BPs? These are much more interesting because this part of the game is not wel-evolved. At this time, most strong high-stakes HUSNG players have soft-SCPs that are extremely hard to discover. On the other hand, hard-S3BPs are still found in virtually everyone; I’m currently thinking of only a few exceptions. When thinking about a hard-S3BP and the adjustments you can make relating to it, consider how a villain views your calling frequency and 4-bet frequency
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when facing a non-committing 3-bet. When they 3-bet noncommitting, are they polarized? Are they merged? What does their 3-bet frequency look like below the S3BP (when they are only going all-in). Does it increase or decrease on the other side of the S3BP? What does that say about their calling range around the S3BP? What does that mean your opening range should look like? What kind of tricks can you pull? I’m not going to spoon-feed this one to you... figure it out
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20bb to push-fold play lagdonk At 20 bbs down to which ever stack depth you think pure pushor-fold* should start (whether it’s 10/9/8/7/6 BBs -- villain dependent, ideally): Typically, you should try a mixture of limps and min-raises on the BTN. The earlier phases of the match should give you some clues about how villain will respond. Any of these BTN pf strategies can be appropriate against the right villain: 1) Min-raise ~70%+ of hands, fold the rest -- because villain rarely 3-bet shoves, folds many of his big blinds, and/or plays fit-or-fold on the flop when you c-bet. 2) Min-raise ~40% of hands, limp a whole bunch more, and fold trash -- because villain is a bit more active in raised pots, so you want your range to be stronger, and to be able to call a 3-bet shove pf more often than a 70% range can; but villain will let you limp without punishing you, and lets you take down limped pots reasonably often with a simple stab on the flop. 3) Similar to the above, but mix in some strong hands into your limping range -- because villain perceives it as weak and has begun attacking limps pf pretty often. 4) Raise very few hands, because villain is very aggro spewy in raised pots due to drug use or whatever reason, and he will shove 52s when you make your first min-raise with AQo after limping the last gazillion hands 18 BBs deep. OOP: Tighten up your flat-calling range from the BB. Playing fit-or-fold is way too expensive and unsustainable at this stage. You want to enter pots OOP armed with significant flopping power and/or an ability to handle villain when he has position post-flop. Maybe he has some exploitable traits you’ve spotted,
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like only c-betting if he hits, or c-betting very often but folding non-strong hands to smallish check-raises, or three barrel spewing too often when you take a check-call line, such that hitting a pair will net you his bluffed off stack. Also, monitor his BTN raising frequency as you get shallow, and review all of the hands that are +EV 3-bet shoves against someone who opens too often when stacks are short. You can also mix in some small 3-bets against against semithinking, nit-at-heart players who aren’t very comfortable lagging it up (in this case, opening more BTNs than they’d like), and are doing so half-heartedly because they think they should as blinds go up. (That was a retardedly specific villain profile; small 3-bets when shallow can work against a number of opponent-types, especially if you balance them, but this is not my area of expertise. More of a growth area for me.) Post-flop: Keep a very close eye on stack-to-pot ratios if you and villain start putting bets in on the flop or beyond. It is very easy to cross commitment thresholds inadvertently, and to be priced in to make correct calls with one over and a gutshot, or other weak draws/hands, as the pot grows relative to remaining stacks. In short, constantly look ahead before putting chips into the pot and adjust your future continuing/folding plans accordingly. Try to avoid taking lines that involve calling a bet (or two) on earlier streets and folding to further pressure on later ones. Such lines are sometimes inevitable, but stacking off sooner when you feel more certain of your equity becomes more correct as the stack-to-pot ratio shrinks, especially since you can still get called by worse (or draws) as pot odds become better for villain. Compare this to taking a more inducing/potcontrol/way-ahead-way-behind type check-call line earlier in the match when stacks are deeper against a barreling villain.
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22 Flawed Reasonings Mersenneary When I give poker advice, either on the 2+2 strategy forums or privately, I ask players to include the reasoning behind their decisions. After all, the point of asking about a situation is not to learn how to play it if ever occurred exactly the same way, but to figure out the concepts that really matter so that they can be applied to a wide variety of difficult spots. Perhaps most informative is when people give me explanations that are largely irrelevant to the situation, or demonstrate serious flaws in their broader understanding of the game. These are opportunities to produce the “aha!” type moments that can lead to significant improvements. This article chronicles 22 different reasonings HUSNG students have given me when explaining their actions, along with why they each suggest the chance to get better. Some of them are misapplied to far too many situations, and some of them should never be applied at all. Most are about in-game decisions, and a few have to do with a broader approach to the game. Throughout, the common theme is that each incorrect rationale focuses too little on calculating EV, relying instead on emotional heuristics or misconceptions about theory. Do you understand the error in each? 1. “When bluffcatching, if I call the turn, I have to call the river.” This is only true when playing against a maniac who always
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triple barrels after betting twice, not against the vast majority of the population. The river decision is its own independent equity calculation based on your assessment of how often your opponent gives up on bluffs and what percentage of his range that gets to the river are value hands. It is quite often optimal with a bluffcatcher to call the turn and fold to a river bet. The error tends to come from people’s irrational desire to either say they lost the minimum, or say they won the maximum. If I’m folding on the river, they think, “dang, I’d have been better off folding on the turn”. That’s a results-oriented fallacy that takes away from your EV, both in folding to too many turn bets and in making crying calls on too many river bets. 2. “If I get caught bluffing, I’ll be down to 300 chips.” While I will concede there are sometimes very small differences where a stack of t1000 might not be worth exactly twice as much as a stack of t500 in a HUSNG, in practice, cEV very closely mirrors $EV. The difference is almost never going to be enough to correctly stop you from making an otherwise +EV bluff. The elements of the equity calculation here are the pot size, your bluff size, and your fold equity. If you should be giving up, the math from those three numbers is going to be why, not your shortstack if you get caught. 3. “I’ll fold and wait for a better spot.” Similarly, especially in the era of the rematch button, you’re looking for a +EV spot. Hourly rate is a much better stat to be proud of than your ROI. The question you should be asking yourself is whether the play is +EV. When you’re folding, “waiting for a better spot” isn’t generally going to be why except in more extreme scenarios, like passing up on 52% equity against an opponent open-shoving 75bb deep. In general though, making the play that gives you the best equity in the hand is going to be what wins you the most money overall. 4. “So I raised to define his hand...” When arguing that he should check/raise an A K Q flop with Q 4 in a limped pot 20bb deep instead of check/calling,
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a winning $100 player remarked to me that by raising, he was able to define his opponent’s range more, eliminating all the junky hands. As if we had anything to fear from seven high! Knowing what our opponent is likely to have is not a benefit in and of itself. Raising for information is a play that always should be grounded in equity, not out of unwarranted fear of playing against a wide range. 5. “Readless, I like to play fairly nitty, not wanting to get into a marginal spot against a player I don’t know anything about.” Generally, this is said by people who go on to pass up against highly +EV spots because they are not sure of your opponent’s tendencies. It’s poker, and when Oreos aren’t involved, we’re never sure about any of your reads. It’s always a probabilistic guess. When you know nothing, go by the population tendencies of how likely villains in general are to have each hand in his range. Don’t fail to four-bet shove 77 just because you don’t know whether your opponent’s three-betting range is too tight for that to be profitable. Do a calculation. Based on range of villains I generally face, how often is it profitable, and how often is it not? That’s a better approach that will lead to a +EV decision. 6. “If I’m facing a minraise or a limp in the BB, I can use the NASH chart to help make my decision.” NASH, the more technically correct cousin of SAGE, details the push/fold and call/fold equilibrium strategies for the small blind and the big blind respectively. It guarantees at least a certain amount of equity. However, it is best used as a solely general guideline for <10bb poker, and exploiting players with 2x raises, openshoves, folds, and limps generally leads to superior results better than what NASH provides. While it is suboptimal >10bb, NASH is at least relevant. Unfortunately, many players use the NASH chart to dictate decisions like shoving over limps. You might as well use Phil Hellmuth’s hand rankings to decide. When people limp, they have a completely different range than “Any Two Cards”. Do the
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math of how much fold equity you have, what your equity is when called, and what your equity is from checking behind or making a smaller raise. Don’t get lazy and try to use a chart for everything. 7. “All-in luck graphs are for whiners who like wasting their time feeling bad about themselves.” While some HUSNG players get all of the action they could ever want at a buy-in and speed they’re positive is their most profitable, most people will not have that experience. There are deepstacks, reg speeds, turbos, and superturbos, all at the stake you’re at, the level above, and the level below. Because EV-adjusted winnings have much better predictive value than your actual results, if you’re not positive which stake level or game you should playing at, you hate money for not taking a quick look at all the information available to you. 8. “Let’s not inflate the pot out of position.” This is another reason that bypasses the correct rationale for taking an action and becomes quite hollow when the real reason doesn’t apply. There are plenty of times when you want to inflate the pot out of position, with great hands, poor hands, and everything in between. If you’re using this logic, make sure you identify WHY it would be such a bad thing if the pot is bigger: Is it that you’re not getting value out of enough hands? Is it that too much of your opponent’s range can play well against your hand and decrease your equity? Focus on the math, not the often misleading generality. 9. “I don’t want to build a pot with a marginal hand.” Similarly, there are plenty of times when you should be making thin value bets on the flop and turn with hands that can’t stand up to further aggression. In fact, sometimes with a marginal hand, your best play is to be aggressive and get the money in while there is still at least some value to be had. Progressing as a poker player means winning pots with more than just your monsters and your bluffs, it means making the most in EV on every single value hand you are dealt, even if that means playing it safe less often.
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10. “If I have Q6 on a 642 board, I hate all turn cards that aren’t queens or sixes.” Thinking like this often leads people to over-protect their hand and be too scared of what cards can come. For example, if you had the Q6 in position on this hand and your opponent check/ called a bet, a Jack on the turn would improve your equity in the hand against his range. Just because a jack increases the amount of hands that beat you doesn’t mean that the card increases that percentage in your opponent’s range of hands. Don’t be scared, make a real value bet, and don’t try too much to push people out on these type of flops. The reason for doing so is emotional, not mathematical. 11a. “Let’s bet big, I have a big hand!” 11b. “Let’s bet small, I don’t want to scare him off.” Different types of players tend to have one of these two instincts when learning the game. Each seems immediately justifiable, but neither is well thought out when applied globally. Whether to bet big, small, or anywhere in between with your monsters depends on your opponent, the board texture, your opponent’s range, your image, your perceived range, and a host of other factors. Often, players will quickly bet big or small without thinking about any of these details, just out of instinct. The first half of this article introduced how there are dozens of common flawed ways of thinking about HUSNG poker that are pervasive amongst average midstakes players. In general, they tend to make use of heuristics that end up distracting from an accurate equity calculation at the core of the decision. We’ll now broaden this understanding towards your poker career and out-of-game poker choices, with a few more examples of specific common in-game situations interspersed along the way. 12. “I haven’t really thought about how much I’ll play poker and when I’ll move on from the game, or applied that to any of my decisions.” Buried at #12, this is perhaps the biggest large-scale leak you can fix if you have it.
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When you decide how much to study poker, whether to invest in a coach or a training site, whether to move up, how many buyins to carry, what game selection to employ, and so many other decisions, you are making choices that are drastically affected by how much you’ll play in your life. If you pick one stat to focus on maximizing in your poker career, it shouldn’t be ROI, your current hourly rate, or even your lifetime profit. For most people, the best goal is maximizing your lifetime hourly rate. Make the most from the time you put in, both in fun and in money. If you think you might give up poker in a couple of months, a subscription to a training site is far less valuable than if you know you are in it for the long haul. If you have no ambitions of moving up, focusing on bumhunting to maximize your current hourly rate is better, but otherwise, you’re holding yourself back from the skills that will allow you to succeed at the next level. Start thinking about where you see yourself in poker in a few years and how to give yourself the best possible career path. 13. “There isn’t much of a point in studying how to beat fish; I want to learn how to beat regs.” Do you think you’re beating fish as badly as Phil Ivey would? That you’re playing perfect poker? If you’re sane and don’t think this, money is a continuum, and the extra 2% of EV ROI you pick up against a regular fish is just as important as the extra 2% of EV ROI you pick up against a decent reg in an individual match. Learning how to beat good players is important as you move up, but complacency about how you play against fish is lighting money on fire. Maximally exploiting bad players is an exceedingly complicated concept and one that deserves to be treated as such. If you think you should “just play ABC”, you’re missing out on a lot of money. 14. “I know this strategy is unexploitable, so it’s what I choose to use.” This attitude falls back on the crutch of knowing a play is +EV, afraid to search for lines that have even better equity.
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For example, many players want to ease themselves of the emotional swings of playing shortstacked poker by strictly adhering to NASH and consoling themselves about how they had positive expectation, never mind the boatloads of EV they threw away to be convinced of that. 15a. “Deepstacked poker is pretty simple, I don’t have much to learn there.” 15b. “Shortstacked poker is pretty simple, I don’t have much to learn there.” I would get absolutely crushed against the best shortstacked HUSNG player in the world, and similarly dominated against the best deepstacked player. There’s always plenty to learn. Headsup players have notoriously big egos, and defense mechanisms that get in the way of improvement. Always be excited to learn when someone says you’re not playing well. Take it as an opportunity to get better and win even more money in the future, or learn more about why your play was actually correct. Don’t close yourself off from chances to improve just because you want to feel confident in your game. 16. “So I checked to be deceptive...” This is in the “tell me more” family of errors, where too often, people think this is reason enough to trap. Why is checking the best option, equity-wise? What does your opponent’s range look like? How do you know it’s worth being deceptive against? Learn what are and aren’t sufficient reasons to take a particular line. 17. “I like to mix up my play and take different lines, with or without reads.” Translation: I like to take suboptimal lines just for fun. If you’re not going to have a long history with your opponent, don’t play them like it. Take the most profitable line. 18. “When I hit the turn after check/calling the flop, I should almost always check the turn to give villain a chance to bet again.” Check/call the flop, and insta-check the turn when you hit:
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along with looking away from the computer screen right after you see that you hit, it’s an instinctual reaction. However, when that card is an overcard to the board against a player who does not double barrel wide for value or for bluff, leading the turn often does far, far better on average than checking. Take into account your opponent’s range, how much of that range is now marginal showdown value that is likely to check, and consider leading rather than just mechanically checking to the aggressor. 19. “If villain calls flop bets light, he’s a station, and I shouldn’t bother bluffing against him very much on any street.” When people call flop bets light, they have a significantly weaker range for the rest of the hand, a range that produces much more fold equity than against players who call the flop in fit-or-fold fashion. True, some players will call down all the way no matter what they have, but it’s a mistake to shut down on bluffing just because you find out your opponent likely has a weak range. 20. “I don’t know how I’d be exploitable if someone analyzed my database.” In thinking about balance and exploiting the tendencies of other winning regs, the best thing to do is know yourself. You know how you feel in different spots, you know how you play, and you know where you can be exploited. Or, at least, you should. Take a while to think about it. Here are a couple common tendencies for winning low-mid stakes husng players. 1. When you raise a healthy-sized river bet, it’s almost always for value. 2. When you three-bet and readlessly check a 987ss flop with two times the pot left in your stack, your range is pretty weak. Sound familiar? Do this type of analysis on your own play, knowing everything that you know about it, and it will help you understand how to exploit others. 21. “If I have a suited hand in the BB and flop a pair
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and a flush draw, I’m pretty much always check/raising because I know I have great equity.” This is just to hammer home the point with an example a lot of mid-high stakes players can make errors on. Just because you know you have great equity and a non-monster does not mean it’s best to check/raise. When you have a pair and a two-card flush draw on the flop, you’re in good shape. Anything besides folding is going to be +EV. Break down your opponent’s range and what actions make the most against different hands. While check/raising is often best, a good percentage of the time, check/calling or leading is preferable. 22. “If I make this play, I might make money in the short run, but I’ll soon become exploitable.” This reasoning serves as a crutch for people who are afraid to deviate from their moderately winning strategies, and is not grounded in equity. It’s okay to be exploitable. You play most people only for a game or two and should be trying to maximize your value from their tendencies. If you think your opponent might be catching on, keep being a moving target, and continue to exploit. Having a strategy that is willing to be dynamic takes more effort, but it gets rewarded when you click the withdrawal button. To take your game to the next level, you have to figure out what aspects of your thought process about the game are distracting you from what really matters: Your EV, both in-game and in your lifetime poker career. Talk with your friends about this list, defend ones you think you might disagree with, come up with more that I’ve forgotten, and work hard to rid your mind of the flawed understandings that keep you from making the most from the hands you’re dealt and the games you play.
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Limpers and Minbetters ChicagoRy I posted these on my blog in the last few months ago. I should have x-posted them here sooner, but I kind of forgot about them. Feel free to comment/question them, that’s what they are here for, discussion and learning. Dealing With Min Bettors The first question in the Q and A is from Marchy in Germany. Question: How do you handle players who minbet (1/4 to 1/3 of the pot about) 90% of the flops? At the moment i play the 33s on FullTilt and there are lots of these guys. I just cant stand them because i really dont know what the best strategy is against them. Response: This is a very good question. This is something I struggled with early on in my husng progression and I’m sure many others have or do struggle with as well. There are a few things I like to keep in mind when dealing with min bettors: 1) We’re usually dealing with a very wide range of hands, so we should not try to narrow their hand range down based on actions that do not warrant it. 2) Our odds of calling a min bet on the flop are much greater
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than on the turn, therefore we’ll probably be calling a lot more often on the flop and we shouldn’t be worried about folding turns. 3) We want to be careful about getting overzealous about raising them too often in small pots and folding to the min bet too often in bigger pots. Keeping those points in mind, here are a few things I like to do against min bettors: - Figuring out if they will min bet 3 streets with strong hands (top pairs+), good draws (flush draws, OESDs, weaker pair combo draws), weak draws (low flush draws, gutshot straights, overcards) and outright “bluffs” (weak hands that need runner runner to beat most hands that will play a big pot). If they are not following the same betting pattern with all of these hands, then I want to try to find out which hands that they are deviating from their min bet strategy with and what they are doing instead. - I want to also figure out how they react to a raise. I generally want to raise a stronger hand first, because most min bettors are going to be too loose and call with a lot of hands they should not on the flop, at least in the early portion of our match. If I notice a fold I’ll try again, perhaps with an outright bluff or semi bluff, if they fold again I start to see they are weak and will throw in a good amount of bluff raises along with semi bluff and strong hands and wait until they adjust. While I may not always get action on my strong hands, the raises are most likely going to frustrate the player. - It might not be too difficult to win when you are hitting cards/ boards vs these players, but what about when you are card dead and the boards just aren’t hitting your starting hands? In these cases, you really have to pay attention to how you are playing your high cards, how often you are chasing without the correct odds and other decisions you make in marginal/close spots. If a player is going to min bet every street with any hand, it’s
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going to be correct to call down with a hand like A high. If you notice he is starting to check hands that are really weak or that have no showdown value, you’re going to want to adjust and starting folding high cards to his bets. A few things you’ll want to avoid are bluffing off a lot of chips because “I haven’t bet big in awhile, he has to respect me here” or “he bets every street, he can’t call a few raises from me.” Be careful on taking raises too far. If you bluff raise his min bet on the flop and he calls, be weary about following through on the turn. Don’t blindly spew chips against these players, that is how they are going to win because they usually don’t get enough value out of their bigger hands and end up letting you build pots when you want with stronger hands. A few other lesser points that I want to make about playing min bettors: - Don’t over or under raise them. For example, if they bet 30 into a 200 pot on the turn, raising your weak top pair to 400 is going to be an over raise. On the flip side, raising 3x to 90 is going to probably be an under raise. Often times against constant min bettors, I almost “ignore” their small bet and just raise them to what I would bet if they had checked. In this case it would be a 130-160 type turn bet (raise) that I would make. - Like I said earlier, be aware of the odds you are being offered compared to their presumably very wide range of hands. You also want to be aware of the odds you are offering them. If their drawing hands are 20-25% likely to hit the river, you don’t want to “keep them in the pot” with an under raise that offers them the correct odds to draw. They will likely make the mistake of calling without odds, so don’t be too worried about pushing them out of the pot with a 4-5x raise. In fact, your raises will often be over 4x the bet against min bettors. In conclusion, since this is a player and situations you’re probably not dealing with on a regular basis, you might have to think a little longer/harder when facing the min bettor. While I gave a lot of general advice, you should find enough above to effectively combat the min bettor and to get you thinking in the right direction against almost all of them.
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I’d say above all, awareness is key against these players, and the most common mistake is a lack of discipline and emotional control when dealing with these players. The same can go for the opposite end of the spectrum, the aggro-maniacs, though it is not just a simple “take this advice but apply it in the opposite direction.” That, however, is another day and another blog post.” -------------Facing A Limp (Or why you should resist the temptation of raising limps over and over and over again) You probably get what I’m going to advocate in this post. First, the following is a response to another question from Spacko about “when you should raise limpers.” It’s a very general question but I notice that even good players often have a general problem with how they approach this area of the game. Lets begin by looking at reasons why people raise limps. **We’ll assume that effective stacks are a relatively deep 4075bb, unless otherwise noted. 1. Our hand is better than the range of hands villain will call with. 2. We think villain will fold a tremendous amount of time and we will raise for the fold equity. You could call this a bluff-raise. 3. We have a great read on villain and have found an exploit in their game (fairly rare early on). For example, a player that calls almost ATC preflop but is very weak/tight postflop. You would want to get chips in the pot preflop to steal postflop. There are no doubt other reasons you can raise a limp, but the most common will be similar to the 3 above. We’ll start with raising for pure hand value. A common reply to “why did you raise his limp with that hand (we’ll say a hand like QTo)?” is “he’ll call with worse hands.” That is probably true, a lot of villains will limp and then call a 3-5x raise with a lot of
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worse hands. But unfortunately, many people don’t consider other factors of the hand besides the hand values. The first factor of the hand that a lot of people ignore is position. You’re out of position, so you’re at a disadvantage (the deeper you are the more this is true). This will weaken your holding/value somewhat. Another factor is postflop play. How does your opponent play postflop? What is his calling range? What is his limping range? If you’re having trouble answering any of those questions, raising a medium-strong hand like QTo OOP for around 4x the bb is probably not going to put you in good spots postflop. As an example of how crucial it is to know most if not all of these things about your opponent, I’ll point you to a recent thread in 2+2: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/ sh...d.php?t=177357 In this thread, Skates (a 220-550 regular) raised Heir Apparent’s (a very solid 200/220 regular) limp with what you could call a “medium-strong” hand. He assumed that Heir would raise any ace preflop, so therefore an ace could not be in his calling range. Based on that assumption, it would be a pretty easy call based on Heir’s line (call, c/c, c/bet). However, Skates even admitted that he was pretty confused about the hand/line and it turns out Heir had a weak ace. Throw aces into Heir’s range and it would be a pretty clear fold on this river. Moving on, the other big reason people will give when raising a limp is “he’s only limping weak hands, he’ll probably fold.” While this is fine reasoning, this is generally not worth doing until effective stacks (in bbs) are pretty small (think like < 30bbs deep). Most players will adjust after you raise their limps a few times, so you’re not going to want to pick up their 20 or 30 chips once or twice when you have 1500 chips and then have to figure out how they are adjusting later on. Knowing they are limping weak and/or folding often is going to be much more valuable when you can pick up 50-100 chips each time or more appropriately, 5-15% of their stack a pop. I’ll touch on one other point about limp raising before I conclude, and that would be to think about what it means to
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face a limp. Are you really worried about a player limping his button when stacks are deep? You shouldn’t be. Most players are losing value by constantly limping their button when stacks are deep, so why should you abuse that leak early on and force them to raise more often in position and generally play more aggressively throughout the game? It is my belief that you should not. Now lets quickly touch on when you should raise limps. -The blinds are a big % of the effective stacks. 5-15% is probably a good rule of thumb for when you really want to be paying attention and looking for spot to raise limps for fold equity. -You really have a good grasp on this villain and his calling range as well as his postflop play. -Your hand is very strong. I would never suggest checking a hand like 99 or AK in the big blind when a player limps. With a hand like this, your hand is just too strong to not want to build a pot, position or not, good reads or not. Building off of that, my default raising range for low-mid stakes husngs would be 55+, A9s, ATo+, KJs+, KQo+. That range would change as effective stacks, game flow and reads developed and changed, but on the first hand of a 22 dollar husng that would be my suggest raising range facing a limp from a random player. To conclude, in general I would suggest letting players limp early but especially paying attention to limp ranges, reactions to aggression and postflop play of villains so that you can take advantage of poor play as effective big blinds get shallow and leaks grow tremendously. A good way to gain this information is to mainly only raise strong hands early on when facing a limp, and to deviate from that strategy as the conditions above warrant.”
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Overbet NASH Mersenneary For those of you expecting “Everything I know about Poker” as promised in the Regs thread, that’ll come eventually when I have more time. As for now, here’s a formal explanation of why you see (and should see more) overbetting in matches between good players, especially when they have a history together. Take the following hand that occured early on at a 10k HU Event I just made up: MersennearyPoker.com $10000.00 No Limit Hold’em Tournament - 2 players - Blinds t5/t10 - The Official Reddit. com Hand History Converter Hero (BB): t3500 BTN/SB: t2500 Pre Flop: (t15) Hero is BB with A 5 BTN/SB raises to t20, Hero calls t10 Flop: (t40) 5 A Q (2 players) Hero checks, BTN/SB bets t40, Hero raises to t160, BTN/SB calls t120 Turn: (t360) 7 (2 players) Hero bets t320.00, BTN/SB calls t320 River: (t1000) Q (2 players) Hero checks, BTN/SB bets ?
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Suppose, further, that both players know that the BB has Ax here always (this isn’t the best hand to demonstrate this, as BB has plenty of busted draws, but whatever, pretend it’s a standard ace high board with no draws and it’s gone c/c c/c c/b if you’re hung up on that), and that BTN has 50% Qx+, and 50% air. This is, naturally, an idealized situation, but we’ll get to the practical applications at the end. For now, you should all know what the Nash Equilibrium of this situation is (Equilibrium isn’t just an endgame thing). Do you? If not, let’s calculate it. For demonstration purposes: Let’s assume as the button, we have three choices on some site with crummy software: Betting t500, betting t1000, or betting t2000 all-in to the pot of t1000. Let’s say we decide to bet t2000, or not at all. In Nash Equilibrium, after you make your river bet, your opponent should be indifferent between calling and folding. Hence, as the button, along with betting t2000 for all of our value hands, we want to bet t2000 with the percentage of our air that makes it so folding and calling have the same EV for our opponent. The math on that: Code: -500 = (2500)x - (2500)(1-x) -500 = 5000x - 2500 2000 = 5000x x = 2/5 Thus, at Nash Equilibrium, BTN shoves what makes a BB call correct 2/5 of the time. So, BTN shoves 100% of her value and shoves 2/3 of her air. This makes BB indifferent between calling and folding, meaning that 5/6 of the time, BTN has an expectation of +t500, and 1/6 of the time, BTN concedes the pot for an expectation of -t500. Hence, EV playing this strategy is +t333. Let’s note what happens if we try to make our bets only in 1000, or only in 500: If we’re betting 1000, again, we should be doing so with 100% of our Qx+, and some % of our air. BB should be indifferent between calling and folding in equilibrium. Code:
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-500 = (1500)x - (1500)(1-x) -500 = 3000x - 1500 1000 = 3000x x = 1/3 Thus, we want to bet what makes BB call correctly 1/3 of the time. So, we shove 100% of our value hands and 50% of our air. This makes BB indifferent between calling and folding, meaning that 3/4 of the time, we have an expectation of +t500, and 1/4 of the time, we concede the pot for an expectation -t500. This means our expectation playing this strategy is +t250. At equilibrium, betting pot is inferior to overbetting 2x pot. If we’re betting 500, you know the drill... Code: -500 = (1000)x - (1000)(1-x) -500 = 2000x - 1000 500 = 2000x x = 1/4 So we bet what makes BB call correctly 1/4 of the time, which means betting 100% of value and 33.3% of air. 2/3 of the time we have an expectation of +t500, 1/3 of the time it’s -t500. Expectation playing this strategy is +t167. The bigger the bet, the bigger the EV. Let’s take it to the extreme, though. Say we’re really deepstacked, perhaps at a cash game with 10k behind and this river decision. This is also applicable in smaller HUSNG pots. If we make a big overbet shove (crazy, reckless stuff, right?), what’s our EV? Code: -500 =(10500)x - (10500)(1-x) -500 = 21000x - 10500 10000 = 21000x x = 47.6% Which means we bet 100% of our value and 90.8% of our air, giving us an expectation of +453, the best yet. The general theme: When it’s clear your opponent is highly unlikely to have anything other than bluffcatcher, your chipstack is a weapon. You want to use your chips to allow you to remain
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unexploitable as you bluff with a bigger percentage of your air hands. Two quick points to make, which I won’t bother to show the math on: 1. At equilibrium, overbetting is better than any combination of small/large bets with different types of hands. 2. Shoving is still a Nash Equilibrium regardless of what percentages BTN has air and value; it doesn’t have to be 50/50. OK, you get it. But you read 2+2 strat so you can take more maney. When does this help me take maney? The downside: I am a strong advocate that in the vast majority of games, Nash Equilibria are going to be useless. Nash relies on both players having perfect information about each other’s strategies. This is ridiculous. If a Nash Equilibrium calls for you to do something 90% of the time, you might as well do it 100% of the time - nobody’s going to know. Mediocre players who have no history, aren’t attempting to balance ranges, and do not respond appropriately when you unbalance yours, make it a critical error to not go for MORE than the +t300 expectation that t2000 overbet shoving guarantees you in this hand. There also will be concerns about variance and putting your stack at risk for too slight of edges. All these are legitimate concerns: There’s simply no reason to play any Nash, be it end-game or early-game, if deviating from it affords you a better winrate because of the incompetence of your opponent. However, as you move up in stakes and get more and more history between common opponents, who tend to understand and react appropriately to your frequencies, you need to start playing more equilibrium strategies. The Nash Equilibrium here is overbetting, and that’s a significant part of why you see it at higher stakes, taking advantage of players who would never, ever check the river with a big hand in the example above. Stop thinking about Nash in poker as only relevant to the endgame and start thinking more about it in early-game decisions when you’re up against a tough opponent, especially one you have history with. I would argue that the “you only have a bluffcatcher” situation is pretty commonplace, but regardless, there are numerous other spots that make thinking about equilibrium and how its occasionally counterintuitive conclusions more than mental masturbation, but hookers and blow from all
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of the bing blang blaow you’re going to be singing.
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Preflop Ranges in HU SnG lagdonk I think one way of looking at it is: You want to raise as many BTNs as you can get away with before/unless villain adjusts. So theoretically you can start off by opening 100% and seeing how villain responds. Some people will start off at 85-90%, because opening 100% has a certain feel to it that causes some villains to play back faster (‘omg he’s blindly clicking raise every time he has the BTN’) than if you occasionally fold your BTN (‘oh he has some standards, even if they’re minimal.’) You may want to start reducing your BTN opens if villain starts 3-betting a lot and is hyper-aggro in 3-bet pots / doesn’t fold easily to positional pressure and is generally hyper-aggro OOP / will pay you off lightly but will not go away often enough when you have air unless you put stacks into play every time. In such cases, opening super-wide might still be profitable if you’re skilled post-flop, but the match becomes much easier to play if you reduce your opens to like 60%-75%, especially since most villains of the type I described won’t adjust well. (For example, there are hugely losing villains whose basic approach is to try to win every pot, literally, no matter how many chips they risk and almost no matter what kind of resistance you put up. Opening super-wide against them can get really tough if you’re not running hot or sick good, because you basically have to show them a hand or bluff for stacks or fold and bleed off chips every time you enter a pot.) As far as raise-sizing pf goes, I recommend HokieGreg’s advice (which I presume is standard) when getting started, until you
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design a scheme of your own that you prefer for whatever reason. The key is that your pf raise-sizing should take effective stack size into account. You don’t want to be opening 3x when too shallow, because it’s pretty easy to exploit by 3-bet shoving, unless you open a ridiculously low percentage of hands. There are posts about this on this forum; search for “3-bet shoving 25 bbs deep” by Insane_Steve. Anyway, HokieGreg’s advice: raise 3x between 75-51 bbs deep, raise 2.5x between 50-30 bbs deep, and raise 2x between 30-13 bbs deep. Below that, a lot of people start playing push-or-fold preflop, using the Nash Equilibrium tables as a guide. As far as limping is concerned, some people never/rarely do it, and stick to raise-or-fold pf, and do just fine. Others will limp anything they’re not raising, until villain starts attacking their limps, and then they’ll mix in some strong hands into their limps and fold the very worst of their limping hands, in order to make life harder for villain. I typically don’t limp until the effective stack is less than 23bbs, then I start doing it with many weakish and some strong hands. So there’s a lot of flexibility in this arena. Finally, you say OOP you call anything remotely decent and raise all decent hands to 3 bb. I’m not sure exactly what ranges you mean here, but I strongly recommend starting out by playing very tight OOP. You can call min-raises a little wider than 3x raises, but the key is to play OOP pots much less frequently than pots in position. Look for hands that flop well, where both cards can make a decent pair, so K9s > A2o. Also watch how frequently your opponent raises; you don’t want to be calling with dominated hands against a nitty BTN-raiser (they do show up.) Your OOP play is of course conditioned but how well or poorly villain plays post-flop. Some guys will give you free turns when they miss and check/fold when they don’t connect and you fire turn or river. Others will c-bet 100% but play very weakly against frequent check-raises. But please, please start off by playing tightly OOP. And if someone limps into your BB, don’t raise their limp with a wide range until you know exactly what you’re doing. Start off by only raising limps with something like 88+, QJ+, KT+, AT+, and taking free flops with the rest of your hands.
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Push-Fold Poker spamz Some people asked me to write this for a belgian pokerforum and I figured I could just post it here as well because there’s a question about this pretty much twice every week in the beginner’s thread and I think this is a decent guide for beginning players to play the really shallow endgame of a sng without too much errors or misinformation (or generally lack of information). Nothing really groundbreaking in here for more experienced players I think. Stuff in advance: If you have t2700 and villain t300 and blinds are 15/30, you are indeed the chipleader but this shouldn’t adjust your play AT ALL. You’re still only 10bb’s and should treat it like you both have t300 in chips. Obviously if you make an ev- shove or call here you’re going to lose less $$$ in ev than if stacks would be t2000 and t1000 and blinds 50/100 but you’re still 10bb’s deep and ev- decisions stay ev-! Don’t think about “I can gamble, if he doubles up, I’m still big chipleader!” make sure your moves are ev+. Maybe I’ve been a bit to harsh about “it shouldn’t affect your play” because sometimes it can. However, this will not be because of your play, but because of villain’s play. Some people will shove ATC when they have the chiplead with the 2.7k in chips because they indeed want to finish you quickly, so your callingrange should get wider by a decent percentage. Also if you just won a big pot from villain one way or another this will affect metagame and he may be tilted so you should try and add these into the equation when you calculate ranges and odds and stuff. Just keep in mind that in the end you should
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only look at the amount of bb’s you have. Even if you play a big mtt, there won’t come any ICM into play. Suppose first prize is €2k and second prize is €1k, then you already have won the €1k and can just look at the end-game as being a €500 hu sng. Doesn’t matter how big the difference between first and second place is really. Sage: Most people have probably heard about this already, you can find a lot of links about it if you google for a bit. (See attached) Sage works with a chart and a power-index which is really easy to memorize. You just have to know how shallow effective stacks are and calculate the power index for your hand and see whether you push or fold. Power index is easy to calculate, just take the value of your highest card (ace is 15, not 14, face cards are 11,12,13 obv) and double it; add the value of the other card to it and if it’s suited add an additional 2. If you have a pocket pair you add 22 to the number. Then you look in the chart and see if you can push/fold from your button and if you can call if villain openshoves. Note that this becomes slightly ev- for the sb to push starting from 7bb’s. Small negative ev, but still ev-. So you should only adapt this when really shallow imo. Also note that this is far from optimal play. If you think villain shoves tight your calling range should be a little tighter but you can shove wider. Basically (since it only works for 6bb’s or shallower) this is just a crapshoot and it’s almost a “push any two cards” and hope villain folds. 6bb’s is really nothing, and you barely need fold equity preflop to make shoving ATC ev+ because there’s already 1.5bb’s in the pot. Some higher stakes winning players actually DO shove ATC in these spots because villain will often have a way too tight callingrange. Nash equilibrum: Something a little more worked out and interesting is the nash equilibrum:
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(See attached) problem is you just see a chart there and while the chart itself is still pretty easy to figure out, you still need some info to go with it to know what you’re doing. Why are we shoving 54s for 20+bb’s for example, but not J8o? Let’s just say we’re playing headsup, we’re 100bb’s deep and I’m on the button. You know 100% sure I only openshove AA on the button. If I openshove what’s your callingrange? Obv only the other two aces. When I openshove KK+ what’s your callingrange? Still, only AA. When I openshove QQ+ your callingrange is KK+ (although KK only has 49.995% equity vs QQ+ it’s still an ev+ call due to the sb + bb in the pot). Okay that’s for strong hands, now let’s look at a range of {AA,54s}. What’s your callingrange now? You call with KK? equity win tie pots won pots tied Hand 0: 58.174% 57.94% 00.23% 59530656 236778.00 { AA, 54s } Hand 1: 41.826% 41.60% 00.23% 42734028 236778.00 { KK } Appearantly calling with KK will lose you money in the long run. A lot of people think that in the nash pushing chart shoving a hand like 54s is 20bb’s+ and 54o for 2.1bb’s is because 54s has more equity because of the possibility to hit a flush. This BARELY has anything to do with it. In the small example I gave here the only reason why KK is not an ev+ call is because there’s 6 combo’s of AA and only 4 combo’s of 54s. There’s 12 combo’s of 54o, so... equity win tie pots won pots tied Hand 0: 39.788% 39.56% 00.23% 73162224 417762.00 { AA, 54o } Hand 1: 60.212% 59.99% 00.23% 110931084 417762.00 { KK } this makes KK a snapcall if your range would be {AA,54o}. So they started like this and in the end they came up with an entire chart of all hands you can openshove which is unexploitable for 20bb’s or shallower. There’s a decent amount of hands which say 20bb’s+ but the maker of the chart just
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assumed that you shouldn’t play push/fold deeper. Openshoving A2o for 200bb’s would be very likely ev- if villain has a different callingrange than the “nash equilibrum” calling chart. So this is an equilibrum, which means a stalemate position: if both hero and villain use the pushing and callingrange you’re gonna be ev0 against each other. If one of the two deviates from one of the charts, he’s gonna be ev- against the other. What does this mean? Do NOT use the CALLING chart against a random opponent. Actually, it’s better not to use it vs ANY opponent unless you know 100% sure he uses the nash pushing chart, which is a really rare occassion. Just forget about the callingrange and you’ll be better off imo. It only is ev0 if villain uses the pushing chart and will be ev- in pretty much all other cases. Another important thing you have to remember: don’t deviate from it if you want to use it. Suppose you’re 11bb’s shallow and you have Q7o. Nash says you can openshove this and it will be ev0 at worst. HOWEVER, what would you do with QQ+ in this spot? Would you also openshove it? Or limp or minraise in order to induce a shove from villain? If you would also openshove these hands, you can indeed openshove the Q7o as well. If you would play any other hand differently from the chart it becomes totally worthless and would have to be recalculated entirely before the equilibrum can be reached. Can you still openshove this? Hard to determine a new equilibrum so you should go to Chubukov instead. I wouldn’t really recommend using this above 12bb’s, where there’s still room to manoeuvre a bit preflop. Usually 10-12bb’s is the part where I start openshoving a lot of my buttons, because minraise/folding becomes too expensive and you need some specific gameflow for your opponent to allow limping (however, if villain allows you to limp, do it as much as possible and try to just stab at it postflop; i sometimes limp some hands which i could shove ev+ for sure but i just don’t want to change the dynamics of the match and let villain see some flops because it keeps him passive and happy). One last thing is that you have to take the bb and sb posted with the effective stacks in the chart (so looking for push/fold BEFORE blinds are posted actually).
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Chubukov: Okay, let’s just say you’re in a spot now with K3s, there’s an aggro push/fold dynamic already and you are on the button with 12bb’s effective stacks. Nash says this is a push, but let’s just face it, you’re probably not gonna openshove QQ+ vs this aggrotard who has attacked all your limps preflop already and will just limp in most of the time. Can you still openshove the K3s? Look at Chubukov imo: (See attached) What is this? This is a chart which says how deep you can be EXPRESSED IN SMALL BLINDS to openshove a hand and be still ev0 at worst when villain has a perfect callingrange due to flipping over your cards (the amount of small blinds is shown in the right column, so just cut in half for bb’s obv). Obv AA you can shove for infinite bb’s as you chop in worst case. KK will only get called by KK+ so that’s a tiny fraction of a random hand and you still have equity when called (like you always do). So you look up K3s and see that you can openshove it for 14.2bb’s! That’s a whole lot, even though nash gives us almost 20bb’s, we can still openshove a ton here without openshoving the top of our range. Basically his callingrange will be any pocket pair, any Ax and K3s+/K4o+ hands. What are the important things to remember from this chart? The fact you can openshove K2o for 10bb’s preflop imo. So shoving a pocket pair, Ax or Kx hand for 10bb’s or less is always gonna be ev0 at worst, irregardless of villain’s callingrange. Again, don’t overdo this, even with aggro dynamics there’s a lot of play left from 12-20bb’s and you can limp/openshove/ minraise/fold instead of just openshoving. Given, this will take some time to master because it depends a lot on villain and gameflow but if you get some experience in it it shouldn’t be THAT hard to quickly see how villain plays and adapt to it. Cliffnotes: 1) Sage is a bit outdated. Just use nash for 6bb’s or shallower because you will probably openshove QQ+ anyway with these stacksizes. 2) Use nash only if you use it correctly, and preferably 12bb’s or shallower.
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3) Use Chubukov if you dislike minraise/calling a shove, or limp/folding, or folding in general, but openshoving is appearantly ev+, also don’t use it over - say - 14bb’s imo. Openshoving 33 or K3s for 13bb’s is something I do from time to time, against certain opponents it’s going to be the easiest way to play these hands. 4) When your opponent openshoves his button for x bb’s, don’t use any chart, but estimate a shoving range and see if you have odds to call with the dead money in the pot.
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Sage
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Nash
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Chubukov N_call and N_fold are the number of hands that will call/fold given that you move in with the maximum stack that you will do so with. P|call is the probability of winning given that you are called (plus 1/2 the probability of tieing). The last number is the original question.
