HUNL Preflop Play
Posted by Sean Lefort
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1) Villains range is likely weak because he checked back turn, his preflop 3bet defending range is very wide and we have already made the assumption that villain is going to have to float/play back at us in order to "show a profit". Yes, we almost certainly have the best hand, but villain might value bet worse anyways.
2) If villain has missed draws 56,A2,A5,67, hearts, etc, now he has a chance to bluff.
3) If villain checks back I'm still ok with it at this point in the match because we can better define his 3bet calling range and flop raising range in 3bet pots. I think the added value in this alone more than makes up for the fact we might lose value from getting hero called.
4) By shoving we only learn about part of villains range in these types of spots (which we are going to get into frequently) when we get called which I don't think is that often.
Thoughts?
When the turn chks through, our range becomes the dominant range in that he is rarely going to have a strong hand yet we will sometimes have slowplayed hands as strong as TPGK+. We will also have a decent amount of weaker hands given that his flop raise is smallish and not representing a lot (ie. we're going to "float" OOP a good amount of hands vs. it with intentions of being able to sometimes bluff the river after turn chks through).
Thus, I'm more in favor of jamming most if not all of our range in this spot and have him either fold everything (fine) or decide to make some hero calls when he picked up a pair on the turn/river. If I thought he was the type to spazz out on the river, sure exploitatively checking makes sense. But as aggro as he was, he didn't seem to be the type to surprise-bluff spots after giving up initiative like he did here.
The topic of not over-adjusting in an attempt to keep your opponent playing a certain exploitable style yet adjust enough to take optimal advantage of it is an important one, and one I plan on covering in a video at some point.
IE: I would def. also CiB as a bluff here with a lot of my range.
Also, I think a lot of the hands the raises the flop with will often have some kind of backdoor equity which I am not happy with him realzing. I am aware of the fact that our calling range get weakended a lot by CiB with KQ in this spot, but as long as he doesn't know that (If we don't get to showdown) I don't think that is to big of a concern?
I think it's simply too ambitious to try to have both a balanced CiB and flatting range in this spot with our range so if we're looking to play strictly balanced, I think flatting our whole proceeding range is the best option.
Also, the great thing about KQdd is that it does well on a lot of turns thus further making it a better call to defend against turn/river bluffs.. I'd be more inclined to CiB for value (if I wanted to do so) with a hand like KJo.
I'm having trouble seeing why 3h5h would be dominated less often than Q6o. You gave a couple of examples of hands that he would call the 3b with that dominate Q6o. I could also point out that he will be flatting with 6s5s, which will have 5h3h dominated, but is dominated by Q6o.
Did you think he would be tilted in any point or how often u think things like that generally? It makes some sense to me play KQ that way but I still kinda feel u took very (over)strong line which I would have probably not be able to do personally. How did u determine he is on the level he could be sick herocalling u since his range is very wide yet he hasn't talents to make big calls? Did u pushed that just for making wide 'biodiversity' for your game? Maybe he still could play draws like this in some cases?
What's your opinion about very small valuebet to induce and call shove? How about half pot bet vs. small bet vs. overbet shove? What do u think about me now other that I am bad to write shortly? I mean I would have bet small or pretty small like almost always here but not really shove ever...
I am not HU player btw but nowadays get lots of HU-action on 6maxes. Unfortunately to me only against best players of that stake. I definetely get more weapons to battle now since I feel my HU-game is such that it doesn't go anywhere if not run hot or good opponent get tilty which makes it frustrating for both :)
Thank u for the great video once more.
I think it's important when playing a very aggressive opponent not to fall into a habit of playing passively in every spot in hopes of letting him bluff every spot and making a ton with your bluff-catchers. First off, you'll find that there is just simply a ton of hands/spots where neither of you have much and he's going to win the majority of these pots (and thus, crush redline potentially beyond the point where you have an edge). Secondly, his super-aggro play in a lot of spots implies that he's going to have some spots where he's got a very weak/exploitable range with OUR aggression. And we need to be cognizant of these spots so that we can explo him with aggression because he's not playing balanced poker. I believe this to be one of those spots.
ie. If we jam our {value, A5o/A2o/3x/4x}, he's going to be in a pretty tough spot with 9x/6x/4x/3x (which I think he does have a pretty significant % of the time) given that it's the top of his range and he's likely pretty close to indifferent. It may even be a spot where he has to fold out his entire range (correctly), which I think has more value for us than chking and picking up *some* value against bluffs yet losing the pot (which is pretty big) with a good amount of our floats.
When we are deciding whether to raise or fold a marginal hand on the button, our decision point comes at a time when the blind has already been posted. If the total EV of opening 32o on the BTN is -.1bb it is a hand we should not be opening. At the time of our decision point the EV of folding 32o is 0, not -.5bb. Since we should never purposefully make a -EV play (ignoring its influence on metagame etc) and 32o is not a +.4bb open here ( it is a -EV one) and we should fold.
(BTW I'm not stating as a fact that 32o is a -EV open, just making some assumptions to prove a point)
Not sure if I explained myself well here... let me know if what I'm saying makes sense.
