Responding to Various C-Betting Strategies
Posted by Sauce123
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Great vid, definitely wanna see more of this type videos in the future!
Is there a way to see the EVs of each player after OOP selects his first strategy choice? I'd like to measure the EV of OOPs betting range if possible.
Somewhat obviously (based on IPs response vs check) in all 3 cases OOP loses EV with his checking range due to his cbet freq being too high. (as you noted in vid, once you bet too much, your checking range is essentially screwed no matter how well balanced the betting range is).
Based on IPs reaction vs bet it feels like against 2 strats (Mr polarized and bet when he's got it) OOP is also losing because of his poor range composition in his cbetting range. (So he gets exploited both when he bets and when he checks which makes sense as these strat profiles were designed based on what some local live players might play). However, the "tricky reg" profile seems like he's not actually giving anything up when betting (based on IPs response vs bet). The overall reduction in EV is just because of how badly his checking range gets exploited. (That profile strikes me as someone that could potentially beat 500z in the not so distant past and may beat a stake like 200 NL currently.)
It would be nice to measure the EV of the third betting strategy as I suspect it would work well live and at lower stakes. (Because the betting range itself is actually well designed it would seem). If the population isn't exploiting your weak checking range and the betting range is doing well, it makes sense to use that good betting range as often as we can get away with it. Especially if OOPs flop strat involves protecting his checking range with a x/r range that looks a fair bit like what his cbet range looks like (because then we end up missing all these x/rs vs the passive opponents in addition to not actually needing to protect the range).
IIRC, there weren't any pure bets for OOP at equilibrium. Since the IP response to OOP bet in the third betting strategy is (almost) the same as at equilibrium, we know that the EV of OOP's bets in the third sim are equal to X/CB at equilibrium.
It's likely that every mixed X/CB combo at equilibrium is doing better cbetting against a passive IP opponent. So, it should win EV against passive players relative to equilibrium to play high frequency or pure bets with many mixed hands. Supposing OOP wants to make IP's optimal response to CB the same as at equilibrium and wants to only exploit passivity in the X/ line, then it's a good plan to take the third strategy from the video.
Summing up, the third strategy in the video guarantees EV gains against passive IP players while controlling for IP response vs CB. This sort of exploitative thinking is appropriate when we have a read about one branch of the game tree but no reads about the other.
Another Sauce video feels like a christmas day <3
I love sauce
Do you think collapsing the OOP strategy to a pure check in this spot is a viable strategy vs non-superstar opponents? There's a few hands we can imagine being kind of uninspiring checks in a vacuum, but it seems more practicable than balancing a more elaborate strategy.
Yes, I'd play a pure X here against most tough opponents. I expect that an auto X is maximally exploitable for <1% of the pot, though I haven't run the numbers.
I ran the Pio sim for forced OOP X using otherwise same params as Ben's sims and the EV is the same as the initial sim that allowed an OOP bet (actually tiny amount better but within error tolerance). I suspect the small frequency bet in the initial sim is an artefact of not running the sim to higher tolerance. The optimal OOP bet % in this spot probably converges to zero given long enough sim runtime.
Would love to see an analysis of dark check. Specifically, if Dark X, how to exploit an in position player who is betting too much when checked to.
Also curious if we check, Button bets 3.5bb, if we raise to 10.5bb what his worst continue is.
Being a solid midstakes reg, when I watch a video like this one I go through a mix of emotions. It feels kind of bad because even when I'm doing it really good at the tables, I feel like a complete fish :D. But in the other way it feels really good... because it shows me how much more I still have to improve, and it's what I love about poker and what keeps me motivated.
Great vid Ben, thank you for share your magic.
Ben, besides the practicality of an OOP X versus a tough opponent do you think the other takeaway is the need to somehow understand our opponent's range and strategy a lot better?
I suggest this because the Pio strat in this spot seems unstable and highly sensitive to changes in assumptions about IP's range and strategy. Default OOP X against some reg opponents could waste a lot of EV. (I'm assuming exploitation of non-regs anyway but it seems our strat against regs needs to be quite variable, too).
Change IP's range, say to not include 44,55, 54 (as you indeed deliberately included for flop coverage in this exact spot) and Pio's OOP strat changes to Bet quite a bit (80+% see next post). There are a lot of reg opponents who will have such holes on this flop. Whenever IP board coverage has holes PIO's clairvoyance means it will exploit maximally, dependent on flop attributes piercing those IP holes. It can be problematic to do that in game.