Hand AA KK AKs QQ AKo JJ AQs TT AQo 99 AJs 88 ATs AJo 77 66 ATo A9s 55 A8s KQs 44 A9o A7s KJs A5s A8o A6s A4s 33 KTs A7o A3s KQo A2s A5o A6o A4o KJo QJs 48
N_call 1 7 75 13 79 19 84 25 93 31 96 41 108 105 61 103 117 123 153 135 256 275 129 147 265 171 141 159 183 455 277 155 195 265 207 181 171 202 277 418
N_fold 1224 1218 1150 1212 1146 1206 1141 1200 1132 1194 1129 1184 1117 1120 1164 1122 1108 1102 1072 1090 969 950 1096 1078 960 1054 1084 1066 1042 770 948 1070 1030 960 1018 1044 1054 1023 948 807
P|call 0.500000 0.226177 0.457697 0.207007 0.433132 0.201104 0.424149 0.198947 0.403144 0.197142 0.401528 0.226651 0.385544 0.379834 0.285621 0.355264 0.362908 0.367405 0.389493 0.361211 0.429500 0.431528 0.339884 0.356565 0.419399 0.367031 0.332789 0.352858 0.366358 0.454268 0.411707 0.329722 0.366882 0.400723 0.366815 0.340952 0.329477 0.347061 0.391325 0.432774
Max Stack for EV > 0 Inf 953.995465 554.509992 478.008197 331.887184 319.213589 274.211191 239.821017 192.670217 191.413933 183.221336 159.296894 138.913083 136.310470 134.847705 115.348532 106.264712 104.124788 98.629873 89.865649 86.627695 81.979590 81.716196 79.175905 72.621257 72.292128 70.956513 70.744533 66.650529 65.440821 62.805558 62.747746 62.275315 58.771664 58.141993 56.542087 56.151230 51.939490 50.838788 49.515440
A3o 22 K9s A2o KTo QTs K8s K7s JTs K9o K6s QJo Q9s K5s K8o K4s QTo K7o K3s K2s Q8s K6o J9s K5o Q9o JTo K4o Q7s T9s Q6s K3o J8s Q5s K2o Q8o Q4s J9o Q3s T8s J7s Q7o Q2s Q6o 98s Q5o J8o T9o J6s T7s J5s Q4o J4s J7o
220 709 295 240 289 430 307 325 570 301 337 433 457 349 324 367 445 344 379 394 469 368 597 408 459 585 458 484 721 499 508 609 514 555 479 547 597 568 733 624 520 591 566 841 652 613 721 648 748 686 748 751 657
1005 516 930 985 936 795 918 900 655 924 888 792 768 876 901 858 780 881 846 831 756 857 628 817 766 640 767 741 504 726 717 616 711 670 746 678 628 657 492 601 705 634 659 384 573 612 504 577 477 539 477 474 568
0.351305 0.467553 0.392879 0.355839 0.383383 0.426952 0.378141 0.378587 0.440073 0.361114 0.375940 0.404082 0.409880 0.371933 0.351582 0.371425 0.398126 0.353033 0.369025 0.367883 0.394731 0.355714 0.422213 0.363569 0.377014 0.411106 0.373684 0.381931 0.434081 0.382276 0.383123 0.406766 0.379236 0.389958 0.363775 0.381543 0.389470 0.380696 0.418399 0.393116 0.359844 0.380441 0.370110 0.427277 0.386607 0.374112 0.402190 0.383218 0.404171 0.388455 0.400659 0.396332 0.368521
48.445438 48.054119 47.812358 45.172344 44.946538 43.809464 39.910810 37.330652 36.106522 35.754152 34.890001 32.816822 32.519706 32.303331 30.473887 30.163283 29.716401 28.541184 28.381805 26.730843 26.718552 26.675708 25.712524 24.680974 23.419539 23.085252 22.845021 22.685237 22.491482 21.785164 21.392219 20.636243 20.321860 19.999415 19.819326 18.916352 17.799380 17.734011 17.465705 17.194521 17.077335 16.641032 16.295139 15.293343 15.034981 14.867761 14.832206 14.718597 14.199426 14.048416 13.662167 12.955471 12.666038 49
Q3o 97s T8o J3s T6s Q2o J2s 87s J6o 98o T7o 96s J5o T5s T4s 86s J4o T6o 97o T3s 76s 95s J3o T2s 87o 85s 96o T5o J2o 75s 94s T4o 65s 86o 93s 84s 95o T3o 76o 92s 74s 54s T2o 85o 64s 83s 94o 75o 82s 73s 93o 65o 53s 50
857 853 733 792 767 975 891 945 755 841 765 878 855 886 949 969 947 877 873 1026 1045 970 1047 1123 976 1039 987 1003 1129 1115 1063 1097 1159 1087 1121 1145 1133 1145 1164 1153 1198 1225 1149 1197 1225 1201 1201 1225 1207 1225 1200 1225 1225
368 372 492 433 458 250 334 280 470 384 460 347 370 339 276 256 278 348 352 199 180 255 178 102 249 186 238 222 96 110 162 128 66 138 104 80 92 80 61 72 27 0 76 28 0 24 24 0 18 0 25 0 0
0.415272 0.412903 0.385474 0.398770 0.391983 0.428097 0.412488 0.422015 0.378294 0.394874 0.374878 0.401527 0.395413 0.401897 0.408748 0.410324 0.405076 0.385581 0.384566 0.415998 0.418616 0.403431 0.415307 0.425488 0.396225 0.406723 0.393276 0.394962 0.420420 0.414674 0.403925 0.406874 0.418775 0.402754 0.409454 0.409633 0.406508 0.406672 0.410142 0.406646 0.412623 0.414534 0.397258 0.407938 0.413333 0.403003 0.400861 0.405120 0.398164 0.400359 0.393756 0.399443 0.396930
12.503232 12.251417 12.156984 12.040344 11.921088 11.302950 11.138727 11.110552 10.780675 10.271257 10.204755 10.097673 9.987293 9.946900 9.260066 8.994746 8.906238 8.571955 8.570963 8.415718 8.318417 8.261043 7.914721 7.538836 7.505732 7.239171 7.074151 6.920957 6.885765 6.594160 6.583641 6.248512 6.207388 6.099835 6.058991 5.692773 5.650827 5.480421 5.439126 5.359298 5.109201 4.850294 4.832254 4.812230 4.769221 4.463809 4.345783 4.269797 4.129509 4.018033 4.000304 3.972305 3.851054
63s 84o 92o 43s 74o 72s 54o 64o 52s 62s 83o 42s 82o 73o 53o 63o 32s 43o 72o 52o 62o 42o 32o
1225 1225 1215 1225 1225 1225 1225 1225 1225 1225 1225 1225 1225 1225 1225 1225 1225 1225 1225 1225 1225 1225 1225
0 0 10 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0.395336 0.394468 0.388261 0.386419 0.385498 0.381559 0.381553 0.380105 0.378493 0.376690 0.374838 0.368290 0.368277 0.366023 0.362648 0.360776 0.359844 0.351459 0.345836 0.342846 0.340751 0.331998 0.323032
3.777173 3.737896 3.585219 3.402163 3.366747 3.221509 3.221293 3.170312 3.114999 3.054809 2.994827 2.796223 2.795837 2.731972 2.640274 2.591343 2.567461 2.366073 2.243309 2.181602 2.139745 1.976146 1.825374
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Learnin’ Dem SnGs Good Hood I’m reformatting this post from my blog. It may be easier to read over there than here (see link in profile ldo) As I’ve said many times before, getting good at SNGs is _ hard_. Not only do we have to play competent FR or 6-max poker, but we also need to learn many additional sub-games: mid-level, bubble, and heads up. The games are tough now, and you need to be knowledgeable at every stage of the SNG to squeeze out your profit. When I played SNGs, I went through many iterations of game review using HEM and SNG Wizard to try to hone by general game and my ICM-based decisions. Here I’m going to outline my final method I used, which allowed me to review a very wide range of hands I played in a methodolical, systematic way. I was playing 50-80 SNGs a day, so it was impossible to review all hands. But at the same time, it is important - as you add on more tables and play more hours a day - to be confident you are not leaving unseen holes in your game. The main tools I used were HEM and SNG Wizard. I’m sure PT3 will do most - if not all - of what I lay out below (except where my own custom tools come in to play). Along with these 2 main programs, I developed various AHK scripts. Any mention of a script can be found in the “tools section”: http://www.sickread.com/blog/tools/ of this blog. I’m not here to pimp them out - I wrote them specifically for my own use as the needs arose, and have since made them available publicly. All the scripts are free (with the exception of
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a ‘pro’ version of WizHUD, but that’s an optional extra). I am splitting this in to two distinct sections: * The daily review * Systematically learning ICM from real hands This might seem like a lot of work. But in practice it’s much simpler than it sounds. Normally I would study an hour or two before playing each morning, then play for 5-6 hours. At the weekend, I would do the weekly ‘systematic’ review for a few hours. I think at least 20% studying time is the least you should be doing if you want to continue moving forward. Put in place your own strict study session and, using some of the techniques I outline below, you should be getting through a review session much quicker, and making much better use of your time.
I don’t play SNGs much any more. And I was not that hot at them. I think by the end I was playing the mid-stakes 6-max games on stars and beating them for some, but I was far from the best at the tables. A lot of my problems came from concentration issues playing multiple tables. I was never great at that. But what I was damn good at was my ICM. Gimme a situation and the stack sizes and reasonable calling ranges I could nail the correct range of hands to be shoving. I could give a pretty close approximation for nash for shover, SB and BB in most standard 2-4 situations, and this information was internalised through many hours of study. I’m sure many regulars on the forum can do the same, but for the new player, the task seems daunting. I’ve read many posts from players saying, “How exactly am i meant to remember this?”. Hopefully this post will help with that.
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The Daily Review. Marking hands and tournaments.
To be prepared for daily review, I would make extensive use of the ‘mark hand’ facility in hold’em manager whilst playing. I don’t just mark hands I feel I might have played incorrectly, but also hypothetical situations such as “well here this is an easy shove with A4o, but what if I make my hand J4o?”. I have a notepad by the laptop to make these additional notes. Using a hotkey (which is one of many I have in my “HEM Shortcuts” AHK script), I can mark the currently playing hand in HEM. I would also irregularly ‘mark’ entire tournaments. Again I had a small script to do this (which isn’t publicly available at the moment - but you can just jot down the last 3 #s of the tournament ID in your notepad for now). I would do this for when there was a string of interesting hands, say a long foughtout bubble with interesting stack sizes, or a long set of BvB situations vs. a reg. The Review Session I would review in the morning, reviewing yesterday’s hands. I preferred this so that it would get my brain working before I started playing my first set of SNGs. You may work better reviewing at the end of the day, whilst the hands are still fresh in your mind. But it’s important to get in to your regime and stick with it. I will mention something now that will come up a lot in this: I never use the SNG Wiz ‘game view’ (the list of hands in one tournament with tick marks) at any point of the review. I think many players do their reviews by just firing up some HHs in wiz, quickly scanning for any red X marks, checking a few
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hands, and calling it a day. I found this a very ineffective method, and potentially destructive way to learn. I’ll go in to this a bit later in part 2. Reviewing marked hands. So in HEM, set the date filter to ‘yesterday’, go to the tourney ‘hands’ tab, clear any filters, and check the ‘only show marked hands’. Click twice on the ‘date’ column to sort in chronological order (oldest first). Then right click and ‘Review all hands in replayer’. There’s no science to the next part - step through the hands, have your notebook ready, and check out those problem spots. This post isn’t about actually ‘how’ to improve, rather the methods I used to do a review, so I won’t go in to what exactly you should do at this stage - but a few pointers: if you want to get outside help on a hand, do it now when the hand is up in the replayer and you have stats. Post it on 2p2 (don’t use the ‘2p2’ format that HEM provides, it’s barely readable. Copy the ‘txt’ format, and paste that in to the 2p2 converter). Share it with a friend (I paste that same text in to weaktight.com). Paste it in an IM to a friend. Make use of HEM’s mini-hand history, that gives you your equity vs known hole cards on each street. If you have an ICM decision, send this hand to SNG Wizard. Locate the hand back in the HEM hand list. If you have WizHUD, you can middle click on a hand and it will be send to wiz for you. Otherwise, right click, copy hand to clipboard, then over on SNG Wizard, use the ‘paste’ button on the toolbar. Once I’ve been through marked hands, I do the same process but for marked tournaments. If I have no marked tournaments, I may just pick a couple at random, or maybe the last ones I played. Find the hands in Tourney > Results > Data View, find the tourney based on the # you wrote down, then sort the hands in chronological order, right click and replay all hands. Using all my shortcuts in HEM Shortcuts for the replayer, I can review a tourney _very_ fast. I could go through one and review/post important hands, check ICM spots in wiz, in 5 minutes.
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Daily hand filters. The second part of my daily ritual was running specific filters across the day’s hands. This would be a 4 or 5 filters saved in HEM to check common trouble spots. Often these would be checks to ensure I’m not making any misclicks or board misreads due to multitabling. For example, one time during a random tournament review, I missed an easy cbet on the flop. This was probably due to my focus on another table, and missing the action. So I set up a “missed flop cbet” filter, and ran it daily. Of course, some times I wanted to check back a flop, so I would have some ‘false positives’ in the filter, but having these filters, and knowing I would check them daily, gave me confidence to ignore these issues ingame because I knew they would surface in the review later. Similarly, at various times I made some changes to my default preflop decisions (for example, to open fold small PPs UTG in 6max). Because a lot of my preflop play is done automatically at a sub-conscious level, I was concerned I might not apply the changes. So I created a filter “vpipped 22-55 UTG/HJ with >20BB eff stack 4 players+”. The HEM filter system is pretty powerful once you get the hang of it, so many scenarios can be modelled and saved as filters to be run daily.
Systematically learning ICM from real hands The problem with using SNG Wizard for review. As I touched on earlier, I never use the wiz ‘game view’ when reviewing games or when trying to learn ICM. I think there are two inherent problems with the ‘scan the game view and look at the checkmarks, or step through the hands’ process. One is that simply the ticks and crosses are not accurate
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enough to use as a guide for whether a hand should be reviewed or not. There are too many X’s that are obviously fine and, much worse, many ticks for shoves that were clearly wrong. There are some specific situations (such as when there is a shorty all in) where ranges are way off that the ticks are meaningless. This is no criticism of SNG Wizard, it’s just the nature of the game. But more importantly, this method is very ineffective at internalising the information in order to learn ICM and make the right play at the table. Clicking through hand after hand, looking at constantly changing dynamics and stack sizes and # of players, does no good to try and learn one certain spot. First, you see a hand where you shoved too loose in the cut-off. It should have been only top 40%, wiz says. Then you see a hand where you folded when you should have called out of the big blind. Any ace, broadway or pair, wiz says. How are you supposed to remember this for next time? It’s not really relevant whether you played that hand correctly or not. Patting ourselves on the back for getting a sea of green ticks, or chastising ourselves for getting lots of red X’s does little to further our actual understanding of the game. What’s important is that we can learn something from that hand to further our internal knowledge of the game and make a better, more informed decision next time it occurs. A Systematic Approach with HEM filtering Using the power of HEM filtering, and a little extra I built in to wizhud, we can turn our review process from looking at hands in a one-dimensional, linear fashion (stepping through hands in a tournament), to a dynamic and methodical process, using our real hands. Each week, I would pick one ICM situation and create a specific filter through HEM. For example, I may feel I’ve been making some mistakes on the button with 8-12 big blinds when 4 and 5 handed.
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Fairly complex filters can be created. You can look at 3bet situations with deeper stacks, setups with limpers, etc. Using the effective stack, you can also in some situations control the opponents stack size within certain bounds(this works only in blind vs blind situations). I then set the date filter (all hands that week or, if it’s a very specific filter, I may look at all hands that month or even wider) and we get our list of similar hands.
Using the ctrl-middle click feature in wizhud, i can then send all these hand histories in one batch over to SNG Wizard. The result is that we now have a pretend tournament in the ‘game view’ of sng wizard, just showing all hands in a specific context. The benefits of this should hopefully be obvious. We can now easily see how well we are playing in this situation, whether there are common errors (maybe over-valuing A-x type hands, generally shoving too wide, over-estimating our fold equity, etc). By seeing one specific situation, we are cutting down on the number of variables (our position, our stack size, blind level, etc) and limiting it to a few uncontrolled variables (out hand, opponents stack sizes, etc).
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The result is really like a SNG Wiz quiz, except you have more control over the hands, you have real situations vs. real opponents, and you can review your play at the same time as internalizing the scenario. The missing context. One problem with this method is that it lacks the context of the situation. When going through hands linearly, you see how the SNG progresses, build up reads on the players, etc.
This was one of the reasons I created wizhud - it allows you to get some sort of read when reviewing the hands with various stats. In the pro version, you can also add blind steal stats and HEM note text and icon. But when doing this contextual approach, the main goal isn’t to
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see how well you’ve played vs. that specific opponent at that time; we use this approach to have a body of example hands in similar contexts to see how changing variables effect correct push/fold/call ranges. One such variable is the read on the opponent. It’s not that useful to conclude, “Well this was a bad shove because this guy calls super loose.”. Much more useful is to note how exactly our profitable shove range changes based on that player type, so next time we can make the right decision for all player types. Cliff Notes At The Bottom * Have a regular daily process for reviewing your hands. Mark hands and tournaments as you play, and review these first, using the HEM replayer to step through the hands, only sending a hand off to SNGW when needed. Next, apply specific daily filters to review certain trouble areas in your game. * When trying to learn ICM, use filters in HEM to create specific scenarios, then send this batch over to SNGW. With hands in groups, it’s easier to try to internalise specific ICM situations. You can do this exercise as part of a regular review, applying a set of 2-4 filters a week to review and learn, or irregularly when you have the time to study.
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MTT: Stack size theory Gigabet Ok, boys and girls, this here may be the most -ev post I have ever written. The Q3 push thread received quite a few responses from players who were confused about the validity of it, while I thought that it was a fairly standard play for most of us here(read independent.) Even if the players do not know why they do it, I thought that at least they would understand intuitively the value from plays such as these. Before I get into the actual dynamics of that individual hand, let me see if I can explain the “Gigabet Dilemma.” For those that do not know, there was a very long and controversial thread(in the MTT forum) about another hand that I had played. Basically, I had made a -ev call because I had felt that the positive ev I would gain later in the game, if I win the hand, outweighs the negative ev of the specific hand. Because you cannot mathematically prove the positive equity of future happenings with any certainty, this is all theory. The controversy surrounding the argument of whether or not to take the immediate negative expected value or make the “correct” play has been coined the Gigabet Dilemma. If you are on my side, and agree with my reasoning, then you have to take these negative situations and use them to your advantage. But the real question is, how do you recognize when you can get on the negative side of the situation and know that if you lose that individual hand, your stack will still be able to contend with the fields? Understanding that every situation is one long stream of events, and the results of any single hand mean nothing in the long run isn’t enough. Because of Gamblers Ruin(cannot recover from zero) you are forced to
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recognize that each situation is independent, and have to be results oriented for that hand. It is counter-intuitive to make a move based on one situation, rather than 100s of thousands similar situations, but because you cannot recover from zero, there has to be a plateau in each situation that you can recover from. Since each situation will involve different stacks, you have to depend on your results from the texture of that individual setting to decide whether to make that -ev move. You cannot create hard and fast guidelines to make that decision, rather, you have to go by your feel for the situation at hand. Here is where it gets interesting. Although you cannot make guidelines, you can create one “model” that you can look at, and decide what the best decision would be in that model. If you decide that your model calls for avoiding the -ev situation, then adjust the sizes of the stacks until you find a model that calls for embracing the negative situation. If you think you would have troubles actually finding a correct model, here are some things that may help you. Put everyone at near the same stack size, except for one player, who has around 1/3 the rest of the field, and gradually increase the blinds, if you still cannot get it, gradually increase your stack, while leaving everyones the same, including the small stack. Once you get your model, use it as a relative comparison to some past stts you have played, and see if you cannot see actual game situations that are relatively close to that situation that is represented by your model. Read through enough hand histories, and you will start to intuitively see the situations as they arise. In my mind, I see each stack as a “block” that fits into a complete mold that encompasses all of the chips in play. I cannot comprehend what “one” chip is, because that is too small of a unit for my mold. Here is a very loose description of what I mean. At the beginning of a tourney, everyone has a block that is the same size, imagine 10 blocks sitting next to each other, with a bold face line running across the top of all of the blocks. I actually envision a pie type mold, with the blocks pieced in the pie evenly, however that is too difficult to put into words, so I will try and analagize it. Ok, so your bold face line is just a guideline that represents the saturation point of the chips in play, basically, the average stack, but the line could go
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above or below avg, if one of the stack gets excessively larger or smaller than the fields. As the tourney goes on for a time, and the blinds get to a certain point, your line will get very erratic, and there will be times, when the size of the blinds will equal, or nearly equal the size of a “block” that is near the level of your line. When situations like these occur, and your stack hovers above the line, then any part of your stack over the line is essentially meaningless. However, because the line is erratic at that level of play, using those meaningless chips to capture a “block” will make your stack a real force that controls the level of that line. Basically, capturing a block is nearly equivalent to doubling up. Here is a kicker, if your stack is flush with the line, and the size of the pot is nearly flush with the line, then you have an ideal situation to take alot of negative ev to call an all in from another player. If you can understand that statement, then you will understand alot more than just what I have written so far. There will be situations where math tells you to push with any two cards to pick up the pot(preflop, of course), however, if you are using my model, you will see that because the “line” is relatively stable, and your stack hovers above the line, than taking down that pot is very nearly always wrong. This is working on the opposite side of the coin, and recognizing when +ev situations should actually be avoided, because it would be more positive to wait until either the line moves, or your stack moves closer to the line. Now that you have read this, go back and look at the hand history, and see if you can see why I pushed all in with Q3, knowing I was going to take the worst of it in a showdown. If need be, I will go through and explain that hand in detail, and try and put together a more easily identifiable model that represents the stacks at that table. I have never put this theory into words before, however, I have put them in use enough times to know that there is no doubt in my mind that they are true. I hope that this isn’t too disjointed to read, and while I know that understanding it may be difficult, please read through it a few times before asking questions that may have an obvious answer. Obviously newer players will benefit from this more, since they have less “preconceived” notions of how to play. More experienced players may actually
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intuitively understand it more, but find it hard to believe that this is any kind of poker, and never really incorporate it into their game.
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Blind Stealing HappyPixel Concept of the Week #4: Blind Stealing Blind stealing is a topic very close to my heart, being the LAGtard nitbox that I am... so here’s my advice on blind steals. I’m going to focus on stealing rather than defending and restealing, since I play pretty terribly from the blinds, but I also think that (especially for new players), working on stealing is going to be much easier and much more profitable than blind defence. So what is blind stealing? Blind stealing is making a preflop raise (usually from late position), in an unopened pot, to attempt to win the blinds. Hold’em Manager calculates this stat based on CO, BTN and SB raises in unopened pots, although you can still steal from other positions, depending on table dynamics. Why should I steal blinds? It’s only 1.5BBs, why should I get involved? Because 1.5BBs is a LOT OF ****ING MONEY!!! For performing a single blind steal, you can win 1.5BBs (a successful steal equates to 75PTBB/100 which is a silly amount). Of course it won’t work every time (nor should you steal at every single opportunity), but even when the blinds defend, you still get to play a pot postflop with:
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- Position (this is huge) - Initiative - Postflop value So you can often take down an even bigger pot on the flop with a cbet (more on that later). Stealing adds a TON to your bottom line. Know your blinds It helps a lot to know who the blinds are. Useful things to know (most of these should be pretty obvious) are: - VPIP - 3bet% (in particular, 3bet% from the blinds or 3bet% facing a steal) - Fold to cbet% - Additional history VPIP tells us how loose the blinds are in general. This should be our main indicator of whether we can profitably steal in a given situation. Obviously if the blinds are really loose, we can’t expect our steal to take it down as often preflop. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t steal from loose players: we steal with a different range which we can play very profitably, in position, postflop. Instead of bluffing or semi-bluffing with our steal, we are actually value-raising. On the other hand if we have two nits in the blinds we can steal with a huge range. 3bet% tells us how often we’re going to get... 3bet (duh). If either of the blinds tend to resteal a lot, it’s probably time to tighten up your stealing range. That’s the easiest way to adjust to this - however, you can also adjust by 4betting light, or by widening your value 4betting range (intending to call a shove ofc, please don’t turn value hands into bluffs intending to 4b/f) if they are aggro enough to bluff shove over your 4bet. But at micros, this normally isn’t a huge consideration. I ought to say something on that note, about “stealing” with a
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huge hand. Suppose we are on the button with AA, and we have a fairly aggro reg in the SB, who 3bets 8% facing a steal, over a decent sample. We have a bit of history, and he’s 3bet our steals a few times. We’ve 4bet his resteal with A4s once, and he snap-folded. So now we raise and he 3bets. What should we do? Well, 4betting is bad. I know a lot of you are stuck in auto4bet-get-it-in mode, but this is a spot where we should be flatting. His 3bet range here is really wide, and he’s not prone to shoving over 4bets. Of course he’s getting it in with QQ+ and AK here, but 4betting is also folding out a ton of worse hands which we want to keep in the pot. We have position and can play the hand much more profitably postflop than preflop. We can induce huge mistakes postflop, whereas by 4betting preflop we allow him to play much closer to optimally. Range manipulation ftw. Here’s an example to illustrate: Poker Stars $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold’em - 8 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com Hero (CO): $49.75 BTN: $35.10 SB: $28.15 BB: $72.90 UTG: $50.60 UTG+1: $78.75 MP1: $50.00 MP2: $28.45 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is CO with K K 4 folds, Hero raises to $1.50, 1 fold, SB calls $1.25, BB raises to $8, Hero calls $6.50, SB calls $6.50 Flop: ($24.00) 3 3 Q (3 players) SB checks, BB checks, Hero bets $16.50, SB raises to $20.15 all in, BB raises to $36.65, Hero raises to $41.75 all in, BB calls $5.10 Turn: ($127.65) 4 River: ($127.65) 9
(3 players - 2 are all in) (3 players - 2 are all in)
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Final Pot: $127.65 Hero shows K K (two pair, Kings and Threes) SB mucks Q J BB shows A Q (two pair, Queens and Threes) Hero wins $43.20 Hero wins $81.45 (Rake: $3.00) Squeezer was a reg called xxricecookaxx (fwiw it was very satisfying to stack him since he owns my soul and has a baby avatar ) and SB was a fish who we want to keep in the pot. Even without the fish it’s probably a good idea to flat here. Fold to cbet% tells us how often we can steal and cbet flop when we get called. This is especially useful against loose players. Suppose there’s an 89/0 fish in the blinds, who shuts down a ton postflop when he misses, and has a ftcb of 79%. We have XX. Even though he’s incredibly loose preflop, he’s c/f’ing so often postflop that this is a profitable steal spot. We can fire out a 1/2 pot (or even less) cbet and take down a decent sized pot on the flop. Similarly there are some regs who flat almost exclusively with PPs when facing a steal, and they’re going to setmine (against your huge range, which isn’t paying them off anyway) and fold 80% of flops when they brick. Steal away. Like I mentioned, against weak-tight (or weak-loose) players your cbet doesn’t have to be huge. Depending on board texture and opponent you can make your cbet as little as 1/3 to 1/2 pot. Additional history is so situational that I can’t really go into much detail about it. However, I will say that some regs do exceedingly stupid things when in BB vs BTN or BvB situations. I’ve seen a lot of this (as Goldseraph calls it) “reg spite syndrome” at 50NL, and you should adjust accordingly. If you’ve seen that someone is going to be making moves more often postflop and getting it in lighter, you should be willing to either tighten up your steal ranges or to get it in lighter postflop to counteract their wider ranges. Figure out when they’re spewing and take advantage.
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Know your button Obviously this only applies if you’re in the CO (or HJ), but you need to consider the people to act behind you. This is pretty similar to the last section, except arguably more important, since they have position on you. There are also some people who are serial 3betters/squeezers in position. They are going to pick up on the fact that your range is so much wider in steal positions, and they will 3bet yo ass. If you sit down at a table and see greg on your left and you don’t have a hot Asian girl as your avatar, there are probably better tables to sit at. Similarly you should be one of those annoying 3betters yourself, and own lots of people stealing and isoing from the CO and HJ when you have the button. In position = In power. What should I steal with? Late position play is such a personal preference thing, and so situational, that I’m not going to construct exact ranges for you. If you are uncomfortable stealing with 95s, or if you suck direly postflop, then don’t steal with it, that’s fine. However, I will give some general guidelines: - Play really loose from the BTN. Abuse it. Play loose from the CO. Play tighter from the HJ. Hijack is getting towards middle position, and having two players to act behind you makes stealing a lot trickier. - Pick hands that play well postflop. This includes suited connectors, suited gappers, pocket pairs, suited broadways, strong offsuit broadways, suited aces... basically if something is s00ted you can’t go too far wrong. If you’re uncomfortable playing offsuit aces like A2o-A9o I suggest you avoid them. Personally I still steal with them. - Against tight players, open up your steal range. Personally I steal with ATC against a lot of players. But stealing with 40% of hands from the button against tight blinds is still pretty respectable. Just see how much you can get away with (you’d be surprised). People just don’t adjust anywhere near as much as you would expect. Ball till you fall.
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- Against loose players, particularly ones who don’t like folding postflop, I’d avoid hands which have little top pair/middle pair potential, such as 75s. Because you’re going to be seeing a lot more showdowns, you’re going to be relying on equity and playability rather than fold equity. Weight your range towards hands that can flop decently with a high frequency. Against loose-aggressive blinds, you should tighten up your steal range (or just leave the table). However, against a loose-passive fish, you can play hands like K8o and Q9o profitably, since you will flop top or middle pair pretty often, and you can get a couple of streets of value out of them. Domination just isn’t as much of an issue against someone who is playing 60% of their hands. Also, against these kinda players, if you do happen to flop a decent (but not strong) draw, you can also check back the flop a lot and take a free card. 4 cards for the price of 3. Bet sizing So... here is something which for me is a big factor in blind stealing. When you steal a lot, it’s a good idea to make your bet sizing a bit smaller. It gives you a better price on your steals. Split’s probably done this already in his bet sizing post, but let’s quickly run through the math behind this: Assuming our hand has zero postflop value (which it doesn’t, of course): - If we open to 4BB, we risk 4 to win 1.5, so we need our steal to work 73% of the time. - If we open to 3.5BB, we risk 3.5 to win 1.5, so we need our steal to work 70% of the time. - If we open to 3BB, we risk 3 to win 1.5, so we need our steal to work 67% of the time. - If we open to 2.5BB, we risk 2.5 to win 1.5, so we need our steal to work 63% of the time. - If we open to 2BB, we risk 2 to win 1.5, so we need our steal to work 57% of the time. Personally, my steal from the BTN is a minraise. HappyPixel, you big donkey! But it only has to work 57% of the time to make it profitable in its own right, and that’s ignoring postflop value, which is huge (since we have equity, position and initiative). And my steal
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success rate has only dropped by a small amount from when I used to make it 3BB (less than the 10% needed to make minraising less profitable). Another reason for making our steals smaller is that we have position. So we want the SPR (stack-to-pot ratio) to be higher, since we can leverage our position more effectively postflop. A smaller raise size accomplishes this. OK, so you may think minraising is gross, and I agree it’s not for everyone. But if you’re making it 4x from all positions, I strongly recommend that you try opening to 3x from late position. It makes a big difference in the long run. Also, a quick note about exploitative bet sizing: against unknowns and unobservant fish, you can open larger with your better hands, since they don’t know or don’t care what your standard late position open is. Flex your bet sizing (to reassert your dominance). Stealing from the blinds You can steal from the SB when it’s folded to you. However, you should generally do so with a tighter range since you are out of position. But with only one player left to act, you can still steal with a pretty wide range (ATC if they are a nit). And if someone open-limps the SB when you’re in the BB, that is your blind. Collect it. Their range is really weak, so just make a decent-sized raise and take it down. If that fails, you still have all the postflop advantages I’ve already mentioned. You can also “steal” limps... I won’t go into that, but there are some interesting articles on that here: - In position: here (by Dan Bitel) - From the blinds: here (by MT2R) Stack sizes Pay attention to stack sizes. If you’re deep with one of the blinds, you can steal liberally (especially with suited cards). You have higher implied odds and it’s a nightmare for your opponent to play OOP while deep.
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Versus shorter players, you can tighten up if they’re a push-orfold shortstack, or open lots of high-card kinda hands like Q9o if they’re loose. Then flop TP and get it in. Profit! Also, against shortstacks you can make smaller steals, or if you’re in the blinds vs a shortstack you can just do this: Poker Stars $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold’em - 8 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com Hero (BB): $58.35 UTG: $52.05 UTG+1: $10.00 MP1: $50.00 MP2: $10.85 CO: $69.25 BTN: $50.95 SB: $4.85 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is BB with 6 J 6 folds, SB calls $0.25, Hero raises to $58.35 all in
, 1 fold
Final Pot: $1.00 Hero mucks 6 J Hero wins $1.00 That’s just about everything I can think of about blind stealing, so if anyone has something to add, please comment! Happy stealing and in before tl;dr. Oh, and stay off Digger’s blinds, ldo.
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Cold Calling alex23 Here we’ll talk about preflop aspects of cold calling. Firstly, cold-calling is generally bad. You are giving up initiative, often to be in a heads up pot, against a villain who is already showing strength. When you are not in a heads up pot, you end up with poor relative (and often absolute as well) position. So why do we do it? Recall the three main edges in hold’em: card edge, positional edge, and skill edge. When a villain raises, if we believe ourselves to be ahead of their range cardwise, we generally 3-bet. Thus when we are cold calling, we are mostly trying to push our positional and skill edge. Based on their ranges, we should have a plan for cold calling from the start. The idea is either to potentially bust the player we are involved with by hitting a monster against their made hand, or to take the pot away from them on a later betting round, hopefully with outs to a better hand than theirs if that fails. In general, while these two purposes can merge somewhat, it is best to have a plan for which is the main goal unless it is highly dependent on board texture, meaning that on some board textures you will have fold equity and some you will be likely to stack them. Thus, the two most important questions about our opponents when we are considering cold calling are: do we have implied odds, and two, is their range weak enough that we will likely have fold equity on later streets? The reason the ideas of busting vs. bluffing are separate is that usually you usually don’t have much fold equity if you have large implied odds and vice versa, although there are exceptions. These ideas can be illustrated nicely by seeing the goals of
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calling vs. different player types. For instance, vs. a nit who will mainly play big pair hands and AK preflop, but will go too far with overpairs and TPTK, we are calling for the massive implied odds they offer. The standard is that we are trying to crack aces with a set. Vs. a positionally aware thinking TAG/LAG, we are calling to use our positional advantage to put pressure on them and put them in difficult situations where we can force them to fold better hands or extract value from worse in spots that are easy for us to play but marginal for them due to our positional advantage. Vs. these opponents we could either bluff them or bust them based on board texture and betting action and the lines between fold equity and implied odds can become blurred. Vs. a maniac we are calling to flop something strong enough to give them rope to hang themselves with. We are calling to bust them, but we may not need as strong a hand to bust them as we need to bust a nit. Finally, vs. a passive fish, we are calling so that we can value bet and raise them very aggressively. As you can see then, in all cases the two factors to consider are what are our implied odds vs. this player and what is the likelihood we will have fold equity later on. Position ties well in with this in that it often tells us more about our implied odds and/or fold equity. For most villains, we can create some kind of range for them based on their position. If they make an EP raise, we can generally assume we have implied odds, while if they make an LP raise, we will often have fold equity on later streets. There are exceptions though. Bad players generally cannot be put on a range based on position, while tricky villains will occasionally mix in more speculative hands EP for balancing their ranges. Also, extremely nitty players will have an extremely strong range regardless of position. We additionally have to consider our own position; more for the risks. For instance, if UTG raises and we call UTG+1, there is a good chance we will play a multiway pot with no initiative and both poor absolute and relative position on postflop betting rounds. On the other hand, if the CO opens and we flat on the button, we our opening ourselves up to a potential squeeze from aggressive players from the blinds. Further, the position we are calling from and their position also tells an observant opponent something about the strength of our hands. If a thinking UTG raiser opens and we call UTG+1, he will generally put us on either a strong hand or something like a medium pocket pair that can easily make a very strong hand postflop. Finally, it is generally terrible to cold call from
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the blinds; mainly due to the disadvantages you have in controlling the pot size being out of position. You lose the implied threat of future bets, and thus much of your fold equity, you often have to pay more if you are on a draw to see if you hit, and you lose much of your implied odds because it is harder to build a pot out of position. Now we come to what hands to cold call with, and it really mostly relates to whether we have implied odds or fold equity, and also where our implied odds come from. Do our implied odds come from him overplaying strong, but not monster hands? Do they come from him being a calling station, or do they come from him bluffing too much? For instance, vs. a nit who overplays big pairs, it might be wise to cold call with pocket pairs only. You will need a very strong hand to beat his, and if you have little fold equity it may be difficult to play draws successfully, so a fit or fold strategy where you attempt to hit a set may be best. Vs. a persistent bluffer, we may only need a good top pair hand to bust him, we could add AK/AQ to the list, and if he has poor preflop hand selection and will likely play dominated hands we could even add AJ-AT and KQ/KJ to the list. The hand selection ideas vs. a bluffer are similar vs. a calling station, but in fact hands with huge potential like 33 may be less valuable (though probably still worth playing) vs. a calling station, since you will hit a set less often than top pair playing the other range, and a good top pair may be more than sufficient to take his stack. Against all of these except perhaps the aggressive nit whose bet sizing is too small, drawing hands like 67s are pretty weak, since against the group you will likely have no fold equity when you flop a draw, and against stations even if they let you get to your draw, the pot might be too small for you by the time you hit on the turn or river for you to get his stack. Finally, we should look at our image when deciding when to cold call. For instance, in some cases versus an MP open with us on the c/o we may decide that AQo is ahead of his range. However, if we’ve been 3-betting relentlessly it may be time to cold call instead of 3-betting, as 3-betting can open us up to a 4-bet bluff. Similarly, if we haven’t been 3-betting much a 3-bet may be better in some cases than a cold call. Finally, if we are just to active and we pick up a hand like 67s we may just decide to chuck it.
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In sum, the most important things to decide in cold calling are whether we will have fold equity or implied odds post flop, and if we do, we may decide to cold call. However, it must be remembered that cold-calling in and of itself is often not good and we must make up for it by a skill and/or positional edge.
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Exploiting Short Stackers *Split* Shortstackers. I hear more complaining about shortstackers than anything else in the poker world. Why? Because these people have found a mathematical loophole made possible by the current minimum buy-ins on poker sites. But why the hate? Apparently there is a loophole, why would one hate someone for doing something they could just as easily do themselves? Why doesn’t everyone tick that “Buy in for the minimum” button as they sit down at their table? Why doesn’t everyone use a simple hand chart, with certain stipulations, and grind 24 tables? The answer is simple, and actually is the same as that old adage “you get out what you put in”. If you are using very minimal brain power, if you are simply following a hand chart, if you are mindlessly pressing buttons, then you have put in very little and in return, will make very little. A shortstackers winrate is severely capped given the simplicity of the strategy. As it stands now, there are 3 main types of actual SS (the ~20bb variety) The “nittynitty”: This is the 5/5, 4/4, 5/4 type that is most likely following a simple hand chart. The last time I drew up a SS chart without any variety it came out to 6/5.7, and that was pure robotic SS-ing. This player type doesn’t think and most certainly doesn’t use any sort of variation in play. They look at their cards and go “ok, I have this position, there are this many limpers, my chart says to do this” and they do it. These players are amaaaaaaaaaaazing to have on our left as we can powerhouse their blinds every single orbit and have an insane
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ROI/steal Quote: Why they suck for us? It really only sucks when they are on our right. They really don’t light steal, so they just take up space and we can really never win an easy pot against them. They also plague tables, and lots of tables, because their strategy is so simple (basic FPP strategy really) and they play for long hours.
The “pro”: This is the good kind of SS’r. They tend to run stats like 7/7, 9/8, and almost never have a vpip of 10 or higher, and almost never have a vpip/pfr gap of more than 1. They have a bassline of actions (what hands to shove v a raise from every position, hands to squeeze with over how many callers, etc), but they also understand variation. They will sometimes light steal, they will also utilize SC’s to their advantage. They make you call them a bit wider, which may get you tilty when you run into their top side a few times. Quote: Why they suck for us? Our edge against them is pretty small. They understand what they are doing, and will mix it up well. The big reason they suck is because they leech the games. They don’t take much per session, but over time, they are leeching a significant amount of BI’s per level, especially when there are multiple of them. They become more prevalent at 100NL and 200NL, but there are some at 50NL as well.
The “going2lose”: This is our most profitable SS’r to play against. They are terrible and have terrible stats to back it up. Why do they buy in in for 20bb? Because they fear losing money, have it as an “auto-option”, or try to use a chart and then go nuts. They tend to have a gap of 2+ in their stats, and most have vpips of like 11+. It is very standard to see them like 12/4, 19/6, or even 9/5. They have wide ranges, call shoves poorly, go absolutely insane in positional pots, and just make endless mistakes. Do not avoid them, just adjust your calling and re-shove ranges appropriately. Quote: Why they suck for us? Well, they don’t actually suck for us! They are profitable for us so long as your range adaptation is solid.
What Can I Do To Improve Against Them!? There is an awesome program called “poker stove” that I went over how to use. However, there is another awesome program called “All-In Expert” that has made it very easy to figure out not only your exact range of shoving/calling (given factors like
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stack sizes, opening ranges, calling ranges, etc), but also the exact profitability of each hand. But how do we know their ranges? Start thinking about it. I have actually had students before that had trouble against SS’s, so I told them to spend a week creating a SS-ing strategy and then we reviewed it. Amazingly enough, this simple exercise (that took maybe 2-3hrs for them), made it so they understood every range of a SS’r, how position changed their ranges, and most importantly, how to counter it. After spending maybe a total of 4hrs on everything (doing the work themselves, working it out with me, etc) they had it so they never had a tough decision against a SS’r. Now, if you are reading this paper to figure out exact ranges, I apologize...Just consider this super beneficial homework =) Also, think logically while playing. Of course, it is easiest to play against a nittynitty, the ranges are concrete and they play super straight forward (in fact, you could probably find the EXACT chart they are using if you explore the internet). Logically, we know that if we raise TT UTG to 3bb, folds to him OTB and he shoves for 20bb, we know his range is super strong, probably TT+/AK (and in all actuality, it is probably QQ+/AK ~JJ). If we pokerstove it, we get 34/66. We know we are getting 23:17, so we need 42.5%ee to call. We have 34, so we cannot call. This is simple math. But what if that OTB player was a “going2lose” player who was 18/9. We think his range is wider (because it is) and probably 66+/KQo+/AJo+. Against this range, TT is 53/47, so we would call. This is logical and mathematical. The good, though most people view is oppositely, is that SS’s force you to work through these math issues, which in turn makes you much stronger in other facets of the game. One of the easiest strategies I can suggest for ranging is to figure out a nittynitty’s range, and then expand from there based on looseness. That should help quite a bit. Also, here is just a basic look at/tutorial of All-In Expert:
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This is what we would call a shove with. I the pot is 24.5 because I assume that I raised to 3bb, the blinds make up 1.5bb, and the SS shoves for 20bb. I designate his range, which in this case I said was 99+/AT+, and some mixup hands like 22-55, AT, etc
This is what AIE says I should call with. If you were using the program, you could hover your mouse over and hand and get
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the ROI on it and see exactly how profitable it is This is what we would want to shove with. I assume the SS’r raised to 3.5bb, there are 1.5 in blinds (so 5bb is the current pot). I assume I am not in a blind, so I would have to call 3.5bb, and if I shove, the SS’r would have to call 16.5bb. I say his current range is a steal range of 30% of hands (this is not for a nittynitty player obvi), and that he will call very wide (this is certainly a “going2lose” calling range in certain spots).
This is what AIE says is our profitable shove range. Notice, this does not take into account other players, and really, you should only 3b in this spot to like 14bb to ensure we don’t lose too much if/when other players wake up with really strong hands ““Dieting: A system of starving yourself to death so you can live a little longer.” Jan Murray ” What the hell does a dieting quote have to do with shortstackers? Your bankroll is the diet of a shortstacker. He is mathematically entitled to it. You can work hard so you have a small edge against them, but it takes work. So how do you stop feeding them? DON’T PLAY WITH THEM! It is very simple. If there are shortstackers at your table, don’t play. Now this may seem like an idealogical statement (especially for those who do loathe shortstackers), but it is
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possible to put yourself in better spots. Table selection rules involving shortstackers: 1.)NEVER sit at a table with more than 3 more shortstackers
Quote: Tables with too many SS’s are terrible for our WR. Our WR is not very high against a SS in the first place, so when you add more of them, it only gets worse. Leave tables if they get invested...the fewer the better, always.
2.)There is a huge difference between 20bb and 60bb people. Quote: DO NOT confuse them. 20bb people are SS’s. 60bb buy in short, but are terrible for a whole different set of reasons. You cannot use the same strategy against each, so don’t even try to.
3.)Deepstack tables don’t allow shortstackers
Quote: Although these tables tend to be a bit more reg-filled, it is much better than sitting with 5 SS’s.
So going full circle to answer the original question of “why does everyone hate shortstackers?”...the answer is simple. Because people are too lazy to figure out how to work around them. Too lazy to figure out the simple strategy and hand ranges to call/ shove with to beat them. Too lazy to solidify their own game against them, that, oddly enough, would eliminate them. So people don’t hate shortstackers, they hate the work (albeit very little in reality) they have to do to beat them. Don’t be lazy, put in the work and time to make these shortstackers not only profitable for yourself, but to eventually rid of them. Enjoy and good luck with your work and winning flips!