If you wanted to use your notation, it would take another filter (or simple handwork) to calculate the EV from the steal/fold decision point onward (ie. you'd simply subtract 0.5bb from how the hand did when played, and count the decision of folding = 0 EV.)
Hope that clears it up for you and anyone else wondering about that.
If you want to do a quick analysis to see what rake is for average pot-sizes etc at 0.5/1 or something like that and make it into a thread, I'd be more than happy to try to help out in determining just how relevant it is with some of the pre-flop decision making at that stake.
It's funny because in theory, the exact opposite is true. :) Technically, if you know how to play a GTO game then your opponent's stats are irrelevant. They're only useful for exploitative based adjustments.
However, none of us are perfect. It's nice to have a HUD to get a feeling for frequencies of both you and your opponent and in general getting to know a lot of stats well (as far as what mine are, what my average opponents are, etc..) has helped a ton in mapping ranges for certain situations and trying to work out balanced ranges.
I think at the bare minimum, there's no reason you shouldn't have a HUD for at least the pre-flop frequencies given that they offer (1) some huge explo opportunities and (2) the starting point for post-flop ranges. I'd recommend starting with them and slowly adding some pertinent flop/turn stats.
Regarding your adjustment of checking to induce with hands that are able to call down, how does this impact our range of double barreling? isn't it going to make our double barrel hands too heavily weighted towards bluffs since we are checking the bottom of our value range?
I love your videos, but i have a idea for new video.
Is 6max Nl holdem. I have seen you video about BTN Steal.
But it will be great, if we make a video where you talk about Cut off Steal. Because i am not sure about how big Cut off range shall be in differents spots. I think some reg have too big range there
What % minraising do you deem being the most optimal given your current understanding of game theory in poker? You stated that you think BTN should minraise roughly 45-50% as an optimal core range in 6max, what % would you believe is fairly optimal in HU?
Would you apply the same equation/model you used for determining BB optimal defense frequency against a 2.5x steal in HU as you would against a minraise in 6max where you end up defending a total of about 70% of hands? (Theory Concepts Epi 3 - BB defending)
It is interesting to note that sometimes we actually don't have to worry about letting our opponent auto profit in some spots. Since our whole goal is actually to maximize our hourly win rate it actually isn't too bad if we are over folding in the big blind (when in these spots we won't be losing too much and if we decide to defend the optimal amount we are wasting time playing pots where are longterm EV is not that great). Instead, we can choose to take these marginal losses from overfolding OOP and play more pots IP against fish where we're going to make up for the lost profit from overfolding the BB.
Not sure if that makes any sense but I guess the gist of what I'm trying to say is that even though theory wise some of these concepts are important, in practice, especially when we are trying to make the most money per hour (instead of per 100 hands) we want to do things that increase hour hourly more than playing theoretically perfect poker.
Another thing to note is that in the lower stake heads up games 25NL, 50NL, 100NL ish we want to adopt a tighter button open because it means we are going to be paying less in rake to the site. If it is going to go minraise, call, check fold flops you are going to be losing too much to rake to make up for the fact that theory wise opening wider from the Button is sound approach. Because of this I play around a 69% 3x open from the button, and folding around 65% of my hands OOP (no need to waste time defending spots where I am only marginally profitable or losing if I don't play perfectly OOP). This works for me because at the low stakes I am able to get in a lot of hands in quickly against stationy fish in position in big pots. This way I don't get eaten by the rake (winning small pots where the rake is big) as opposed to winning big pots where the rake becomes capped.
Just some things to think about when bumhunting and adjusting to rake at the lower stakes heads up no limit games.
Edit: Could be wrong about all this, but just offering some food for thought.
P.S. Great video! :D
Hey Mushmellow, great points on both minimizing the rake in small stakes and maximizing hourly by folding marginal hands. If you want to max your hourly against fish those are very important things, althought when playing regs you probably need to take every edge you can and play those marginal hands.
Agreed!
Hi. I always 3x 3bets. Could you go over why you 4x? and also you bet your qq jj when an over card hits on the flop vs agro guy and wth jj you decided to turn it into a bluff catcher ontheturn. when i have 1010+ and an over card hits often ill check call or if it goes chkchk ill get 2 streets of value on turn and river. Ill balance this by chk calling some ax hands in 3 bet pots, mostly weaker ones. Could you explain why you prefer to bet with your good pairs on a high k high flops? Thanks alot
How is RobinHood's 3 barrel with JJ when you had KK at the end of the video too thin when you said you were looking to call him down light? If you had AT/QT/JT etc (which you would be defending vs the 4bet I'm assuming) aren't you calling down on this run out? If JJ is too thin then he really shouldn't be bluffing off a lot on this run out, no? What do you think his 3 barrel cutoff hand should be, QQ?
Hi, would that be correct to say, if we open 100% on BTN, we could defend less than the minimum defense frequency to a 3bet, since our weakest hands would have 'lost' 0,5 BB had we just open fold ?
I was thinking, if for instance, I would open to 2.5x on BTN, I could calculate my minimum defense frequency as if I had opened 90% of my hand, because 10% of my 2.5x would already been lost had I open-fold. Or calculate my Min defense frequency as if I opened 91.777% had I opened to 3x, etc...
Is my thinking ok ?
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