Secondly, when I experimented with IP strategy, keeping the ranges and other parameters the same as yours Pio still adjusted strats quite a bit. If IP tends to stab flop and then X back Turn and river, then Pio changed OOP strat to flop X 99% and X/R 20% (double the XR of initial sim). On the other hand, if I locked IP to passive strat of X back on all streets, now Pio wants to OOP Bet flop 26% with a range seemingly quite different to your first sim (much more polar I think but I could be wrong as I haven't studied the range in detail) and IP now only RR's 2% (down from 10%).
Thirdly, OOPs response to IP's flops stabs depend on how IP constructs the stabbing range as linear, polar, optimal which suggests a bunch of other Pio sims to validate.
So, in the real world as reg ranges and strats change, OOP Bet in this spot could reasonably vary from X always to Bet optimally (~7%) to Bet polar with frequency varying from zero to quite a bit (80%+). And OOP X/R composition needs to vary depending on IP's range composition and street-by-street tendencies.
OK, I've now run the sim to test how unstable OOP's strat is versus IP's calling range not including small pairs. Many regs will not call small PP's versus a solid reg so to not include these is a reasonable assumption.
If I change IP calling range to
and then maximally exploit we get OOP Betting pretty much his whole range
So OOP strat is extremely sensitive in this spot to assumptions made about IP range and strategies.
Footnote: OOP Bet 79% solely by changing IP range to not include 44,55,54s
Barely reducing the weighting on 55 (75% down to 50%),44 & 54s (down to 25%) (11 combos reduced by only 5.5 combos to 5.5 combos) and solving we get OOP Bet just under 50%. In this sim I made no other changes to IP range.
The critical factor affecting whether OOP optimally bets a reasonable frequency is not simply whether 44,55,54s are in IP range but rather their relative proportion. Ben's range triggers near OOP check because 44,55,54s are relatively overrepresented in IP range. You could instead engineer a similar max exploit increase in OOP betting without changing the weight on 44,55,54s by simply increasing the weighting on other hands in IP range or adding other hands such that 55,44,54s become relatively less in the whole IP range.
Such subtle IP range changes producing such large theoretical OOP betting swings are problematic in game for default strategy since of course in many spots we can never have such exhaustive reads on our opponents and even if we did our opponent can ruin that read by "accidently" humanly adding/subtracting a few combos.
That is very interesting, thx for this analysis.
Did you check in that scenario if forcing an OOP check loses a lot of EV?
A forced OOP Check costs 8bb/100 at an inaccuracy tolerance of 3.2bb/100 assuming the modified IP range above with slightly lower 55,44,54s in contrast to Ben's original IP range where a forced OOP check costs nothing.
In case IP does not cold call small PPs (and optimal play would be close to bet whole OOP range) instead an OOP Check costs 28bb/100 EV.
(A typical winrate in MP is about 15bb/100 across whole MP range across all board runouts so the voluntary loss of 8+ on too many flops is probably a big deal).
Id guess there must be some kind of equilibrium point regarding to [set, 2p+] being a very high % of IP´s range in order to force OOP to always check with NLH 100bb. It would be interesting to study.
Hey Ben,
Great video, I found this very unique, informative and applicable.
Could you give some advice on finding situations in which one player has a range advantage on the flop without the use of PIO? Lets say you were one of these weaker regs who bet too often on boards that they shouldn't be putting money in, how would you go about finding those spots? Do you just compare the equity of range vs range on a given board or is it much more complicated than that?
I'll keep this in mind for a future series, ty.
Shoutout to IamIndifferent for the series of insightful evidence based posts ITT.
On a pedagogical note, I've noticed that this video has gotten way more likes/day than most other theory videos I've done. Generally my theory vids get around half the likes of a "part 1" live play video, or around the same amount as parts 2+ (but take a lot longer to produce). The rare exception being the "high stakes explained" video which did very well. Feedback from the community on why these videos were particularly successful would help me in creating better theory videos in the future. As always, I find criticism at least as helpful as praise, so examining the flaws of other theory videos is great too.
I guess, cause this video shows how to exploit different types of opponents, generally it is more applicable in practice than most theory vids and it shows us how we can analyze / find a way to exploit different types of opponents ourself, which is very important IMO.
Thanks for the shoutout and thanks to RIO for the complimentary one month elite membership that made my comments possible. I'm just trying to give some value back.
I agree with 528632484 that this vid's popularity is because it is "more applicable in practice than most theory vids". It also shows how to use Pio for exploitative analysis. I think many players are struggling with Pio, confused by all the numbers and confused by optimal play.