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Facing a 3bet knn05 My initial thoughts when I agreed to do this ‘Concept of the Week: 3betting’ post for the micro forum were as follows: 1. Preflop drama is for poor postflop players. 2. People don’t fold often enough to 3bets in the micros. Generally speaking, calling 3bets in the micros just isn’t profitable and I think that most people will find that if they filter in their DBs for “faced preflop 3bet = true” that they will see calling 3bets is –EV. Let’s look at the above thoughts. So, you’re a positionally aware poker player and you raise a wide range from LP and steal those blinds like it’s your job. Thus, you are more likely to be 3bet preflop from villains both in the blinds and on the button (depending a bit on how loose you are from the CO). Now, because you open wide from the CO and BTN, your LP raises are smaller at 3bbs and your villains are 3betting you to 10-12bbs. If you successfully 4bet only once every 4 hands (i.e. villain folds his 3bet to your 4bet) you get the following: 4 hands In 3 of those hands, you raise to 3bbs and fold to villains’ 3bets to give you -9bbs. In 1 of those hands, you 4bet and villain folds his 3bet of 1012bbs to give you +10-12bbs. Net profit 1-3bbs over 4 hands You have now taken those “light 3bettors” and bent the situation such that their preflop drama is slightly +EV for you (though, imo, it will be closer to BE over the long run). Now, keep in mind that you’re not going to be 3bet 4 orbits in a row so over 200 hands, or about 22 orbits at
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the table, you need only successfully 4bet once. I highlight this point because I am NOT advocating that everyone go out there and start 4betting light. You must pick your spots wisely and have enough history with your villain to know what type of range they are 3betting both for value and lightly. That’s just a general example, but you can see that if you’re being 3bet a ton and folding to even 75% of them (and I do believe that most micro’ers should be folding to the majority of 3bets that they face), that you’re still making a slight profit if you are 4betting in the right spots. But, in general, I find that all that preflop drama ends up being a break even play even if you are 4betting in the right spots and inducing preflop folds from your 3bettors. Now, if you raise to the standard 4+1bb/limper (2p2 dogma) from LP, then your 4bets will need to work with a higher frequency to make all that drama breakeven or slightly +EV for you. Basically, from my initial 2 thoughts and that little breakdown above, you can see that you can still fold to a majority of 3bets, but, by picking out the correct spots to 4bet, all that preflop drama isn’t going to amount to much. Now, people often ask me, “How do I deal with these 3bettors??!!!” My answer is always the same, “It depends!” It depends on position (are you IP or OOP). It depends on the history you have with that villain (primarily, in the micros, do you have enough history). It depends on what range you think villain is 3betting you with. It depends on the dynamic at the table and what has been going on prior to the drama that unfolds. Etc. HHs will explain these dependencies and will also give you some examples of how to play in 3bet pots. The first HH: Villain in this hand is a reg who I have at 10/5/3 AND I have a note on him that says, “he likes to limp/mini3bet his premiums on occasion. JJ+/AK.” People should focus primarily on isolating the fish, but you can certainly also isolate the bad regs. Now, I raised it up preflop here to isolate this
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villain because if he limp/mini-3bets then I have a hand that, if it flops well, will have decent equity vs. his limp/mini-3bet range, I will have an opportunity to stack him AND I have position on him. Poker Stars $50.00 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com BTN: $74.95 SB: $25.55 BB: $83.65 UTG: $52.00 UTG+1: $67.75 UTG+2: $50.00 Hero (MP1): $56.00 MP2: $54.95 CO: $50.00 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is MP1 with 7 8 2 folds, UTG+2 calls $0.50, Hero raises to $2.50, 5 folds, UTG+2 raises to $6, Hero calls $3.50 Flop: ($12.75) 6 7 9 (2 players) UTG+2 bets $7.50, Hero calls $7.50 Gin. Now, I could raise it up on the flop as I have 14 outs vs. his range (straight draw, 2 pair, trips), but, if I raise it up on the flop then I will basically be polarizing my range to flopped sets and I know that this villain is capable of laying down an overpair. Not to mention, villain’s cbet% over almost 500 hands is >80% so he’s still going to cbet here even if he has AK. Turn: ($27.75) 7 (2 players) UTG+2 checks, Hero bets $21.00, UTG+2 folds Naturally, I hit on the turn, but villain checks to me so I can pretty immediately assign his range as AK and bet on the turn and take this pot away. Note: I could have bet this turn and still taken the pot away even if the turn had been a blank such as a 2 or 3 etc. Final Pot: $27.75 Hero wins $5.40
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Hero wins $21.00 (Rake: $1.35) I cannot stress the importance of taking notes on your villains while you are playing. If you notice something like a reg limp/3betting premiums, then you can try to isolate that reg when you have position and when you have a hand that stands a chance of flopping with decent equity vs. that villain’s limp/3bet range (iff you know that your villain will stack off with an overpair/TP type hand...very important point). Onto the next hand. In the HH below, villain is a solid reg running at 12/10/4 and has a wider 3bet range from LP (~9% from the CO and BTN). However, villain probably sees me as a pretty solid player and one thing that people really need to keep in mind when facing someone who 3bets wider from LP is that these villains are probably NOT 3betting your UTG raises light (be aware not only of how you see your villain, but also of how your villain views you). I’ve seen this time and again. People say to me, “but he 3bets light from LP!” Fair enough. But, I think that if you will pay attention that you will see these villains 3betting MP and other LP raises light as opposed to 3betting UTG/EP raises light. When someone 3bets my UTG raise, I almost ALWAYS give that 3bet respect. Not to mention, in the HH below, if I do call villain’s 3bet, I will be OOP post flop vs. a solid reg whose 3bet range in this scenario I would assign as JJ+/AK (in this case, QQ+/AK as I hold JJ myself) and given that he 3bet my UTG raise, I’d weight his range as QQ+ and am thus highly uncomfortable felting JJ even on a low flop. Easy fold preflop. Poker Stars $50.00 No Limit Hold’em - 8 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com MP1: $50.00 MP2: $73.60 CO: $53.20 BTN: $11.00 SB: $37.70 BB: $55.85 Hero (UTG): $51.50 UTG+1: $50.20
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Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is UTG with J J Hero raises to $2, 3 folds, CO raises to $6.50, 4 folds Final Pot: $4.75 CO wins $0.25 CO wins $4.50 Now, to those of you who 3bet light from the blinds…I hear it all the time, “That guy is attempting to steal my blinds 50% so I have to protect my blinds!” Protect your blinds if you must and certainly 3bet a wider range from the blinds both for value and for image. But, imo, you’re not playing a SNG or an MTT. You are playing a cash game. It is MUCH more important to focus on protecting your button than it is to protect your blinds. I’m usually more concerned with protecting my button when there’s a nut job/loose villain sitting just to my right (i.e. not only is he stealing a ton of my blinds, but he’s playing really wide from the CO and is trying to steal my button). Think about it. Go into your DBs and look at your profit from the BTN and it should be much higher than your profit from any other position at the table. People love sitting next to a nit because, “I can steal his blinds all day!” Well, fair enough; but, I’d rather steal his BTN. 3betting light from the button: In the HH below, I only had ~100 hands with villain, but he was running EXTREMELY loose at 22/11/3 over all, so you can imagine that he was pretty much a nut job and from MP, I had him at 26/11. Here, I am protecting my button and doing so pretty lightly imo with pocket 6s. A pfr of 11% can roughly be estimated from MP is, roughly, 22+, lots of suited aces, pretty much any 2 broadway KT+ and some SCs/off suit connectors. Now, it is VERY important to let the villains to your right know that you will 3bet their MP/LP raises when you are OTB and, often, you don’t necessarily want to see a flop when you 3bet preflop (i.e. you’re happy to take down the chips that are already on the table). In this HH, I am certainly happy to take it down preflop because I don’t have much history on this villain and, while I do have position, I have very little idea as to how to play this opponent postflop. You will make the most money on any given table from the two opponents to your right and the two opponents to your left.
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Focus on playing those villains at each and every table and I promise that you’ll do just fine. Poker Stars $50.00 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com UTG+1: $12.10 UTG+2: $24.45 MP1: $39.55 MP2: $62.75 CO: $84.95 Hero (BTN): $58.35 SB: $48.00 BB: $59.55 UTG: $50.75 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is BTN with 6 6 4 folds, MP2 raises to $1.50, 1 fold, Hero raises to $5.25, 3 folds Final Pot: $3.75 Hero wins $3.75 Text results appended to pokerstove.txt 532,526,544 games 0.625 secs 852,042,470 games/sec Board: Dead: equity win tie pots won pots tied Hand 0: 49.450% 48.93% 00.52% 260572446 2762105.00 { 22+, A4s+, KTs+, QTs+, JTs, T9s, 98s, 87s, 76s, 65s, 54s, ATo+, KTo+, QTo+, JTo, T9o, 98o, 87o } Hand 1: 50.550% 50.03% 00.52% 266429888 2762105.00 { 6c6h } As you can see, I am ahead of the range that I assigned villain in this HH, but certainly not by much and, given that I have very little history with this villain, I am happy to take it down preflop because I lack the necessary history to outplay him postflop. Also, it lets villain know to be a little more careful
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when raising from MP/LP when I am to his left and have position (i.e. it establishes my image in that villain’s mind). How much do your hole cards matter when protecting your button? Not much. In the HH below, I 3bet preflop because over 500 hands, this villain was running at 39/34 from the CO and had a fold to 3bet of 100% from the CO. Again, I am protecting my button, I have position and I have a nut job sitting to my right. Each and every time you 3bet, ask yourself, “Self, why am I 3betting?” Are you 3betting for value? Are you 3betting to scoop up the chips on the table (i.e. your opponent has a very high fold to 3bet %)? Are you 3betting to compensate for being OOP post flop? In addition, when a villain calls your 3bet, you should IMMEDIATELY be able to narrow that opponents range considerably depending on villain’s pfr from that particular position and his fold 2 3bet%. Always, always narrow your opponents range based on his actions both preflop and postflop. Poker Stars $50.00 No Limit Hold’em - 8 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com UTG+1: $50.00 MP1: $31.70 MP2: $123.20 CO: $60.90 Hero (BTN): $51.35 SB: $30.75 BB: $59.15 UTG: $58.55 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is BTN with 2 4 4 folds, CO raises to $2, Hero raises to $6.50, 3 folds Final Pot: $4.75 Hero wins $0.25 Hero wins $4.50 Playing from the blinds: One of my favorite “moves” from the blinds is to punish people on the button who punish limpers. Think about, 2 people limp in and there’s a 2p2’er doing his job on the button and raising to 4bb+1bb/limper from the BTN. Here I am in the SB or BB thinking to myself, “There’s a lot of
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chips on the table and villain OTB is just punishing limpers a majority of the time and won’t be able to call a 3bet.” Now, keep in mind that when you 3bet from the blinds that you are going to be OOP post flop. This is an entirely different scenario than when you are in the CO or OTB and are 3betting. I rarely 3bet light from the blinds for this exact reason, unless I have a truly nutty nut sitting OTB or in the CO. Again, I’d rather focus on protecting my BTN than defending my blinds. In the HH below, villain was running 29/22/1 with an ATS of 60%. This table was pretty tight and this was probably the 3rd or 4th time in a row that villain had retardedly mini-raised in the SB when folded to him. Now, I didn’t have much history with this villain, but, in this case, I have position. Poker Stars $50.00 No Limit Hold’em - 8 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com BTN: $50.00 SB: $54.00 Hero (BB): $65.50 UTG: $52.95 UTG+1: $48.75 MP1: $40.40 MP2: $52.95 CO: $50.00 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is BB with Q 9 6 folds, SB raises to $1, Hero raises to $5, 1 fold Final Pot: $2.00 Hero wins $2.00 I’m really not going to go into too much detail on 3betting from the blinds because, again, I rarely 3bet light from the blinds in the micros. You’re going to be OOP post flop so I generally 3b from the blinds to compensate for position when I have a strong hand. The majority of my light 3betting takes place from the CO/BTN. Okay, this is getting long and I’m just going to post it and we can get some discussion going. In summary, I would encourage
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everyone to focus on their postflop game instead of looking for what I refer to as “preflop drama” spots. Calling 3bets in the micros is generally a losing proposition/-EV so I highly encourage people to FOLD to the majority of 3bets that you face during your stint in the micros. That said, I’m hoping that the beginning of this post showed you how you can make those light 3bettors “pay” for their preflop drama with some welltimed 4bets. I do not advocate 4betting light as I personally find that most of my opponents in the micros were not 3betting nearly as lightly as most people think. Just focus on the two players to your right and the two to your left and outplay those villains since they are the ones who will be giving you the most money. Thank you for your time and attention begin.
. Let the discussion
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Fold Equity watte23 Introduction What is fold equity? Very basically, fold equity is the probability that a villain will fold his hand in the face of a bet or shove by Hero. Note that it is completely different from pot equity, which is the probability at the current time that you win a pot if it were to go to showdown with no further betting. Various other definitions of fold equity are out there, but I find this to be the most direct and logical meaning. When you hear someone say “You have no fold equity”, they basically mean there is zero chance that a villain will ever fold if you bet or raise. For this article, I’m specifically addressing fold equity as it relates to no limit hold ‘em cash games. The concepts here are basic and meant to serve as an introductory lesson to fold equity. Theory: Fold Equity Equation So how can the concept of fold equity be used to help our game? To eventually achieve this understanding, some theory is in order. First of all, to define fold equity mathematically, we can rely on an equation that helps us find the breakeven fold equity of a given situation. For example, say you are heads up in a no limit hand on the flop against a villain who decides to check and the action is on you. We want to find out how often we need the villain to fold to make a jam breakeven expected value (EV). The following equation represents this scenario: PF + (1-F)(-VSl+ HSw) = 0 Here we are saying the expected value of a villain fold plus the
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expected value of a villain call must equal zero. The probability that the villain folds (F) times the size of the pot (P) is the expected value of our play when the villain does indeed fold. The expected value of our play when the villain calls is the amount that we win (Sw, the sum of P and the amount the villain calls) times our pot equity (H), plus the amount we lose (Sl, our bet) times Villain’s pot equity (V). Note that for this equation we are assuming that we are covered. So, since we know all variables except for F, using some seventh grade algebra we can solve for F and come up with our breakeven fold equity for various scenarios. For a given pot equity, if a villain folds more often than this, we gain, if Villain folds less often than this, we lose. You can find various online calculators that compute this for you given certain scenarios, for example: http://dailyvariance.com/fe-calculator.php This is great, but it is more helpful to look at a graph to see how this equation behaves so that we can get an intuitive feel for how fold equity actually works in relation to our pot equity. The following shows how breakeven fold equity changes versus real pot equity for three different scenarios.
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On the graph there are three curves, each representing a different ratio of the amount bet to the pot size. These are roughly representative of three different heads-up situations in a 200NL game. The main objective here is to see how three very different bet sizings in no limit appear to behave regarding fold equity. In the “overbet” case (the blue curve), we are shoving $155 into a pot of $90. In the “pot bet” case (the red curve), we are betting $130 into a pot of $140. Finally in the “1/2 pot bet” case (the green curve), we are betting $100 into a pot of $200. You will probably say, “But wait, I don’t really know my pot equity, I can’t see the villain’s cards.” This is of course entirely true. But in many scenarios it is possible to fairly accurately estimate your pot equity given the villain tendencies and the line he has taken. So for this analysis let’s assume you have a rough idea of your pot equity in a hand. At the very minimum, you usually know when you have none versus some. The points on the Y-axis where the curves intersect represent how much FE you need to break even in the scenario where you are drawing dead ( i.e., you have zero pot equity). This may be the case on the river, for example, where there are no more cards to come and you are sure the villain has at least a pair and you have nothing. Another case may be on the turn where you have undercards to the board with no straight or flush draws and you think Villain has at least a pair. The points on the X-axis where the curves intersect represent the point where you no longer need any fold equity because your pot equity is now enough to justify your bet. An example of this would be if you have a huge draw on the flop with 45% pot equity and you shove with two cards to come. Once you get to a certain percentage of pot equity, the villain can never fold and it will still be +EV. Everywhere in between assumes you have some fold equity and some pot equity. A couple points should be highlighted. The graph really shows how having even a little pot equity helps our bluff cases immensely. For example, in the overbet case, simply having 25% equity reduces the fold equity you need from almost 65% to about 40%. Similar effects exist in the other cases as well. This is why semi-bluffing is so much better than stone bluffing. You have some insurance against your bluffs
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failing. And when that insurance pays off, you win a massive pot. When some players first start playing no limit, it is not clear to them why shoving big draws with meager equity is actually profitable. They think, “I’m winning less than 50% of the time, how can this possibly be profitable. What they are not considering is the large amount of money won when a shove gets called but sucks out anyway. Fold Equity and Bet Size So how do most players decide whether or not to fold? There are multiple hands that villains can hold. Generally, at some particular bet size as bet size increases, villains will start to rapidly fold more and more hands. For a simple case, take the case of a bet on the river after there has been action on previous streets. Usually this starts to happen around a half pot bet. Once the bet size gets past a pot size bet and into overbet territory, almost all hands are folding except extremely strong almost nut hands or occasional bluff catchers. This concept is represented by a logistic curve, with the X-axis representing bet size and the Y-axis representing probability of a fold. For more information, I suggest No Limit Holdem Theory and Practice by Sklansky. This phenomenon can be exploited in no limit in certain cases. For example, if you have the absolute nuts, and it is highly probable that Villain has a near-nut hand, you exploit the fact that against such hands you have almost no fold equity. You do this by shoving, even if your shove is a massive overbet. Due to the lack of fold equity, this is profitable when the profit from the overbet gained overcomes the extra money to be made by getting weaker hands to call with a smaller bet more often. The idea is, sometimes those weaker hands are never calling anyway or are not in Villain’s range, so the only time you get a call is with a very strong hand. Those times, you are free to set the bet size, so bet as much as possible. A common situation here is having quads versus a likely full house, or straight flush versus a flush. This could probably be analyzed with further mathematical rigor, but is left as an exercise for the reader. I suggest reading up on the Zeebo theorem for more information. There are certain exceptions to the above graph. For example,
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you may find that a certain fish always bluffs with the bet pot button. In this case, the fish may actually have less fold equity against you then he would with a ¾ pot bet. Another exception that is relevant here is the “post oak” bluff, which is a concept turning the above idea on its head. The idea is that in some circumstances, a smaller bet may actually have more fold equity than a larger bet, because Villain may think, “This bet has to be for value, otherwise he would not bet so small. Therefore, I fold. I might have called if the bet were larger because bluffs are in his range in that case.” These exceptions are interesting, but for the most part you should retain the above as your fundamental model. Using Fold Equity to Advantage Against bad players who are bad because they are very passive calling stations, you have no fold equity. Use this fact by relentlessly value betting big, and simply don’t bluff. Against good players who can hand read and are known to have the ability to fold, use fold equity by bluffing in spots where you can hold a strong hand and they most probably have mediocre holdings. Additionally, spots where you can represent a very strong hand resulting from the turn or river card combined with your line combined with a Villain line that is weak or indicative of a mediocre holding are great spots to bet big and let fold equity do the heavy lifting. Yes, you will occasionally get trapped, but for most villains the probability of a trap is so small given a certain line that it’s still fine to abuse them. I will again stress that to have fold equity, you usually want a villain that can actually think above level 1 and hand read. Overbet bluffing a river card that is terrible for a villain’s range when you have air is all well and good, but the old analogy of playing Mozart to a cow applies. If the villain has no ability to even recognize that his range is probably crushed based on board texture and lines, it’s probably a bad idea to bluff. In no limit once you bet larger than pot, most solid players will start to think that the bet is polarized, meaning it’s either the nuts or close to complete air. In many cases this is true, but occasionally you will find players who will call slight overbets just as often as pot size bets. Abuse these players by getting more value with value hands. You also may find players who refuse to call overbets without the nuts. Amazingly many of
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these players do not adjust and will continue to allow themselves to be abused because they continue folding to overbets. Simply continue to abuse them until they fight back. It’s hard to have the nuts. In certain situations you may use image to manipulate fold equity to your advantage. This is probably most applicable in a live setting where everyone is paying attention to every hand, but may also apply online if your villains are paying attention and not mass tabling. For example, if you getting caught running a huge bluff at some point, there will probably be period of time where your fold equity against villains may diminish significantly. This can be exploited if you do indeed pickup a monster because your monster will get paid off lighter. As well, the inverse case can be exploited. If you have shown down very few hands and the ones that were shown down were indeed solid, it will be much harder for villains to call down bluffs, so feel free to bluff until your FE gets reduced due to people seeing you get caught. There can be some leveling involved here, but due to psychological phenomenon of recency effects, most people tend to remember the most recent events. Remember that what people expect will usually be based on what most recently happened. On Stakes and FE Some may disagree with this, but I’ve found as you move up in stakes you slowly transition from having betting for value be your bread and butter to having more and more bluffs make money. As players become stronger they will be reluctant to put in a ton of money with weak/mediocre hands. Value becomes more scarce, hence bluffing becomes more profitable. The reason for this is that there is more fold equity to be found as players become better thinkers and hand readers and know that they should fold in certain situations. Fold Equity in Practice: Examples Here are a few examples where the concept of fold equity is important in actual play. Example 1: Fold Equity Preflop A very standard play is isolating a weak player with a
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substandard hand because of the fold equity involved. With no fold equity the play would not be profitable because your hand strength is just not that great. For example, you may find fish who limp/fold constantly and/or fish who may sometimes limp/ call but then fold to 85% of cbets. Find out who these fish are and then isolate them with marginal hands letting fold equity make the play profitable. In this hand, I know that the villain limp/folds and folds to cbets way too often, so I decide to isolate him with a marginal hand, knowing that most times I will win the hand without even worrying about my actual hand strength. Full Tilt Poker $1/$2 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com Hero (BTN): $307.15 SB: $260.50 BB: $152.00 UTG: $183.50 UTG+1: $914.30 UTG+2: $140.65 MP1: $199.10 MP2: $294.10 CO: $74.90 Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is BTN with Q 7 3 folds, MP1 calls $2, 2 folds, Hero raises to $10, 2 folds, MP1 calls $8 Flop: ($23.00) J A 8 (2 players) MP1 checks, Hero bets $14, MP1 folds Final Pot: $23.00 Hero wins $21.85 (Rake: $1.15) Example 2: Semi-bluffing In this example, the hero uses the tailwind of pot equity combined with fold equity to win the hand. This example represents the middle part of the graph where we have both some fold equity and some pot equity. This line is profitable here because sometimes the hero makes a hand, and
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sometimes the villain folds. Only the combination of the two makes the line profitable. It should be noted that we must be sure the villain is good enough to fold at some point, i.e. not a complete fish. Poker Stars $50.00 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com UTG+2: $66.55 Hero (MP1): $50.75 MP2: $97.00 CO: $62.45 BTN: $43.50 SB: $60.75 BB: $50.00 UTG: $65.60 UTG+1: $18.50 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is MP1 with A 5 2 folds, UTG+2 calls $0.50, Hero raises to $2, 5 folds, UTG+2 calls $1.50 Flop: ($4.75) K 4 9 (2 players) UTG+2 checks, Hero bets $3.00, UTG+2 calls $3 Turn: ($10.75) 3 (2 players) UTG+2 checks, Hero bets $6.00, UTG+2 folds Example 3: Shoving with Draws Here we flop a hand with decent equity, given our nut flush draw outs and gutshot. When the villain raises we can put him on a range that includes enough bluff raises that we should 3-bet and get it in given our equity and the chance that we have some fold equity here. I will leave the Pokerstove as an exercise for the reader, but we can comfortably estimate our real equity at around low to mid 40s. Full Tilt Poker $1/$2 No Limit Hold’em $0.30 Ante - 8 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com SB: $310.90
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BB: $200.00 UTG: $114.95 Hero (UTG+1): $230.10 MP1: $138.70 MP2: $199.65 CO: $100.90 BTN: $200.00 Pre Flop: ($5.40) Hero is UTG+1 with 5 A 1 fold, Hero raises to $8, 1 fold, MP2 calls $8, CO calls $8, 2 folds, BB calls $6 Flop: ($35.40) J 2 4 (4 players) BB checks, Hero bets $22, MP2 raises to $100, CO folds, BB folds, Hero raises to $221.80 all in Summary Hopefully this article has given you some better understanding of what fold equity is and how it can be used to profit. So try using the concepts in this article and don’t be discouraged when you have a bluff that gets called and you lose a big pot. If you have valid reasoning for the play (as opposed to spaz shoving) it’s usually +EV. Having the confidence that the play was well thought out will prevent you from tilting and saying that a play was horrible after a bluff gets called and going on tilt because of short term results. Good luck. P.S. Thanks to damntra for much help in reviewing, and joopjan for a bit of help on the samples.
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Hand reading 1 Pokey So you’ve got bottom set on a three-flush board and your opponent just check-raised you all-in. What do you do? Well, the first thing you do is you put your opponent on a hand. Hand reading is simultaneously the most important and the most difficult thing that a poker player does. Some of the best poker players in the world ignore many (or all!) of those other “rules” in poker, have deadly-accurate hand reading skills, and make mountains of cash for their troubles. Other players are exquisitely good at all the fundamentals but stink at hand reading and therefore struggle to consistently beat $50NL. Unfortunately, there is no “magic formula” for hand reading; after all, your opponents work very hard to AVOID letting you know the cards in their hands. However, while there is a great deal of artistry in hand reading, the basics are describable. After some thought I came up with these Five Commandments of Hand Reading (I had ten, but one of the tablets broke when EMC dropped it -- sorry, blame the mod) to get you started. 1. Know thy numbers. So you know that your opponent who just limped has a VPIP of 30%; what does 30% really MEAN? We know it’s loose, but are you really aware of what “30% of all hands dealt” actually looks like? Here are some probabilities of getting a hand in a particular preflop range: Super-premiums: AA, KK, QQ, AK. Total probability: 2.6%. Premiums: AA-TT, AK, AQ, KQ. Total probability: 5.9%.
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Any pocket pair: AA-22. Total probability: 5.9%. Any two broadway: Two cards, both T+, including pairs. Total probability: 14.3%. Any suited ace: A2s-AKs. Total probability: 3.6%. Unsuited ace: A2o-AKo. Total probability: 10.9%. “Maximum suited connectors”: JTs-54s. Total probability: 2.1%. Any ace: A2o+, A2s+, AA. Total probability: 14.9%. Any two suited: literally. Total probability: 23.5%. Any two connectors: 32s-AKs, 32o-AKo. Total probability: 14.5%. To give you a VERY broad feel for what different percentages translate into, here are some potential example ranges: 5% = “pairs 77+, AK, AQs” or “pairs 99+, AK, AQ.” 10% = “pairs 66+, AK, AQ, suited aces, KQs, QJs” 15% = “any pair, AK, AQ, KQ, suited connectors 54+, any suited ace” 20% = “any pair, any two broadway, any suited ace” 25% = “any pair, any suited broadway, any ace, any suited connectors 54s+, KQo” 30% = “any pair, any ace, any suited king, any suited broadway, any suited connectors 54s+, KTo+, QJo” or “any pair, any ace, any suited king, any broadway” 40% = “any pair, any ace, any king, any two broadway, any suited connectors 32s+” 50% = “any pair, any two suited cards, any ace, any two broadway, K5o+” Again, remember to use the relevant range: a player who is 65/10 is looser than the 50% range when he limps but has a rather tight range if he actually raises. Also realize that some players who are loose and passive will raise with SECOND-best hands like 88-JJ, AJ, KQ, and 54s-JTs, but NOT the ultrapremiums like QQ+, AK, and AQ -- those they will slowplay to disguise their hands. Watch these folks at showdown to try and figure out how they play their really big hands. Postflop aggression numbers also reveal much about a player. When a player with an average aggression of 8 raises preflop and then checks to you, suspect a trap: this is very often a strong hand that’s going for a check-raise. When you get that same preflop bet and flop check from a player whose average aggression is 1.3, that’s more likely to be a player who missed
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and is giving up. When that same play comes from someone with a postflop aggression of 0.4, you gain no information from the check -- checking is just what this player does. Mentally split players into three groups -- high aggression, medium aggression, and low aggression -- and then adjust accordingly. Be VERY afraid when a player is playing out of character: the passive postflop player who leads and raises almost always has a monster, and you can fold without a worry. The ultramaniac who check/calls two streets also has a monster, and is waiting to beat your brains out. Don’t fall for it. All of this leads us to our second commandment: 2. Know thy enemy. A leopard never changes its spots, especially at uNL stakes. Together, the HUD trinity (VPIP, PFR, and average aggression) tell us much about a player. Loose players play loose; tight players play tight. Aggressive players play aggressively and passive players play passively. Categorize your opponents on three separate measures: Preflop looseness: a loose preflop player has a VPIP over 40% (I made up the number, but you get the general idea). These guys have crap preflop, and any hand you’re willing to play is beating their range. Beware of these folks postflop, however -- there’s no flop that definitely missed your enemy. Be prepared to play with caution when you don’t have a monster. That’s not to say you should be check-calling; rather, expect to be ahead and bet consistently with your made hands, but keep the bets small and try for pot control. Alternatively, raise light and raise strong preflop while your hand dominates your opponent’s range. His mistake is playing too many hands -- exploit this mistake by hammering him preflop while you’re way ahead. On the other hand, a tight preflop player has a VPIP under 20%. These folks won’t enter into a hand unless they’ve got something worth pursuing. They aren’t really making a major mistake preflop, and the only way you can really take advantage of this characteristic is by stealing their blinds remorselessly (though you’ll have to instafold if they catch you stealing and you don’t have an honest hand). Preflop aggresssion: a passive preflop player has a PFR under
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a quarter of their VPIP. That means that this is a floating scale: while 10% PFR is passive for a player who has a VPIP of 55%, it is aggressive for a player who has a VPIP of 15%. Alternatively, an aggressive preflop player will have a PFR over half of their VPIP. When we’re trying to decide a player’s preflop holding, we should use their VPIP and their PFR to come to a conclusion. Say a player has a VPIP of 40% and a PFR of 20% and they limp in front of you. What sort of holdings do you expect them to have? Well, we know the player is willing to play with 40% of his hands; our sample range for this looked something like “any pair, any ace, any king, any two broadway, any suited connectors 32s+.” But we can already refine this range some more: we know that with 20% of those hands, villain would have raised, and here he didn’t. If we assume that villain raises with his top 20%, our sample range for that looks something like “any pair, any two broadway, any suited ace.” So take THOSE hands out of his current range: just like you discount 72o when a nit is in the hand, you discount QQ when a maniac limps. A likely range here is going to be the difference between the two ranges, or “any unsuited ace, K9s or worse, K9o or worse, T9s or worse.” That’s a much easier range to play against. Be sure to watch this opponent’s showdown hands, however -- you’d really like to know if your assumption about him raising the top 20% of his range is correct or not. If you have a tricky opponent who raises his middle 20% and limps the top 10% and bottom 10%, your range will be significantly wrong, and you’ll be in a good deal of trouble with your hand reading. One huge word of warning: people often look at a player’s VPIP and conclude that the player is a loose idiot. Then they call his raise and are shocked when they find out at showdown that he had rockets. Remember, if you are raised preflop by a 65/5, he has roughly the same hand range as when you’re raised by a 12/5. Don’t mistake his typical preflop looseness with a wide range when he raises.... Postflop aggression: after the flop, a new game begins. People often make the mistake of assuming that a tight preflop player is tight postflop, or that an aggressive preflop player is aggressive postflop. This can only be discovered by observation. I will tell you that every combination of preflop and postflop playstyles is possible, and none are terribly uncommon. The true TA/TA (tight-aggressive preflop, tight-aggressive postflop) and LP/LP (calling station pre and post) is only one form of opponent. Another very common player is the TA/LA: always
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aggressive and solidly tight preflop, this opponent plays hands so infrequently that when he finds something -- ANYTHING -that he’s willing to play preflop he cannot bring himself to let it go. He turns into a maniac postflop, relying on folding equity and a better starting hand range to win money. Another common player is the TP/TA, who goes from nit preflop to aggro-monkey postflop. If they miss, they’re out of the hand, but if they hit the hand they’re going to hammer every street and try to get all-in by the showdown. Less common at uNL, but increasingly common at higher levels (and deadlydangerous when they do it right) is the LP/TA: this player is a total calling station idiot preflop. You’ll often see preflop numbers of 75/11 or 68/6 for these folks. Don’t fall for it! It’s a ruse. These folks are splashing around in as many pots as they can as cheaply as they can, and then postflop they play POKER. They’ll be folding a tremendous fraction of the time on the flop, escaping for 1 BB, but when they hit it will be with something sneaky-as-hell and solid-solid-solid. They then go into aggro mode, betting incredibly hard and relying on unobservant TAGs to call them down lighter because “hey, this idiot is 72/7, my TP3K dominates his range.” They stack more TAGs than you and I could ever hope to, because their image gets them mad phat postflop action. So the rule is: postflop is a new game; expect people to play a different style postflop from preflop, and try to quickly figure out BOTH of these styles. Now, once we’re on the flop and beyond we need to use average aggression and postflop tightness to decide what a player’s holdings are, refining our original range based on their preflop play. This leads us to the third commandment: 3. Know thy board. Flops have different “textures,” and those textures can be much more or much less scary, depending on your holdings and your opponent’s range. More importantly, different people respond in different ways to different board textures. On a draw-heavy board, if a loose and aggressive player is check-calling you can expect him to have the near-nuts, but if a loose and passive player is check-calling you can expect him to have ... well, any damn thing. What affects the texture of a board? Well, let’s start with the flop. Suitedness: flops can come “rainbow” (three different suits),
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“two-suited” (two of one suit and one of another), or “monochrome” (all three cards in the same suit). The more “suited” a flop is, the bigger the hand most opponents will need to call. However, note that many hyperaggressive opponents will be more likely to bet out, check-raise, or “float” (smoothcall on the flop with the intent of taking the pot on the turn) with either a pure bluff or a semi-bluff (draw) on these types of boards. If you are first to act, you can often steal these pots for a reasonably small (2/3rds-pot) bet; if you are called, beware of the flush draw! One small bit of math: let’s say that the flop comes with three spades and you have none in your hand. The odds that your single opponent flopped a made flush are 3.3% and the odds that he flopped a flush DRAW are 15.8%. If you’ve hit a solid hand (say, TPTK) DO NOT PANIC AND START CALLING! Bet out and protect against the draw that is 4.75 times more likely than the made flush that has you killed. Besides, if your opponent actually has a second-best hand, he’ll be more likely to pay off a bet on a monochrome flop than he will to pay off a bet when the turn has FOUR spades (assuming he doesn’t have one). Bet while your hand is best and charge him well to try and outdraw you. Incidentally, if your board has three spades and you have one in your hand, the odds that your opponent has two spades drops to 2.6% and the odds that he has one spade drops to 14.4%, so the odds that your opponent is drawing to a flush are now 5.6 times higher than the odds that he flopped the monster. Bet and protect! Connectedness: here we’re talking about how many cards to a straight the board has. A monochrome flop of J-T-9 is MUCH more dangerous than a monochrome flop of J-7-2. Always be aware of straight draws -- they’re a gold-mine to the savvy poker player because so many people miss them. When the flop comes A-K-Q, the player holding JTs just stacked the preflop raiser holding AK. When the board is connected, you need to beware of two separate possibilities: your opponent might have two pair and your opponent might have an open-ended straight draw. Often, two pair is the scarier event, because your weakbut-made hand is often drawing very thin against it. A straight draw can become an almost unbeatable monster, but it has to GET there first. Two pair is already there. At small stakes games, many players will play very passively with a draw, check/calling in the hopes of improving, but they will play aggressively with two pair. Your more aggressive opponents will bet BOTH hands strongly. When someone plays back at you on
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a fairly connected board, you need to decide if they’re likely drawing or if instead they’ve flopped some powerhouse hand. Then you’ll proceed based on the strength of your hand in relation to the range you think is likely for your opponent. Much like a suited board, a connected board can often be used as a powerful bluffing or semibluffing tool. Say your 30/11/3 opponent raises preflop from MP and you call in position with 33. Heads-up, the flop comes 7-6-5. This is a REALLY good flop for attack aggressively: considering your opponent’s stats, the raise makes overcards much more likely than usual, so the odds that this flop has completely missed your opponent are higher than usual. A flop raise or a flop float can prove extremely valuable to you. In this analysis I’m completely ignoring your inside straight draw -- that’s virtually worthless since it’s highly unlikely to happen and also highly unlikely to get paid in any significant way by your opponent while still being the best hand. No, I’m saying that this flop is a good one for you because it is unlikely to have improved your opponent in any meaningful way. Pressing back hard should win you this pot quite often WITHOUT getting to a showdown. High Card Value: your opponents love playing high cards. Sure, you’ve outgrown calling raises with KJo and A9o (you HAVE outgrown that, right?) but they haven’t. Playing these easily-dominated hands will prove very expensive for your inattentive opponents, but realize this general rule: a flop that is high-card heavy is much more likely to have connected with your opposition than a flop that is high-card light. If an ace hits the board in a multi-way pot and I don’t have AT LEAST AQ, I’m usually done with the hand. Opponents love nothing more than playing aces, and when those aces hit the board your opponents will hang on to their aces like they were made out of solid gold. Worse yet, a pair of aces with a J-or-worse kicker is going to be in oodles of trouble unless that kicker connects, too. Think about this: say you have AJ on an ace-high board. The next highest board card is a T. If one other player has an ace, what are the odds that his hand beats yours? Well, AK and AQ obviously have you outkicked, and the unlikely AA has you decimated. However, there are four OTHER aces that beat you -- the ones that have made two pair. That means you’re behind about as often as you’re ahead in this situation, and that’s even
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assuming that your opponent “only” has an ace! You throw in the other random two-pair and set hands and your hand will win at showdown less than half the time. Worse yet, most opponents will get the message and fold their aces with weak kickers, but they’re unlikely to fold any hand that beats you. The odds are that if you somehow create a big pot, you’re even MORE likely to be behind. In short, proceed with great caution on ace-high boards, even if you have an ace. King high boards are pretty dangerous, too, because the looser opponents will play many kings, especially suited ones. Q’s and J’s are less scary as a player’s high card, but VERY dangerous as a player’s LOW card. Someone willing to play KJo preflop is virtually never going to fold that hand on a J-high flop. Recognize that the odds that your opponent has missed the board are highest on low-card boards, and much lower when the board has high cards. This is especially true if the board has more than ONE high card. One major exception to this rule: if you RAISED preflop, don’t give up when the flop comes with a high card, especially if that high card is an ace. This is a fantastic chance to steal the pot. Statistically speaking, virtually any opponent you could face has a less-than-50% chance of having an ace in this situation, but if you bet the flop they will assume you DO have one. A standard continuation bet will win the pot a surprisingly large fraction of the time. If they play back, fold and move on to the next hand. Paired Boards: usually, a paired board is a cause for celebration. Why? Because with an unpaired board there are nine separate cards in the unseen deck that could give an opponent a pair. However, with a PAIRED board, that number falls to only FIVE cards. In other words, it’s now almost 50% less likely that an opponent has made a hand good enough to want to continue. You should use this against them if it is reasonable for you to do so. Mind you, if you limped preflop and the board is AAK, you can usually check-fold, because your opponent is not going to believe that you have the goods. However, if you raised preflop and the board comes 884 a bet in a heads-up pot is virtually MANDATORY: your opponent will realize he’s missed, assume you have a pocket pair, and fold even more often than he would fold to a typical continuation bet. Paired boards are perfect for continuing preflop aggression.
