How do I work out what hands to call/defend??
Posted by tbeckett
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tbeckett
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How do I work out what hands to call/defend??
Lets say I'm playing heads up. How do I work out what hands I need to be calling? I'm talking about calling in the big blind when the small blind raises, and also when getting 3bet. There's a lot of things online that show you what hands to call. Preflop charts. But I'd like to be able to work it out myself. Is that possible? If so what is the method?? Thanks for reading.
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Calculate pot odds, estimate equity of hand vs. RFI range, and estimate equity realization.
Seems silly to want to attempt to figure it out when software is available to do it for you relatively quickly and at high accuracy, though.
Thanks for taking the time to comment. I understand it's long, but I like to understand how it works rather than just following GTO, because I find otherwise I never feel comfortable. My brain won't allow me to just blindly follow something.
So I workout the pot odds, I'm guessing this gives me my break even point. Then I get the equity by comparing my hand against his RFI range. Then if the equity is higher than the break even point, I can profitably call this hand. What do you mean by realization?? and why would this matter??
Your equity is only one part of the equation. You can overrealize or underrealize your equity. Some hands to tend to have better equity realization than other hands because they can and will be played aggressively. Lets say you're playing 6-max nlh and the btn opens to 2.5bb and you are in the BB. It's 1.5bb to call and play for a 5.5bb pot, so pot odds are 1.5bb/5.5bb... and therefore you need equity = or greater than 1.5/5.5. However, you need equity > 1.5/5.5 because you're not going to realize all your equity. A lot of flops you will check and fold, so you will not see the turn or the river.
Solvers these days can calculate equity realization, which is basically just your pot share (EV) divided by your equity. This is because all the EVs are known. If you have PIOsolver or some other solving software you can get a decent idea of what a reasonable equity realization is going to be (0.8-0.9 would be reasonable approximation depending on your skill level compared to opponent). So, your equity to call would need to be 0.9*(equity of hand/call) = > pot odds.
You can likely find some older pre-solver-era videos on runitonce that attempt to do these calculations/estimations. They will be from like ~2014-2016.
There is a video by Cameron Couch, "constructing bb defense ranges". If I recall correctly, he does something like this (though its been 8 years since I watched it).
A couple of my first videos for RIO were called "Designing preflop ranges." They are many years old (before solvers were widely available) so might be useful for your question
edit: Part 1 from Nov 2014
Part 2 from Sept 2015
Neither is about HU specifically but you can apply the same structure I did in the first video to HU.
Yes, these would be good videos tbeckett I remember watching these from Steve Paul in the past.
Hope you're doing well Steve, cool to see you are still around :). I don't frequent this site often anymore.
Hard to believe I've been making videos that long!
Steve Paul And a few years kind of seemed to have flown by for a lot of us with COVID. But as a blanket statement, yes: Time is a truly unstoppable force.
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