Also, OOP play is harder so the spot you chose to analyse is one we all recognise as needing improvement in our own play but are unsure how to go about it. Similarly, IMO the flop is deceptively difficult in that small flop mistakes in range composition compound and get geometrically exposed on turns and rivers but most players have trouble diagnosing the turn/river problem as flop error. Traditionally the flop has been presented as the easiest street but I think Pio is showing it is the hardest street.
I would like to see more exploitative theory vids:
Nick Howard and Tyler Forrester seem to advocate pure rather than mixed strategies including substantial OOP range checking but Pio ranges are highly mixed. How do you exploit an opponent seeking to simplify by adopting pure strats? (Besides polar, linear and tricky reg, range check is an emerging fourth flop strat).
I think many of us have less than optimal flop betting ranges but struggle trying to go from a polar or linear range to optimal without it becoming overly random and illogical. A related struggle is how to quickly adjust that pseudo-optimal range to exploit opponent tendencies. I would like to see a vid (or series) where you manually build a pseudo-optimal flop betting range (as you quickly did here for polar, linear and tricky ranges) but take it slower, break it down and justify why each category of hand at what frequency is bet and explain the exploitative holes left open if this category is missing or under or overrepresented. At each iterative refinement category step compare the pseudo range to Pio's optimal range by asking Pio to exploit the manually created range (and by using Pio's range arithmetic to add/subtract the pseudo-range with Pio's optimal range). Iterate and discuss. As part of building the optimal range or as a second or series of vids explain how you would adjust the optimal range to be exploitative of certain opponent reads and demonstrate its effectiveness by using Pio to adjust and nodelock opponent tendencies.
I'd guess because, even though it was theory-oriented, it dealt specifically with a typical spot, so it seemed immediately relevant for a lot of people. It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to see how you can use this video to make more money.
I'll say for myself, the theory videos are by far the most valuable, so I hope you keep doing them!
Just make what "IamIndifferent" said. And give this guy a life time elit account, please. :p
its pop go the weasel u already know what time it is....
Sauce,
Do you think oop's EV could be increased here if we gave more strategic options. For example I'm thinking about a 1/3 pot c bet size. Is there a reason you didn't include this as part of the sim?
My guess would be we would see a relatively high c bet frequency from oop. Maybe I'm simply underestimating oop's EV disadvantage and it would be tough to defend xing ranges, but this strategy intuativly seems to have a lot of benefits on a board where IP can aggressively raise. Thoughts?
Ps sorry I don't use Pio otherwise I'd posts some outputs.
Cheers
If there's only a small betting frequency for the larger size there won't be a huge change by adding a smaller one.
do you think the same concept should be used in mtt's when effective stacks are, say, 30 bigs deep? i noticed the almost auto check from OOP on PIO when studying some cash hands, but playing mtt's again i end up doing a ton of checking from UTG vs HJ flat, for example.
guess i need to get back on PIO...
Great Video. Builds a very solid Bridge from Pio to the daily Job on the felt. Thanks a lot and please keep on.
I found it valuable because it described your end to end process to reach a specific set of modified actions you intend to take in the future. It included a way to "bucket" opponent tendencies and gave a label to those, described how to summarize PIO results in a simplified way in the spreadsheet, and then showed your thought process to summarize a series of simple non equilibrium plays to take maximal advantage.
What would have been valuable to add would be to look at a few additional, similar flops as PIO is quite sensitive to the flop texture -- similar to iamindifferent analysis where IP range makes a big difference -- how the range interacts with a specific flop. Lets say instead of a 5, there was a 2, or a 7.
I ran some PIO myself and saw that the Bet The Good Stuff is really terrible on a J42 flop as the Optimum EVs are significantly higher than the J54 flop at 3.56 for OOP but Bet The Good Stuff is 2.85 for OOP. This is because Optimum OOP should lead 50% on this flop of mixed bluffs and value, but in BTGS he leads 39% and mostly the good stuff. For either an Optimum lead or BTGS lead the IP player should only be calling 26% and raising 8% ,
The most notable difference on a J74 flop is that the response to a BTGS lead has twice as many raises at 27% call 18% raise compared to either of the two flops.
Also, I don't believe I saw you look at the difference in EV for specific combos -- as for many combos a IP flop action between bet and raise, and sometimes check/call versus bet -- has extremely small EV differences. It would be interested to see which combos most significantly contribute to the overall EV difference you highlighted between strategies -- looking quickly at BTGS it seems a lot of the EV comes from being able to bet 100 percent when checked to and get lots of folds so low equity hands have much more equity than in the Optimum case.