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Also, realize that most aggressive players know this, so if you happen to be in a pot that someone else raised, the flop comes paired and you’ve got a sneaky monster, consider a slowplay like a flop check-raise or even a “check/call flop, check/raise turn.” Your aggressive targets will fire off a continuation bet quite often, and you can then “snap off a bluff” and win a bigger pot than you otherwise would. Obviously, this will be opponent-specific, but keep your eyes peeled for such opportunities. On the turn and river, similar issues with connectedness, suitedness, high card value, and board pairs will continue to pertain, and will define the “texture” of the board. As a general rule, a tight opponent will continue on “wet” (highly coordinated) boards when he has a strong hand or a strong draw, but a loose opponent may continue with as little as top pair. An aggressive opponent can bet “wet” boards with a draw, a “combination draw” (straight and flush), or a pair+draw, and may even bet these boards on a pure bluff. A passive opponent betting into a “wet” board usually has the goods -- these folks rarely bet their draws. Now, to start to put this all together, let’s move on to the next rule: 4. Know thy hand history. Here we’re discussing how this particular hand has played out: who bet when and how much? Start looking for betting patterns, as different people will have different patterns. A few general issues: Check-raises: when an opponent check-raises, he is sending the message that his hand is unusually powerful. He knows you are betting and he doesn’t care. What’s more, he was confident enough to risk your checking behind in his quest to get more money in the pot. These types of bets will usually mean one of three things: either your opponent was monsterously strong and slowplayed an earlier street, or the last card just helped your opponent in some way, or he is bluffing in a situation where he thinks he can scare you off your hand. As a general rule, trust check-raises from passive players. Completely. If you don’t have a sneaky MONSTER (and I mean MONSTER with a capital *everything*) you should be folding to this raise. People often ask “can I ever escape from pocket aces?” This would be one situation where escaping would be easy. Another general
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rule is that the more aggressive a player is, the more likely a check-raise is a bluff. I would say that until an opponent has an aggression factor of at least 2 you shouldn’t worry much about a check-raise semi-bluff, and until he has an aggression factor of at least 4 you shouldn’t worry much about a check-raise bluff. People are very quick to put a player on a bluff when he check-raises; I believe this event is much rarer than most people think. One caveat to this: check-raises on the flop are far more likely to be bluffs or weak hands than check-raises on ANY other street. On the flop, people will often take a checkraise line against a frequent c-bettor, even with hands like “bottom pair, no kicker” because they know that their opponent will frequently have pure air. So: a check-raise on the flop usually means “I can beat ace-high,” but a check-raise on a later street usually means “I can beat YOU.” Check-calls: this play is highly player-specific. Against a passive calling station this means “I have two cards. Look! Spades are pretty. I like pie.” Against a tight and moderately aggressive player this often means “I’m on a draw.” Against a highly aggressive player this often means “I have a monster and I’m going to let you bet yourself to death.” Check-calls are precursors to check-raises on later streets from very aggressive players; from very passive players, they just precede more check-calls. Donkbets: a “donkbet” is when someone who does NOT have the betting lead makes an unexpected bet. For instance, if a player called your preflop raise but then leads into you on the flop, that would be a donkbet. Similarly, if a player calls your flop bet but then leads on the turn, that would also be a donkbet. At these stages, a donkbet should be interpreted as saying “that card helped me.” The more passive your opponent, the more straightforward this interpretation is. When a passive player comes alive on a third straight card, or a fourth flush card, or a pairing of the board, or some odd-looking random card, you should expect that the card has helped his hand out and he is now value-betting. Of course, how strong his hand is remains to be seen, but the card has improved him. Don’t expect that this means he has the nuts: I’ve seen passive players wake up and bet the fourth heart...because it gave them two pair. On the other hand, very aggressive players love to donkbet on scare cards. This is a cheaper bluff than a checkraise but it works just as often at these levels, and many
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aggressive players will take advantage of a turn ace or a third/ fourth club, or a board pair to try and steal the pot. Be aware of this. Unexpected checks: a player who has been betting steadily in the hand suddenly starts to check. What does this mean? Well, one obvious interpretation is that he has been bluffing and has now given up on the hand. Most players are straightforward enough that this will be the case. Against a medium-aggressive opponent, this will often be a good opportunity to bet with any two cards, since your folding equity will be through-the-roof. Another common situation is that a player flops a decent hand -- say top pair on a T-high board -- and then slows way down when the turn brings a K. They are worried about the overpair, and so have stopped betting. That does not necessarily mean they are ready to fold; some players will go from betting/raising to check/calling all the way to showdown. However, when an aggressive player stops being aggressive, that’s usually a sign that your situation is not as dire as you thought it was. Beware of the hyperaggressive opponent who unexpectedly checks, ESPECIALLY if he check/calls a scare card. For some reason, these players have taken the “strong = weak, weak = strong” philosophy to heart, and will often bet with little or nothing but immediately slowplay the moment they get a hand. Watch your opponents carefully to see if the turn check usually means they are giving up or if it usually means they are trapping you. Bet-check-bet: a strange-looking but rather common threestreet line is “bet the flop, check behind on the turn, bet the river,” where the opponent has check/called the whole way. Against an aggressive opponent, this river bet is often what we call a “desperation bluff.” The hand has no showdown value so the villain bets in the hopes that you will fold the best hand. Since you’ve shown little or no strength the whole hand through, they feel they have strong folding equity (which is true), and they are now attacking in a last-ditch effort to scoop up the pot. However, you need to be aware of what the board looked like. Another common reasoning behind this line is that the flop bet was with nothing, the turn gave the opponent a draw, and the river either made the draw or missed. If an obvious draw arrived on the end, you would really need to know more about your opponent before you knew if this was a bluff or not. Calling against some opponents will be extremely +EV even with bottom pair; against other opponents it will be -EV
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with anything short of a powerhouse. Again, watch your opponents and take notes on what their lines mean. Our fifth and final commandment ties in to everything we’ve already discussed: 5. Know thy image. “Image” is how the other players at the table perceive YOU. Against some opponents, this will be the very most important commandment. Against others, it will not matter at all. It all depends on how attentive your particular opponent is. How do we start to figure out our image? Only worry about image with second-level thinkers. For some of you, this is your first segue into third-level thinking. First-level thinking is asking, “what is my hand?” Second-level thinking is asking, “what is my opponent’s hand?” Third-level thinking is asking, “what does my opponent think my hand is?” Obviously third-level thinking is irrelevant against a first-level thinker. However, most opponents will at least make some token effort to guess your hand, so against your better opponents understanding your image will be important. When you have a complete idiot who never looks past his own hand while playing the game, don’t worry about image -- you’ll just be wasting your time and effort. Your cards only affect your image when you SHOW them. In the last five straight hands you’ve had AA, KQ (flopped trips), QQ, JT (flopped straight), and 55 (flopped set). You won all five hands before showdown, and you never show your hands without being forced to do so. Recognize that your table image is now absolute CRAP. Yes, you had the goods. Sure, your hands were actually powerhouses. Of course, your starting hand selection is tight. None of that matters. All your opponents have seen is you betting and raising every hand. They doubt you, and they’re very quickly going to get sick of your crap and start looking you up. This is NOT the time to get cute with QJs or 33 -- this is the time to play squeaky-clean poker as tight as you know how. Alternatively, if each of those five went to showdown and you displayed to the table your powerhouse winners, your folding equity will be HIGHER than usual, because people will begin to believe that you don’t get involved with a hand unless you’ve got the goods. Be aware of
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this. Recent history matters more than ancient history. Very few of your opponents actually have Poker Tracker. As a result, their image of you will be determined by their own personal observations. Most people have a relatively short memory, so concentrate most on your actions in the last two orbits. If your table image has fallen apart and your bluffs have gotten picked off several times in a row, tighten up and fold for the next two orbits -- in that short period of time you will rebuild most or all of your table image and you can then go back to doing your nasty deeds. Conversely, if you’ve been at the table for three hours playing a 12/8 game but you’ve gotten involved in 10 of the last 12 hands, people will think of you as a maniac, and play back at you with all sorts of crap. It’s the recent history that counts, so remember how your last two orbits looked at the table. Personal history matters more than table history. A player may not remember that you bluffed Seat 3 off his hand five times in a row, but he WILL remember that you bluffed HIM off his hand once an hour and a half ago. People have much longer memories for hands that involved them personally. If you stole a player’s big blind three times in the last four orbits, he’s going to know that, and he’s going to play back at you with any reasonably strong hand. Your folding equity on a steal will be particularly low against HIM, but won’t be low at all against the other players at the table. Opponents will usually assume that your lines always mean the same thing. If you bet 3/4ths pot on a river scare card with the nut flush, then the next time you are in a pot against that opponent and the river comes with a three-flush (not yours), bet 3/4ths pot! Your folding equity will be tremendous. Alternatively, if the flush card DID help you, bet a DIFFERENT amount -- push all your chips in, or bet 1/2 pot, or do something else. When you want a call, don’t do what you did the last time he saw you with the nuts. When you want a fold, do exactly what you did the last time he saw you with the nuts. People will remember these things.
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Hand Reading 2 I vi ii V7 This is probably my favorite topic so I’m happy to be starting the thread this week. I’ll try not to get too tl;dr. Why and What Hand reading is important because it allows us to make better (and thus more profitable) decisions - LDO. It’s a combination of figuring out what type of hand a person is likely to hold and how they will react with it. The better you are able to determine these two things (by better I mean the more narrowly you can determine their range of hands and actions) the better poker player you will be and the more money you will make. How it works On every street - preflop, flop, turn, and river - a player has a range of hands they will play. We use things like VPIP and position to have a base starting point, a preflop range of hands from which we scale their range down progressively on each street. What I mean by this is that preflop, their range is widest and as the action takes place, we remove more and more hands from that starting range until we finally have just a few hands remaining. Let me put it another way: If someone cannot have a hand in their range on a previous street, they cannot suddenly have it on this street. For example, a tight ABC player raises UTG and on the turn the board is 2456. You know he is very unlikely to have any sort of 3 (or 78) in his range preflop, so on the turn it obviously makes no sense to be afraid that he has a made straight. This is a pretty simple example, but this idea should help you when facing bets that make no sense.
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Useful Stats VPIP and PFR are great stats to start with to assign a preflop range and starting point. c-bet% and fold to c-bet% are also useful to have in your HUD. Logically, you know that if someone is c-betting more often, their range is weaker, and similarly, if someone is folding to c-bets more often, their range is much stronger when they actually call. I don’t like putting much stock in stats like turn c-bet% because they take a while to converge. Profiling Get used to profiling players until you have a more in-depth read on them. What I mean is that different player types tend to play their hands in a similar fashion. You can use VPIP and PFR to very quickly figure out what type of player someone is. Though you cannot really determine a concrete range over a small sample, you can reasonably assume that someone playing 30/0 is a passive fish and that someone playing 20/20 is aggressive, even if the sample size is only over 20 hands. Notes Always always always always be taking notes on your opponents. I would recommend avoiding logical and obvious notes like “limp reraises aces” and instead look for things out of the ordinary, like “check raised air on dry flop” or something like that. Anything that doesn’t line up with their player profile is good to know. Notes and reads trump stats, IMO. Stats are not the be all end all. It’s especially useful to note what someone’s stack-off range is, if you happen to see them in an all-in pot. Playing HUDless As an add on to the last section, if your note taking skill is solid, then playing without a HUD is totally doable (in fact, several of the biggest mid and high stakes winners don’t use a HUD, if I’m not mistaken). HUDs just allow you to play more tables. If you’re playing HUDless though - and I’d recommend having a HUDless session once a week just to work on hand reading - play fewer tables and assume players are playing straightforward until you can start profiling them. “He’s limped every hand this orbit, he’s probably passive and we should ISO him often.” “He hasn’t played a hand in the first 3 orbits, and now he just reraised from the BB, he’s probably pretty tight.” EZ game.
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Levels This doesn’t apply heavily in most cases at micro stakes but you should be thinking about it nonetheless if you want to improve your hand reading skills. It’s important to determine what level a player is thinking on. Different sources label them differently but for purposes of discussion, let’s say Level 1 = What is my hand? Level 2 = What does my opponent have? Level 3 = What does my opponent think I have? And so on. It’s usually good enough (at micro stakes) to assume someone is playing their hand and not thinking about how it plays against your range. But it’s important to be at least aware of this idea, because otherwise you could be making some very costly mistakes. The most common (and quoted everywhere) is “never bluff a fish.” Why? They don’t fold. Why? They’re thinking on level 1. They’re not putting you on a range and figuring out how their hand plays against it. You need only think on one level higher than your opponents to beat them. Reliable lines Always be looking for patterns and similarities in player types and how they play different strength hands. This will help you to narrow ranges down on further streets. You’ll have to do the grunt work for yourself, this kind of thing takes time and observation, but in general, people are way more likely to call with a worse hand than they are to raise with a worse hand. Don’t be the guy (aka me) who calls river raises too often because “they might be bluffing me this time.” Using aggression for value and hand reading AKA, postflop poker. The good stuff. The place where money is made and real players eek out thin value when they don’t have the nuts. How are they different that the guy nut pedaling or the guy folding a pair because it’s not the nuts? Aggression. “Wait I thought this was a COTW on hand reading.” It is. Post flop poker is a balance of aggression for value, bluffs, and dead money. Most villains you face have a very concrete range for their actions - calling, checking, and raising. This means that we get to play very optimally with marginal holdings. To be more specific, most players want to showdown with medium hands, want to raise big hands for value, and want
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to either fold or bluff their air. Say you have AK on a board of A67hh and OOP vs a passive fishy player. The turn is a 4h, oh noes!!! Check fold cuz he hit his draw??? No. Bet for value 100%. Players typically want to showdown their medium hands. They don’t want to turn one pair no draw into a bluff. He’ll let you know if you’re beat. But keep in mind ranges. If he can’t have a hand you can bet for value against on the flop, he can’t have it on the turn. Tips for better hand reading - Trust your reads and go with them! You will never get better at hand reading if you don’t try and fail sometimes. You will never learn to trust your reads if you never go with them and find out you were right. Look at failure as an opportunity to improve yourself (in this context, your hand reading). - Use PokerStove. Do you actually know what 10% of hands looks like or the various ways that 10% can be made? - Use your tracking software for review. To quote Sounded Simple (hope it’s okay, if not I will take it out, but it’s just from last week’s COTW anyway): Quote:
Originally Posted by Sounded Simple (3) Hand Reading Turn and river hand reading is 100x more complex than preflop or flop hand reading so the players who know opponents ranges will simply have an unassailable advantage. Recently I have been using a new technique to get a grip on hand ranges; - Open HEM/PT3 and filter for > Single Raised Pots > Final pot >180bb (shorter stacks are easy to play anyway) > You are OOP (because this is tougher) > You cbet and are called HU > You saw a showdown Then add these filters in turn: > You got called > You got raised
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For both “Got Called” and “Got Raised” Manually or in excel note the > Player Type > Flop SPR > Board / Board Type > Positions > Villains hand Your hand or who won is not relevant, now look at the info you have on what player types are doing on the turn with what holdings. You may want to get more specific with the filters once you see patterns emerge. I won’t pre-empt results, if anyone wants to know what I have found then post yours here or PM me and I will tell you if they correspond to what I have found In other words…. Do some work you lazy bums. *Don’t forget that you will need to do this analysis as you move up and/or games change over time. Summary It should be pretty obvious why hand reading is important. If you get better at hand reading, you will make more money. Ok and let’s get the discussion going!
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Playing Deep mpethybridge Note: I am organizing much of this CotW around the Stack to Pot Ratio concept fromProfessional No Limit Hold ‘Em, by Matt Flynn, Sunny Mehta and Ed Miller, 2+2 Publishing, 2007. So props to them, and you should assume that all of the stack size concepts discussed herein come from or derive in some way from their book; my contribution is in the specific application of those principles to our micro games. How Deep is Deep? This is an interesting question that I don’t think has a clear cut answer. In PNLHE, the authors round down to 200bb and call this deep, on the theory that it takes at least 4 pot sized bets to get all the money in. Full Tilt evidently agrees, because this is the max buy in at the deep tables it created. I don’t think 200bb is the minimum effective stack size necessary for a game or a hand to play deep. I actually think that today’s raised pots play as if they were deeper. The average player is far less willing to stack off with a top pair hand than he was in, say, 2007, and, therefore, some of the plays that people think of as deep stack plays are very effective at 100bb games. Conversely, there is so much 3 and 4 betting going on even at $10 and $25 that SPRs are, on average, probably significantly lower than they were in 2007, thus making even deeper games play more like shallower games in those situations. I think that any raised hand where the effective stacks are about 130bb plays more like a deep hand than a standard
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100bb hand in today’s game. The distinction is only important in specific situations, so I don’t think it is very important. Why Play Deep? To win bigger pots. Should You Play Deep? You should play deep if your post-flop skills are superior to the field playing deep. You should not play deep if your post-flop skills are average or inferior to the field at deep tables. Bear in mind that deep tables tend to attract regulars who think they have an edge on the field, so the average quality of the opponent you will face is significantly higher. Table Selection and Seat Selection When you start out playing deep, it is important to identify regs that you think have an edge against you, and to be careful about getting involved with them. Ideally, you should sit with position on a fish you are targeting, and, ideally, you should avoid any situation in which a reg will have position on you. While this is generally true for seat selection, it is far more important when you are deep than 100bb deep, simply because the reg can put you in tough spots for bigger amounts of money. This is so important deep that I do not believe a player that is inexperienced in deep stack play should sit in a game deep if there is a good regular with position on him that has him covered. Take your ego out of the decision. If you are inexperienced deep, and there is a good reg behind you that has you covered, you should strongly consider leaving the table. This might happen, for example, at a 100bb table where you have built your stack up to 150 or so bb, and another reg behind you has, too. Consider leaving the table; you should probably leave unless you have position on a fish with a big stack. Even in this situation, though, the fish will be difficult to exploit because of the reg behind you. This is a good situation to book your win, and stand up.
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Why Do Deep Hands Play Differently? Providing a framework to use to think about stack sizes was the single biggest contribution the authors of PNLHE made to poker, and this framework is the basis for the answer to this question. In a deep game (or a hand where effective stacks are deep), it is very difficult to extract maximum value from top pair hands. This is true primarily because of the reverse implied odds you offer to speculative hands. When SPR is low, you make a profit with one pair hands even when speculative hands draw out on you--they just can’t draw out frequently enough for you to lose money. Stove it and you will see what I’m talking about. (I actually stoved it here but then deleted it because it doubled the length of this post to stove both a 60bb shallow hand and a 160bb deep hand). Deep, though, they can more easily extract enough profit to justify playing speculative hands. (Not to mention the extra value you can get by bluff-threatening a 200bb stack). So What Adjustments Do We Make When Playing Deep? According to PNLHE: 1. Drawing hands go up in value. This should be obvious. Hands that want to build big pots post-flop become more valuable. This includes small and mid pocket pairs, suited aces and middle suited connectors. 2. Position becomes more important. It allows you to better exploit your informational advantage, as well as the fear one pair hands have of playing a big pot. Combining these two adjustments suggests that we ought to be calling in position with a wide range of drawing hands, looking to flop two pair or better. Similarly, you are getting better implied odds to float on the flop if you flop a small piece of the board, such as if you call with 98s and flop one pair. 3. One pair hands go down in value. This is a function of stack to pot ratios. If your hand is most likely to flop as a top pair, it prefers really small SPRs, in the 4-7 neighborhood. These are basically impossible to achieve at a deep table. Since it is therefore going to be very difficult to maximize your profit with
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these hands, you should aim to play small-ish pots that will minimize the reverse implied odds these hands offer. You should pot control these hands to try and ensure that the final pot is 4-7 times the size of the final preflop pot. 4. Consider varying your raise sizes. You’ll have to mix it up to avoid being readable, but it is worth thinking about incorporating 5bb and 2 bb raises into your preflop bet sizing to manipulate SPRs. AA is an exception to this adjustment, according to PNLHE. While the authors sort of argue for at least considering making smaller raises preflop with hands like AK, AQ and QQ, they specifically exclude AA, asserting that it wins big pots post flop often enough to accept the consequences of awkward SPRs rather than raising smaller with it. In addition to these adjustments, I favor the following adjustments as well: 5. Remember that 3 bet pots are no longer really deep. If someone raises to 4bb and you 3 bet it to 12bb, if he calls, the final preflop pot is 24bb-ish and SPR will be under 7 at 150bb effective stack size and about 9 if at 200bb effective stacks. These are workable SPRs for one pair hands. They are a little on the high side, but manageable. 6. Never fold a pocket pair if SPR is shaping up to be around 13. This requires an adjustment to your preflop strategy, if, like me, you normally fold small pocket pairs in early position. This is also an area in which you can get creative at manipulating SPR by changing your preflop bet sizing. For example, if you are 100bb deep and you raise to 4bb UTG with 55, and the button 3 bets you to 12bb, you are facing an SPR of 4-ish if you call, which is a horrible SPR for this hand. But suppose you are 200bb deep and you raise to 2bb UTG with 55 and the button 3 bets you to 8bb. Now the pot is 17, effective stacks are 192, and your SPR is 11. If he 3 bet you with a one pair hand, you basically have him right where you want him, playing a one pair hand with the opportunity to make really big post-flop mistakes. I know, I know, we hate minraises. I’m just sayin’ is all.
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Also, if you are going to vary your preflop raises, you are going to have to balance. I would suggest doing so with some of your one pair hands that, if they can’t get really low SPRs, play pretty well with really high SPRs. If you make small raises in EP with one pair hands and get 3 bet, you have the option of folding and losing less, or 4 betting and playing a pot with a really low SPR. 7. With your strong hands, prefer flop raises to turn raises. This just makes it easier to get all the money in because of the exponential increases in bet sizes. 100bb deep, I advocate usually just check/calling or flatting with a powerhouse such as a flopped set on a very dry board. deep, however, I think you have to suck it up and raise at least some of the time. I would probably pick the villains with the lowest c-bet %s to raise on dry flops, maximizing the probability that the bettor actually has a hand he can call a raise with. 8. Vary your 3 bet sizing. This is crucial, in my opinion. If you are value 3 betting, you want as low a SPR as you can get. If you are bluff or semi-bluff raising, you want a SPR as low as possible so that calling your c-bet does not necessarily commit the villain to the hand. Obviously, to vary your 3 bet sizing, you have to mix it up sometimes. I actually hate this idea, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that: 9. Playing 200bb deep allows you the opportunity to run big multi-street bluffs that win big pots. I personally think that this is usually FPS, but there are occasions where I can see this being a good play. The adjustment below comes to us courtesy of Baluga Whale: 10. Since people call EP raises with hands that can crack AA, raise in EP with hands that can crack hands that are looking to crack AA. Baluga specifically mentions adding to your range hands such as AJs, KQs and KJs. Thinking About Exploiting Micro-Grinders at Deep Tables
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Pretty much everything in the adjustments section is in, or inferable from, PNLHE, and would apply to pretty much every deep game. But we play at the micros, and micro-players have specific leaks: 1. They over value 1 pair hands. 2. They can’t fold good, but second best hands. 3. They overestimate their implied odds. 4. They chase draws (see leak 3). All of this leads us to some important conclusions: 1. Playing deep, it is actually possible to win the battle of the coolers. Until I started playing deep, I believed that situations like KK v. AA were 0 EV situations; that, over the long run, we would break even stacking off our KK against AA against some villains, and stacking KK with our aces against others. Playing deep, though, affords us the opportunity to win this battle and extract a profit from situations such as this where other players are breaking even. This is really just a specific application of the general rule that the deeper the stacks the more important skill becomes. But if you spend much time playing deep stacked, you have to be looking for opportunities to win the battle of the coolers. I don’t think 200bb deep is deep enough to be looking to fold middle set and save a few bets when you are set over setted, but it does give us some chances to manipulate pot size when we have AA against KK to win most of a stack, while manipulating pot size with KK so as to lose the minimum to AA. Another application of this is directly inferable from PNLHE. Suppose you take the authors’ advice and start (usually) raising 3bb with AQ instead of your usual 3.5 or 4bb. Over time, you will lose a little less in the pots you lose to, say, AT when he flops two pair, or to a guy who flops a set. Now suppose that the field, on average, raises AQ to 3.5bb. Each time you flop a set or two pair, you will win, on average, a bigger pot than you lose to the field. The difference is all profit to you, and it is profit you owe to the fact that you planned
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your hand around your hand’s value in a deep stacked game, whereas the field in general, did not make this adjustment. 2. Playing deep, you should pot control your one pair hands. There are a variety of ways to do this, and they vary from opponent to opponent, but the idea is to not put yourself in a position where you justify your opponent’s overestimation of his implied odds. You should play in such a way that it is basically impossible for most villains to chase a draw against you profitably. The corollary to this is that when you have two pair or better, you should be building a big pot and charging draws ruthlessly. Conclusion Although this post appears tl;dr, in fact, I think I covered maybe 2% of what there is to say on these subjects. In every section I wrote, I had to leave out the vast majority of what I wanted to say. So I would like to see some discussion on applying the principles in specific situations to flesh out my post, which I consider to be nothing more than a collection of very general statements that can be applied in a lot of situations and have exceptions in a lot of situations.
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Playing Limpers KurtSF The basic jist of this is going to be: abuse limpers at every opportunity. I’ll get into some reasoning, some math, some examples, but I want you to keep in mind that basic premise: limpers suck at poker and have hands they are unsure about. LIMPERS SPECULATE Everyone’s limping range is different. Some people will never open-limp. Some will open-limp with AKs because “its a drawing hand”. Some will limp with KK to trap you. Some limp with small pairs to setmine on the cheap. Some limp any two cards because they want to see a flop, any flop. But the basic premise behind limping is the same: speculation. The idea is to see a flop for cheap, then make a lot of money afterward when you spike. Thinking players describe this as Implied Odds, or IO. IO is when your hand is not strong enough to play at the current price, but the implied profit from later streets if you hit makes the hand playable. Its unlikely many limpers will describe their play with the term however. Why? Because there’s tons of information available on poker strategy readily available. Books, twoplustwo and other forums, DeucesCracked and other coaching sites, etc. And all of them will generally recommend against open limping. Therefore, when you see someone open-limp, and more people limp along behind, its likely that these players have not availed themselves of these resources. In other words, its unlikely they have studied the game, and likely that they are weak players.
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Now, its such common knowledge that limping is bad that isolating limpers is much less valuable than in years past; there’s just not that many people happily limping along in every pot anymore. But if there’s one place where you still find the limpers, its at the micro-stakes tables, and this is the microstakes forum after all. So keep in mind that some of this advice may not be as useful as you move up (and may even get you in trouble), but let’s take a look at the HUGE opportunity for profit in isolating limpers. POSITION Let’s start by looking at some reasons to isolate limpers. Poker is a game of edges - you want to find and edge and press it. An edge can be knowing you opponents tenancies and exploiting them (what alex23 calls “skill edge”). An edge can be in hand strength (being ahead of their range). An edge can be having position on your opponent. If you don’t understand how valuable position is and how to use it to your advantage, I suggest you study up with CaptVimes . One of the key advantages you gain in isolating limpers is a positional advantage. This works in a couple ways. First, the folks you know are interested in seeing a flop and playing a hand (the limpers) have already acted, and you have relative position on them. Second, it makes it more difficult for players who have absolute position on you to play the hand, and makes it much more likely that you will have position on the field post flop. Let’s look at one (admittedly contrived) example. Assume full stacks and unknown villains, 25nl. Hero is on your left and is a 15/12 TAG. Pre Flop: ($0.35) Villain is BU with A 9 3 folds, MP1 calls $0.25, 1 fold, Hero calls $0.25, Villain ??? How does he feel about his hand here? Pretty good ya? He’ll play it, and just has to decide to limp along or raise it up. But what about: Pre Flop: ($0.35) Villain is BU with A 9 3 folds, MP1 calls $0.25, 1 fold, Hero raises to $1.25, Villain ???
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How does he feel about his hand NOW? Not so warm and fuzzy, eh? He’ll need to spike to be good, plus there a lot of RIO because a ton of Hero’s range is aces with a better kicker. Fold! Do you see how Hero just got postflop position on EVERYONE left in the hand by isolating the limper and pushing the button out? Let’s peel back the curtain: Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is CO with Q J 3 folds, MP1 calls $0.25, 1 fold, Hero raises to $1.25, 3 folds, ... You just got the in-position player to fold the best hand FTW. Isolating limpers gets you better postflop position in bigger pots. Its usually better than limping along, and often also better than folding. Isolating limpers presses your positional edge. INITIATIVE Again, I’m not going to explain why initiative is good, but in 3 weeks when Cangurino writes his Concept of the Week article you can read all about it. Suffice to say, initiative is money in the bank. Let’s just continue with the same example, eh? Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is CO with Q J 3 folds, MP1 calls $0.25, 1 fold, Hero raises to $1.25, 3 folds, MP1 calls $1.00 Flop: ($2.85) T A 8 (2 players) MP1 checks, Hero bets $2.25, MP1 folds. Results: Hero wins pot $2.85, profits $1.60. And peel back the curtain: Pre Flop: ($0.35) Villain is MP1 with 3 3 3 folds, MP1 calls $0.25, 1 fold, Hero raises to $1.25, 3 folds, MP1 calls $1.00 Flop: ($2.85) T A 8 (2 players) MP1 checks, Hero bets $2.25, MP1 folds. OHAI you just won 6+bb with the worst hand!
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Isolating limpers will get you initiative in a hand, and initiative is almost as good as cash most places. Always use your initiative to cbet limp-callers. Remember, they are unsure about their hands. They don’t want to play! Give them a reason not to. And when they do start putting money in the pot, get out. Obv if MP1 calls or c/r here you shut down to an offsuit-K on the turn. But guess what? He expects you to have TP, and if he starts putting money in the pot, he’s got TP beat. If you have AQ on the above board and action, but MP1 check raises you on the flop, its still a fold. LIMPERS DO NOT LIKE THEIR HANDS! IF THAT CHANGES, GET THE **** OUT OF THE POT. GANGUP EFFECT Let’s talk set mining for a bit. We all know the math, 5-10 rule and 1:8 blah blah blah. Well guess what? All that standard math is for HU pots and doesn’t matter in multiway pots. We all know that if you can get a villain to put in 15-20% of their stack preflop when you’re holding aces that they cannot profitably setmine, that you can safely stackoff postflop and STILL be +EV. Well, not so much if you’re playing against a field and are not HU postflop. You’re OTB with AA. Time to make some money, amirite! Four limpers to you, std 2+2 raise of 4+1, you bust it to $2... everyone calls. “Stupid idiots. All four of them just called without good odds to setmine, putting in too much of their stack to be profitable in the longrun. Gogogogogo!” *buzzzz* Thank you for playing. Please head to the back of the line and practice your EV calculations. Each one may have made a -EV call individually, but you’re playing against the field. Peel back the curtain and all 4 have small pocket pairs, say 22, 44, 55, 77. There is now a huge chance that the field catches a set, something like 42% on the flop. You’re now in the awkward position of having to cbet and give up on this hand, because putting in any more money than that makes you -EV. All it takes is one idiot with KTo to feel
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priced in preflop, spike his T on the flop and peel your cbet, then put you on AK and bet the river and BAM you fold the best hand. Yuck. “But I did what I was supposed to do and raised! What do you want me to do, limp and setmine aces to avoid -EV situations?” No. But this CoW is not called Raising Limpers, its called Isolating Limpers. Same example, AA OTB with 4 limpers. Make the bet $3.25. Now you get one optimistic caller who is bad at math... feel free to stack off happily. NH, GG. “But what if they all fold? I make the minimum with my aces?” Yes, but you make money. +EV. Playing against a field is not like playing against one villain. Each one can individually be -EV and you are STILL -EV also. Let me repeat that: each one can individually be -EV and you are STILL -EV also! Because you’re not playing against a hand, you’re playing against many hands. You’re better off winning a small pot with your big hands than getting yourself into a pickle against a large field where you have high RIO. Reverse implied odds my friends... limpers are playing for Implied Odds, and when you have a good hand against limpers, that means you have the opposite, Reverse Implied Odds. Another example: Unknown villains, full stacks. Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is BU with A J 1 fold, UTG+1 calls $0.25, 1 fold, MP1 calls $0.25, HJ calls $0.25, Hero raises to $1.25, UTG+1 calls $1.00, MP1 calls $1.00, HJ calls $1.00. Flop: ($5.35) T A 9 (4 players) UTG+1 checks, MP1 checks, HJ checks, Hero bets $4.00, UTG+1 calls $4.00, MP1 folds, HJ calls $4.00 Turn: ($17.35) T A 9 6: (3 players) UTG+1 checks, MP1 checks, Hero ?????? Kicks a puppy? What now? OHAI you’re in a world of hurt!
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Let’s peel back the curtain and see that UTG+1 had 99 for bottom set and HJ has Q J for the OESFD. Yeah, HJ could have just as easily had 87 and made his straight. UTG+1 got greedy and tried to trap more money in the pot with his set (yes, even with the FD out). And you... you want to puke. Bet/ fold and protect against the draws? Check for pot control and call one on the river if the flush doesn’t come in? Or just c/f from here out, and risk folding the best hand or allowing them to draw out? ****. Let’s try that again! Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is BU with A J 1 fold, UTG+1 calls $0.25, 1 fold, MP1 calls $0.25, HJ calls $0.25, Hero raises to $2.50, UTG+1 calls $2.25, MP1 folds, HJ folds. Flop: ($5.85) T A 9 (4 players) UTG+1 checks, Hero bets $4.00, UTG+1 raises $8.00, Hero??? Folds. Much better!! Hopefully next time he doesn’t get so lucky and flop that set. Most big hands play better against a smaller field, and big preflop raises will accomplish that.Don’t get married to one preset “strategy” for preflop hand selection or bet sizing. Think about why you are raising each time, and size your bet to accomplish that. FREE MONEY Now that we’ve discussed some of the advantages of isolating limpers, let’s start talking about how to use these advantages to make money. You know how you open your range in late position to steal the blinds? Yeah, if you don’t know why you’re doing that, go read Happy Pixel’s treatise on the subject. I quote: [QUOTE=HappyPixel It’s only 1.5BBs, why should I get involved? Because 1.5BBs is a LOT OF ****ING MONEY!!![/quote] The blinds are forced to put money into the pot with any hand. But there’s another player that puts money into the pot with marginal holdings: the limper. One more time, everybody now!
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Limpers are bad at poker and are unsure about their hands. Every time a limper enters the pot in front of you I want you to hear this sound in your head: “CHA-CHING!” That’s your EV cash register counting up the bad money in the pot sitting out there for the taking. Another example, again unknown villains and full stacks. Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is HJ with two cards 4 folds, Hero ??? It gets folded around to you, what’s your standard opening range here? I don’t know, but let’s make one up for the example. Let’s say any two suited broadway, ATo+, KQ, and any pair. Fair enough? Time to tweek it. Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is HJ with two cards 3 folds, MP1 calls $0.25, Hero ??? What’s your opening range now? “Well, I was against random hands before, this time villain has a hand he wants to play, so I’ll tighten my range a little to preserve my equity edge and be +EV when entering the pot.” YOU! BACK OF THE LINE! What have I been prattling on about all this time? Isolating limpers gives you a positional edge, it gives you a initiative edge, and it gets you involved in pots with bad players who don’t like their hands. You don’t need to protect your equity edge when you have all this other stuff working for you! Here, let’s try that again: Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is HJ with two cards 3 folds, MP1 calls $0.25 CHA-CHING!, Hero ??? “OK, I get it. He’s probably got a small pair or something suited there and will need to hit the flop hard to continue. Well, there’s still a lot of players left to act. What if I added any suited aces to my open range?” Yes, good. Suited aces are ahead of a ton of his range (suited junk), and when he’s got better (small pairs) he STILL needs to hit the flop to want to continue. Plus, suited aces can hit the
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flop many ways and play well postflop. A+. One more time: Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is HJ with two cards UTG calls $0.25 CHA-CHING!, UTG+1 calls $0.25 CHA-CHING!, 1 fold, MP1 calls $0.25 CHA-CHING!, Hero ??? Now what? “That’s a lot of money out there.” Indeed. “But I don’t want to play easily dominated hands, right?” *cough* “OK, OK. What if I opened... any 2 broadway, any ace, and any pair? Is that OK?” You are such a LAG. Welcome to the wonderful world of exploiting weak players! Here’s you diploma and a couplon for a free Happy Meal. Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is HJ with K J UTG calls $0.25 CHA-CHING!, UTG+1 calls $0.25 CHA-CHING!, 1 fold, MP1 calls $0.25 CHA-CHING!, Hero raises $2.00, 8 folds. Results: Hero wins pot $1.35, profits $1.10. Nice hand. “But they NEVER FOLD in the micros! I don’t know how it is at your stakes, but they ALWAYS come along, and now I’ve got a crap hand in a big pot!” Sometimes. Do I have to repeat the mantra again? Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is HJ with K J UTG calls $0.25 CHA-CHING!, UTG+1 calls $0.25 CHA-CHING!, 1 fold, MP1 calls $0.25 CHA-CHING!, Hero raises $2.00, 6 folds, UTG+1 calls $1.75, MP1 calls $1.75. Flop: ($6.55) T
A
9
(4 players)
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UTG+1 checks, MP1 checks, Hero bets $4, 2 folds. See where I’m going with this? “Um, they don’t always miss.” You’re right. About 25% of the time it will go like this: Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is HJ with K J UTG calls $0.25 CHA-CHING!, UTG+1 calls $0.25 CHA-CHING!, 1 fold, MP1 calls $0.25 CHA-CHING!, Hero raises $2.00, 6 folds, UTG+1 calls $1.75, MP1 calls $1.75. Flop: ($6.55) T
A
9
(3 players)
UTG+1 checks, MP1 checks, Hero bets $4, UTG+1 raises to $11, 1 fold, Hero??? Any doubt about where you’re at in this hand? So 75% of the time you win $4.65, and 25% you’ll lose $6. I’ll let you work out the EV calculation. SUMMARY Abuse the limpers at every opportunity. That is all. I was originally going to include a quiz and a video with my CoW, but I ran out of time. Maybe I’ll add them later in the week. My apologies for all the set-mining nits who are going to start wondering why no one ever pays them off anymore and where their winrate disappeared to. CHA-CHING!
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Playing OOP magodeoz84 Disclaimer Playing oop (out of position) is a huge topic and it’s impossible to cover anything that could be said about it in a single COTW. I’ve decided to mostly concentrate on flop play, but there’ll also be some remarks about preflop and some information on turn play. I’m trying to write this from a game theoretical perspective (as good as I can), so please be aware when you’re reading this, that against a lot of villains it’s better to play “incorrectly”. For example, there’s no need to balance your range (and I’d say it’s actually bad in a lot of spots) against a guy that’s not paying attention and that you don’t see at the tables very often. Playing oop Before I start talking about specific lines and stuff I’d like to make a few general statements about playing oop: - Position is important. Yeah I know, you’ve all heard and read that before. And I’m also sure that there’s quite a few of you out there who’ll be thinking “yeah, sure, I know position is important, let’s get to the interesting stuff.” But those of you who are on the same level that I was at when I started grinding micro FR probably don’t understand how important it really is. And even though I’m sure I’ve improved a lot since my micro FR days I’m also a 100% sure there’s stuff related to position which I don’t get yet either. So my point here is: Everybody who’s read a poker book or been on 2p2 for only a short time knows position is important. However there’s a huge difference between “knowing” and “understanding” and the latter needs a lot of work. And only when you understand something you’ll be
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able to make it part of your game in a non robotic way. I hope that doesn’t sound offensive or, even worse, discouraging, cause it’s not meant that way. It’s more of a warning that it takes some time and effort to get a better grasp of how positional issues should change your decision making. - Whenever you enter the pot from a position where you’re likely to end up being oop after the flop you willingly accept having a big disadvantage. When you call a raise in the blinds, you know you’ll be playing the pot oop. When you raise in early position it’s pretty likely and even when you’re opening in the cutoff you’re not guaranteed to have position postflop. This is one reason why you should be tightening up your openraising range when you move away from the button. In poker there’s 3 advantages you can have over your opponent (quick shout out to Baluga Whale from whose videos I borrowed that concept). Those are skill advantage, card advantage and positional advantage. So whenever enter the pot from a position where you’re sure or likely to end up being oop postflop your opponent(s) has/have the positional advantage. To make up for that, you better have some good card advantage or skill advantage (This can be a lot of things: F.e. being a better player in general or having a good idea of villain’s tendencies which allows you to make good decisions against him postflop, etc.). I’m going to distinguish 2 different scenarios. One is when you raise pf and get called by a player that has position on you, the other is when you call a raise being oop, which will mostly be the case when you’re in the blinds. So in the first scenario you’re having the betting impetus whereas in the second you’re the pf caller. I’m going to focus on heads-up pots, but I’ll make some comments about how you should adapt in a multiway pot. My hand examples will be from 6m games cause that’s what I’m mostly playing at the moment, however I don’t think this matters. All those lines work just as well at a full ring table as long as you adjust for table dynamics and the villains in the hand. Playing oop as the preflop raiser Preflop adjustments Whenever you open with a raise, other things being equal (mostly skill), you prefer to be called by one of the blinds and
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play the hand in position rather than being called by a player in later position. Unfortunately this doesn’t always happen and the earlier your position, the more likely you’re gonna end up out of position postflop. There’s two things you can do to make up for raising in early position (or in the SB), where the risk of being out of position postflop is biggest: You should raise with a stronger range, which basically means raising with hands that you think will still make you money on average even if some of the time you have to play them out of position or against multiple opponents and also taking into account the times when someone behind you wakes up with a monster. (Plus, at least from a theoretical point of view, you should include some hands for deception/balance, which maybe aren’t +ev by themselves but help you make more with your big hands). The second thing you can do is to raise a bigger amount when your preflop position gets worse. This is open for debate, but in my opinion it makes the most sense to raise bigger in early position or in the small blind than in LP. As an example (that’s how I play) you could do 4x in EP, 3.5x in MP, 3x in the HJ/CO, 2.5x on the BTN and 4x from the SB. This has several advantages: From EP (and to some extent from the SB) you might reduce people’s willingness to call your raise, and if you get called you created a bigger pot when your range is stronger and you reduce the SPR (stack to pot ratio) which is good when you have to play your hand out of position cause when stacks get shallower, your positional disadvantage decreases as well. On the other hand, when you’re on the BTN, you loose less when you get 3bet and the players in the blind might call you lighter which is good, because you generally should be able to outplay them when you’re in position. That being said, let’s take a look at what your arsenal is when you end up in a heads-up pot oop. The cbet I just want to point out a few very important points: - Flop texture matters a lot: Standard cbetting is something that is pretty easy to learn, so especially for the micro players reading this, having a decent idea which boards are good for cbetting and which aren’t should help you a lot. - Change your sizing: Please don’t be lazy with your cbets. Against players that don’t pay a lot of attention (which will not only be the fishes but also masstabling regs) barring some very special circumstances there’s no reason I could think of to cbet more than ½ pot on a super dry A83r board with air. Or if you
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have TT on a T87 two tone board I got no idea why you would ever bet less than at least 2/3 pot (I’d prefer more) against someone who’s only thinking about his own hand and doesn’t adjust to bet sizes (unless you start overbetting big or minbetting). If you’re afraid of giving away information I’d recommend having a fixed amount based on board texture, but this just isn’t necessary versus most opponents you’ll play against at the micros (and at small stakes as well for that matter). The check-fold Again you should have a decent idea of flop texture and ranges. When to c/f is super villain dependent and also depends on your position. But in general you should be c/fing in spots where you think that a cbet is going to get called or raised too often to show an immediate profit. If f.e. you bet 2 into a 3 dollar pot, you need to win 40% of the time to break even. So if you expect villain to call more than 60% of the time and you don’t think that you can continue when called, you should just give up. Let’s look at an example: You open in UTG+1 with AJ and a tricky TAG calls you in the CO. His range there is like any pp, some suited connectors, maybe some suited gappers, maybe some suited aces, maybe also premium hands. Now the flop comes 874 two tone. When you cbet, probably any pp is going to call, a lot of the sc’s got a piece as well, then there’s a part of his range that made a FD and if he’s tricky he might still float you with air. This might be a spot where you’re generally better off just c/fing, especially if you think he’d just flat the flop with 2pr+ and you don’t feel comfortable firing multiple barrels. Another example might be when you raise 55 in the HJ and the BTN who’s a huge station calls you. Flop comes QJ8 with a FD and you think that the BTN is calling with any gutshot or better. In this situation I really doubt he’s going to fold as often as he should to make cbetting profitable and making a multi street bluff versus a station is usually just bad. The check-call This is a line that you should use less and also one where I struggle a bit. A lot of players just don’t have that in their arsenal when they’re the PFR. And the reason for this is that if they cbet a lot of air they should also cbet their monsters. So whenever they check you can be quite sure they’re just going to give up. That’s why against players that you think will take
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advantage of your obvious weakness and steal whenever you check, you should have a c/cing or a c/ring range. However this line should be used far less frequently than the other two. A few things to think about: - To be able to cbet as often as you should, you can’t afford to play your monsters like this very often. This would weaken your cbetting range way too much. - This line works best versus aggressive villains that you expect to fire multiple barrels once you check. If that’s the case, this line might make you more money than the standard cbet. - Sometimes it can also make sense to c/c to keep your equity share in the pot. Let’s say you open in MP with JTs and a good and aggressive villain calls you in LP. The flop comes J87r. That’s a flop where an aggressive villain is gonna raise your cbet quite often and against some very aggressive opponents a bet/3bet line might be best. However, if you don’t think you can comfortably 3b/get it in here, I’d prefer to c/c on the flop instead of cbetting and then either fold to a raise or call the raise and get bluffed off your hand on the turn. I think those pair+weak draw hands are probably the kind of hands which I usually use to strengthen my c/cing range. - Every once in a while it makes sense to c/c flop, c/r (if possible c/s) turn with a monster or a good draw versus an agro player on your left, just to send him a message and prevent him from betting every time you check on the flop. - You could also c/r on the flop instead of c/cing, however this is something I don’t do very often at all when I’m the PFR. The cbet Flop, c/r Turn line This is a line I really like and which you should do as a semibluff and also for value. I use this mostly against players that like to float so I get value from their bluffs and it should also prevent them from barreling every time I check on the turn. How wide you can do this depends on villain’s floating frequency, but against some villains doing this with any FD or OESD should work. Against others I’d need some kind of combo draw. This all depends on how wide you think they are floating you and how they are gonna respond to your c/r. However to make this play work you got to be sure that this villain is floating a lot and will bet most of his floats on the turn. Example 1: PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, $2.00 BB (6 handed) - PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com
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Button ($282) SB ($236.75) Hero (BB) ($200) UTG ($200) MP ($200) CO ($391.85) Preflop: Hero is BB with K , A 2 folds, CO bets $6, 2 folds, Hero raises to $22, CO calls $16 Flop: ($45) 5 , 10 , 6 (2 players) Hero bets $27, CO calls $27 Turn: ($99) 4 (2 players) Hero checks, CO bets $45, Hero raises to $151 (All-In), 1 fold Total pot: $189 | Rake: $3 This was in a 3b pot, so the stacks were perfect for it. Unless villain is a big nit, I’d expect him to float me with Ahigh or some medium pp pretty often (if those are in his pf range). So if I expect him to bet the turn pretty often, I prefer the c/r over a b/c line for two reasons: I’m the one getting in the last bet, so I have some fold equity to go with my pot equity which is huge and I also maximize value against his bluffs by letting him put a bet into the pot before making him fold. The cbet Flop, c/f Turn I’m sure you all know this line. All I wanted to say here is, that it’s sometimes better to just give up when your cbet gets called. You should have a range for cbetting the flop and then c/fing on the turn and firing multiple barrels all the time is going to be a sure recipe for disaster for most players especially at the micros. It’s important to recognize good spots to double barrel or c/r on the turn, but a decent portion of the time just giving up is going to be the right play. Adjusting in a multiway pot I don’t want to go into detail here, but in general you should give villains more credit when they show aggression and you should also bluff less, because it’s more likely that you’ll get called. And you also need a stronger hand than you would in a heads-up pot to play for stacks. This also applies when you’re the preflop caller.
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Playing oop as the preflop caller So now I’m going to assume that you’re calling a raise in the blinds. Two basic things to consider: Your range in general should be pretty tight cause you’re going to have the positional disadvantage. How tight it should be depends on villain and on villain’s position/range. The lead out/ “donk bet” A donk bet is a bet made from a player who’s acting before the preflop raiser’s got a chance to act. This again is open to debate, but in my opinion it’s usually not a good play especially in a heads-up pot. The reason for this is that whether you have a monster, a marginal hand or air you usually benefit from villain putting more money into the pot with a weak range. This is almost always the case when you call a raise from LP (and to some extent from MP as well). When you donk, you take the possibility to cbet away from the preflop raiser and his range for putting money into the pot (calling or raising your donk bet) is gonna be stronger than his cbetting range would be. That’s not something you want when you’re bluffing or have a marginal hand. And to only donkbet with monsters is pretty transparent. There are some spots though where I think donking is a good idea: - It’s a multiway pot and you think it’s likely that the flop will get checked through. So with a good draw or a monster it might be a good idea to lead out. - You think donking out will maximize fold equity if you’re bluffing or value if you have a monster. I hardly ever do it, but I could imagine that you might get some spazzy bluff raises or light call downs if you have a good image. However, a c/r is usually gonna work just as well. - If you’re heads-up and you’re pretty sure that villain is gonna check back on the flop, you might want to lead out to get him off two overcards. For example if you call a raise from the CO and the flop comes 653, it might be a decent spot to lead out with your whole range to prevent the CO from taking a free card with all his unpaired overcards. I think that most of those are really marginal advantages and usually not enough to make donking better than a c/c or c/r.
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Example 2: PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, $2.00 BB (6 handed) - PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com Button ($434.45) Hero (SB) ($200) BB ($29.30) UTG ($40) MP ($285.15) CO ($200) Preflop: Hero is SB with 7 , 7 3 folds, Button bets $6, Hero calls $5, BB calls $4 Flop: ($18) 3 , 6 , 4 (3 players) Hero bets $12, BB calls $12, 1 fold Turn: ($42) 5 (2 players) Hero checks, BB bets $11.30 (All-In), Hero calls $11.30 River: ($64.60) 4
(2 players, 1 all-in)
Total pot: $64.60 | Rake: $3 In this hand I was up against a very bad player with a short stack in the BB and a nitty/passive player (over 200 hands) on the BTN. My equity against the fish is excellent and he’s bad so he could call with anything. At the same time it’s quite likely that the fish on the BTN is going to check back and I don’t want to give 2 players a free card. So I lead out expecting a call from the BB and a fold from the BTN the vast majority of the time. The check-fold Again it all depends on ranges and board texture, but especially oop you’ll just have to give up on some boards. You’ve got to realize though that if you’re c/fing the vast majority of the time you’re probably calling too light preflop. C/fing is going to be a good play in a lot of situations, however you have to make sure that a decent part of your range is either going to c/c or c/r. Otherwise you’re just burning money by calling raises oop and then giving up to a cbet all the time.
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The check-call It’s really tough to give general guidelines when you should be c/cing. In general you’re going to take this line with made hands that have some showdown value like top pair with a weak/medium kicker, 2nd pair, even bottom pair or Ahi. It’s really important though that you have a read on the villain and a plan for the rest of the hand. C/cing the flop with anything just to fold on the turn is usually not a good idea. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have some hands that you elect to call with one time and then give up. But if you’re doing this the vast majority of the time you’re going to lose a lot of money. Here is a hand I played against a slightly passive villain: Example 3: PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, $2.00 BB (6 handed) - PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com CO ($418.50) Button ($220) SB ($200) Hero (BB) ($211) UTG ($334.85) MP ($249) Preflop: Hero is BB with 9 , 8 3 folds, Button bets $6, 1 fold, Hero calls $4 Flop: ($13) 2 , 9 , 4 (2 players) Hero checks, Button bets $8, Hero calls $8 Turn: ($29) 10 (2 players) Hero checks, Button bets $22, Hero folds Total pot: $29 | Rake: $1.40 Unless you have a very aggressive dynamic going this hand is probably too weak to c/r for value on the flop so I elect to c/c. On the turn, the decision depends entirely on what you think of the villain in the hand. Against a lot of players it would be better to c/c again (if you have a plan for the river), but I didn’t expect this villain to have a large bluffing range here, eventhough the turn is a decent card to bluff at. Against some villains you might include some monsters/good draws into your c/cing range, otherwise you’ll always have marginal hands
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when you c/c. Something I wouldn’t recommend very often at all is to float oop with complete air to steal the pot later. Against some players you can call on an Ahi flop with anything and if they check back on the turn you can be almost certain that you can steal it on the river. There’s so much that can go wrong though and you need a solid read on villain to try this in my opinion. The check-raise Whenever you think your hand is too good to just c/f (and donking isn’t a valid option for you in most spots), then you’re going to make a decision between a c/c and a c/r. As a general guideline I’d recommend to c/c with most one pair hands, while you c/r very good one pair hands and monsters plus a lot of draws. What I think is very important in this context is that you’re thinking about your entire range (and at this point I’d like to give a quick shout out to Foucault who helped me a lot with this stuff). Let’s say you decide for whatever reason that you want to c/r with roughly x% of your hands. So what hands should you choose for it? In general you’re going to have a range that you raise for value and a range that you’re bluffing with (good draws fall somewhere in between I guess). C/ring for value is a viable option, whenever you think you’ll get called by enough worse hands. Whether you can c/r KQ on a QT4 two tone board for value depends on your opponent and your image. Sometimes just calling is the more +ev line here. The same is true for your monsters, sometimes you might decide that calling is more +ev than c/ring. Most players that have some idea what they are doing have a decent understanding of what hands belong into their value range, eventhough they might overplay some hands or play others too passively. Now the other part of your c/ring range is going to be bluffs and semibluffs. And when I look at the posts in the micro forums it’s pretty obvious that some players don’t really have a good idea what hands they should be c/ring with. Again there’s always exceptions, but in general you should bluff with those hands that have the best equity against villain’s calling range. This is really important, cause every now and then I read a post from someone who asks if his c/r bluff with 55 on KT4r or so was a good one. Well, if you think it’s +ev to c/r bluff a huge part of your range, sure then go ahead. But if you’re playing against someone who won’t let you run him over with bluffs and you want/need to have a “normal” c/ring
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frequency, then there’s just no reason to put 55 into that range. Let’s assume you’re playing against a rather tight villain and his calling range (for simplicity let’s assume he’s not 3betting) on KT4r is going to be JJ-QQ, any Kx, QJ, sets, AA. So what should you c/r bluff him with? Again, choose hands that have the best equity vs his calling range, this means you want to have hands in there which have a gutshot (AQ, AJ, J9, Q9) an overcard (all Ax) or hands that can turn good bluffing cards. That would be hands with a backdoor flush or straight draw. You don’t want to have 55 in there, cause 55 has exactly 2 outs against a huge part of his calling range. I want to say that once more cause if that’s all you take away from this COTW I’m happy: Unless you think you could profitably c/r almost anything against a certain opponent, choose those hands that have the best equity vs villains calling range and those hands which can turn a backdoor draw that’ll let you continue bluffing on the turn. Example 4: PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, $2.00 BB (6 handed) - PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com Hero (BB) ($256.60) UTG ($239.45) MP ($428.85) CO ($272.75) Button ($236) SB ($103.65) Preflop: Hero is BB with J , 10 3 folds, Button bets $5, 1 fold, Hero calls $3 Flop: ($11) 8 , 9 , 8 (2 players) Hero checks, Button bets $8, Hero raises to $28, 1 fold Total pot: $27 | Rake: $1.30 If he’s calling with a 9 I have about 14 outs, if he calls with a big pair or an 8 I have about 8 outs. Also any diamond on the turn would give me a flush draw so that would improve my equity when bluffing. Example 5: PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, $2.00 BB (4 handed) - Poker-
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Stars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com Hero (BB) ($313.85) UTG ($50) Button ($76) SB ($200) Preflop: Hero is BB with A , 9 1 fold, Button bets $4, 1 fold, Hero calls $2 Flop: ($9) 8 , 2 , J (2 players) Hero checks, Button bets $5, Hero raises to $20, 1 fold Total pot: $19 | Rake: $0.90 I’m probably bluffing with the best hand pretty often here and c/cing would be a good option against some villains as well. The important point here is to note that I c/r with A9hh, because any heart, T, maybe even a 7 or Q will improve my equity and helps me if I want to keep bluffing. I usually wouldn’t c/r A9cc or A9dd there. Random thoughts 1. If you’re up against a very aggressive villain that fires multiple barrels frequently and you flop a monster, a good draw (8 outs or better) or even just something like mid pair that you don’t want to call down with, you might be better off making the c/r on the turn than on the flop, cause that way villain will put more money into the pot with a weakish range before you drop the hammer. Just realize that if you’re c/ring on a lot of flops villain might be suspicious when you suddenly flat on the flop and c/r on the turn. I think this is quite long already (tl:dr, I know, I know…), so I’m going to finish it here. A lot more could be said about playing out of position, but I hope that you found this interesting/ helpful and feel free to ask if you have any questions or flame if you don’t agree with what I said. PS: If anyone’s interested in doing it, I think it would be be interesting to discuss some lines in more detail, f.e. there’s easily enough stuff on c/ring to make that a COTW on it’s own
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and take a closer look at how to continue on different turns and rivers versus different villains.
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Polarization *Split* Polarization, depolarization, and polarized ranges are terms tossed around often on the forums. However, most people either use the terms incorrectly, or have difficulty in understanding how to visualize polarization. Let’s first start with the basics: Quote:
What does ‘polarized’ mean? When something is polarized, it means that we are dealing with the poles. So when we say a range is polarized, we mean that a range is effectively nuts or bluff. He either has one pole (the value side) or he has the other pole (the bluff side). This is a very basic concept, but it is the building block of getting into intermediate and advanced strategy. What does depolarized mean? Depolarization is the exact opposite. So instead of a nuts/bluff type of range, we are dealing with something that is not so...dramatically opposite, for lack of better words. What do they look like? Let’s take the most common spot where polarization is spoken about, which is 3betting. On the left is a polarized range, and on the right is a depolarized range. We notice they are both the same 10% range, yet have totally different hand strengths in them.
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So let’s break this article into 3 different sections where polarization is the most prevalent: 3betting, CB-ing, and VB/ bluffing. Our goal is to understand what polarized ranges look like, what are good v bad spots to use it, and having an idea on combating them. A quick note on polarization is that whether we pole or depole our range is based 100% on our opponent. Balancing, for all intents and purposes, is the composite of poling and depoling our ranges. But if I am playing 10NL, there isn’t a chance in hell that I care about being balanced, because my opponents just don’t care. Bad hand readers just don’t need to be balanced against. So don’t go nuts balancing and poling here, and depoling there, if it puts you on level 2 vs a level 0 opponent. 3Betting 3betting is probably the most common spot where people talk about polarizing. Especially in terms of restealing from OOP, polarizing our range is usually best. This is true for a few reasons: 1.) It gives value to our non-value hands. Take this spot: Quote:
Full Tilt Poker $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com
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CO: $19.40 BTN: $32.10 SB: $50.55 Hero (BB): $54.25 UTG: $57.80 UTG+1: $51.10 UTG+2: $152.75 MP1: $55.10 MP2: $20.00 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is BB with 6 3 6 folds, BTN raises to $1.75, 1 fold, Hero raises to $5.45, 1 fold Final Pot: $3.75 Hero wins $3.75 I don’t think anyone can argue that 63o has no real value. Flatting is just not an option, and thus we are left with the options to 3b or fold. Well, we can 3b, giving 63o value if we think our opponent will fold enough of the time outright to show a profit. So rather than folding the hand, assuming we think that our opponent will fold 70% of the time our $EV on the outright 3bet becomes $EV = .7($2.5) - .3($4.95) = +$.26, or +1SB. This may not seem like a lot, but positive is positive, and for a hand that should be an overall loser in your DB, we can’t complain. 2.) It gives more value to our strong hands. If our opponent knows that we 3bet things like 63o, then it makes picking up AA and 3betting even more profitable. Our perceived range is tainted, which means our opponent is more mistake prone. He might 4bet more as a bluff thinking the crap side of our range is big enough to get folds, or might call and float more liberally. Either way, he is putting in more money bad than if our range were just the nuts. 3.) It will be the easier range of hands to play from OOP. Many players get themselves in trouble using a depolarized 3b range in resteal spots because postflop becomes incredibly difficult (also considering the increased 4b dynamic which decreases outright profitability). For instance, a common spot is with KQ. If you 3b with KQ and get flatted, which will of course happen a very non-zero percentage of the time, their C-Range is usually going to be very strong. It will be hard to bluff, and also hard
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out minimax when we hit. Now, this isn’t to say that we can’t use polarized hands IP, nor to say that you should never depole OOP...this is just talking outloud. Each situation is specific and individual, so adjust as the situation calls for. The Issue + The Combat: The issue for us, and other regs as well, is finding the happy medium in weight. What I mean by this is making sure that we don’t weight one side of our polarized range too heavily. Take this situation: Quote:
Full Tilt Poker $0.10/$0.25 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com MP2: $7.08 CO: $25.00 Hero (BTN): $35.69 SB: $27.15 BB: $33.11 UTG: $9.65 UTG+1: $4.71 UTG+2: $27.28 MP1: $15.87 Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is BTN with 4 Q 6 folds, Hero raises to $0.75, SB raises to $3.25, 1 fold, Hero raises to $7.10, 1 fold Final Pot: $6.75 Hero wins $6.75 The SB here is a regular in the game, and running 14/12 with a 12% resteal. I know he is polarized based on some hands I have played with him (he has shown down a few crap hands after getting his CB floated)...so lets take a peak at his range in pieces: Piece 1: The “nuts” stuff. Here are 4 different “nuts” ranges that most players will use for their top side of a polarized
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range. Some players will put some hands that others would consider “depoled”, like KQ or AJ, into the top side of their polarized range. So here are the most normal ranges (these are ranges you should have internalized, at the very least for the percentage).
Range 1/Range 2
Range 3/Range 4 Piece 2: The “bluff” stuff. This is the part that makes our life awesome. If we can figure out to some extent what percentage of crap there is in their range, we can gauge the profitability of a float or 4bet very easily. For each of the top side ranges, we can figure out, roughly, how much bluff they have.
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Range 1 = .9/12 = 7.5% “nuts” : 92.5% “bluff” Range 2 = 2.6/12 = 21.66% “nuts” : 78.34% “bluff” Range 3 = 4.2/12 = 35% “nuts” : 65% “bluff” Range 4 = 5.7/12 = 47.5% “nuts” : 52.5% “bluff” (These calculations simplify everything into very black and white sections. Of course, sometimes pieces of the “nut” range will fold if 4B, and sometimes pieces of the “bluff” range will 5B ship if we 4B. This is just so you can start visualizing it) So what is this doing for us? Well, say we know that he doesn’t 3b AQ, or at least doesn’t always (we have seen him flat AQ v a steal before). We also know that he doesn’t resteal JJ (as we have seen him flat that to a steal as well). This frames his resteal range at roughly QQ+/AK and crap. So in a purely black/white point of view, 78.34% of his range is crap. And if we knew that he would play all of his hands straight up if he got 4bet (fold the crap, stack the nuts), then we can show an outright profit by 4betting any 2 cards. (It should be noted that blockers are lovely in this mix. This is why having an A or K blocker is fantastic, because it knocks out even more of the top left quadrant, aka, the “nut” part of range. The more of that we can discount, the more weighted a player’s range would be towards the bottom assuming the pure 3b% is the same.) In saying all of this, we need to be aware of it in our own game. If we keep a 3b % that is too high, and try 3betting a thinking player who understands, it will/should tweak their 4b/float range dramatically. Now, like I mentioned earlier, we don’t need to balance against those that don’t care about it. But playing against regs especially, we need to be aware of how weighted, either top or bottom side, our range tweaks. CB-ing Polarization of CB ranges is something that is becoming more and more prevalent, even in the smaller games. This is something that is relatively simple to figure out, and also something that many still manage to mess up. Let’s take this spot:
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Quote:
Full Tilt Poker $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com BB: $97.15 UTG: $13.55 UTG+1: $64.50 UTG+2: $51.90 MP1: $73.40 MP2: $20.00 CO: $78.80 Hero (BTN): $50.00 SB: $65.05 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is BTN with K A 5 folds, CO raises to $1.75, Hero raises to $5.80, 2 folds, CO calls $4.05 Flop: ($12.35) J 8 CO checks, Hero ???
K
(2 players)
Let’s say my range is 22-55, 65s, JJ+/AK (it isn’t, but it makes the spot easier to talk about) A depolarized CB range = we CB all of it. We stab with things like 22 and 65s because they have no value and we want to pick the pot up. We stab with things like JJ and AK because we think worse hands will continue enough of the time and we want to make a big pot against that range. A polarized CB range = we CB 22-55, 65s, and JJ/KK, and check QQ/AK behind. We CB things like 22 and 65s because they have no value and we want to pick the pot up. We stab with things like JJ and KK because we want to make a big pot and think enough worse hands will continue. We check behind with things like QQ and AK because they have SDV and we think a bet doesn’t do much, but a check can do lots. What kind of things can a check do?: Quote:
1.) induce bluffs 2.) induce comfortability 3.) minimize loss when behind
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4.) pot control (from a pot geometry POV) 5.) WAWB + minimal overcards/hell cards can hit the next card 6.) don’t want to face a CR Now obviously not all of these factors will be true every single time we check...but they are the base ideas behind the check. A big point is #5. There is a huge difference between checking A9 behind on a 973 flop and KQ behind on a Q76 board. The other major points are #1 and #2. Many players make the mistake of not letting their opponents make mistakes...and allow them to play fairly close to perfect at all times. If a CB would let your opponent play perfect, but a check would induce idiocy, then consider the check. A quick note about this, is what happens the times that we check. Take a hand like this: Quote:
Poker Stars $0.50/$1 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com Hero (MP2): $100.00 CO: $177.05 BTN: $100.00 SB: $103.00 BB: $116.25 UTG: $126.00 UTG+1: $111.85 UTG+2: $100.00 MP1: $100.00 Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is MP2 with Q 6 4 folds, Hero raises to $2.50, 3 folds, BB calls $1.50 Flop: ($5.50) 3 7 Q BB checks, Hero checks
(2 players)
Here, say we decided to check the flop (for whatever reason). We are giving hands like 44 or AJ free chances to spike and beat us. This is part of the parlay when considering a polarized CB range and checking the SDV part of our range. We take the parlay that we will make more, and more often, the times we
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stay good than we will lose the times when he improves. I have to make this disclaimer because many players will get pissed when they get 2 or 3 outed after making this flop check...but remember that making the best play doesn’t mean you will win 100% of the time. Every play in poker comes with risk, so why would this play be any different? The Issue + The Combat: There are two major issues with polarizing our CB range. The first is doing it too much and missing value (especially doing it too much against fish and station-TAGs). The second is doing it against good hand readers who will lower IO and increase RIO. Against fish and players that make more calling mistakes than betting mistakes, we should look to bet our strong SDV value hands a little more. Of course, if a check now would encourage always getting 2 streets later in the hand, then checking can be OK. But if an outright bet should get at least 2 streets of value, then betting should be more heavily considered. The issue against good hand readers is that doing this will turn your hand face up. It makes life easier against a good player (deletes a street and the chance to get CR’d on the flop), but with the parlay of making your range very apparent if you continue to play the same way (CB-ing the nuts/bluff, and check the SDV). I will not go into massive detail in this part, but you should do some thinking in this area and see what you come up with as far as line creation and balancing are concerned. Also, the combat against these polarized CB-ing players is very simple and effective...but again, I will leave that up to you =) Bluffing/VB-ing This section of the article will review a couple of hands (from various places). While hand reading is a very useful skill in all facets of our strategy, just understanding polarization will help in certain situations. There are some textures where betting ranges tend to be very polarized. They would be 4 straight and 4 flush boards. Notice these are very definitive boards, and many A and K high boards tend to play similar, although
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they are not as dramatic. It should be noted that players who understand SDV well tend to polarize on the turn/river more so than players who don’t understand SDV. To illustrate this, let’s take a spot from the last episode of HSP between Doyle and Lex: Quote:
($500/$1000, $300 ante)Lex straddles to $2K It folds around to Doyle who completes the BB with Q Lex raises $9K with 9 2 Doyle calls $7K The flop ($21.5K): 6 3 Doyle check, Lex checks
7
2
The turn ($21.5K): J Doyle bets $20.5K, Lex calls $20.5K The river ($62.5K): 4 Doyle bets $60K, Lex calls $60K To someone watching this hand at home, it probably makes no sense. It looks like Lex is being a donk calling with bottom pair (and I mean, NO KICKER?!?!), and that Doyle is being a donk by bluffing a donk. But, Lex’s call on the river makes a lot of sense. Doyle isn’t someone that does a lot of thin VBing, especially not for pot (he doesn’t tend to have, and Lex even commented on this after the hand, the online pot/overbet dynamic). So when Doyle pots the river, he either has a 5, or he has nothing. His range is totally polarized. Couple that with Lex getting 2:1 on the river, only needing to be good 1/3 of the time to show a profit, he can call if he thinks Doyle’s range is at least 1/3 crap. Again, notice the definitiveness of the board, and also the definitiveness of the opponent. Had Lex’s opponent been say, Durrrr, then the entire dynamic and river analysis would be different. (It should also be noted that in this situation Doyle may turn a hand like A3 or 44 into a bluff...which changes things in the weighting process). Here is a hand that I ended up reviewing in a video I released earlier this year:
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Quote:
Poker Stars $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com UTG: $67.35 UTG+1: $49.75 UTG+2: $57.10 MP1: $23.25 MP2: $89.10 Hero (CO): $72.25 BTN: $65.05 SB: $70.50 BB: $55.65 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is CO with T T 5 folds, Hero raises to $1.50, BTN calls $1.50, 1 fold, BB calls $1 Flop: ($4.75) 2 7 2 (3 players) BB checks, Hero bets $2.30, BTN raises to $6, BB folds, Hero calls $3.70 Turn: ($16.75) 7 (2 players) Hero checks, BTN bets $11, Hero calls $11 River: ($38.75) 4 (2 players) Hero checks, BTN bets $23, Hero calls $23 Final Pot: $84.75 Hero shows T T (two pair, Tens and Sevens) BTN shows J K (two pair, Sevens and Deuces) Hero wins $81.75 (Rake: $3.00) In this hand our opponent is 14/11 over 800 hands...a very standard TAG. So getting involved in a pot this large with just TT against a TAG is a rarity. But using the concept of polarization allowed to make this play very easy. Preflop and the CB are totally standard, but when he raises the flop, a redflag has been raised. First, as a TAG, his raising range here is usually something like
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set+, draws sometimes, and bluffs sometimes. And this...this is the important thing...if we consider weight...it changes things. Do I think he will ALWAYS raise 77/22 on the flop? Probably not, especially in position on an aggressive opponent (what he views me as). Would he raise a hand like 99 or 76? Probably not, because he understands SDV. So instead of his range maybe being 2:1 strong:weak...it might weight down to 2:1 weak:strong...or possibly even more bottom weighted at 3:1 or 4:1!
When the turn comes off, it pretty much solidifies that his range has to be bottom side weighted, as the combos of nut hands have dropped to effectively 2. So the rest of the hand is a pretty easy call down...but made very easy when we look at polarized weight and combos. While 160bb is hardly a pot size I would ever create with TT as a single pair, I make an exception when the situation calls for it. Conclusion Polarization is a very important part of getting out of base-level thinking. It can help us pick off bluffs, adjust well to aggression, and even create lines against players who understand (or don’t) poled ranges. Remember though, to not out level yourself here. Also remember to think about weight. Weighting polarization is
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one of the biggest problems that regs in current games have. They heavily bottom-side weight their 3betting ranges, they heavily bottom-side weight their CR ranges, and they top-side weight in some really absurd spots. If you find someone who is doing something like this, just adjust accordingly and take advantage as you see fit. Just remember to only attack players that understand...stay on level one against level 0 thinkers! Hopefully this article helped you frame and visualize some new things. Let’s start a discussion...
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Reacting to 3bets mpethybridge Obviously, this is a tough spot. You’ve raised and someone acting after you has re-popped you. They are representing a big hand, and, if you were not stealing in LP, you may very well be out of position for the remainder of the hand. It’s a hard spot to play for a profit. In fact, if you check your database, you will probably see that you are losing money in this spot. Don’t worry about this, most people lose money in this spot. It is possible to profit in this situation, but, in my experience playing and analyzing databases, only the very best players at their level can show even a small profit in this situation, and even then, you only see people showing a profit if their pre-flop stealing range is on the tight side. Thus: It may sound defeatist, but realistically, we are usually not looking to make a profit on this situation, we are looking to have the smallest loss rate possible. The math is simple: You have raised somewhere between 3 and 4 big blinds and the villain has 3 bet you. If you reacted to all 3 bets by simply folding, your loss rate would be your average raise size times 100. Lets call that a loss rate of 350bb/100, or 1.75ptbb/hand for you PT3 users. Our goal when we get 3 bet is to use a combination of folds, calls and raises to reduce our loss rate below 350bb/100 or 1.75ptbb/hand. If we achieve this, then we have a +EV loss mitigation strategy for reacting to 3 bets. Playing AA and KK I want to do this first, because I want to get it out of the way
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and focus primarily on playing close decisions where we do not necessarily welcome the 3 bet. Obviously, when you have a big hand, you are glad your opponent is cooperating with your intent to play for stacks. The question here is almost always simply whether it is more +EV to 4 bet pre-flop or to flat call and trap. Not surprisingly, my database for the last 180,000 hands I have played at NL $50 shows that it is more +EV to 4 bet than to flat call. When I flat call a 3 bet with AA or KK, my win rate is 1541bb/100 hands; when I 4 bet, my win rate is 4327bb/100. The numbers change significantly when I filter for just KK, but the 3 to 1 relationship stays the same. Conclusion: When you are holding AA or KK, you should almost always 4 bet. You should only flat call with these hands in specific, unusual situations. I might suggest flatting when you are in against an aggro maniac whose 3 bet percentage C-bet% and AF are super high, but who you have reason to believe will fold to a 4 bet. I might flat with a comparatively high frequency against regulars I trust will make a note to that effect. Otherwise, go ahead and 4 bet these hands. All Other Situations 1. Reacting to a 20bb Short Stackers’ 3 Bets Often, you are simply calling or folding to a shove, but sometimes you can see pretty silly things like a short stacker who min 3 bets your button steal. Either way, for all practical purposes, you are making a commitment decision pre-flop. For the most part then, we are making pure value plays. We fold when we are behind his range (taking dead money into consideration,) and we get it all in when we think we are ahead. My Hold ‘Em Manager is not working correctly, and it will not let me filter for these hands at the moment. I will fill in this section when I can figure out what the problem is. My intent is to look at some short stack ranges and which hands I have been profitable and unprofitable with. Edit: CMAR let me off the hook on this; for playing against
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short stackers, just read his excellent post linked below. I could not possibly improve on that. 2. When Effective Stacks are between 20 and 80bb Things get really tricky when the villain’s stack is in this range. At the bottom end of the range you have essentially no room to do anything fancy, and at the top you are almost, but not quite, playing full stacked. But at 80bb, the difference is crucial, simply because there is no way you can convince yourself that calling a 12bb 3 bet with your pocket pair to set mine is profitable. Thus, if you are going to play against these people, you have to be prepared to NOT fit or fold. And because SPRs are so low in these situations, you should err on the side of folding marginal hands that prefer deeper stacks--suited connectors, small to medium pocket pairs and such like. 99-JJ are pretty tricky to play in these situations. You have a really good hand, but it is going to get out flopped a lot of the time. Against the shortest stacks in this range, I usually shove or fold based on the villain’s stats, playing a 30bb stack pretty much exactly the same way as i would play against a 20bb stack. When stacks get to 50 or 60 big blinds, I start to think about seeing a flop, and when stacks get up to 80bb, I am playing these hands essentially the same way as I would play them against a full stack. The only exception is that I tend to think that somebody playing less than full stacked is more likely to bluff the whole thing off with AK or AQ unimproved than somebody playing with a full stack (both because they are, on average, less skilled, and because they are simply more willing to lose their stack because their stack is smaller). Thus, I am more inclined to call an all in bet with 99-JJ than I would be against a full stack. THIS IS A MAJOR LEAK; DON’T DO IT. A careful database review shows that 80bb stack guys are, on average, stronger than full stacks when they three bet. This revelation turns out to be a significant aid to playing against them and is going to plug a significant leak in my game. You can call and semi-set mine decent pocket pairs. You might
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play 99, for example, and call a flop bet if you don’t hit a set, and then tend to shut down to further aggression, but look to steal the pot if he shuts down after the flop. You would be compensated for this by knowing that you are going to get paid off with his entire stack at a slightly higher rate than you would against a 100bb stack when you do hit your set. Just assume the opposite of what I have been assuming: that an 80bb stack knows his hammer of future betting is smaller, and, therefore, he is not relying on FE as much as a 100bb stack. Rather, he is playing an 80bb stack because he thinks it will be easier for you to double him up when he does have a hand; so, in general, if he is trying to get his stack in, he probably has it. To play middle strength hands like 88-TT against a 70-80bb stack, you are going to have to be able to win a high percentage of the time unimproved. Thus, you shouldn’t do it if his 3 betting range is tight or the situation dictates that he have a tight range. Obviously be more inclined to call when you have position, and, in general, respect check raises. You should err on the side of folding these hands if the villain looks reasonably tight and solid with his 3 bets, or if you honestly appraise your post flop skills as not up to being able to win a high percentage of the time the villain has 3 bet a drawing hand and missed the flop. Stack to Pot Ratios will be very low in these situations, so one decent-sized C-bet from the villain is going to get you to the commitment threshold. So you’ll want to look for a villain who makes an unusually small C-bet on a low flop or some other indicator that the hand may be winnable. 3. General Considerations playing 100bb Deep In reacting to 3 bets, I generally look at the following factors in the following order to determine whether I will continue with the hand: a. Villain’s 3 bet %. I honestly do not think you can come close to an effective strategy for reacting to 3 bets unless you display on your HUD and use the villain’s 3 bet% stat. For example, last night I found myself out of position relative to
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a LAg (he wound up the session at 24/16/3) unknown who sat and immediately started three betting most spots where there was a raise in front of him and he wanted to play the hand. After 76 hands at the table, he had 3 bet 24% of his opportunities. This stat was a bit misleading, though, because up to the point where we played this hand he had not flat called a single raise. he folded or 3 bet. Based on this stat I knew that he had a wide range, and that a lot of it was going to be weak stuff that would not necessarily play well post flop. Here I called figuring I was flipping a huge part of his range and way behind a fairly small part of his range. I was not necessarily going to go away at the first sign of aggression. If villain has been paying attention, he knows I am running at about 13/10 on this table. Hero (MP1): $68.15 MP2: $50.00 CO: $50.50 BTN: $49.40 SB: $42.25 BB: $50.00 UTG: $69.75 UTG+1: $73.75 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is MP1 with 7 7 2 folds, Hero raises to $1.75, 1 fold, CO raises to $5.25, 3 folds, Hero calls $3.50 Flop: ($11.25) 8
6
A
[color=blue](2 players)
This is a really good flop for me. I raised and called a 3 bet, so AK and maybe AQ are definitely in my perceived range. Far from being concerned about the ace, it gives me bluffing opportunities against a lot of his range. Also, because the ace is not the ace of hearts, if he doesn’t have it, he has to be concerned that I have it. If he does have it, he’ll let me know. Hero checks, CO bets $5.50, Hero calls $5.50 At this point, I feel pretty good about my prospects of winning this hand. His bet size is the primary reason: a half pot c-bet into a two-flushed flop lacks credibility. At
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this point, I assume that he is worried about the ace and is “one and done”. I’m planning to fire any turn card to pick up dead money; I may still have the best hand, but I am certainly not beating anything he calls a bet with (well, K Q non- , I guess, might call) so this is in no way a value bet. I don’t check/raise because I want to take a line that is credible both for the ace and for the flush, in case the turn is a heart, and I think he will not put the flush draws in my range if I check/raise. Turn: ($22.25) J (2 players) Hero bets $13.50, CO folds Final Pot: $22.25 Hero wins $21.15 (Rake: $1.10) Had he called the turn, I still would have had the option of shoving any non-heart river representing the flush. I probably would not have, but this is certainly an option. Had a 4th heart fallen, then I would definitely have made a small value-betlooking bet, which I would be certain was a bluff. This is just a standard call-bluff, all in a day’s work, but you have to be willing to do this sort of thing to be able to play your small and mid pockets profitably. The key is to not do it indiscriminately, but, rather, to look for any sign of weakness; in this case, it was the small c-bet. I’m not going to lie to you--normally I fold pre-flop and if i do call preflop, I normally check/fold here. But here I had a villain with a wide range who showed weakness on the flop, and that made the hand look winnable. b. Position Obviously being in position is a good reason to call a 3 bet, but you have to be careful with this. When you are on a steal from the cut off or the button, your range is really weak, and most of the time you have to suck it up and fold, or occasionally 4 bet. So, for instance, here is a hand I played when I was in the small blind against a solid TAg 15/12/6 3 bet 3.1% (5,5% in BB):
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Hero (SB): $103.00 BB: $50.00 UTG: $142.95 UTG+1: $67.10 MP1: $50.00 MP2: $32.65 CO: $75.00 BTN: $100.00 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is SB with 2 2 6 folds, Hero raises to $1.50, BB raises to $4.50, Hero raises to $12, 1 fold Final Pot: $9.00 Hero wins $9.00 My thinking here is that even if I flop my set getting marginal set mining odds against his pretty wide 3 betting range, it is going to be hard to extract a profit out of position against a good player, so I can’t call. If I fold, i am folding the best hand a lot of the time, so folding is bad. When you can’t call and you shouldn’t fold, ldo, you raise. On the button, though, I would be strongly tempted to flat call this smallish 3 bet from this player. So out of position, while I sometimes do call, i am usually folding, but sometimes 4 bet bluffing. When I play on the button, or any time I am going to be in position relative to the 3 bettor, I am willing to call with a very wide range, but not all of my stealing range, obviously. I’ll call with all pocket pairs that have a decent chance of flopping as an overpair, and semi-set mine, or I will call a very tight 3 bet range with any pocket pair and set mine, and, of course, I will call with suited connectors some of the time, intending to shove most of my good to very good draws: UTG+2: $106.65 MP1: $97.20 MP2: $54.25 CO: $124.45 Hero (BTN): $100.00 SB: $76.15
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BB: $40.00 UTG: $41.45 UTG+1: $50.00 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is BTN with 9 8 6 folds, Hero raises to $1.50, 1 fold, BB raises to $5.50, Hero calls $4 Flop: ($11.25) 3 K 2 (2 players) BB bets $7.50, Hero raises to $94.50, BB folds Final Pot: $26.25 Hero wins $24.95 (Rake: $1.30) Villain in this hand was a little short at 80bb, and that fact probably makes this a preflop fold. I probably failed to glance at his stack size before I made my decision. But villain in the hand had a 3 bet % of 5.3% (8% out of the BB), so maybe I was just calling planning to try to take it away. c. History with the Villain Sometimes, for whatever reason, we find ourselves the target of a villain, or we find ourselves targeting a specific villain, and a dynamic gets created between the two of you that is way outside of the norm. There are quite a few players at $50 with whom I have an ongoing feud, and who I know are looking to outplay me simply because of our history. In this hand, the villain is a a solid reg at $50 (14/9/4 ATS 4% Edit: this is his 3 bet%). he had position on me, but I didn’t want to leave the table because there was a 76/32 or something that we had position on. The solid reg had 3 bet a couple of my iso-plays against the donkey, leaving me no choice but to fold like a lawn chair. When he branched out into defending his button, I knew I had to make a stand. And, because he would notice that this was the first time I made a stand, I figured he’d give me credit for a hand. BB: $106.85 UTG: $202.00
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UTG+1: $105.10 MP1: $44.20 MP2: $53.30 Hero (CO): $100.25 BTN: $97.50 SB: $96.15 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is CO with 6 5 4 folds, Hero raises to $1.50, BTN raises to $5.25, 2 folds, Hero calls $3.75 I called rather than 4 bet because no good comes of a 4 bet here. He may have a premium hand, in which case I’ve got a lot of money in really bad, or he may be pretty light but read the 4 bet as a tilty bluff and look me up anyway, or he may just assume that I have a monster, quietly fold, and go back to the business of 3 betting my iso-plays. In a way, what I am really looking to do here is just send the message that i will call a three bet, so he needs to make sure that he has a hand when he 3 bets me. Actually winning this hand is a somewhat secondary consideration--I just need to show him that my fold to 3 bet % is less than 100. Flop: ($11.25) K 6 9 (2 players) Hero checks, BTN bets $7.00, Hero calls $7 Here i am basically just floating him oop; I’m planning to check/ fold most turns, if I catch I am going to check/shove, and if a diamond comes I am probably going to bluff the turn and the river. Turn: ($25.25) 7
(2 players)
The turn is really interesting because I pick up 4 probably clean outs, giving me a total of 9 all of which are probably clean. So now I have a situation where: i. I will improve to the best hand about 20% of the time; ii. A lot of his range is king-free, so I have decent fold equity; iii. A not insignificant amount of the time I have the best hand (AQ, AJ, randomness he is “outplaying” me with). I decide to split the difference between a blocking bet and a value-bet looking bet which may be a value bet but which may also be a semi-bluff. I’ll fold to a shove. Feel free to quibble with the bet size, just understand that my intent was to make a
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bet that was a little high to be a blocking bet, and a little low to be a value bet. This wasn’t the best size for anything; it was a compromise bet size that could look like either. Hero bets $13.50, BTN folds Final Pot: $25.25 Hero wins $24.00 (Rake: $1.25) d. My Image Meh, in a way I have already covered this. Probably all of you think of me as a nit, and it is easy to jump to that conclusion when you see me at the table playing 11/8 in a big sample, or a card dead 8/6 in a small sample. This gives me quite a bit of freedom to make plays like some of the ones I have shown here, and to get credit for them. I use this most frequently by 4 bet bluffing with marginal or trash hands from mid and late position when a call would leave me out of position and the 3 bettor is likely light. 4. A Word on Frequencies Thus far I have not really talked about how often to do what. here is where I do that. The fundamental point that I hope has been driven home is that your strategy in reacting to 3 bets is entirely dependent on your post flop skill. If an honest appraisal of your post flop skill leads you to conclude that you are average skill for your level, then you should start out by folding most of the time. A fold to 3 bet of about 65-75% would be about right. You could flat JJ (maybe), QQ, AK and AQ in late position against most villains (go ahead and shove them against the maniacs and shorties) 4 bet KK and AA always (don’t trap, trapping is for people who can get away cheap post flop when they get out flopped) and fold pretty much everything else. If you consider yourself slightly above average for your stakes, and are looking to improve, do this:
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First, steal more in LP. This will put you in more marginal spots in smaller pots. Once you get your win rate back to where it was with your tighter stealing range, then you can consider opening up by calling 3 bets with decent drawing hands and decent pocket pairs and look to play post flop. In general, when you call with pocket pairs, you are looking for low flops that, even if they didn’t hit your set, missed the drawing hands people 3 bet (KQ+) and a raise on the flop or a call followed by a bet when the villain checks a brick turn. When I hit a set in position after calling a 3 bet, I almost always play it extremely passively, often taking the line call/call/call (the third call assumes the villain puts his whole stack in). If the board is drawy or monotone, then I jam it. When you play suited connectors, look to be in position, usually, and plan to shove big draws as a matter of routine, and look to shove good draws against people who you suspect may be 3 betting light and who also have high c-bet %s. If you are looking to play more 3 bet pots, aim to be getting your fold to 3 bet down to somewhere between 50 and 60%. Once you feel like you have a significant edge at your stake, you should be looking to get the fold to 3 bet down as low as possible. In my last 180,000 hands at $50, excluding my traps with AA and KK, I: 4 bet 14% of the time for a win rate of 190bb/100 hands call 45% of the time for a win rate of -70bb/100 fold to 3 bet 41.3% for a loss rate 0f -357bb/100 Thus, by calling, I am saving myself 2.87bb/hand every time I call a 3 bet versus folding to it. knn05 has similar stats. She has said that she would post her actual figures in this thread, but from what I recall discussing this with her, her fold to 3 bet is right around 40% also. To a certain extent, your fold to 3 bet is dependent on your ATS; but only to a certain extent. knn05 and I are both pretty
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close in folding to only 40% of 3 bets, but her ATS is at 32% and mine is only at 28%. But, in general, the less you steal, the better your average hand, and, therefore, the more willing you should be to call a 3 bet. 5. A word on Ranges There are no rules. Or rather, there are very few rules. You cannot set mine profitably in 3 bet HU pots. You probably cannot set mine profitably in multi-way 3 bet pots. But: You don’t need to; if your loss rate in these hands is better than folding, keep calling with them. I like to call with suited connectors and pocket pairs. I will have position when I call a 3 bet with suited connectors >90% of he time; I need a really, really good reason to call oop with suited connectors. In position, my range is heavily weighted toward pocket pairs, but I play suited connectors also. The reason for this is not because I am set mining, but it is because I have a hand with made value, and I often don’t need to improve to win the pot when villain bricks the flop. I would have no problem with someone changing this mix, and I suspect that, for example, knn05’s range is very different than mine, but I know my range works for me, so I am pretty satisfied with it (well, except that I haven’t flopped a set in a 3 bet pot since April 5 ). in general, I look for lower suited connectors. I disfavor (but will still sometimes play) the suited connectors that need aces kings or queens to make their straights. usually, if you get all in drawing with one of these hands, the villain has two of your outs. Thus, I am much more inclined to call a 3 bet with 76s than I am with T9s. 5. Conclusion this post feels a little disorganized, but i hope it has given you some ideas on how to open up and lose less to 3 bets. I’ll leave you with what, in my opinion is the best way to improve your results in 3 bet pots; do this at every opportunity:
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Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is UTG with 9 9 Hero raises to $1.75, UTG+1 raises to $6, 7 folds, Hero calls $4.25 Flop: ($12.75) 9
9
4
(2 players)
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Reasons to Bet PokerRon247 Most of the strategies below have been discussed in greater detail in their own COTW threads. This is therefore designed as a guide for the lesser experienced players as to the different reasons as to why we bet, and not an in depth guide to how to play specific situations. Why do we bet? Every single action we make while we are playing should have a sound logical reason to back it up, as well as a plan for any subsequent action. A big mistake I see in many of the hands posted on the forum is where people make a bet with no logical reason or plan of action, and many of the tricky spots could be avoided if some logical reasoning were applied to earlier decisions. Fully understanding the reasons behind making bets will in turn lead to better decision making and a clearer though process. There are several reasons to make a bet, but the first two reasons are fundamental to a good strategy and should be fully grasped before moving on to betting for more advanced reasons. The two golden reasons to bet: Value: To make worse hands call Bluff: To make better hands fold
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A successful bet for either of these reasons will result in a profit. A losing bet is one where only better hands will call you and only worse hands will fold, resulting in you gaining nothing while ahead and losing while behind. Before deciding which of these main reasons you are betting for, you should first take a little time to think about several things: 1) 2) 3) 4)
What hands will call me if I bet? What hands will fold if I bet? If I make a bet, how will I respond to a raise? If my bet gets called, what is my plan for the next street?