Really enjoyed the video sauce, Do you apply these concepts to recreational players also?
Also do you play gto against recreational players or do you play exploitative sizing depending on your hands? For example are you cbetting third pot IP with ak on a25rb against a recreational player with ak or are you still a 1/3 pot sizing?
Cogitus, this question is too general. I don't play against many recreational players either so I'm likely not the best person to ask.
There were several reasons I thought THIS theory was great
1/ it involved real life profiles which we could identify with
2/It showed optimal strategies as well as common lines with contrasting exploits
3/ it laid out a framework that allows me to springboard off and create my own question, and answers just like Iamindifferent has for all of us to see
I for one, am now emboldened to set up similar spots but perhaps different flops, tweaked ranges etc and work more with Pio
so in summary- For me, this "Theory" video was extremely practical
nice video sauce!
i have a question here, does stack depth change the strategy for oop player? what happens if stacksize is 300bb+, should oop have develop a strategy that bets more because his good hands gains more by betting and building the pot?
PH, I don't think so. As SPR increases, the EV of IP increases because position is worth more. Additionally, having value betting hands for stacks becomes more valuable. On the J54r, IP enjoyed an advantage in the relative frequency of sets as well as draws and this should only increase IP's EV as stacks get deeper.
Loved this video, would love to see more of this occasionally rather than the same old live commentary videos everyone does
Sorry just saw your question about this video vs. other theory videos. I'm generally a fan of all of them but two quick thoughts:
--I suspect part of the appeal of live play videos is the variety? So the fact that this looked at a bunch of different (though obviously related) situations helped make the video seem a little faster paced and varied, vs. when you do a big CREV tree of one hand
--I liked the summary bullets at the end; I know you've done that in some other videos as well but it helps make the video seem more practically applicable (as everyone ITT is emphasizing)
--Relatedly, I think that especially now that solvers have been out for a long time, it's not that people don't know how to run them, it's that we don't know how to best translate them into our games. I think a lot of people (including me) are bad at knowing how to optimally study away from the table, even when we do things like run Pio sims etc. Oxota had a video about "Intuitive GTO" that sort of spoke to this problem. It reminds me a bit of trying to learn a language or solve a math problem. When you see the translation or the solution worked out, you say to yourself, "Ah yes, that makes sense, I knew that." When prompted, we have understanding/recognition, and that can feel like knowledge/skill. But having to produce that knowledge or skill unprompted is entirely different.
Been a RIO user for years and this video... this video.... damnnn!
More good theory vs different types of players!
This vid is a bit to advanced for me but this vid is showing how a optimal player would cbet this board or continue vs a bet vs the other 3 player types. The problem for me is the players i play against aren't optimal and even if i was good enough to play optimal i doubt its better to play an optimal cb strat vs the polarized player you was talking about.
Overall i think its good to see how you should adjust vs these different player types, but i think it would be a lot more interesting to see how you would adjust your own cbet strategy vs those different player types.
When you compare the EV of the strategies "here OOP loose 2.8 bb/hand which is 28bb/100"
Just want to make sure i'm not understanding something wrong, the sentence above is wrong and if OOP is losing 2.8bb/hand he's losing 280bb/100 right ?
Wow this a fantastic video, thanks Ben. And thanks to "Iamindifferent" for the excellent comments. I don't have a lot to add to what others have said about why it was so good, just seconding that I would love to see more theory-based vids about how to exploit various common strategies. This is in no small part because I found my own play way too close to that of the "tricky reg" for comfort!
Watched this last night and it really helped me understand how I can run experiments in Pio to produce actionable results. Thanks Ben!!
amazing video. second time I've watched this but I've been trying to work a lot on this aspect of 6 max Z as I feel that reg's are nowhere near the optimal strategy when playing this spot.
for example there's this reg who bets like 85% of the time when x to on the button, which makes no sense as I am x'ing range. so I realised I need to do a ton of x raising vs this strategy. and other regs just c bet like range from OOP, so I need to do a ton of raising vs this strategy.
interesting stuff.
Mind-blowing! Wow...I thought I played poker till this video. Please, I would like to see more videos like this one! : D
Even though I find this video almost 6 years after, it's still extremely helpful. Thanks for the video !! By the way, the three player types you described in this video is still very accurate in the live poker scene.
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