And as you start to play against more sophisticated opponents: 5) What does my bet represent to Villain based on my image? 6) How is Villain likely to respond to my bet, given my image, his image, the board texture and recent history? Value Betting: In very basic terms, a value bet is one that is going to be called by hands that you beat. However, value bets range from fat value to thin value, and a value bet doesn’t have to be called exclusively by hands that you beat to make it a value bet. Sometimes Villains range for calling includes both hands that you beat, and hands that beat you, but if you are ahead more often than not, then it qualifies as a value bet. See more about value betting here - COTW on Value Betting and here COTW on thin value Leak 1: One of the major leaks in beginning uNL players is not value betting frequently enough and not betting heavy enough. Calling ranges of players at the micros should not be underestimated. Many are only playing their own hands and are not putting you on a range and even when it is completely obvious that they are beaten, they just cannot lay down their pretty looking hand. Bluffing:
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A bluff is a bet that folds out hands that are ahead of yours. You would use a bluff when you know that your hand has very little, or zero, chance of winning at showdown. You must be aware of a couple of things when bluffing… 1) You must be confident that your opponent is capable of laying down his hand. 2) You are telling a convincing story with your bets, and are able to convincingly represent a legitimate hand. Bluffs are not as important at the micros as value-betting, and while you could probably sustain a positive winrate at 50NL and below by purely value-betting and never bluffing, it is a good skill to have in your arsenal, and essential if you want to break into small stakes. Semi-bluffing: A semi-bluff is similar to a standard bluff, however it is much more useful in marginal situations and against better opponents. Semi-bluffing is making a bet with a hand that is almost definitely losing at the moment, but has outs to improve to the best hand. A good semi-bluff is a double edged sword as you often take the pot down by making your opponent fold the best hand, yet when you are called, you are often playing against the top of their range and are likely to win their stack when you hit. See more about bluffing here - COTW on bluffing and here - Improving your red line Leak 2: The second major leak that beginning uNL players have is that they bluff too often and (as leak 1) they underestimate their opponents calling range. Bluffing at the micros should be used sparingly, and only in well thought out situations, against the right opponents. How do we decide why we are betting? You should always keep in mind the Fundamental Theorem Of Poker as quoted by Sklansky….
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“Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents’ cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose. Conversely, every time opponents play their hands differently from the way they would have if they could see all your cards, you gain; and every time they play their hands the same way they would have played if they could see all your cards, you lose.” To put this more simply…. If you are ahead of your opponent, and you think he will put more money in the pot, then you must make a value-bet. If you are behind and have no realistic chance of outdrawing your opponent, and you think he can fold his hand, then you should bluff. Of course it’s not that easy because of the one main difference that poker has compared to other games. We never know our opponents holdings with 100% accuracy, and this is where the skill of hand-reading and ranging becomes important. You need to apply the above guidelines to your opponents range as a whole and choose your reason for betting (or other action) on that range. This leads to what I call range-targeting. Range-targeting: While playing a hand, you should always have in your mind an idea of a range for your opponent. Unless you are holding the nuts, then parts of your opponents range will be ahead of you and parts will be behind you. Based on where your own hand fits into your opponents range, you can choose your reason to bet, and target the appropriate part of their range with your betsizing. Let’s look at a few examples…. Our opponent in these hands is running at 24/10 with a fold to cbet of 80% (ie he folds unless he flops TP+). We have noticed that when he does flop TP+, he has trouble laying it down to aggression and will call pot sized bets. Poker Stars $0.05/$0.10 No Limit Hold’em - 7 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com
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SB: $10.35 BB: $2.55 UTG: $14.35 UTG+1: $13.60 MP: $10.90 Hero (CO): $9.75 BTN: $19.60 Pre Flop: ($0.15) Hero is CO with 6 7 2 folds, MP calls $0.10, Hero raises to $0.50, 3 folds, MP calls $0.40 Flop: ($1.15) 3 K A (2 players) MP checks, Hero bets $0.60, MP folds Here we have flopped absolutely nothing. If we put him on a range of AJ+/22+ and a bunch of suited connector type hands, then we can see that on this flop he will likely fold pretty much all of that range apart from 33 and Ax. Because we have no sd value with our hand, we want to bet out here and pick the pot up (it will be a bluff most of the time as we will not be ahead of anything in Villains range very often). We now need to use our betsizing to target the part of Villains range that we want to fold (ie the air and lower pairs). If we think that he will fold this part of the range to a ½ pot bet, then that is all we need to bet and any more is unnecessary and will just result in us losing more money when he has hit. We are minimising our losses when behind, whilst not reducing the success ratio of the bet. Poker Stars $0.05/$0.10 No Limit Hold’em - 7 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com SB: $10.35 BB: $2.55 UTG: $14.35 UTG+1: $13.60 MP: $10.90 Hero (CO): $9.75 BTN: $19.60 Pre Flop: ($0.15) Hero is CO with 3 3 2 folds, MP calls $0.10, Hero raises to $0.50, 3 folds, MP calls
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$0.40 Flop: ($1.15) 3 K A (2 players) MP checks, Hero bets $1.15, MP calls $1.15 In this hand, it is the same flop, but we have flopped a monster. Here we have the effective nuts (he would have likely 3bet AA/ KK) so we want to extract as much value as possible. Again we need to target the part of his range that we want to play against, which is the opposite end of the range that we targeted in the last example. We are not interested in the low pps and the other hands that have completely missed the flop as they will likely be folding to any bet we make. In this hand we want to target the Ax part of his range that, according to our range, will pay us off well. This time a bet of ½ pot will be losing lots of value, because he will call at least double that. We are maximising our wins when Villain has hit, whilst not losing any value against the hands that wouldn’t call us anyway. These are two very simplified examples of range targeting, but you can apply the concepts to any hand by putting your opponent on a range, choosing the part of that range that you want to play against and adjusting your betsizes accordingly. This is a very successful technique that works well at the micros against unobservant, however you need to be aware that as you move up, your opponents will start to pay more attention to your betsizing and you need to adjust your play accordingly. Reasons not to bet: As already stated, a losing bet would be one where only better hands can call and worse hands will fold. Another bad reason for betting is quite common among beginning players, and that is the “bet for information” or “to see where I’m at”, when you have a marginal hand. This kind of bet usually falls into the losing bet category, as worse hands will fold and better hands will raise or call. The following is an example of betting for information. We raise our top pair to “find out where we are” and find exactly where we are by folding out hands that were obviously worse than ours. Poker Stars $0.10/$0.25 No Limit Hold’em - 8 players
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The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com UTG+1: $15.00 MP1: $5.50 MP2: $12.35 CO: $8.00 BTN: $23.80 SB: $22.05 Hero (BB): $31.75 UTG: $4.25 UTG+1 posts a big blind ($0.25) CO posts a big blind ($0.25) Pre Flop: ($0.85) Hero is BB with T J UTG raises to $0.75, 2 folds, MP2 calls $0.75, 3 folds, Hero calls $0.50 Flop: ($2.85) 4 T 2 (3 players) Hero checks, UTG bets $1, MP2 calls $1, Hero raises to $4, UTG folds, MP2 folds The information you get from betting in situations like this is usually completely redundant, as you will usually get one of two outcomes. The first is that your opponent folds and the information you got was that you were ahead, resulting in lost value. The second is that your opponent raises, and the information you get is that you were likely behind and have to fold. Other reasons to bet: As well as the main two reasons to bet, you will sometimes find yourself in situations where you may need to bet for a different reason, or your bet will accomplish two things at the same time. Most bets that go under a different name to “value” or “bluff” are often just variations. Isolation: An isolation bet is a bet used to narrow the field down, usually to try to get the pot heads-up with an inferior opponent. The
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most common reason you would use an isolation bet is as a value bet to isolate a bad player. Poker Stars $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com UTG+2: $43.35 MP1: $10.00 MP2: $50.00 CO: $94.35 BTN: $69.25 SB: $17.25 Hero (BB): $60.50 UTG: $21.15 UTG+1: $16.75 Pre Flop: ($1.25) Hero is BB with J J 1 fold, UTG+1 raises to $1.50, UTG+2 calls $1.50, 2 folds, CO calls $1.50, 2 folds, Hero raises to $6, 1 fold, UTG+1 calls $4.50, 2 folds In this example, the original raiser has shown himself to be an aggrodonk and the two callers are good solid regs. Where you would often flat an early position raise with JJ, this is a good spot to 3bet to isolate the fish and drive the two regs out of the pot. This is of course a bet for value as well as isolation because the fish will often continue with a much wider range than your JJ, and you have the advantage of taking them to the flop heads-up. See more about isolation bets here - COTW on Isolating limpers Protection: On certain boards you will need to bet to protect your hand from draws. Again this falls into value-bet territory as you will often have the best hand and you want to charge your opponent to make his draw rather than giving free cards. A big leak that a lot of micro players have is allowing their opponents to draw too cheaply because they’re worried about scaring them away. This is usually a case of underestimating how much people will pay to draw, which at the micro levels will often be
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much higher than you would imagine. People do not like to fold if they might hit the nuts on the next street, so make sure you charge them accordingly. As well as protecting from draws, it is sometimes necessary to protect yourself from being bluffed off a hand. Villain in this hand is a tricky 18/14 reg, with a 65% fold to 3bet. Poker Stars $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com BTN: $28.85 Hero (SB): $82.80 BB: $52.85 UTG: $50.25 UTG+1: $20.55 UTG+2: $15.55 MP1: $49.15 MP2: $51.30 CO: $50.00 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is SB with Q Q 5 folds, CO raises to $1.50, 1 fold, Hero raises to $5.50, 1 fold, CO calls $4 Flop: ($11.50) K K Hero bets $8, 1 fold
A
(2 players)
In this example, while you are not expecting to get called by worse, and you are not expecting to fold out better by betting, it is still a spot where you should often be betting (obviously Villain dependent) as checking will give your opponent a good opportunity to both bluff and value bet you, so betting to take the hand down straight away is not a bad result in this situation. Blocking bet: A blocking bet is a variation on betting to protect from bluffs. It is often used on the turn or the river to set your own price to see the next street or a showdown and is usually a small bet
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(½ pot or less). The blocking bet can be a useful tool when you think you might have the best hand, but you don’t want to be forced into calling a decent sized bet and you think that the chance of being raised is small. See more about blocking bets here COTW on blocking bets Balance: As you start to play more sophisticated opponents who are hand-ranging you and reading into your betting patterns, it is often necessary to balance your range. What this means is that you take the same line with different strength hands to help disguise your holdings. A good example of this is a problem that a lot of people have around 50nl. They find that their flopped sets stop getting paid off by decent players and this is because when they raise the flop or the turn it is almost exclusively with sets and they become very easy to read. A good counter to this is to start raising more flops, either as bluffs or more usually as semibluffs, which has the double advantage of helping to get paid off more often when you do hit (people are more likely to stack off if they see you raising a disproportionate amount of flops) and also helps you take down lots of smaller pots by exploiting their tendency to fold. Summary: Always have a reason behind every bet you make. Bet to make worse hands call and better hands fold. There are often additional reasons as to why you are betting, but your bet will still usually fall into the catagory of “value” or “bluff”. Value bet more. Bluff less. Only bet for any other reason if you are confident in your reasoning.
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Playing Small PPs Y2Dennis Many people play small pocket pairs like this: 1. ????? 2. Flop set 3. Profit. My hope is that this helps some people figure out how to play pocket pairs according to the situation rather than just always raising, folding, calling, etc. It shouldn’t be anything groundbreaking, but I’m hoping it helps people think about their hand a little bit more. So here we go... Introduction: One of the reasons I wanted to do the CotW on playing small pocket pairs because they have been something I’ve been contemplating a lot and this would give me a great opportunity to take a look at my game and how I can best play them. So I looked over a lot of topics and studied my stats and re-read some previous CotW’s and this is my attempt to summarize and expand a little on how some of the concepts relate specifically to playing small pocket pairs. I don’t claim to be an expert but I do believe that this should help beginners and act as a refresher and chance for regulars to re-evaluate their game and take a look at why they play small pairs the way they do. I am also hoping that this leads to some discussion on the points I may have skipped over too briefly, missed entirely, or screwed up. For the purpose of this I’m going to consider small pocket pairs
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as 22-66, and 22 will play differently than 66 in many situations and I’ll try to make notes when I think this will specifically come into play, but generally I feel this is the best way to categorize them. Also, I’m assuming normal 100bb stacks but strategy will obviously vary depending on stacksize. I will make notes here and there, but we can assume that generally shorter stacks are worse for small pocket pairs and deeper stacks are better. Lastly, I’m not going to address floating with small pocket pairs too much since there is already a fantastic CotW on floating and I’m not that great at it yet. There are tons of topics that really apply to what we’re doing here and I’m going to try and link to these where I feel they’re especially important (full credit given, of course). Especially now that we have a full year of CotW’s done there should be tons of topics that crossreference each other and share similar themes. Many players here are better than me and I’m going to make sure my CotW utilizes their past efforts. I hope people don’t think this is a lazy way of writing a CotW or think I’m trying to ride other people’s coat-tails. I’m simply trying to make this as good as possible without directly copy/pasting everyone’s ideas which would obviously be no good. By the way, if I mentioned a CotW and didn’t link/credit it, someone please PM me right away so I can edit that information in. I edited a couple times but there’s a possibility I may have overlooked something and I don’t want anyone’s CotW uncredited if I mention it, even briefly. Early Position: Playing small pocket pairs in early position is going to be tabledependent. I looked through my last year’s database of 280,000 (about ½ are 25NL and ½ are lower, I was a VERY marginal winner both in the 25NL-specific hands and the lower levels) hands and was a slight winner open-raising (including 22). I don’t open raise blindly, however, and won’t raise if I have a bunch of shortstacks after me (although I try not to sit at tables with more than three normally), if it’s especially aggressive. I don’t normally raise UTG with 22-55 and won’t raise 22, 33 or even 44 sometimes UTG+1. Blindly open-raising any pair in any position will likely burn you unless you are extremely skilled postflop, or playing deeper. Here are some things that I try to keep in mind that will help
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me decide that it’ll be OK to raise my marginal hand out of position (keep calling it that, it’ll help keep things in perspective): -If it’s a really tight table and lots of pots are being taken down by preflop raises and/or cbets then we can feel better about raising. On the contrary, if it’s a more aggressive table (especially at higher limits) then we should probably be dumping them more often than not. -How well do I cbet, read hands and generally play postflop? If your postflop skills aren’t completely developed yet there’s absolutely no reason to get yourself into marginal decisions and hands. I would say that you should have a really good idea of how to cbet and double barrel/use turn scare cards in order to be really profitable playing these hands. -What image do I have? If we’re playing aggressively and people have been playing back at us lately, there’s a good chance we could get floated or played back at, regardless of our position. If we’re tight I’ll tend to raise these hands more often than if I’ve been aggressive. We’ll tend to get more respect since we’re in EP but we still may not get as much as we’d hope. If it’s a tight table and no one has been playing back though, feel free to disregard this until they start playing back. Open-limping: boooooo. I do not condone open-limping, it simply defines your hand way too much. If you open-limp UTG or UTG+1 you pretty much define your hand if you get raised and flat. Regs will be able to read you really well and you may not be able to extract as much value OOP vs the weaker players as you would like. You’ll have a positional disadvantage, the initiative disadvantage and you’ll very rarely have a good card advantage other than a small edge in coin flip situations. HUGE DISCLAIMER I DONT PLAY LIVE VERY MUCH: but I think that open-limping live might not be nearly as awful as doing it online. People don’t read as well and will stack off much worse, and you don’t want to build a huge pot preflop with a small pocket pair. I think I would open-limp live sometimes, depending on conditions obviously, but really just about never ever online. Reacting to open-limps and open-raises as UTG+1: Since we’re in EP, if UTG limps or raises, we’re obviously in UTG+1.
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Depending on table conditions, I may flat, but I want conditions to be pretty good for me. In my 280,000 hands I did this about 60-80 times, when conditions were optimal. There needs to be no shortstacks/aggressive squeezers behind me and I need to have some sort of note that the raiser is going to stack off somewhat lightly. The problems are that we may often find ourselves sandwiched and won’t be able to float or try to take the pot away (if we feel we can do so, board and villain dependent, of course) which helps us make up for some of the times that we miss our set, etc. and that there is a better chance of being three-bet off our hand by a real hand since there are tons of people behind us that could wake up with a 3-betting hand (and maybe even aggressive squeezers who can put us on the hand we have fairly easily and think they can push UTG out, obviously not a huge worry though because of the UTG raiser). Obviously since this occurs only in one situation my numbers are smaller, but I think we can feel pretty good dumping this situation unless we have some good reasons not to. Middle Position Middle position is where I’ll start to raise more often but I’ll still take caution if I’ve got a lot of aggressive players or shortstacks behind me (in which case it could be time to consider switching tables). We will get three-bet more often by aggressive players and if we can’t react correctly to three-bets then we would do better to just dump these hands. I was a small loser with these hands in 25NL for a little while in MP because I called threebets way too liberally and lost a ton doing this (something I revert to when tilting sometimes). We will talk more about reacting to 3-bets with small pocket pairs in a bit, but it’s something to consider. Open-limping here is worse and even live I’m raising or folding at this point if no one has opened yet. We can also begin to flat raises more often since we’ll have position on a fair enough amount of people who are left behind us that decide to play and there are less chances for people to wake up with a huge hand behind us. Ideally there aren’t aggressive squeezers behind us. By the way, this is as good a place to put it as I can find, so I think it’s important to note that I would much rather be flatting a tight UTG raiser than a loose MP raiser. Simply put, we will
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win stacks more often versus someone who has a really tight range that will include tons of overpairs and TPTK type hands than someone who will be flopping weaker pairs, draws and middle pairs more often. If someone has 99 and we flop a set we’re rarely getting stacks from them even if they have an overpair and stacks will only go in on set over set or against super loose postflop players. So we’d like to play against the tightest ranges we can get, especially at the small price of 3-4BB. Also, people are going to squeeze someone who’s flatting a 10/7 player raising UTG or UTG+1 hardly at all, if ever. On the other hand, if someone is 24/21 raising MP and we have a cold-call and I’m on the button, squeezing looks pretty sexy. So take all this into consideration when deciding whether or not to flatcall. As far as 3-betting goes, I’m not going to 3-bet small pocket pairs. We’re ideally hoping for the villain to have a big hand when we have a small pocket pair so we can hit our set and get stacks. When we 3-bet the villain is going to 4-bet a good amount of the hands we want them to have and force us off our hand. There’s no need to increase the SPR since most of the time we’re not going to have a hand we really want to continue with. And when we do flop a set we’ve shown enough strength to possibly scare off hands that could possibly pay us off like AQ, JJ, TT, etc. for more than one more street. We could easily get three streets of value from someone when we’re in position rather than scaring them off on the flop or river (villain dependent, but I still hate three-betting). Late Position: By late position, if it’s unopened and I have a small pocket pair, I’m raising. Maybe with super aggro players behind us or with aggro shorties or something we can find a fold, but if that’s the case then we need to leave the table next time the blind comes around. I’m flatting most raises unless stacks are short or I think there’s a great chance we’re getting squeezed, which doesn’t worry me much at 25NL and under. We are in position and can float a bit more if we’re good enough at it and aren’t as worried as people waking up with big hands behind us. We can extract value because of our position versus good hands and we’re generally going to be able to take control more often than we could with more players behind us. I’m not squeezing or three-betting very often for reasons I’ve outlined before, but
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there are situations where I can envision doing it if there’s enough dead money, but I’d still do it only on the very rarest of occasions, if ever. Reacting to shorties with small pocket pairs: If you have two or more shortstacks behind you should raise anyway but leave the table as soon as you can. If the shortstack pushes depending on how loose they are I may call. If a shortstack is pushing 10% of their hands and all pairs Pokerstove says 22 has 36.2% equity and 66 has 47% equity, which is a fairly small difference. If they are pushing 5% of their hands but all pairs we have 27% equity with 22 and 43.6% equity with 66. If they’re pushing 20% of their hands we have 43.8% equity with 22 and 46.77% equity with 66. You can use this as a rough estimate as to call or fold, but assuming we raise 3x blind and they push 20x blind we’re normally calling 17 blinds to win 24.5 blinds which means we have 40.97% equity to call profitably. If we think calling lighter may deter the shorty (or other shorties) from pushing light on us in the future, then we can probably call SLIGHTLY under equity. This is some fairly rough math, but a decent guideline. Read the CotW on crushing shorties for more advice, I’m really only touching the tip of the iceberg here and the beating the shortstack CotW was phenomenal. Reacting to 3-bets Generally we’re going to be out of position and the stacks are going to be too small for us to profitably call a 3-bet with our small pocket pairs. With larger pairs we may feel that we’ll have the strong enough hand unimproved enough to call them, but that will very rarely be the case with our small pairs, and even against an unimproved AK/AQ type hand we are going to be out of position and unable to steal the pot often enough. Mathematically we flop a set about 11% of the time so we’re going to need to be calling less than 11% of our stacks in order to profit. This of course assumes that we are going to get in stacks and not get sucked out on every single time we flop a set, which is silly. Realistically calling anything other than minraise 3bets against people who have a really strong raise is going to get us in trouble. Normal 3bets will be at least 10bb if
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we (or someone else) raised to 3bb and we aren’t getting good enough odds considering we aren’t getting even half-stacks most of the time we nail that set. If we’re in position we have a tiny bit more room to play around if we believe we can take the pot away from them if we don’t hit our set. We also have a better chance at setmining if there are more people in the pot but keep in mind that they likely have marginal hands and won’t get it in often against us. If the 3-bet is larger we really should fold unless we have a sick read and want to four-bet bluff but 1) we already flatted in LP and may have defined our hand already and 2) I’m not good enough to discuss this further so let’s just say fold. There is a superb CotW (I know, I’m pimping other people’s work a lot and using lot by mpethy on reacting to 3bets that can help you out if you want to take the pots away from them postflop. From a purely setmining point of view, though, calling a 3-bet is almost never a good idea, so we need to have a plan other than “call, hit set, profit”. If we’re deep and we’ve noticed our opponent stacking off or dumping large portions of his stack off with overpairs and/or top pairs then we have a much stronger argument for calling the 3-bet and should proceed accordingly. Shorter stacks and it’s likewise a much, much easier fold. Unless we’re super-short and then we get to figure out the shorties pushing range. Fun times. Playing from the blinds: With a small pair in the blinds, I want to flat call if the raiser has a strong range obviously, or if there are several people in the pot already since I don’t want to create a situation where I screw myself out of a multiway pot with a great SPR by getting fourbet out of it or stuck out of position with a poor hand. If someone is attacking our blinds I feel ok 3-popping them with a small pair once in a while if they steal liberally since we can’t get stacks against them often enough anyway. If they have a tighter range we can feel comfortable set-mining/folding. We’re out of position so playing a hand fairly straightforward doesn’t bother me as much. We also are either facing only one player left if we’re SB or closing the action if we’re the BB so we can feel comfortable enough that we’ll get to see our flop. If we’re the BB we can definitely flat and try to outplay the SB on the
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flop even if we miss our set. If I’m the SB and it’s folded to me I raise any pair, but I typically raise 4xBB from the SB instead of my usual 3xBB, I’ve found that my 3xBB raises don’t get much respect and I find myself getting played back a bit versus decent players in the BB. If the BB is tight or poor then feel free to raise as usual. If for some reason we have our option in the big blind to check with our small pair, if it’s just one player and us and I’m raising to 5xBB and trying to take it down. We’re keeping our SPR too small by just checking and may not get stacks even if we flop a set vs a good hand. You can try to sweeten the pot with a small raise if your table is really weak but generally against competent opponents it may be best to raise to try and take it down or check and flop your set (dependent on aggression, table, etc.). If it open folds to the SB and they limp, we raise. If they three bang us, we re-evaluate as normal and make a note. I’m raising with any two cards here, there isn’t a hand in the deck I check in this situation. venice10 did a really good job on blind defense that you can read to get a better idea of blind defense. Honestly, this may sound lazy (and maybe it is) but I think that the blind defense is really situational and since we’ve got almost all the info possibly available to someone preflop that writing about general situations is difficult. We really have to consider who raised, from what position, the fact that we’re OOP and whether or not we can extract a ton of value or whether we should try to take it down now, etc. I had a really tough time writing this section for some reason, but I think a good general rule is to look at the villain’s range, figure out if we can extract a lot of value if we hit our set, and if not then we can consider 3-betting. I’m still not three-betting my small pairs a ton here though. That general rule goes fairly well for our late position section, too. Summary: Overall playing pocket pairs is a little more tricky than they seem at first. If we want to setmine we need to evaluate the
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situation and make sure that it’s a good spot to try and do so. We have to be aware of our opponents range and the opponents that are sitting behind us. If we don’t our red line is going to go down too quickly and we’re going to develop a considerable leak. Raising early on isn’t a bad idea if you know why you’re doing it and the conditions are good, but doing it blindly is a leak also. Calling three-bets is generally bad, but there are conditions under which we can consider doing so, especially if we have a plan. In other words, it depends.
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Stack to Pot Ratio DonkDonkDonkDonk Introduction I could make this COTW real short and say ‘if you want to know about SPR, read Professional No Limit Hold ‘Em by Matt Flynn, Sunny Mehta and Ed Miller.’ Since I won’t do that, you’ll have to bare with me. I’ve heard that SPR is a controversial topic in NLHE but I’m not sure why, PNLHE maybe overrated it’s status a little, but SPR is an enormously helpful tool that you can use to improve your game no end. What is SPR? Stack-to-pot-ratios are simple. You divide the amount of the smallest stack by the final preflop pot. For example: We have a stack of $100, our opponent has $200 and the pot is $10 on the flop, we divide the smallest stack, our $100 stack by the final preflop pot, $10, 100/10 = 10, so the SPR is 10 We have a stack of $10 ,our opponent has a stack size of $15, and the pot size is $0.50, 10/0.5 = 20, SPR is 20 When there are more than one opponent in the hand we can calculate the SPR with all the opponents. For example we have a $300,000 stack and durrrr has a $200,000 stack but Ivey has a $500,000 stack and the final preflop pot is $10,000. That means that we have a SPR of 20 with durrrr (200,000/10,000) and a SPR of 30 with Ivey (300,000/10,000).
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I hope this makes sense, it’s really simple mathematics, I hope I am not making it complicated. Why use SPR? SPR simply puts a numerical value on the relationship between the smallest stack in the hand and the pot size. Instead of saying ‘the pot was big’, say ‘the SPR was small’ We use SPR to help make better commitment plans, manipulate the pot preflop and to make better decisions post-flop. It isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of poker as PNLHE said it was, but taking it into account is vital in my opinion. Using SPR at uNL Here is an example of a hand in which we don’t use SPR Hand A: Full Tilt Poker $50.00 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players MP1: $44.00 MP2: $14.40 Hero (CO): $50.00 BTN: $33.90 SB: $44.55 BB: $54.15 UTG: $32.00 65/19 fish UTG+1: $40.20 UTG+2: $50.25 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is CO with K K UTG calls $0.50 4 folds, Hero raises to $1.50, 3 folds, UTG calls $1 make a standard raise to 3x for value, fish comes along, good. Flop: ($2.25) 2 J 7 (2 players) UTG checks, Hero bets $2, UTG calls $2 Make a reasonably sized cbet on a good flop and he calls, that’s also pretty sweet for me.
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Turn: ($5.25) 6 (2 players) UTG checks, Hero bets $4.00, UTG raises to $10, omgwtfbbq what do i do is he bluffing head asplode?? Hero made several mistakes in this hand, most of them can be avoided if he considered and used SPR effectively. Hand B: Full Tilt Poker $50.00 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players MP1: $44.00 MP2: $14.40 Hero (CO): $50.00 BTN: $33.90 SB: $44.55 BB: $54.15 UTG: $32.00 65/19 fish UTG+1: $40.20 UTG+2: $50.25 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is CO with K K UTG calls $0.50 4 folds, Hero raises to $2.50, 3 folds, UTG calls $2 I usually make it 3x the blinds, but if I did that that would give me an SPR of around 16 which isn’t great for my hand, I’ll go for a 5x raise that will give me a more favorable SPR of around 8 Flop: ($4.25) 2 J 7 (2 players) UTG checks, Hero bets $3.50, UTG calls $3.50 Make a reasonably sized cbet on a good flop and he calls, I think I am ahead here and given he is a big fish I think I am committed to my hand given the SPR is 8. Turn: ($11.25) 6 (2 players) UTG checks, Hero bets $9.00, UTG raises to $26 and is all in, Well I said I was committed on the flop and the 6 is unlikely to
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have improved his hand, I’m going to go ahead and stick to my plan and commit my chips against this aggrodonk Hero calls $17 The biggest mistake that hero in hand A made was not that he raised to 3x after the limper but it was not making a commitment plan on any street. If he had made a plan like the hero in hand B, he would not have been put in such an awkward spot on the turn, even though the only action Hero B did differently is raise more preflop. SPR didn’t tell hero in hand B how to play the hand, but it helped him create a plan and then manipulate the pot size in order to carry out the plan. Maximum SPRs Maximum SPRs are estimates on the largest SPR you could expect to profit when you get the money all in. We estimate maximum SPRs based on the particular hand and the particular opponent. Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is CO with A A 5 folds, Hero raises to $1.50, 2 folds, BB calls $1.00 Here is a good spot to estimate a maximum SPR. if BB was really tight that he will rarely stack off without 2 pair+, then you can say that you’ll only get it all in profitably if the SPR was less than 4. That means that if the SPR was 4 or less you can commit versus this particular opponent and expect to profit. However, you estimate that if the SPR was over 4 then committing all your chips versus this opponent would have a negative expectation. If BB was a loose spewy aggrodonk, you could say that you’ll commit if the SPR was 10 or under. Target SPRs We can estimate the maximum SPR as the highest SPR that you can get the money all in and expect to have a positive expectation. However that doesn’t mean that the maximum SPR is the optimal SPR.
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PNLHE defines target SPRs as; Quote:
your ideal stack-to-pot ratio with a particular hand versus a particular opponent. It is the SPR that is going to win you the most money when you get all in. So how do you estimate your target SPR? Well, it depends on two major factors: 1. Your hand This is the most important, obviously. If you’ve played any significant amount of poker you should know what starting hands make what type of hands by the river. AK, AQ and other big aces, broadways, and JJ+ make top pair hands and overpairs. Small pocket pairs make underpairs and sets and suited connectors make flushes, straights and big draws. Top pair hands and overpairs are triskaidekaphobic. That means that they fear the number 13. While low SPRs like 4 or 6 are easy because you can bet/bet/commit and large SPRS like 21 aren’t bad because you aren’t usually stacking off anyway, 13 is a uncertain middle ground where people have just enough implied odds to set mine and draw out on you as well as having enough to bluff you off your hand. Good target SPRs with TP/OP hands are either much lower than 13 or much higher. Drawing hands like small pocket pairs and suited connectors love the number 13 for the same reason as TP/OPs hate it. 2. Your opponent A good estimation of your target SPR has to take into account the stack off ranges and tendencies of your opponent. A set mining nit won’t commit his chips without a set or a very low SPR and will fold otherwise. You want to make as much money preflop versus this guy because he is going to play reasonably perfectly versus you postflop and with lower SPRs he is more likely to spaz out or feel committed with his pocket pair. So a good target SPR versus him might be 4. Against a solid, aggressive TAG, you might raise that a bit. His calling range is going to be wider than just pocket pairs and
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will seek to bluff you every once in a while. He can also be encouraged to stack off if he hits TPTK or something of the sort, however he is still solid and isn’t going to commit a lot of chips without a good hand. Against him, you can set a target SPR of 6-7. Against a maniac fish you can set your target SPRs as high as 10-11 because he is going to do stupid stuff with stupid hands and the higher the SPR the more money you can win off him. I have only given a basic guide, these target SPRs change because of specific reads and tendencies that every player has (remember no two players are the same). I could go through all different hands and players but I feel I don’t have to, use your brain and come up with your own target SPRs for common situations that you find yourself in. Manipulating the pot to achieve your target SPR Once you have set a target SPR it is time to achieve that target (we set targets for a reason). Managing the preflop pot is very important because 1bb difference on the flop can mean 30bb difference by the river, and it all matters. Raise Sizes Raising to 3/4bb+1 per limper in all positions is the overwhelming trend in online poker. You raise the same all the time because otherwise people can read into your raise size. While this has it’s merits, and it’s something I do when I play, my one PSA is, STOP, THINK AND ADJUST! Your standard might be 3bb plus one bb for every limper, however doing this automatically is costing you money. Think about your target SPR and then think ‘is raising to 3x going to achieve this?’ Maybe you are deep with a whale and raising more isn’t going to lose you value, or maybe there is a shortstack in the blinds and minraising from the button is more profitable, who knows but adjusting your preflop raise sizing every so often in order to achieve a more favorable SPR will really improve your game. To 3bet or not to 3bet Deciding whether to 3bet can be a difficult thing to do.
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Remember people have a tendency to call 3bets especially in position. So before you 3bet you should think ‘if I am called I will be in a pot with a low SPR’ and then think do I want to be in this pot with my hand/position against the opponent and his calling range? I see this a lot people 3bet KJo or something in the SB and then they get called and then they’re like ‘oh **** what do I do, I am not doing well against his range but the SPR is 5 surely I have to commit with my pair of jacks’. Well it’s too late for thinking about that buddy, you should have planned it out before hand, considered all the possibilities and then made your decision. Low SPRs usually make decisions easier but they can make decisions harder when you’ve got a marginal hand against the opponents range and you are OOP. Sometimes, flat-calling when you would normally 3bet can be the correct decision if you are deep. MP1: $44.00 MP2: $14.40 CO: $61.65 BTN: $33.90 SB: $44.55 Hero (BB): $130.00 UTG: $54.15 UTG+1: $120.20 11/9 with 81% f3b UTG+2: $50.25 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is BB with A A 1 fold, UTG+1 raises to $1.50, 6 folds, Hero calls $1.00 Here although we have AA and we want to get the most value out of the hand, I think flat calling here is a good play. If we 3bet to $5.50 and he calls we are setting up a pot with an SPR of 11 which is really close to 13 and 13 is bad for our hand especially against a tight player. If we just call the SPR is huge at 36 which is better for our hand as it removes the fear of getting stacked by a better hand as we are not going to stack off without a set anyway. Here by 3betting we allow him decent odds to call with smaller pocket pairs and we are going to be OOP with a bad SPR against a player who is going to play reasonably perfectly against an overpair, not a great situation in my opinion. He isn’t going to stack off preflop either unless he has the other two aces.
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Remember in poker there are three advantages you can have over your opponents -Skill advantage -Positional advantage -Card advantage In general, if you have skill and/or positional advantage over your opponent you can afford to have high SPRs because you allow yourself more room to maneuver and exploit these edges. If you don’t have either but you have card advantage, try and aim for smaller SPRs as positional and skill advantages are less important the smaller the SPR. If you don’t have any, fold.
Conclusion if you really want to know about SPR, read Professional No Limit Hold ‘Em by Matt Flynn, Sunny Mehta and Ed Miller.
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Playing Suited Connectors babar86 Definition : Suited connectors (or sc) are cards of the same suite and connected. Example : 7 8 A couple of general thoughts: There are different scs type. I’ll classify them in 3 categories : - High sc, they go from QJs to AKs, their value mainly come from hitting pair, you obviousy will make the most profit with them, simply because a pair of ace if better than a pair of king which is better than a pair of queen aswell that a A high ace flush beats a K high flush. You see my point right ? - Medium sc, 78s to JTs, those will be the gist of this CotW. They make good pairs and on a lot of boards, you’ll have decent equity. - Low sc, 23s to 67s, those suck. Their playability mainly comes from hitting draws. A couple of numbers : - Suited connectors represent 4% of hands - With any suited connector, you will be : Flopping a flush - 118/1 (0.84%)
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Flopping a flush draw - 8.1/1 (10.9%) Flopping a Straight draw (8 outer) 8.6 to 1 10.45% Flopping a Straight 75.3 to 1 1.31% From : http://www.cardschat.com/f11/various-pokerodds-69737/ When we make a simple addition : You’ll flop a solid draw (flushdraw / str8draw) or a nuts made hand 23.5%. And you’ll hit a pair/2pairs/trips 35.75% In today’s games, implied odds are not as good as they used to be. You can’t stack a nit when you make a flush on the turn every single time he has a big overpair. This is why draws go down in value whereas pairs go up, which is why high sc > medium sc >>>>>>>>>>> low sc.
Preflop : When you are the pfr (everybody has folded) Early position (EP) : Your gameplan must vary according to the table’s aggressiveness. I’ll open 78s utg all day long if : 1) BTN is a 12/8 nit, SB and/or BB are fishes. Otherwise, don’t play low and medium sc in EP. You can raise high sc. It’d increase your EP pfr and you’ll get 3bet light, you’d hit bad pairs and don’t know what to do because you are out of position, you’d hit draws but they play terribly out of position. Just don’t. Middle position (MP) : The table is now shorthanded. I usually raise the high end of the medium sc (89s+) but you can play tighter if : there are aggressive players left to act (especially in position), you have a crazy mother ****er image, you are not confortable playing postflop. Dump the low sc. Late position (LP) : You now are 3 or 4 handed. Like before, it depends a lot of the blinds and btn if you are in the CO. I won’t get into details because this is pretty basic but the tighter blinds/btn plays, the looser you can open and vice versa. You can now start opening low sc’s.
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In the small blind, I’ll usually open any sc’s there, I might fold low sc’s if the BB is loose.
When someone opens and you are in position : Early Position: (utg opens, you are utg+1) Fold. All of those, FOLD NOW. You’ll get squeezed a decent amount, this pot is probably going to be multiway and you’ll have to play more straightforward than not, your pairs might not be good and if they are, you still need to go to the showdown. Midle Position: I usually fold most of them except if bad players behind (preferably in the blinds). Late Position : this is the most interesting situation imo. 2 scenarios : EP opens, he’s a standard regular (16/13, 10% opens utg). 10% opens utg = 22-AA, ATs+, AQo+, KJs. You need to know what type of hands you can profitably play against that range. Pokerstove tells us T9s up to KQs have 40.20% pure equity. But there is also time your opponent will check fold the best hand, cbet and give up on the turn the best hand which will happen way more than 10%. On the other hand, 45s up to 89s only have 35% against that same utg range.
A couple of variables though : - Our post flop skill (includes the fold equity we think we have on some boards against a specific opponent)
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- His post flop skill Don’t overestimate your fold equity. The intrasec value of sc’s (the time you’ll make 2pairs/str8/flush or anything that can beat AA) is generally not good enough so that you can play any sc profitably, even in position. You need to rely on fold equity. Fold equity comes from aggression and your aggression should be based on your equity (the more equity you have in a pot, the more you can play a hand aggressively…). Here’s why I’d rather play JTs than 45s. The better you know your opponent tendencies in specific spots, the more you can call with lower sc’s. Against middle and late position opener (MP vs HJ vs CO vs BTN), most regulars don’t call 3bet out of position, therefore you want to polarize your 3betting range to premium hands and “trashy” hands and call everything between. Your calling range will include high and medium sc’s. You won’t make a profit by calling low sc’s against a wide range (cf. playing from the blinds, you’ll understand why). BUT, they are pretty much the top of your bottom range, you can include them in your 3bet bluffing range along with what you usually 3bet. Against fishy opponent, you need to 3bet a merged range (only for value but wider), you need to include high sc’s and even some JTs for isolation/slight value purpose.
Playing from the blinds : Again, you already know that but playing out of position sucks, especially drawing hands. You’ll fold against EP and MP. Now, let’s talk about late position play (the difference between a losing and a winning regular mostly comes from late position play). In late position, ranges are wide. Your goal won’t be to crack aces anymore. When ranges are wide, pairs value go up and draws value go down (because of the lack of implied odds).
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You’ll call (or 3bet if your opponent defends with worse but I won’t get into that, it’s already covered by knn05) with your high and medium sc’s, and fold/3bet your low sc’s. No, you won’t make a profit calling with 5 high out of position but if your opponent folds a lot to 3bet, you can 3bet and still have a decent chance to flop gin.
Quick thoughts about post flop : The more equity you have, the more aggressive you need to be. Don’t be afraid of getting it in with a gutter and a flushdraw on the flop. It might not be SUPER +ev but it’ll increase your overall aggression and it’ll be a huge step from being the empty seat weak tight nit to becoming the crazy loose regular nobody wants to play with. Also, if we think deeper about it : your opponent knows that you don’t play aggressively your fd+gutter on the flop. Therefore when you raise 5h6hTs, you only have 55/66/TT/56 in your value range. A standard player will think “okay, his range is polarized, I CALL or I RAISE (if he has air) . When you do raise your fds+gutters/A high flushdraws on this flop, he won’t be able to call you down with 77/88/99/JT or even JJ because his equity just dropped down significantly against your range. The best of you probably got my point and I’ll put an anti spoiler there because this information is so valuable Spoiler:
[The wider you raise for value, the more you can bluff!] Conclusion : I think this is hard to give a general plan on how to play suited connectors. The value of a given hand depends a lot of the situation/opponent and you’ll need to play a lot to get a feeling of what hand you can make a profit with. Wow, only 1325 words. It looks short to me compared to
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the CotW relative to playing small pp’s. But I hope I covered everything to say about suited connector’s. If so, I’ll respond to your questions and edit the main post later. To keep the discussion going, the best is, imo, to post hand histories to illustrate recurrent pre/post flop situations you feel you struggle with and we all talk together about why a line A is better than a line B. If you notice any big grammar fault, please tell it on this thread or by PM asap. English isn’t my native language.
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The Blocker Bet I vi ii V7 Blocking Bets I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject, but hopefully I can get the discussion going in the right direction. Definition: A bet made OOP on the turn or river, attempting to “set the price” of the river or showdown. You bet because your hand has value vs some of your opponent’s range, but you don’t figure to have the best hand if you have to call large bets and get to showdown. The bet you make is typically smaller than what you would likely face if you checked. In a sense, a blocking bet is kind of a bluff. You do have showdown value, but you do also fold out a few better hands, enough so that it makes betting slightly better than check/ calling or getting to showdown. Things to consider: Your hand strength: I would not make a blocking bet with a nuts/air type hand. When making a blocking bet, you should feel fine about getting called. I don’t feel fine about getting called when I make a small bet with the nuts/air. I’m losing value when ahead and not effectively bluffing when behind. I am much happier making a blocking bet with second pair/ underpairs or weak top pairs than I am with total nothing. Your opponent: Make blocking bets vs villains who don’t see them for what they are (as in, basically most regs at 50NL and below). Don’t make blocking bets vs aggor-tards who will raise
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you anyways. Don’t make blocking bets vs passive players who would check behind anyways. Board texture: My input here might be a little more vague. Basically, you want to make blocking bets on boards where your opponent should realistically only be raising with hands that beat you. Why villains call: You may be sitting there reading that last statement, thinking to yourself, “Wait a sec, I vi, if they only raise with better hands, aren’t I bluffing?” Sort of, yes and no. Villains call (incorrectly) for two reasons when you make a blocking bet. One, “lolol pot odds, I have to call this.” And two, “Whut fux?? I has Ace King, I draw to tawp pair!!” Which brings me to my next point. Bet sizing: A pot sized OOP turn bet is not a blocking bet. A 2/3 pot sized OOP turn bet is not a blocking bet. I will go so far to say that a ½ pot sized OOP turn (or river…) bet is pretty much the most I will blocking bet for. Remember what I said about why people call? Give them a reason to call unprofitably. Are you OOP on the turn, up against a TAG reg, with JJ on a 26TK board? Go ahead and bet ¼ or 1/5 pot and see what they do. They call? Bet 1/5 pot again on the river and laugh when they show you 77 or AT. Each situation is different, but the main thing to remember is that you are keeping them from making big bets that you can’t profitably call, and you do rate to have the best hand a fair amount of the time if you can keep the pot size manageable. If you get raised with JJ after block betting a 26TK board, you can be like 90% certain you’re beat. But hell, with the games playing as nitty as they are these days, I could see even a hand as strong as KQ/AK just calling you down, for fear that you flopped huge. So keep in mind that when you get called, you sometimes won’t have the best hand, BUT you kept the better hands from maximizing against you. And what was that thing that Split taught us all a while ago? Say it with me: Minimizing loss is the same as maximizing gain. And now the fun examples! Hand 1 Villain is a reg running 14/9/5 over 2400 hands. His flop Cbet
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% is 68%. I figure he is opening with basically all pocket pairs, strong face cards, and medium suited face cards, sometimes medium suited connectors. His flop check doesn’t mean much, because this board is super dry. He checks his AK here sometimes. He’s betting the turn with his whole range, IMO, after I check both streets. I bet super small on the river both to get all of his weak crap to call “because lolol pot odds I have to call this,” and because I do get to fold out better hands sometimes. I’m basically gonna have to flip a coin and guess if I check the river and he decides to bet like $7 with his 22 - 88 UI. -------------------HAND #1 -------------------Poker Stars, $0.25/$0.50 NL Hold’em Cash Game, 9 Players Hand History Converter by Stoxpoker SB: $47.20 (94.4 bb) Hero (BB): $52.25 (104.5 bb) UTG: $49 (98 bb) UTG+1: $51.90 (103.8 bb) MP1: $53.40 (106.8 bb) MP2: $59.05 (118.1 bb) MP3: $55.90 (111.8 bb) CO: $10 (20 bb) BTN: $66.70 (133.4 bb) Pre-Flop: Hero is BB with 9 9 3 folds, MP2 raises to $2, 4 folds, Hero calls $1.50 Flop: ($4.25) T A 6 (2 players) Hero checks, MP2 checks Turn: ($4.25) 6 (2 players) Hero checks, MP2 bets $2, Hero calls $2 River: ($8.25) Q (2 players) Hero bets $2, MP2 folds Hand 2 No stats, no HUD. Villain seems interested in the pot, my hand
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has showdown value, but I can’t call a big river bluff, should he decide to turn his unimproved pocket pair into a bluff. I set the price, hopefully getting a “lolol pot odds” call from those hands, and I’m folding if he raises (since it will mean Jx almost always and Ax sometimes). Villain claims he had TT, and I’m inclined to believe him. -------------------HAND #2 -------------------Poker Stars, $0.25/$0.50 NL Hold’em Cash Game, 8 Players Hand History Converter by Stoxpoker CO: $68.60 (137.2 bb) BTN: $34 (68 bb) SB: $43 (86 bb) Hero (BB): $50 (100 bb) UTG+1: $44.45 (88.9 bb) MP1: $45.10 (90.2 bb) MP2: $54.50 (109 bb) MP3: $59.25 (118.5 bb) Pre-Flop: Hero is BB with K K UTG+1 raises to $1.50, 6 folds, Hero raises to $6, UTG+1 calls $4.50 Flop: ($12.25) J J A (2 players) Hero checks, UTG+1 checks Turn: ($12.25) 9 (2 players) Hero checks, UTG+1 bets $5.50, Hero calls $5.50 River: ($23.25) 5 (2 players) Hero bets $5.50, UTG+1 folds Hand 3 Villain was 80/13 over 3 orbits I use blocking bets to keep the pot small and get to showdown, and because i think worse will call. I fold if he raises at some point...betting prevents me checking and being bluffed off the
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best hand. Note here that even though we didn’t win the hand, we got to showdown and lost the minimum because we set the price. I do think this is the type of player who will call down with much worse, sometimes even AK. -------------------HAND #3 -------------------Poker Stars, $0.25/$0.50 NL Hold’em Cash Game, 8 Players Hand History Converter by Stoxpoker MP3: $50.15 (100.3 bb) CO: $69.55 (139.1 bb) BTN: $70.05 (140.1 bb) Hero (SB): $50.50 (101 bb) BB: $63.35 (126.7 bb) UTG+1: $60.40 (120.8 bb) MP1: $11.30 (22.6 bb) MP2: $67.15 (134.3 bb) Pre-Flop: Hero is SB with T T UTG+1 folds, MP1 calls $0.50, 3 folds, BTN raises to $2, Hero calls $1.75, 2 folds Flop: ($5) 9 5 2 (2 players) Hero checks, BTN bets $3, Hero calls $3 Turn: ($11) 3 (2 players) Hero bets $3.75, BTN calls $3.75 River: ($18.50) 5 (2 players) Hero bets $3.50, BTN calls $3.50 So anyways, I hope this week will provide some great discussion on blocking bets. I think people either don’t use it enough, use it incorrectly, or use it without knowing why. Again, I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject, or even that my examples were good ones, I only hope I get the thread going in the right direction.
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The Check-Raise mpethybridge Sorry guys, we have had our first person fail to deliver a scheduled CotW thread, so I am filling in on no notice. To be perfectly candid, check raises are a weak part of my game, so I am pretty much the worst person to be doing this topic. I need it to be clear to everybody that this is the first OP in the CotW series that is not intended as an authoritative treatment of the subject it presents. Rather, it is my intention to just get the discussion started. I’ll structure the discussion using my stats, my hands and my play. Feel free to comment or add your own hands or stats to illustrate points. Using Check Raises At higher stakes, one of the main reasons for check/raising is to protect your checks when you don’t have a hand and you need a free card to improve. You need peple to be wary of your checks and to be more inclined to check behind you rather than make a play on the pot, so you check/raise enough so that they have it in their head that you may very well be setting them up to lose a bet when you check. In theory, this could work at the micros, but I just don’t think people are paying enough attention to you to warrant balancing your actions in this way. It IS increasingly true that the games are getting more aggressive, and that if you check your villain will bet at you a high percentage of the time. This is a good argument for value check/raising maybe more than we have
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been. But in my opinion, it remains unnecessary to protect our checks, because villains will not step betting at your checks when they have seen you check/raise. Thus, I usually valuebet rather than check/raising. So here are some situations where I will check/raise: 1. I have a big hand on a drawy flop and villain is likely to have and bet nothing. In this hand from last night I was actually making a play on the big blind, who 3 bet 16% of his opportunities from the big blind. I flatted the steal in the hopes that the BB would squeeze. No luck. Cut off is a 39/9/2 UTG+2: $59.20 MP1: $92.95 MP2: $256.25 CO: $101.55 BTN: $48.15 Hero (SB): $119.30 BB: $50.00 UTG: $57.65 UTG+1: $58.00 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is SB with K K 5 folds, CO raises to $2.50, 1 fold, Hero calls $2.25, 1 fold Flop: ($5.50) 6 5 2 (2 players) Hero checks, CO bets $3.00, Hero raises to $9.50, CO folds So my thinking was basically what I outlined above. It looks like a pretty drawy board, but it missed, or did not hit very hard, most of the villain’s stealing range. I think the cut off’s hands are weighted toward the trashy end of his stealing range because he made a big, non-standard raise. I go ahead and check to him with a high degree of confidence that he will c-bet his steal, because this is what people do--they c-bet their steals. The part of the hand I was uncertain about was the raise, rather than the check. It just seemed to me that there were a
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lot of cards that would be bad either for my hand or my action. It also seemed that he probably didn’t have anything anyway, and that I was likely not getting any further action, so the check/raise wasn’t costing me future action often enough to outweigh the following considerations: a. I look aggressive, and maybe what I said above was wrong and it will slow some people down against me; and, b. the flop is so low he has to look at it as having missed me, so maybe he thinks my c/r is just a play trying to push him off the pot and he plays back with a little something. I really don’t know whether this was a good use of a c/r or not, but that was the thinking. 2. Using a Short Stacker’s Aggression Against Him. I could come up with dozens of these hands, because I do this as a matter of routine. The villain in this hand plays 29/15/8 and 3 bets 10%. I usually turbo-muck AQ against a 3 bet OOP, but against someone this loose and aggressive, I felt pretty good about calling. I can also see shoving here, but, realistically, most of his call-a-shoverange is flipping me from slightly ahead or is way ahead, so I preferred calling and seeing the flop. Hero (UTG+1): $121.20 MP: $10.00 CO: $19.25 BTN: $9.25 SB: $50.25 BB: $52.90 UTG: $19.25 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is UTG+1 with Q A 1 fold, Hero raises to $1.75, 1 fold, CO raises to $5, 3 folds, Hero calls $3.25 Flop: ($10.75) 5 8 Q (2 players) Hero checks, CO bets $6.00, Hero raises to $28.75, CO calls $8.25 all in
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Final Pot: $39.25 Hero shows Q A CO shows 9 9 Hero wins $37.30 (Rake: $1.95) Three points here: a. Shorties abuse fold equity. b. CRAI here looks a little “bluffy.” c. A and B combine to make it very likely that shorty will look me up here thinking I am muscling him with air. I think this is a standard play post-flop (non-standard preflop, obviously), but it is one of the main uses of a flop c/r. 3. When Your Trash is Probably the Best Hand But You Need to Win Now. I’m not sure about this one, but I do it all the time. Villain is a pretty weak player--14/6/1.5. He could have a better pocket pair, but I can probably muscle him off that. Otherwise, I have the best hand and he is weakly stabbing with air, but I am going to hate pretty much every card in the deck, so I really can’t check/call. UTG+2: $100.00 MP1: $74.20 MP2: $59.70 Hero (CO): $141.75 BTN: $45.00 SB: $46.25 BB: $111.15 UTG: $50.40 UTG+1: $68.35 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is CO with 3 3 5 folds, Hero raises to $1.50, BTN calls $1.50, 2 folds Flop: ($3.75) 6 6 Q (2 players) Hero checks, BTN bets $1.50, Hero raises to $5.50, BTN folds Final Pot: $6.75
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Hero wins $6.45 (Rake: $0.30) This sort of situation comes up a lot on paired boards because you feel so much better about your small pocket pair because of the combinatorics of a paired board, but the rest of the deck still sucks for you. Normally I fold or 3 bet 77 in the BB against a button steal, but I sometimes just call; I called this time because this was my first hand at the table, and I never raise light in my first couple of orbits. SB: $38.90 Hero (BB): $50.00 UTG: $41.90 UTG+1: $75.95 UTG+2: $10.25 MP1: $46.25 MP2: $10.20 CO: $59.35 BTN: $56.35 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is BB with 7 7 6 folds, BTN raises to $1.50, 1 fold, Hero calls $1 Flop: ($3.25) 4 5 5 (2 players) Hero checks, BTN bets $2.50, Hero raises to $7.50, BTN folds Final Pot: $8.25 Hero wins $7.85 (Rake: $0.40) Again, I have the best hand almost certainly, but I am going to hate most turn cards, and I am oop, so I don’t mind winning right now. I don’t know--standard or boneheaded? 4. I Check/Raise Big Combo Draws CO: $23.65 BTN: $50.95 Hero (SB): $50.00 BB: $20.00 UTG: $40.25
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UTG+1: $52.90 UTG+2: $10.00 MP1: $100.25 MP2: $55.55 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is SB with Q A 7 folds, Hero raises to $1.50, BB calls $1 Flop: ($3.00) 4 T 6 (2 players) Hero checks, BB bets $2.50, Hero raises to $48.50, BB folds Final Pot: $8.00 Hero wins $7.60 (Rake: $0.40) Flops with flush draws aren’t the greatest ones to c-bet with air, so villains expect to see check/folds in spots like this more often than usual. So they are more inclined to bet if you check and fold if you bet. I bet big combo draws a lot, too, but I like check/raising them on occasion. 5. Bluff Check/raising I look for a high aggression factor, which means that the villain bets and folds or bets and raises, but doesn’t bet/call very much. A situation where the villain can’t have much of a hand most of the time is nice. here there are lots of hands the villain (AF 4.2) can bet but few he can call a check raise with. UTG+1: $65.75 UTG+2: $103.45 MP1: $25.00 MP2: $39.85 CO: $51.20 BTN: $50.00 Hero (SB): $136.00 BB: $62.80 UTG: $103.40 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is SB with A K 4 folds, MP2 calls $0.50, 2 folds, Hero raises to $2, BB calls $1.50, 1 fold
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Flop: ($4.50) 2 4 J (2 players) Hero checks, BB bets $3.00, Hero raises to $8.50, BB folds Final Pot: $10.50 Hero wins $10.00 (Rake: $0.50) Some Stats on My Check/Raises: I check raise 6% of flops I see. 40% of all my check raises are from the big blind. 30% of all my check raises are from the small blind, which means 70% of all my check raises are from the blinds. I’ll withhold the precise percentages, but this is a list of what I have when I am check raising the flop from most common to least common: Top pair overpair trips a set air combo draw two pair a vulnerable overpair Check/Raising the Turn I can cover this very briefly: Often, but not always, these are check/raises all in, and I usually do it with the best hand or a combo draw that I bet the flop with and then bricked on the turn. I play a lot of deep tables, so I check raise a lot on the turn to build the pot after I have established on the flop that the vilain is going to go with his hand. Below is a pretty classic case:
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BTN: $50.00 SB: $55.55 BB: $50.00 UTG: $94.90 Hero (UTG+1): $145.45 MP1: $101.40 MP2: $62.40 CO: $78.60 Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is UTG+1 with 7 7 1 fold, Hero raises to $1.75, 2 folds, CO calls $1.75, 3 folds Flop: ($4.25) 7 9 A (2 players) Hero bets $2.50, CO raises to $5, Hero calls $2.50 Turn: ($14.25) 3 (2 players) Hero checks, CO bets $7.50, Hero raises to $27.50, CO calls $20 River: ($69.25) 3 (2 players) Hero bets $69.25, CO calls $44.35 all in Final Pot: $157.95 Hero shows 7 7 Hero wins $24.90 Hero wins $130.05 (Rake: $3.00) So the small flop bet was just designed to see if he had an ace, which is the only way I am going to make money on the hand. He minraises, which is awesome, because it gives me an excuse to check to him on the turn. Actually, in reviewing my DB just now, I saw that my turn check/raises were check/shoves only about 35% of the time, and much lower if you ignore hands against people playing less than 100bb. Some Stats on My Turn Check raises. This is more randomly distributed among the early positionsthan flop check/raises, because, by and large, I am only doing it with hands I want to get all in with or on a rare semi-bluff. So:
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I check/raise 6.3% of turns. 20-ish% of which are from SB, BB and both early positions, the remaining 20% coming from mid pos and the CO. I usually have a set, but can also have trips, two pair, an overpair, a combo-draw or air. But i shove combo-draws on the turn far less than I ought to; I only saw two this year. I actually bluff-check/raised the turn far more often than I did with combo draws. Al of those were on boards where I had called on the flop and the turn paired the board (and none of them worked ) Check/Raising the River Well, these are usually hands I think are the nuts or a bluff, so I don’t really see the need to illustrate with hand histories. I am rarely check/raising the river. I need the villain to have a good hand or a good spot to bluff and I need my hand to be effectively the nuts. So I only check/raise 2.6% of rivers. There’s probably a lot more that can be said here, but this is already really long. Reacting to Check/Raises: FOLD
In all seriousness, you should usually be folding. On occasion a villain will check/raise you when you have a powerful hand you can continue with, but, for the most part, you should fold. Basically, you need to have a hand or a read to continue.
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This is a HEM screenshot of all $50 hands I played this year in which I was check/raised. As you can see, I am getting pounded in LP with my steal c-bets being check/raised, but making a profit in the earlier positions where I have, on average, stronger hands that play well against check/raises. So have a hand or have a read to continue, otherwise, just fold. What is a hand you can continue with? Well, my win rate with an overpair where I have been check raised is 1717bb/100 (8.5ptbb/hand). My win rate with top pair top kicker or top pair good kicker is 1558bb/100 (7.75ptbb/hand). So these are good enough if you are paying attention. _______________________________ As I said at the outset, please do not consider this authoritative. I posted the hands and the ways I use check/ raises more as a starting off point for the discussion than as a “how-to.”
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The Double Barrel Ricky1231 It’s going to be very valuable to win the pots on the turn and river when you do not have the best hand since, on average, the pot will be larger on later streets. This concept is all about how to win those pots with a second barrel. Double barreling is so opponent and situation specific that I won’t be able to give you guys an exact playbook about the subject in text alone. What I can do is give you a whole bunch on information on the topic in the hope that you will understand the underlying concepts and learn to apply them in the right situations on your own. A quick warning about double barreling: As I have said in numerous videos and have pounded into the brains of several of my students, you make most of your money at micro stakes by C-betting flops and by value betting later streets. The biggest mistake that bad players generally make is that they call too many junky hands pre-flop and they don’t fold later streets, therefore you will want to C-bet flops to make them fold all of their misses and value bet later streets to get calls from the hands they hit and call down with, not by betting a ton turns and rivers trying to make them fold top pair weak kicker etc. Things to considder: Three big things come to mind when thinking about double barreling. They are PLAYER READS, BOARD TEXTURE and
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EQUITY. Board texture actually influences several things, namely flop continuing ranges, board development and scare cards. These terms are loosely defined below. Flop continuing ranges: A flop calling range will simply be the hands that our opponents will play back at our flop C-bets with. Everyone will have slightly different flop continuing ranges and this is where player reads become important. Generally speaking, it is going to be better to double barrel against a wide FCR than a tight one since wide FCR’s will have more marginal hands in them. A flop continuing range is influenced both by pre-flop calling ranges and by board textures. For example if your opponent is calling a bunch of hands out of the big blind they will have more hands in their range that flop marginal junk like 2nd or 3rd pair that will peel the flop but will have trouble calling later streets. Also, some board textures are going to get peeled by more hand combinations than others and this will play a big role in double barreling. Board development: Board textures will change based on the turn and river. Some board’s won’t change much while others will change a great deal. Knowing how different board textures develop on later streets will be vital in your understanding of double barreling, especially when you relate it to FCR’s. Scare cards: I don’t think I need to go too much into this. Scare cards are anything that hits your perceived range. They are also cards that result in bad board development from your opponent’s perspective. You’ll see what I mean when I get into examples of specific textures. Rick’s list of double barreling generalities: 1) We want to double barrel when the board texture develops such that our opponent’s turn continuing range is much smaller than their flop continuing range or when the turn card improves our hand’s equity in the pot. 2) Bad boards to double barrel will be ones where your opponent has a low/tight FCR.
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3) The best card to double barrel will be a scare card that both results in bad board development and improves your equity. 4) Bad cards to double barrel will be ones that improve your opponents percieved range, pair the board, or are considdered to be “bricks” in general. 5) All other things being equal, we should be more likely to double barrel when we are out of position. This is because we cannot take free cards to capitalize on our equity in spots were our opponent is unlikely to fold to a turn bet. It is also because our opponents will be much more likely to float or peel light against us when they are in position. 6) You will be amazed how much note-taking will help. Reads will be very important when in marginal situations since each persons preflop and flop calling range will be different. If for example, we see someone make a very loose peel against us when OOP then we should seriously considder fireing more bullets against them in the future, even on bad barrel textures. 7) JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVE BARRELED THE TURN, IT DOES NOT MEAN THAT YOU ARE COMMITTED TO BETTING THE RIVER. I can’t stress this enough. I teach and play a pretty aggressive game and if I were just monkey shoving every river after two barreling, I’d be broke. A big reason why we two barrel is to make our opponent fold his marginal hands so why we would always be auto-shoving rivers when called is beyond me. 8) Look for spots where your opponent would almost always raise you with a strong hand or draw on the flop. If they just call, this could be a sign of weakness (or not if you and your opponent are on the same level). Flop textures and how they relate to barreling: I said that knowing how boards develop would be an important part of double barreling. Here are some various flop textures, I’ll try to tie some things together. Try to remember the little generalizations I just made. Ace high and king high “dry” flops
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These are great boards to C-bet on. Not only are aces and kings in your perceived opening range but it will be very difficult for your opponent’s pf range to consistently connect with these boards. To put it simply, when you c bet on A 8 2 , your opponent will be folding 6x7x, KxQx etc. There are also no draws that your opponent could be check-calling the flop with. BOARD DEVELOPMENT: There are no real scare cards that can come ont he turn and the worst this board will usually be will be on the flop. OPPONENTS FCR: It should be very tight when they are OOP. Use reads to figure it out for when they are in position. OUR EQUITY WHEN BEHIND: When you don’t have the best hand on A82r, you probably won’t have it by the river. You can still bet equity based two barrel cards (if you turn a flush or straight draw) to balance for when you want to bet good hands. When you get called on this flop, your opponent often has top pair, doesn’t want to fold and you should be reluctant to double barrel without reads or specific meta. One high card, two low card flops When I say 1 high card and 2 low cards, I’m referring to flops like J42 etc. These boards are decent for C-betting because your opponent will usually fold all unpaired hands but since the jack does not make up as much of your perceived range as an ace does, you are likely to get peeled lighter on average. These boards are fine to C-bet, so long as you’re prepared to two barrel when required. BOARD DEVELOPMENT: This sort of depends on just how low the second card is. There will be 3 over cards on the jack that will be decent to 2 barrel, there will also be several cards over the 4 that are good to betbecause they will be scare cards for small pocket pairs and will aid in bad board development. These cards will be something in neighborhood of 9x and Tx, especially if they bring a flush draw because these are perceived equity boosters that will make it very tough for our opponent to bluff-catch the turn with marginal hands due the the thread of a looming third barrel.
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OPPONENTS FCR: It will be middle of the road. OUR EQUITY WHEN BEHIND: A lot of our range will have 3 to 6 percieved outs with a whole bunch of backdoor draws. Not bad if you ask me! Two high card, one low card These may be the absolute best boards to C-bet against a reasonably wide pre-flop calling range when in position. The reason is because people cannot call a bet without some sort of top/2nd pair or draw. Examples of these flops will be K Q 2 . Again, since people need some sort of strong hand to call a bet on these textures, we should be less inclined to fire multiple barrels when called. BOARD DEVELOPMENT: Probably won’t get too scary from your opponents perspective. OPPONENTS FCR: Very tight. OUR EQUITY WHEN BEHIND: It’s not spectacular. Lets hope you turn a draw. Low, loosely coordinated boards A low, loosely coordinated board is something like 9 7 4 and sets up excellent for barreling. Why? Because these flops get peeled by everything. BOARD DEVELOPMENT: This board also gets pretty damn bad a good about of the time. The most innocuous this board will usually be will be on the flop as there are five overcards that can come off. This means we need to be c betting these flops with the intention of betting a ton of turn cards to punish our opponents for peeling us light. OPPONENTS FCR: All pairs will call, a lot of ace high hands as well as weak draws and other random hands. OUR EQUITY WHEN BEHIND: SUPER AWESOME! Coordinated boards
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These are flops that hit ranges hard. On a flop such as T 8 7 you can expect to get peeled and played back at a ton. For this reason, these are generally bad boards to c bet. What should an “air” C-betting range look like on these flops? Generally it will be something that can improve when called but not so strong that we would be bothered to get check raised off of out hand. Examples would include a hand like A K . One thing we need to remember about these textures is that our opponent will almost always raise or check-raise our C-bet with the top of his range. Therefore when we do occasionally c bet and are called, we can actually double (and tripple) barrel these boards somewhat often since a flop flat call is almsot always a marginal hand and our range will be stronger, on average, when we C-bet. Summary on textures and barreling: These obviously aren’t all of the possible flop textures but I hope that by now you can come up with some strategies related to other boards. Notice that some boards get peeled a lot while others don’t and some boards can get very scary while others rarely do. When making the decision to barrel please use your player reads to make some assesment on just how wide someone is peeling your bets and how likely they will be to fold on various turn cards. I can’t overstate this. Some of you guys will move up to mid-high stakes it will really help to get a feel for what level your opponent is on. When these double barreling concepts become common knowledge then it can sometimes be correct to play your hands in a way that is counter intuitive to this logic. For example, sometimes it will be correct to check back a strong hand on bad double barrel cards because your opponent won’t expect you to frequently bluff. It may also be correct to occasionally bluff in this spot or to bet thin for value in spots where your opponent alyways expect you to be barreling. Some hand histories: Try and figure out where the concepts apply.
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Full Tilt Poker $400.00 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com **HAND ONE** (Villain is a weak regular who calls wide from the blinds) MP1: $400.00 MP2: $139.10 CO: $400.00 BTN: $63.00 SB: $72.00 BB: $300.00 UTG: $174.40 UTG+1: $152.50 Hero (UTG+2): $433.00 Pre Flop: ($6.00) Hero is UTG+2 with A K 2 folds, Hero raises to $14, 5 folds, BB calls $10 Flop: ($30.00) T 4 6 (2 players) BB checks, Hero bets $20.00, BB calls $20 Turn: ($70.00) Q BB checks,
(2 players)
Spoiler:
Hero bets $54.00
**HAND TWO** (Limper is a weak fish) Full Tilt Poker $1000.00 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com UTG+1: $1060.00 UTG+2: $784.00 MP1: $2027.00 MP2: $3005.00 CO: $565.55
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BTN: $2457.00 SB: $490.00 Hero (BB): $1040.00 UTG: $425.00 Pre Flop: ($15.00) Hero is BB with J Q 5 folds, CO calls $10, 2 folds, Hero raises to $40, CO calls $30 Flop: ($85.00) 6 3 K (2 players) Hero bets $50.00, CO calls $50 Turn: ($185.00) A Spoiler: Hero Bets $135.00
(2 players)
**HAND THREE** (Caller is a good regular) Full Tilt Poker $400.00 No Limit Hold’em - 8 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com BTN: $249.60 SB: $819.30 BB: $578.50 Hero (UTG): $440.50 UTG+1: $484.00 MP1: $764.00 MP2: $813.00 CO: $394.00 Pre Flop: ($6.00) Hero is UTG with K A Hero raises to $14, 1 fold, MP1 calls $14, 5 folds Flop: ($34.00) 4 Spoiler:
5
7
(2 players)
Hero Checks
**HAND FOUR** (BB is a tough regular)
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Full Tilt Poker $400.00 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com MP1: $400.00 MP2: $139.10 Hero (CO): $433.00 BTN: $63.00 SB: $72.00 BB: $400.00 UTG: $174.40 UTG+1: $152.50 UTG+2: $400.00 Pre Flop: ($6.00) Hero is CO with Q J 5 folds, Hero raises to $14, 2 folds, BB calls $10 Flop: ($30.00) 7 4 T (2 players) BB checks, Hero bets $20.00, BB calls $20 Turn: ($70.00) 9 BB checks, Spoiler:
[Hero Checks]
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(2 players)
The Squeeze Joopjan Disclaimer: I know people have varied opinions regarding 3bet ranges and how to deal with 3bets/squeezes so this I merely how I see it. I’m not claiming to be all knowing What is a squeeze? Squeezing is 3betting an opener while a cold caller has called the initial raise. It’s called a squeeze because you’re essentially forcing the cold caller to become squeezed out of the pot and fold since there’s not a lot of ways he can defend himself. Why should I squeeze? It’s quite simple. Because it will show an instant profit. The question should be, why should I not squeeze? For proof just go to your pt/hem database and look through your non premium hands where you squeezed someone and compare the profit you normally get on those hands. I’m pretty sure for most of you, squeezing will show a higher profit. For example I make 24ptbb/100 when I squeeze without TT+ AQ+. However when I normally play this range of hands I lose 4ptbb/100 What hands to squeeze? In general I would advice to squeeze when it’s possible when you have a decent hand that doesn’t play well multi way, but does play well in a 3bet pot. A typical squeeze range facing open from a regular (who has a fold button) would be: IP:
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JJ+, ATo+, A2-A5o, A6s+, K9o+, Q9o+, K2s-K9s, Q8s/Q9s OOP: TT+ ATo+ K9o+ Q9o+ K2s-K9s, Q8s/Q9s Why this range? Those of you that have seen mine and Greg’s video about “bluff raising” will already know this. It’s possible to divide all your possible holdings into 3 categories compared to the villain’s range. Low/medium/high. Much like a normal 3bet, squeezing becomes especially profitable against opponents who fold too much too 3bets. It shows an auto profit to squeeze against people who fold to 3bets 75%+. This doesn’t mean you should always squeeze any 2 when you have the opportunity, because you would become super unbalanced. Therefore you have to select the holdings with which you do squeeze. Of course you want to squeeze with your “high” strength holdings because you’re going to get called by a ton of worse hands and/or are happy stacking off. As for your “bluff” squeezes. Why would you turn a medium strength hand into a bluff (which you have to fold when you get 4bet) when you can call and play a multi way pot with big implied odds instead. This includes most medium/low pocket pairs; while it would be ok to 3bet them in a vacuum. Cold calling to set mine in a multi way pot is going to show a bigger profit most of the time. More on this will probably be in Greg’s 3betting COTW. Who should/shouldn’t I squeeze? The more a villain folds to 3bets the more profitable your “bluff” squeezes become. If a villain never folds to 3bets there’s no point (generally speaking, if he’s playing fit or fold post flop it will still be profitable) in ever trying to bluff him off a better hand because he’s not folding. Instead you should increase the value range you squeeze vs those villains. Possible hands you can include are 99/88 a8/a9o KQs KJs. This is especially true against fish who never fold. Since it’s a lot easier to value bet against them. Another point noting is that the wider a villain’s range is the wider their range for folding/defending will become. The more someone folds to 3bets the less inclined you should be to squeeze with value hands because they aren’t going to get called by worse as often. If someone is prone to
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4bet shove it’s also better to flat call with the bottom of your value range because your often going to get shoved off your equity. How do I defend against a squeeze? Defending against squeezes is a tricky thing to do and not surprisingly a lot of people make mistakes with it. A lot of common mistakes are that people don’t defend enough, they defend with the wrong hands or they defend in the wrong way. Why is defending so tricky? Because the size of the pot means it becomes hard to 4bet as a bluff because you will almost always be priced in to call the shove. Therefore it’s often correct to 4bet shove if you’re going to call the shove anyway if you want extra fold equity. The best defense against a squeeze is to fold. People aren’t squeezing you often enough at the micro stakes that it becomes something that you will need to defend against. Even if they are capable of squeezing “light”, People aren’t squeezing as bluffs as often as you think. The second best defense against habitual squeezers is to open less wide of a range so you set yourself up less to get squeezed. This is especially true when there’s several fish on your left who are prone to cold call you. You have to treat the 3better as if he was a short stacker who’s shoving over your opens lightly. If you do find someone whose opening super wide and he has become exploitable I would suggest to either 4bet or fold if you’re OOP. calling a 3bet while oop puts you in a ton of tricky spots and it becomes very difficult to play your draws aggressive enough to call with low suited connectors or pocket pairs. This becomes less the case if there’s a fish behind you but in general I would either 4bet or fold. If you’re in position you can call with your hands that play well multi way like Suited broadways and shove a pretty wide range of value hands. If you call you should raise a pretty wide range of flops because it won’t be possible to profit if you play fit or fold in these spot. If you make a small 4bet you are often going to find villains flatting your 4bet in this situation which you don’t really want with TT or JJ. Is there anything I can do if I cold call and I get squeezed (Back raising)?
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No, when you cold call you announce you don’t have a hand strong enough to raise. This is also what makes squeezing so powerfull. That’s why if you back raise you are going to get called by an incredibly wide range. There’s one thing you can do to exploit this though. If you have someone who like to squeeze behind you (Or if you think the original opener isn’t going to call you without kk+), you can cold call JJ+ occasionally and then back raise when you get squeezed. This will often cause you to win stacks Cliff notes Squeeze a wide range
•
Squeeze hands either as a bluff or for value. Don’t squeeze hands that you’re not sure about.
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Fold when you get squeezed and be more likely to 4bet shove than to call
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List of 2+2 theorums Cry Me A River In the uNL chat today, I mentioned a couple theorems that originate on 2+2 and a bunch of people were, “Huh? Wat?” So here is a list of 2+2 theorems. If I’ve forgotten any, I’m sure someone will mention it. Zeebo’s Theorem - Nobody ever folded a full house. Reasoning: Nobody is good enough to fold a monster. Most players aren’t even good enough to fold a hand that looks like a monster but really isn’t. Application: There are two basic applications to this theory. The first is that if you put your opponent on a full house and you can beat them, don’t be afraid to overbet/push the river. This is particularly true when there is three of a kind on the board. Players will call with an incredible range of full houses in that spot. It is true that some villain may fold 22 on a board with three aces. However, you have no way of knowing if they have 22 or TT so go ahead and felt them. You are losing value if you don’t. And sometimes they’ll call with 22 anyway. The second thing to realize is to never try to bluff anyone off a full house. If you have 22 on a board with three Aces, don’t expect to be able to push 66 off his hand. This theorem also generally applies to any monster over monster situation, from straight flush over quads/FH/nut flush down to set over set.
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Reliability: This is the most reliable theorem. Nearly 100%. Somebody will post and argue that it is actually 100%.
Clarkmeister’s Theorem - When you are OOP HU on the river and a 4-flush comes always bet. Reasoning: Simply put, a 4-flush is an ideal bluffing situation. Application: Bet a lot of 4-flushes, particularly HU, OOP on the river. You will get a ton of folds. Most everyone is folding nonflush hands (that beat you) and small flushes. Reliability: Yes, sometimes villain has the nut flush or calls with the K-high flush. Nothing you can do there. But over the long haul this is a VERY profitable spot to bluff. Keep in mind though, you ARE turning your hand into a bluff. If you have a hand you don’t want to turn into a bluff (very villain dependent) like top set or the K-high flush then check/calling can be fine. BelugaWhale Theorem - When you are the preflop raiser and your turn bet is raised or check/raised, it is time to re-evaluate one pair hands. Reasoning: In raised pots, most players will just call down with one pair (be it pocket pair or top pair) type hands as well as draws. The turn is where most players who flopped a monster stop slowplaying and try to build pot. Or, they raise if they hit their draw. Application: A raise on the turn is a signal to re-evaluate where you are at. It is not and automatic fold but you need to consider if villain has a monster or just hit his draw. Reliability: Against fish and bad players in general, with the exception sometimes of LAGs and maniacs, this is a VERY reliably theorem. However, it is also an extremely popular and well known theorem, perhaps the best known. A lot of good players, particularly 2+2 players can try to exploit this theorem, especially by floating. So depending on the player (a decent
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player who is ALSO capable of making a play) you may need to discount this theorem considerably. Yeti Theorem - A flop three bet on a dry (preferably paired) board is always a bluff. Reasoning On a paired (or otherwise very dry flop) a player with an overpair is unlikely to want to stack off because usually the only hand he gets action from is a monster that crushes him. For this reason, someone who DOES have a monster usually will usually slowplay here. Since neither strong hands like top pair and overpairs don’t 3bet here and monsters don’t 3bet here the only hands left that 3bet are bluffs. Application: If someone 3bets you in this situation, 4bet/push. Reliability: These days this is mostly considered a joke theorem or a sarcastic excuse for spew. This is because Internet games between regulars are so much more aggressive than pre-Internet (ie live) games. For many players, “fast play is the new slow play” so players will stack off in these spots both with overpairs AND with monsters. Aggression is often used to conceal hand strength as much or more as slowplaying is used. Against some players (ABC TAG) this theorem does still hold merit however.
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Thin Value Betting Joopjan Thin value Value betting is the most important thing there is in poker. You may be the best player out there, if you’re not capable of value betting in the correct situations. You will not be able to win as much as others. In fact it is often said that the single thing that defines mid stakes players from micro stakes players is their proper use of value betting. In this COTW I will try to describe what thin value betting is, why you should be value betting as thinly as possible and how to defend against thin value bets. What is thin value? Let’s go back to the theory of betting. There’s 2 (main) reasons why you should be betting: to get called by worse hands or to get better hands to fold. Sometimes however when your value betting, better hands will call as well. This is called thin value betting. Your value betting against certain hands in their range while some other (and hopefully fewer) hands in their range will beat your hand. Why is thin value betting so important? To go back to the fundamental theorem of poker: Quote:
Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents’ cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose.
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Conversely, every time opponents play their hands differently from the way they would have if they could see all your cards, you gain; and every time they play their hands the same way they would have played if they could see all your cards, you lose. Every time you make a thin value bet and they call incorrectly you profit. Because thin value bets come up so often they have a huge impact on your winrate. This is especially true because thin value bets are often bets on the river where the amount won (or lost) is often the greatest. Just think of all those times you have checked back the river and when you have villain show up with something that might have called another bet. This is probably a huge leak for a lot of micro stakes players. Another big advantage to being able to value bet thinly is that it lets you balance your range for betting the river. If you’re only betting when you are almost certain you have the best hand (or the worst) villains are going to be able to play almost perfectly against you. However if you start making thin value bets people will have a lot harder time playing against you because suddenly they can’t bluff catch as wide as they used to be able to. How can I learn to thin value bet? The most important thing you have to learn to be able to value bet thinly is to hand read properly. This of course is no different than normal value betting however thin value betting takes things a step further. Because there will also be hands in villains range that will beat you, you need to be more certain of your read that you’re going to be called by worse hands. For example: having AA on A367J is a very easy value bet that requires little to no hand reading. A2 on A367J requires you to know (or have an indication of) villain’s calling range. Thin value preflop Thin value isn’t necessarily a post flop thing. There’s also plenty of times where you will bet preflop for thin value. A good example would be you 3bet AQ against another regular OOP. You expect to get called by a wide range of hands of which you dominate some. Sometimes however villain will also call you with better hands. Thin value post flop comes up a lot when you are isolating weaker opponents. You might isolate someone
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with K9o preflop for thin value. This means he might call you with weaker hands like 98s but he will also call you with hands that dominate you such as KT. Betting for thin value preflop is one the reasons why isolating is so good. You profit from their mistake of limping and playing too loose preflop with easily dominated hands. For more on this check out the COTW on isolating. Thin value preflop can also exist when your 3betting (or 4betting) someone. For example if you 3bet an utg raise with KK it can often times be considered for thin value. Villain is unlikely to continue with a lot of hands and part of his continuing range has you crushed. But he will probably also have AK and QQ in his range. Board texture The wetter the board texture the wider the range of hands your villain is going to call with. For example Q9 on J96ss can easily bet for thin value. Q9 on A92 will hardly get called by worse on more than 1 street. This means that you should be more inclined to bet for value with these marginal hands against (passive) opponents on wet boards. This even counts on the river if the draws brick. Hand #1 Full Tilt Poker $1/$2 No Limit Hold’em - 3 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com Hero (BTN): $522.00 SB: $205.00 BB: $134.65 Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is BTN with 9 Q Hero raises to $6, SB calls $5, BB calls $4 Flop: ($18.00) 9 J 6 (3 players) SB checks, BB checks, Hero bets $14, SB calls $14, BB folds, Turn: ($46.00) 3 (2 players) SB checks, Hero bets $32, SB calls $32
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River: ($110.00) 3 (2 players) SB checks, Hero bets $53, SB calls $53, Final Pot: $163.00 Hero wins $161.00 (Rake: $2.00) Villain shows: A
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As beluga once said people are more likely to make the mistake of calling too much than the mistake of folding too much. Therefore while the river might look somewhat thin because of all the missed draws. I believe it’s still a bet against this particular villain. Villain is pretty fishy so he can show up with a wide range of hands. Most of the time if villain did have a really strong hand he would have (min)raised the turn with it so his range is mostly medium and low strength hands. When he faces a “small” bet on the river however. A lot of villains will put you on some kind of missed draw that’s trying to get them to fold their draws. A lot of villains will also only look at the pot odds and will not think about the actual hand that you are repping by making a small bet on the river. The more likely villain is to call with worse hands, the more inclined you should be to value bet for thin value. Bet sizing The smaller you make the bet the less often it needs to work. For example a thin value bet of 1/3 pot only needs to get called by worse 1/4th of the time Bet size in relation to pot size - % of success needed 4x - 80 2x - 66 1x - 50 0.66x - 39,7 0.5x - 33 0.25x - 20 So as you can see the % of success needed decreases when the betsize decreases. This means that as the bet becomes thinner and thinner we can decrease the betsize and we will need to get value from a smaller % of his range in total. Reducing the
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bet size also has the added benefit of making opponents more likely to call you with the weakest part of his range. For example some people might hero call ace high if you make the bet small enough. When the value is too thin http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/78...r-spot-482500/ This was one of the first hands i posted after joining 2+2. This is probably what classifies as a spot thats too thin to bet. There’s simply too many hands to have me beat on the river. As you can see however there are still worse hands that ended up calling me though. When the value is razor thin and your unsure on whether to bet or to check behind. In general try to err on the side of betting. People don’t like folding because they won’t see the results and don’t like getting bluffed off hands. Therefore people’s calling ranges are oftentimes wider then you would think. Position As with everything in poker. Position makes your decisions alot easier. Being able to see what your opponent does is a big advantage. Not being able to get bluffed off your hand also doesn’t hurt. This also ties into block bets somewhat. Sometimes you might make a small thin value bet while oop both as a blocking bet and to get thin value from your opponent. Pseudo thin value Pseudo thin value is when you have the nuts or close to the nuts, but villains range only contains hands for which it is almost impossible to call another bet. For example: You have 66 on 667QK and you bet both the flop and the turn and he called twice. Here its pretty unlikely villain is going to have any kind of made hand that is able to call your bet. To be able to get called you have to reduce your bet sizing to induce light calls (or raises) from him. If he does have something like 77 that he was slowplaying however he will almost always raise them so against the nutty end of his range you wont lose value if you make a small bet.
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This also ties into making really small bluffs. Sometimes when you know villain has a range that consists almost only of missed draws it will be profitable to make a really small bet (10-25% of the pot) to get those to fold, If you have a draw yourself as well with no or low showdown value. Your bet will have a great price because villain only has to fold 1 in 5 or so for it to be profitable but if villains range contains mostly draws he most likely will fold most of his better draws that missed How to defend against thin value This ties into hand reading again. You have to be able to identify when your opponent is thin value betting. This can be done either by bet sizing (not the best of tells) or by putting him on a range based on the action leading upto the street. When you have identified that villain is actually thin value betting the easiest defence is to raise. Most villains at the micro stakes are unable to hand read very well therefore when you raise their thin value bet they will almost always fold because a thin value bet is by nature almost always a bet/fold. In fact many of the defenses that work against blocking bets work against thin value bets as well. Be wary however, against thinking opponents you cant just start raising any thin value bet. They will try to balance their range and will try to put you on a range. If you aren’t repping anything you are more likely to get looked up lighter. People aren’t likely to turn their showdown value into a bluff though by raising. If they have some kind of middle pair they are more likely to call because they will assume (incorrectly) that they will have showdown value. Another type of common defense against thin value betting is actually thinking what villains are trying to achieve with betting. Alot of people see a 1/3 pot and only see the pot odds but against a regular you have to think why they are making that 1/3 pot bet. Do you really think there’s alot of villains out there who are going to make a 1/3 pot bets as a bluff? I see way too many regulars snap off these bets with some kind of middle pair for no reason at all. Some common thin value spots -Bet/check/bet
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When someone takes this line it is almost for thin value. They bet the flop for value because they will cbet with a wide range then they check the turn because they wont be able to get 2 streets out of their hand. Then when you check the river to them they bet because they assume they can get thin value. This is often times the case as well as there are a lot of regulars who don’t think enough about their opponents range. Whenever I take this line i always get looked up by all kinds of middle pairs. This means that against regulars who aren’t good this is a great line for thin value because they snap you off with the dumbest stuff. If you’re playing against someone good however it becomes a very poor line for value. They will see what your trying to achieve. If you had a very strong hand or a bluff you would almost always bet/bet/bet so they will put you on your exact holding. This also has advantages however in that you can start taking this line as a bluff. Taking the bet/check/bet line against good regulars also opens them up to river check/ raises. When you check back the river they will assume you are just giving up on the hand and will try to go for thin value themself most of the time. When you check/raise them it is hard to actually represent a credible hand so they will look you up pretty light. Bet/check/Bet is almost never the best line against a fish in position. A fish’s calling range is almost always bigger on the turn then it is on the river. The more draws there are on the board the wider their calling range is going to be and thus bet/ bet/check or bet/bet/bet becomes better against them. -Check/Bet When someone doesn’t cbet a board it often means 3 things. They could be slowplaying a big hand altough this doesnt occur too much. They could be giving up on the hand if they dont think they have enough pot + fold equity to make cbetting profitable. Or they have showdown value but they dont think they are going to get called by worse by betting the flop. This is often the case when they do bet the turn. Often times villain will have a hand like QQ on K52 and will be unsure what to on the flop. Therefore they will check. Then when you check back flop they are assuming you have some kind of showdown value hand as well (or are afraid of them not cbetting a super dry board) and will go for thin value. Cliff notes
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Thin value can make up a big part of your winrate
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People have wider calling ranges then you think
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The smaller the bet size the smaller the range you get value from needs to be
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Think about what villain is trying to achieve when he’s betting
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The more villain calls with worse hands, the more you should be inclined to bet for thin value
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The better you are at handreading the easier thin value betting will become
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Turning made hand into bluff SammyG-SD Before we talk about the mechanics of this COTW, let’s talk about what I feel some of the biggest leaks at the micro FR stakes. First leak I see that a lot of the villains have is: Quote:
The average Micro Stakes players Call too much, when they should be folding This leads the corollary that I see new winning players have at the micro-stakes Quote:
uNL Players don’t value bet enough, or make enough thin-value bets The next two leaks that are related to the above at the micro levels are: 1: Underestimating Showdown Value 2: Bluffing unknowns These are important to remember as we explore this concept of the week. What is a “made hand”. For discussion a made hand, in any hand we have that beats the board and is better than “X” – high. With X usually being an Ace, but will vary on the villain/ level.
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So if the biggest leaks at the micros for the wining uNL players are 1: Not v-betting enough , 2: Underestimating Showdown value, 3: Bluffing too much/the wrong villain; then why are we talking about another type of bluff? Good question. As we get better at hand reading and understating our villains, there will be opportunities where we can make money off this type of bluff. So if you know about it, you can start to identify the situations where it may be profitable and eventually you can implement; and hopefully improve your WR. So here are SammyG’s entrance criteria before we implement this bluff: 1. Know Your Villain. 2. Know your Image 3. Know what part of his range you are trying to get to fold. “Know your villain” So as I stated earlier, and has been stated many times on the forums by countless posters, don’t bluff the wrong villain. When every we are bluffing, we are “representing a range”, we have to know that: a) Villain understands what our line means b) Villain’s software has the FOLD button installed and has shown the ability to click it. One of the notes I use to take at NL25 all the time was “Knows how to fold in a big pot/turn/river” . As I have moved up the ability to fold by the regs seems a little more prevalent. You should also know when they like to bluff, when the are taking pot control lines, and how they play their monsters on wet/dry boards. If we describe the villain as “fish”, “donk”, “spazz”, “calling station”, “ mouth-breather”, “monkey”, “Antonious Patrick” , “unknown” we probably don’t want to be trying to bluff them.
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“Know your Image” If you have cultivated a crazy/agro image at a table, who is capable of bluffing at anytime with any hand, then bluffing a made hand is probably not a good idea. Your showdown value probably has increased for most of your holdings. “What are you trying to get to fold” Think about what you are representing, what the villain is representing, and what do you think villain will be continuing with. If you are targeting one hand to fold that is better than your hand, but if you are taking a line where there are 18 different combos in villains range you can get value from, then you may want to think about maximizing the value part of villains range. Now why do we bluff. I like he explanation given: Quote:
We buff to get the villain to surrender their equity in the pot. There will be times we are doing this type bluff where our hand is currently ahead of them (or even), but they may have better equity against us. Or we have a hand that could be good, but there are tons of flops/turns/rivers that we do not want to see. Let’s look at some examples: This first example is a preflop situation. I am running about 19/14 overall, with 8/8 UTG. My fold to 3bet is 73%. Villain is 20/16, with a 3bet from the button of 10% and a fold to 4bet against me of 11/13, and I noted in one of those calls he had AQ vs my AA, the other was AA vs AA. So he has not seen me 4bet him light, even though I have. Full Tilt Poker $0.50/$1 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked. com MP2: $65.65 CO: $96.60
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BTN: $109.00 SB: $100.00 BB: $100.00 Hero (UTG): $246.65 UTG+1: $181.70 UTG+2: $104.70 MP1: $107.15 Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is UTG with 2 2 Hero raises to $3, UTG+1 calls $3, 1 fold, MP1 calls $3, 2 fold, BTN raises to $12, 2 folds, Hero raises to $31, 3 fold, Hero wins $22.5 A while back ago I started to add a few hands to balance my 4bet range against regs and black twos were the first one’s I added. Basically, I figure his squeezing range here is KK+, AK+, Axs, Kxs. I am not in horrible shape against KK+,AK+, and I believe I probably can even get him to fold some AK and all the other trash. Here is an example on the flop. I raised PF in MP and get HU against a solid reg. Flop is fairly dry, and Villain, who is a serial floater raise me on the flop. Basically given my range, and his range, I do not put many monsters in his range, unless he is slow playing AA/KK PF. I figure if he had a set, he would wait until the turn to fire, since that I have a note that he only plays monsters fast on wet boards, and waits with sets on dry boards. Full Tilt, $0.50/$1 NL Hold’em Cash Game, 9 Players LeggoPoker.com - Hand History Converter SB: $95.90 BB: $207.85 UTG: $80.50 Hero (UTG+1): $109.75 UTG+2: $84.55 MP1: $94.10 MP2: $34.35 CO: $100 BTN: $100 Pre-Flop: 6
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dealt to Hero (UTG+1)
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UTG folds, Hero raises to $3, UTG+2 folds, MP1 calls $3, 5 folds Flop: ($7.50) J 4 7 (2 Players) Hero bets $5, MP1 raises to $12 , Hero raises $28,1fold I figure there are not enough hands that he loves to get it in here that takes this line, knowing my double barrel %. Plus, I can’t call this, so even though I may be ahead, I will either need to turn my hand into a bluff on the turn with a stop and go, or c/f most turn cards. My read was that he polarized most of his range to bluffs here. I will post some river hands later on in the thread. So remember the rules: 1. Know Your Villain. 2. Know your Image 3. Know what part of his range you are trying to get to fold.
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Value Betting Cry Me A River Value betting There are only a half-dozen reasons why we bet: Value - Villain will call with worse hands. Protection - To make it incorrect for villain to chase draws. Bluff - Villain will fold hands that beat us. Semi-Bluff - Our hand has equity, however we’d be happy just to win the pot now. Information - Villain’s reaction tells us where we are. Deception - Merge your range, yo. Shania loves you. VPBSID - Say it with me, VPBSID. Rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it? Now that you have an easy, memorable acronym, you’ll never forget! The post will deal primarily with betting for value. This is a key component of play in the micros. Being effective with your value bets is incredibly important against loose passive players (calling stations). The kinds of players that are very common in micro stakes. What is a value bet? A value bet is any bet where you expect to be called mostly by worse hands and the value gained from worse hands calling exceeds the loss incurred when you actually don’t have the best hand or you’re otherwise forced to fold before showdown.
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When value betting with less than a monster, we often can’t call a raise. So when we value bet we do not want to see a raise. And when he does call we don’t want him to have a better hand. If he has a better hand then betting is just costing us money and we shouldn’t be betting. We need to be enough ahead of his calling range to make up for the times he raises. If we’re in a situation where he’s going to raise our bet a lot (ie; an aggressive player, a board where he either has the nuts or air) then we have to be way ahead of his calling range in order to make betting profitable. When value betting, we don’t want to have to bet/fold very often. When you value bet, you want your opponent to call. And when he does call you want it to be with a worse hand. If he doesn’t usually have a worse hand or if he’s not going to be able to call with a worse hand, you can’t bet. Value betting and especially value betting thin often involves TPNK and middle pair type hands. Betting big hands, 2pairs, sets, straights, flushes is usually an easy decision. The ones we really have to think about are the more marginal hands. Especially against stations who will call with anything. Sometimes things get tricky with sets on coordinated boards, low straights or small flushes. But the majority of these situations are one pair hands. Hand Reading The fundamental theorem of poker states: Quote:
If you can read hands you can overcome the disadvantage of incomplete information. If you are able to deduce your opponent’s hand, you gain a tremendous advantage. In order value bet effectively, you need to be good at hand reading. This also involves being able to evaluate board texture. You may remember this scene from Rounders (yeah, I’m referencing Rounders, it’s called pandering. Deal with it!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv2C_m0D-gY
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Yes, this is a typical Hollywood setup, and there’s some real BS (representing trips by checking? WTF?) but at it’s core you need to be like Mike. You need to be able to put people on ranges and ideally hands. Eventually you should be doing this automatically for every hand. What’s more, putting your opponent on a range isn’t enough. If you’re going to valuetown people you need to also put them on calling ranges. If you can’t do this, you are going to spew. You’re going to miss bets a better player would make. And you’re going to be turning hands into bluffs when you should just be taking showdowns. You need to practice. You need to learn the common patterns used by the various types of players. If you want to be a good player you need to be able to routinely put people on hands. This is one of the fundamental skills in poker. You can get away with auto-betting in the micros, especially the nano-stakes where everyone is so bad it doesn’t matter. However, if you can’t hand read it’s going to catch up to you and you’re going to suffer as you try to climb out of the micros and you can’t just feast on donks all day while avoiding the other decent players. Know your enemy Value betting, especially thin value bets, are most useful against calling stations and other players who call too much (ie; TAGs who aren’t very good). Value bets are not very useful against LAGs. LAGs don’t call down very much. They bet and raise when they have a hand (and when they don’t). The way to beat LAGs is to trap and sometimes call down a little light. Avoid value betting LAGs They’re just going to raise you and then you’re screwed. Against TAGs and good sLAGs you will want to use a combination of value betting and trapping along with other weapons in your arsenal (ie; bluffing).
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Use position Position is important in value betting because position is an important tool in hand reading. When we are able to act after our opponent we are much more able to judge when he doesn’t have a strong hand. When it is checked to us unless he’s slowplaying or intending to check/raise it usually means his hand doesn’t have a lot of value. When out of position it is much more difficult to judge an opponent’s hand strength. It is also much more difficult to get value since our OOP bets will be perceived as much stronger. A positionally aware player will need a much stronger hand to call us down than when we are betting with position. Be more inclined to make thin value bets when you have position and you can use the knowledge gained by position to your benefit. Be less inclined to value bet OOP. In particular, if a tight player has already called a bet be wary of continuing to bet into him unless you have a strong hand. You’re just not going to get more than one or two streets of value OOP from a tight player with less than a monster. Use your image Your image is very important in putting your opponent’s on a calling range. If you have a loose and/or aggressive image, your opponents will be much more inclined to call you down with their more marginal hands. If you have a tight and/or passive image, your opponents will tighten up their calling range because they will tend to put you on better hands. So if you are LAG or sLAG be more inclined to value bet thin. Which leads to a self-fulfilling cycle. The more LAG you are, the more you should value bet. The more you value bet, the more LAG you will appear. If you are nitty or passive, be less inclined to value bet thing because you’re not going to get calls from weak hands. Consider instead starting to open up your play a little so you can start to get more value from marginal situations.
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Bet size can influence calling range The size of your bet can influence your opponent’s calling range. If your opponent is on the tight side and you think he’s going to fold too much of this range, try a 1/2 pot bet instead of a 3/4 pot bet. On the other hand, if your opponent is a serious station consider maximizing value you by making potsized bets all the way. Always remember you want worse hands to call. You’re not trying to force a fold when you value bet. When you’re value betting and your opponent folds it means you’ve made a mistake. You either made a mistake in their range/calling range or you bet too much and pushed them off their hand. Don’t turn hands with showdown value into bluffs If your opponent can’t call you with a worse hand then you’re not value betting. You are bluffing. This is where board texture really becomes important. Most players are not calling multiple streets on A-high boards without an ace. Many players shut down when obvious draws hit unless they were chasing. Most players aren’t calling down on very scary boards (four-flush, four to a straight) without a big hand. Keep this in mind. If the four-flush hits on the river and you don’t have a decent flush you’re not betting for value because your opponent is seldom calling with a worse hand. Bluffing there may be a good idea, but know that you are bluffing, not value betting. You’re often better off checking behind. Beware of polarized ranges Be aware of when your opponent’s range is polarized to the extent that he’s almost always either raising (or slowplaying) or folding. You want to value bet (thin) when your opponent’s hand is a bunch of squishy mid-range hands. Not when he either has a monster or air. When he has air, there’s no point in betting you’re not going to get any value. When he has a monster... Well, it should be obvious why you don’t want to be betting into monsters. Beware of chasers
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Many players, especially stations will chase draws. When these draws come in, you need to be able to assess the likelihood you’re still ahead or you’ve just been out-drawn. In many cases you’re no longer ahead of your opponent’s range let alone his calling range. This is particularly true against loose players who are good enough to fold hands like bottom pair but will chase draws. You may still be ahead of the ones who call with any pair but the ones who can fold will have polarized ranges if there aren’t many one pair/overpair type hands that you’re beating since the draw came in. TAGs and LAGs are much less likely to chase draws without odds. They’ll usually either play these hands aggressively or fold. So you’re often still okay to value bet against these players when draws come in. Think ahead If we are value betting thin and getting called is going to get us into trouble on later streets because we’re not prepared to go after multiple streets of value consider checking this street instead of later streets. For example, if we’re going to value bet the flop thin and shut down if called we’re usually better off checking the flop, particularly OOP if we’re just going to give up when called. Especially against tricky opponents. That is, don’t give your opponents the opportunity to float you or call with a weak hand and then take the pot away from you on a later street when you obviously give up. Part of a well balanced attack Solid value betting is part of a well balanced attack. Go back to that list of reasons we bet. If your betting range is out of balance, you become easy to read. Easy to play against. If every time you bet it’s a value bet from a tight range then observant players will have an easy time adjusting to you. On the other hand, if you bluff much more than you value bet, people are going to start snapping off your bluffs with ace-high. Don’t become predictable, keep them guessing.
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A aggressive move that is break-even is +EV An aggressive move that is mathematically break-even (ie; A thin value bet where we are equally ahead and behind villain’s range) is actually +EV. When we bet, we give players an opportunity to make a mistake. An opponent may accidentally fold a hand he didn’t mean to (misclick). An opponent may misread the meaning of our aggression, especially if he doesn’t have a good read on us. In addition, aggressive players are much more difficult to play against, to adjust to. Players start wondering if maybe they shouldn’t be folding middle pair and they may start to make some bad calls. Or you may tilt someone as they get fed up with being run over even if we aren’t really being all that aggressive. Whenever you bet, there is a small Shania component. Bets and raises are much harder to read and play against than checks, calls and certainly folds. What happens when we fail to value bet? Otherwise known as, “I can’t win because they always suck out on me!” First, the ideal situation. Three streets of value from a calling station: Villain is 40/3/0.1 after 80 hands. His preflop limping range is huge. When he check/calls flop his range is something like A2/ A3/A4/A6/A7/A8/AT/AJ/89/9T/56/45/67/78/55/99. AQ/A9/A5 are possible but you have to think even someone this passive is leading a lot of the time. So we are well ahead of his calling range even though our kicker is marginal. Full Tilt Poker $0.01/$0.02 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players MP2: $1.32 CO: $3.78 BTN: $1.66 SB: $0.77 Hero (BB): $2.00 UTG: $2.04 UTG+1: $2.00 UTG+2: $0.71
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MP1: $2.32 Pre Flop: ($0.03) Hero is BB with A 8 UTG calls $0.02, UTG+1 calls $0.02, UTG+2 calls $0.02, 1 fold, MP2 calls $0.02, CO calls $0.02, 2 folds, Hero checks Flop: ($0.13) 5 A 9 (6 players) Hero bets $0.10, UTG folds, UTG+1 calls $0.10, UTG+2 folds, MP2 folds, CO folds Turn: ($0.33) 6 (2 players) Hero bets $.25, UTG+1 calls River: ($0.83) J (2 players) Hero bets $0.75, UTG+1 calls Final pot: $2.33 - $.12 rake UTG+1 shows: A2 Hero wins: $2.21 ($1.09 in profit) According to PokerStove, our equity on the flop is almost 71% but we only win 54.08% of the time: Board: 5s Ah 9c Dead: equity win tie pots won pots tied Hand 0: 70.859% 54.08% 16.78% 4283 1329.00 { As8c } Hand 1: 29.141% 12.36% 16.78% 979 1329.00 { A2s, A2o } Please read that again - Even though we have a dominating hand and appear to be way ahead, we’re actually only winning 54.08% because we wind up splitting the pot 16.78% of the time. What’s more, the calling station will outdraw us almost 30% of the time! In a split pot, the worst case scenario is that stacks go in and we lose a full $.10 to the rake. For simplicity sake we’re just going to make this assumption that for any split pot we lose $.10. 54.08% of the time we win $1.09.
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16.78% of the time we lose $.10. 29.14% of the time we lose ???. So how much do we lose? With TPNK against a calling station we are folding if he ever raises. He’s basically never raising with a worse hand and even when he has a monster he’s not always raising - Either because he’s slowplaying or just because he’s a station. If he hits his 2pair on the turn and raises this hand costs us $.37. If he hits his 2pair on the river and raises (or slowplays the turn) this hand costs us $1.12. Whether he raises river or just calls out third barrel doesn’t matter. We lose the hand either way - by folding or at showdown. So how often are we folding the turn and how often are we folding the river/losing showdown? When he hits his 2pair, half the time he’s going to hit it on the turn and half the time on the river. However, he’s just calling the turn with 2pair a significant amount of the time. So I’m going to estimate that he raises the turn 25% of the time and we see the river the other 75% of the time. So when we lose, we lose ($.37x.25+$1.12x.75) $.93. 54.08% of the time we win $1.09. 16.78% of the time we lose $.10. 29.14% of the time we lose $.93. Our expected value from this hand is ($1.09x.5408$.10x.1678-$.93x.2914) $.30. On average we will make $.30 on this hand. Except there’s one thing missing here. That’s when we both make 2pair. When this happens we’re going to win more than $1.09. But I’m not goign to go down this road because it requires a lot of assumptions about when a station will stack off. So instead just keep in mind that we actually average slightly more than $.30. So that’s what happens when we keep our foot on the gas and
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take our opponent on a ride to valuetown. What happens when we blink? Full Tilt Poker $0.01/$0.02 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players MP2: $1.32 CO: $3.78 BTN: $1.66 SB: $0.77 Hero (BB): $2.00 UTG: $2.04 UTG+1: $2.00 UTG+2: $0.71 MP1: $2.32 Pre Flop: ($0.03) Hero is BB with A 8 UTG calls $0.02, UTG+1 calls $0.02, UTG+2 calls $0.02, 1 fold, MP2 calls $0.02, CO calls $0.02, 2 folds, Hero checks Flop: ($0.13) 5 A 9 (6 players) Hero bets $0.10, UTG folds, UTG+1 calls $0.10, UTG+2 folds, MP2 folds, CO folds Turn: ($0.33) 6 (2 players) Hero checks, UTG+1 checks River: ($0.33) J (2 players) Hero checks, UTG+1 checks Final pot: $.33 rake $.01 UTG+1 shows: A2 Hero wins: $.32 ($.20 in profit) This is a really simplified case. We’ve assumed that villain checks it through here as well, even when he hits 2pair. Even the worst calling stations will bet there when they river 2pair. They’re also betting their one pair hands sometimes after we check two streets. And of course we will hit out 2pair sometimes too. Even though villain cooperates by checking it down, we’re still
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only winning 54.08% of the time. However, because we’ve kept the pot small, I’m going to estimate that we only lose $.05 to a split pot as villain isn’t going to stack off nearly as often. And of course we still lose 29.14% of the time. 54.08% of the time we win $.20. 16.78% of the time we lose $.05. 29.14% of the time we lose $.12. Our expected value from this hand is ($.20x.5408-$.05x.1678$.12x.2914) $.06. On average we will make $.06 on this hand. Again, we’ve basically ignored the effects of 2pair over 2pair. But we’re going to ignore it in all cases because it’s difficult to model accurately (how often do we play for stacks?) and they should (more or less) cancel each other out because they occur just as often in all these cases. Full Tilt Poker $0.01/$0.02 No Limit Hold’em - 9 players MP2: $1.32 CO: $3.78 BTN: $1.66 SB: $0.77 Hero (BB): $2.00 UTG: $2.04 UTG+1: $2.00 UTG+2: $0.71 MP1: $2.32 Pre Flop: ($0.03) Hero is BB with A 8 UTG calls $0.02, UTG+1 calls $0.02, UTG+2 calls $0.02, 1 fold, MP2 calls $0.02, CO calls $0.02, 2 folds, Hero checks Flop: ($0.13) 5 A 9 (6 players) Hero bets $0.10, UTG folds, UTG+1 calls $0.10, UTG+2 folds, MP2 folds, CO folds Turn: ($0.33) 6 (2 players) Hero bets $.25, UTG+1 calls River: ($0.83) J
(2 players)
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Hero checks, UTG+1 checks Final pot: $.83 rake $.04 UTG+1 shows: A2 Hero wins: $.79 ($.42 in profit) This is a really simplified case. We’ve assumed that villain checks it through here as well, even when he hits 2pair. Even the worst calling stations will bet there when they river 2pair. They’re also betting their one pair hands sometimes after we check two streets. And of course we will hit out 2pair sometimes too. Even though villain cooperates by checking it down, we’re still only winning 54.08% of the time. However, because we’ve kept the pot small, I’m going to estimate that we only lose $.07 to a split pot as villain isn’t going to stack off nearly as often. And of course we still lose 29.14% of the time. 54.08% of the time we win $.42. 16.78% of the time we lose $.07. 29.14% of the time we lose $.37. Our expected value from this hand is ($.42x.5408-$.07x.1678$.37x.2914) $.11. On average we will make $.11 on this hand. In summary, our EV in these hands when we: Bet all three streets: $.30 Bet two streets and check it through: $.11 Bet flop and then check it down: $.06 I’ve only analyzed three very simple cases. Obviously this hand is potentially much more complex. ie; when villain raises or bets somewhere after we take our foot off the gas. When we hit our two pair and get more value than checking it through two streets. However, I’m not going to delve into all these sub cases because I think I’ve made my point. That failing to value bet costs a ton of value and turns very profitable hands into marginal earners. If you can’t win because the calling stations keep outdrawing you, it’s because you’re not making enough from the times they don’t out draw you. You’re actually usually not that big a
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favorite over the calling station so you need to squeeze every bit of profit out of them you can when your hands hold up. Otherwise these one pair hands turn into only marginal winners and you will have a hard time staying profitable. There are some important things you should take away from all of this. In all three cases, the amount of money we lose when we lose the hand is almost as much as the amount we win when our hand holds up. The real difference is in the frequency of winsversus the loses. We need to take advantage of when we are a favorite because otherwise the difference between winning and losing is not very big. When we bet two streets instead of one, our EV only (about) doubles. However, when we go from two streets to three streets our EV almost triples. That’s the value of compound interest. That’s why we need to keep hammering these guys. Giving up a street of value is absolutely huge because that third street is by far the most profitable street. The real key is that the kinds of valuetown hands happen extremely regularly. People like to post about folding KK preflop or folding sets but these situations are relatively uncommon. Marginal one pair hand type situations occur again and again and again. If you are not rigorously exploiting your opponents you are giving up tremendous value over many, many hands. Anyone can bet, bet, bet with a flopped set on a dry board. Anyone can get value from their monsters. It’s being able to capitalize on these very common situations that really distinguishes the marginal winners from the good players.
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Combinatorics derosnec Chomp asked me to post about counting combos, so I have some time now. For some (or most, I don’t know) this post might be obvious and second nature. But maybe for a few it will be helpful. While reading this, keep in mind that I have an IQ of about 20 or 30 in the mornings and that I’m not a coach or anything, so if there are errors, please tear into me all you want. I like to learn. Combinations 101 It’s easy to do. Take the remaining cards and multiply them by each other. Check Poker Stove to verify. Example: Flop is A67. You have QQ. How many ways can the opponent have AK? 3 aces remaining multiplied by 4 kings remaining = 12 ways he can have AK. So 48 ways for AT+. How about 67? 3 * 3 = 9 ways. What you will notice after doing this after while is you’ll start to gain some insights. For example, there are a lot of straight draws on many flops. On A67, there are 48 ways he can have an OESD (16 ways of 98, 16 ways of 54, 16 ways of 85) 64 ways he can have a gutshot (16 ways of T9, 16 ways of 43, 16 ways of 84, and 16 ways of 95). That’s 112 ways he can have a straight draw (ok, 95, 84, and 85 aren’t very realistic, but you
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get the point). Let’s try AA on a QJJr flop. You are the pfr and bet. He calls. Are you generally ahead here? Assume we put his pf range at 22+, A8+, K9+, Q9+, J9+, T8+, 98, 76. The first thing you’ll notice is the ways he can have top pair. AQ = 6 ways (because 2 aces left and 3 queens left); KQ = 12 ways; QT = 12 ways; Q9 = 12 ways. So that’s 42 ways he can have TP. What about straight draws? 32 ways he can have an OESD; 8 ways he can have AT; 8 ways for AK; 16 ways he have T8. And 16 ways he can have K9. 16 ways for 98. That’s 96 ways he can have a straight draw. Impressive, huh? And trips or better? 4 ways he can have AJ; 8 ways he can have KJ; 3 ways he can have QQ; 6 ways for QJ; 1 way JJ; 8 ways for JT; 8 ways for J9. 38 ways he can have trips or better. That’s almost as many ways as he can have top pair. The other hands: we’ll assume he folds 22-88/A8/A9 to the flop bet. So, that leaves 6 ways for KK, 6 ways for TT, and 6 ways for 99. 18 ways total. Add it all up and we get: We’re ahead of 156 combos. We’re behind 38 combos. Range versus Combinations The example above is a bit more revealing (to me at least) of the reality of opponent’s distribution of hands than merely just saying he has X range. If you are only using ranges, you are – to use an analogy looking at a piece of bread, while those who use combinations are looking at that bread with a microscope and seeing all that constitutes it (maybe that’s a dumb analogy).
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Reads versus Combinations You might argue, “But I have my reads, man. I don’t need to count no stinking combinations.” Reads, in my opinion, have severe limitations and are not as good guideposts in assessing the strength of our opponent’s hand postflop as we think they are. The reasons why might be obvious but I’ll discuss them anyway. 1)Sample size: Say you have 300 hands on an opponent (which is a lot of hands against a micro opponent since we are not playing the same people often, as opposed to MSNL/HSNL). Assume that opponent has a VPIP of 20 and WTSD of 25. That means – at best – you saw 15 showdowns where he put money in preflop (not checked his BB). So you have direct hand evidence of 15 hands. What do 15 hands tell you? Very little. See the next sections for why. 2)Preflop dynamics. Sometimes an opponent is the pf raiser, sometimes he is the caller. This affects how he plays his hands postflop. In other words, he might play TT different as the pf caller on a Qh6s7s flop than he would as the pf raiser. 3)Number of opponents posftlop: How an opponent plays top pair, a draw, or a monster multiway might differ how he plays it heads up. 4)Flop texture: There are roughly 17,000 flop combinations heads up (I think). Our reads are based on a tiny % of those flops that opponent has seen. Take opponent having a set for example. Will he play it the same on all flop combinations? Our read on how an opponent plays a set will probably come from only one or two flop combinations observed. 5)Position: How an opponent plays a hand out of position, on the button, or in good/bad relative position will likely affect how he plays his hands postflop. So, he might play a set different OOP than he would on the button or in good versus bad relative position. 6)Steal situations: An opponent might call more/be more
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aggressive in these situations than in non-steal hands. 7)Your image: This is very important from my experience. When I tightened up over my last 100k hands (my vpip dropped to about 14 or 15), I felt like I was getting coolered a lot. Maybe I was. But what was probably happening is opponents were playing their hands differently against me than they were against other opponents. So, while an opponent would play TPGK fast against another player, he was playing it slow and cautiously against me, but playing his sets fast against me. General Micro Plays/Theorems versus Combinations A lot of players at the micros make the same plays. They minraise with sets, slowplay the flopped nut flush, don’t c/r bluff the river, put you on AK, don’t fold full houses (Zeebo Theorem), raise turn with better than top pair (Baluga Theorem), etc. So, for these situations, combo counting is of less value. The Not-So-Obvious Value of Combinatorics So, assuming you’ve made it this far in the thread, you might be thinking, “No way in hell am I doing all this counting at the table. I don’t have a time bank of 2 hours per hand.” You want to review your hands in PT and apply combo counting to see if you made good decisions. After you do that for a while, counting will become much quicker and intuitive because you will have seen so many similar scenarios. So, counting top pair combos on the flop, for example, will require little thought. Now, given this practice, you will start to gain quite a few insights. When you begin to apply these insights, you will become a much tougher player. What will begin to happen is that your game will start to lean towards a Game Theory-ish Optimal strategy. True, you are exploiting your opponents based on the ways they can have a hand, but by doing that you start to make your plays less based on your own hand and more against the distribution of your opponents’ hands, which makes your
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opponent’s task of exploiting you very very difficult. An example: So, after spending way too much time analyzing PT hands, I noticed that I was doing a lot of this: tag UTG/MP raises pf. I call with a small pp for set value. Heads up, the flop comes A62r. I check, he c-bets. I fold having not made my set. But after playing around with combo stuff, I determined that they do not have a pair of aces or better on that flop the majority of the time. So I started to check-raise here or raise from LP (doing it in a way so that it is profitable based on pot size). Now I was no longer playing my hand. Of course, if I do this 5 times in a row against him he will likely adjust, but I can flop sets/two pair/etc too. And on turns and rivers, your play will naturally become much tougher. If I end up on a river, and given opponent’s play so far I assess that there are 70 ways he can have a better hand and 40 ways he can have a worse hand, but only 24 ways he can have a monster, I can play aggressive enough to cause him to fold more often than he should. Also, by playing with Poker Stove, another insight you will likely gain is how few legitimate flush draws an opponent can have compared to other hands. For some reason our brain spots flush draws right away, despite the reality that they are often a tiny part of the ways he can have a hand. Weighting Just because someone has a range of XYZ, doesn’t mean X is as likely as Z. So, in Poker Stove, you go through a hand and reduce the ways he can have a hand so you can weight them appropriately. So, if KTo is in his range, but rarely so given pf and flop action, I’ll reduce it from say 12 combos to 2 combos by only selecting KcTd and KhTc, for example.
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Warning At 10nl or lower, where your opponents are rarely engaged in the process known as “thought”, be very careful about ever bluffing. At 25nl, there are a few tags, and at 50nl, there are alot of tags who do think. So, keep that in mind. To see combo counting in action by one of th ebest, look up Bobbo Fittos’ posts.
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3betting Ronin Talken There are a lot of threads that read: “what should I do against a villain with a 25% 3bet%” or “should I 4bet or flat with ATs?” etc. There is generally a very large misunderstanding of the 3bet/4bet game among the poker community, as there is also a misunderstanding of why people have and do engage in a 3bet/4bet game. The 3bet/4bet game as we know it is the result of what was a very profitable way of abusing people’s inability to adjust to rampant 3betting. To my knowledge, it began in 6max games where people’s PFR was rather high (in same cases, 25%). Some of the smarter regulars realized that a vast portion of players considered 3betting only when they had the best possible hands (AA, KK, and sometimes AK), and the 3bet was so strictly used for value that it was the most easily abused situation in which to bluff. A fantastic paraphrase from Bart Hansen, “You can’t make a play for value that you do not make as a bluff”. Create a polarized situation as an example: if I only 3bet with AA, you can play perfectly against me with any holding when I 3bet. If I 3bet with AA and 45s, your KK has 48% equity against my range and you can’t make much a move at all. Pretty simple, but rather fundamental when you think about poker in general, and what all this “balance” and “range analysis” is really about. So, people began to widen their 3betting ranges. At first, it was a bit absurd. There were winning regulars with 3bet%s upwards of 30% in 6max games, which sounds ridiculous. However, when people are unable to adjust in any way, you can 3bet any two cards profitably. Eventually, people began to adjust, 4bet
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lighter, flat lighter, etc. This forced these regulars to rethink their 3bet game and actually balance. Obviously, the first level of this game is: - If someone is either going to 4bet or fold, and going to fold more often than they should, it is profitable to 3bet them. Or, more generally: - If someone folds too often, you should bluff more. Rather obvious, but fundamental. Now, people started to 4bet lighter. They stopped folding TT and JJ 100bbs deep. No longer are people folding too often, so you have to do more than just bluff very often. Now, you have to create a balanced range. It was rather revolutionary when people began to 3bet with a polarized range (the nuts or a bluff), but they were doing it incorrectly. They had the theory correct, but applied it incorrectly. The theory is: - If someone is either going to 4bet or fold, you are getting your equity from their folds and all-in situations. Thus, if you don’t plan on calling a 4bet or 5betting, and your opponent is rarely ever flatting you, the hands you 3bet-fold are largely irrelevant. People began 3betting SCs and SgCs. However, what they did was turn a hand that already makes them money into a hand that makes them slightly more money. What they should have done was take a hand that makes them no money into a hand that makes them money, and allow SCs to remain SCs. For example: - You are 100bbs deep - You have position on Joe Donk - Joe Donk’s PFR is too high, and thus his range is relatively weak. - Joe Donk does not flat 3bets, and when he does, plays fit or fold (ie., a Cbet will often take it down). - Joe Donk raises preflop, and you decide you want to start abusing him. So, you’ll create a polarized 3bet range. You decide that Joe Donk will 4bet shove a range of approximately: JJ+ AQ+ Because, well, he’s a nit. That’s 4.2% of his possible hands.
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So, you want to stack off with a pretty similar range of hands. Let’s say the exact same range of hands. This means that your preflop ranges begin as: - 3bet: top 4.2% of hands - Flat: 22-TT, SCs, SGCs, generally +implied odds hands that want to see a flop but cannot stackoff against his range. Now, this isn’t optimal, but say we wanted to exactly mirror our top 4.2% range of stackoff hands with hands that we 3bet with as a bluff. This way, when he folds preflop, he is going to be making a mistake 1/2 the time. When he 4bets, he’s going to make a mistake 1/2 the time. Our range matches itself in the sense that we are not more likely to show up in a 3bet scenario with a stackoff hand than we are the nuts, and vice-versa. Well, since we’re either going to force a fold or fold ourselves, there’s no reason to use any of those +implied odds hands. Take the hands that you can’t flat with profitably and turn them into a bluff. What this does is weaken your 3betting range, but make hands that otherwise were NOT profitable into hands that are very profitable. So, we now 3bet with: - JJ+ - AQ+ - K2s-K9s - Q2s-Q7s Now, logic is probably telling a lot of people “why would I want to 3bet Q2s instead of AJs?” The answer is rather simple: - What happens when your opponent shoves? - What happens when your opponent calls, then Check-Raises all-in on an A25r board? - What happens when your opponent folds? In all of these situations, you aren’t particularly happy. If your opponent shoves, you have a hand that doesn’t have equity against his range. You can call and deal with the variance involved in getting it in behind because you have committed so much money that folding would mean folding equity against a stronger range, or you can fold and lose 9 or 10bbs. If your opponent folds, it doesn’t matter what you had. If your opponent calls, the situation really isn’t that different than hand 1. You do not dominate your opponents stack-off range, so when he wants to stack-off, you don’t have equity against him. He’s probably going to fold to a Cbet, but again, your hand doesn’t matter. Sure, you can flop 2pair or a flush,
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but you can do that with Q2s too. So, flat with AJs. Now your opponent’s range has dominated hands when you have AJs, so your equity shoots way up. You don’t isolate his range to only include hands that beat you. A quick note: why hands like K2s? What’s the difference between K2s and 72o in this situation? Answer: In theory, not much. But poker isn’t black-and-white. Sometimes, your opponent WILL flat, despite all evidence to the contrary. In that situation, you’ll have a high PSR and a hand with the ability to flop TPWK and flush draws. Though there isn’t equity in your hand to flat (in this situation--there are situations in which flatting K2s is +EV), the range I chose here is meant to give you the most equity from a hand that did not otherwise have enough to flat, and also not good enough to stack-off with (so we do not commit ourselves into stacking off with what was meant to be our 3bet-fold range). But, now we have a new evolution in the 3bet/4bet game. We all realize that people are 3betting with air and the nuts, and it is really hard to play very strong post-flop poker with air. So, what happens when villain’s start flatting our 3bets too often? Well, now you can create bloated pots in situations where your opponent’s hand strength is weak comparative to the strength his range would normally be isolated to. While your opponent might only 3bet with AA, he’ll call a 3bet and play an 18+bb pot with something like KJo. Maybe hands as weak as A2 or Q8. When your opponent starts to flat too often (or if they begin this way, as is often the case in the micro-mid stakes) you should depolarize your range. Now, you aren’t dealing with the logic that it doesn’t matter what your hand is. On the contrary, you are now working on the other end of the general fundamental poker theory spectrum: - When your opponent doesn’t fold enough, your range should shift to value. If your opponent starts flatting 3bets with a whopping 20% of hands, you can now 3bet that AJs very confidently. When that A25 flop comes down, you aren’t nearly as worried about getting it in. The PSR is very large so the value of top pair goes up, and you’ll often have a mandatory all-in. The difference now is that your opponent’s Ax range isn’t AK, AQ or AJ, it’s A2+.
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That makes an enormous difference in your equity share of a stack-off situation. The same will hold true for much weaker holdings (ie., pretty much any two broadway cards). When you depolarize your range, you’ll probably want to choose hands that play well postflop. While A2s is a marginally better holding than KJ, I would rather 3bet KJ in this situation as you will flop top pair more often. You want to simplify your decisions in these spots. Your opponents will often react in very different ways to bloated pots (some become very fit-or-fold, others will spazz relentlessly). With hands like KJ, you’ll flop top pair, middle pair, flushes and straight draws very often. You’ll be able to play your hand better, in general, than you would with 22, A2, etc. This covers a general outline of how the 3bet/4bet game developed, but obviously isn’t as deep as it goes. And further, as HU SnG players, we are very quickly limited in our abilities to 3bet with air. To create a polarized example for the simplicity of learning, even if your opponent is only 4bet shoving with only 20% of hands and opens 100%: - Blinds, 50/100 - Effective stack size: t1000 Villain raises to 200 Hero re-raises to 500 Villain raises to 1000, and is All-In You have 500 left with a pot of 1,500 chips, so you’re getting 3-1 on your money. You only need to win the hand 25% of the time to break even. Say you have K2s and your opponent’s range is 20%, you have 38.5% equity. If you fold, you’re flushing money down the toilet. Not that getting it in with K2s is a mistake, but you aren’t 3betting with it with the intention of created a polarized range. You can’t, because you can’t fold anything in your preconceived 3bet range. Since you cannot 3bet-fold with almost any holding and make it a profitable play, you now lose this part of your arsenal. Every 3bet has to be a 3bet-shove or a 3bet-call. When the blinds get to the point where they are too high to 3bet-fold, you have the same question to think about: - Is my opponent folding too much, or not enough? If your opponent isn’t getting it in light enough, it’s pretty simple math to figure out how often you should be shoving. The question here is how to balance your flatting range versus your
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shoving range. This is more of an end-game strategy thoughtprocess, and not the 3bet/4bet dynamic. It’s just important to know that HU SnGs are very limited in how long you can maintain a 3bet/4bet dynamic, and how it affects the lategame. I personally don’t engage in much 3betting, as I prefer to keep as small a PSR as possible in the early game to abuse my postflop edge. What people fail to realize is that people aren’t folding too much anymore, and this entire dynamic is often NOT the most profitable way to make money. SnG players are not used to playing hands on the turn and river, and so taking players to those streets as often as possible will force many more mistakes than you can force preflop. Though engaging in these dynamics is profitable, it usually isn’t where most villains have their biggest leaks. Now that you know the limitations of the 3bet/4bet game, and understand the development of thought that brought poker to where it is today, you can take that information and apply it to your opponents. Say you sit across from me, and I’m feeling spunky that day. My 3bet% is about 20%. How do you figure out if I am polarized or 3betting with a wide value range? - What do I do with A2-AT? Do you see me flatting with them oop? - What do I do with my 2broadway hands? Do you see me flatting them oop? If they aren’t in my flatting range, they’re likely in my 3betting range. - What is my VPIP oop? The beauty of a polarized 3bet% is that it makes MORE hands profitable. When I depolarize, my flatting range slims considerably. If I’m 3betting all the broadway hands that I would otherwise flat with, my flatting range drops considerably. For example, if I am polarized, my range might look like: 3bet: top 10% Flat: second 30% 3bet: bottom 10% VPIP: 50%, 3bet%: 20% If I’m 3betting a wide value range, say the exact same amount, my range drops a full 1/5 of the hands I was playing before: 3bet: top 20% Flat: second 20% VPIP: 40%, 3bet%: 20%
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Now, think about what I am trying to accomplish with what I am doing. If I have a polarized 3bet range, that means I’m counting on you either 4bet or folding. So, your adjustment is pretty obvious. Just flat me a lot. Maybe just never 4bet. If my range includes a wide value range, you have other adjustments. You might not realize this, but it also weakens my OOP flatting range, and does crazy things to the way I have to play pots in which I flat. - Put a LOT of pressure on my when I flat. If the flop is K23r, I can’t have TPGK. If I have top pair, it’s weak. As a matter of fact, there probably isn’t even a K in my range for flatting, unless it’s K9 and the occasional K8. Three barrel the crap out of me. - Don’t flat. Just stop doing it. I’m wasting all my value hands to earn 2-3bbs, and only playing pots oop with mediocre holdings that you can now abuse. If we were deeper, you could create a polarized 4bet range, with a similar range of hands to your 3bet range. However, this is a HU Cash concept, not a HU SnG concept. For example, when I play a cash game reg, it might go: Hero: Raise to 3bb Villain: Raise to 10bb Hero: Raise to 25bb And I’ll raise to 25bb with that range of JJ+, AQ+, Q2s-Q7s, K2s-K9s. You can’t really flat that 4bet, or you’re in for a world of hurt. Your KTs is the best hand 1/2 the time, and crushed the other 1/2, so shipping it for another 75bbs is wild. You have no profitable option. A general adjustment you may have to make to someone who 3bets a high percentage, regardless of whether it’s polarized or depolarized, is to lower your PFR. While you might have started the match with a PFR of 90%, drop it to 50%. My 3bet game also hinges on the theory that you raise an exploitable percentage of the time. To adjust, you can strengthen your BTN raising range and thus fold less often. Again, we return to: - When your opponent folds too often, you should bluff. - When your opponent doesn’t fold enough, you should play for value. So simple, but so incredibly important. I was 3betting you because you were folding too often to my 3bets. By
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strengthening your range, you are no longer folding too often. If your PFR is only 50% and you can flat 20% of hands, you are folding much less when I 3bet. Many people will also create a limping range...but I don’t really want to delve into this too much. It’s avoiding the 3bet/4bet game, which can be good. However, most people’s 3bet/4bet game isn’t very strong, and thus can be abused. You can small ball rather effectively this way, but it’s the exact opposite of this post. Benefits and drawbacks: - You get to see flops in position. - If your opponent is a super-donkey/station, you’ll get to play postflop poker and make 10bbs whenever you hit. - You lose initiative. - Your range for both raising and limping is unbalanced and exploitable. I would rather just fold than pay a SB to see a flop with a hand that I can’t raise, with rare exception. There are some villains that will still play rather large pots with air whenever you flop top pair, even if it’s a limped pot. However, these villains are rather rare, and most people err on the side of folding too much in limped pots. This is also exploitable, but for 1bb at a time. When using the 3bet in HU SnG land, be wary of how earlygame 3bets will affect your ability to gain the fold equity you want when it matters. Against many villains, I prefer to keep the pots small and 3bet a wide value range in the end-game, abusing the image I’ve created by 3betting a small % of the time. If you 3bet 20% of the time at the 10/20 level and that shows up on your villain’s HUD at the 50/100 level, he’s getting it in with KJ when you 3bet with what is still a 20% range. If your opponent sees that your average 3bet% is 0-5%, and your actual range in the late game (when the fold equity matters most) is 25-30%, your opponent is going to make an extremely exploitable fold. While the equity is there in the early game, it’s much larger in the late game. However, understanding why and how you should be 3betting will help you exploit people doing it incorrectly, and adjust to those doing it correctly. If this is all a bit overwhelming, think about it this way. No matter how deep you go, poker boils down to two theories. These two theories are applied in every individual situation against every individual opponent (ie., dry boards, crazy
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villains, wet boards, nitty villains, river NASH spots, etc.): - When someone folds too often, you should bluff more often. - When someone doesn’t fold often enough, you should play for value. Playing for value means both bluffing less (or not at all) and widening your value range. In all spots. If you see Isildur shove against Ivey on an 789T board with 6x, it’s because he probably shoved with air the few times. At first, Ivey would only call with Jx. Then, Ivey adjusted to Isildur’s polarized range (the nuts or nothing) but calling with two pair and straights. Now, when Isildur shoves, he shoves with a “merged” (wide) value range that includes no air, but instead a lot of hands with equity against Ivey’s calling range. When I raise the turn with nothing but a straight draw, it’s because I think you’re folding too often because you believe my range to be weighted heavily toward monsters. When I raise the turn with TPTK, it’s because I think you’re calling with worse hands, and I should just call with my draws. This continues into every facet of poker, as it defines your 3bet/4bet adjustments. The reason your structure your ranges the way you do is to find the most value across all your ranges. I’d like to end this by saying this goes deeper, as it always does, and your exact ranges for doing the things you do can be more precise. This is just a general guide for people with little knowledge of what was posted above.
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