Thanks. That's true. For point one, when I was thinking about this issue, I was actually thinking about multiway pots and check-raising. I work with snowie for inspiration but snowie quickly is unbalanced as the hand develops. But I was considering a bit check-raise on QJ3 EP vs BTN/BB since I think BTN will bet AQ KQ QJ QT (maybe JJ I don't remember) and bluff some 88-99 ATs. I think if I check-raise at all the goal is to make Qx indifferent since he check back TT & Jx. But it's true that I also must be careful to not isolate myself against QJ and consider the next bet.

DNegs98 This is really interesting. Could you elaborate on this a bit or give some examples so I can run some sims and look into it myself? No worries if not I know its probably a lot to explain, I just havn't heard about this too much and from my own work it seems to be a mixed response vs bet based on the blocking / unblocking properties of each specific hand. (e.g. 2nd pair calls, whilst some top pair folds)

So take something like 952r btn vs bb srp, on this board I play 75% or x so if we look at the bb range when we play properly they are indifferent to calling KJ/AT no bd, A6/A7 with a bdfd and 33/44, any 2 overs with a bdfd is a pure call and so is any board pair. Flop is a bit murky here, someone might for instance call too many pocket pairs and not enough overcards which is fairly typical at low stakes. Say we look at a Jbd turn where we pot it, blockers are going to be relevant because BB does not call strictly linearly (93 is a pure call whilst T9 mixes) but the general takeaway you can make here is going to be that 9x without an overcard kicker is generally going to be indifferent to calling, lots of these combos are mixing along with some 5x that occasionally wants to call as well. So if you want to play a reasonably balanced strategy whilst still adjusting here you can pure call Q9+ and any pair + fd and then with your 9x you can shift towards what you think the tendencies of your opponent are and you don't lose any EV unless they notice and counter exploit you which is very unlikely to happen. On the flip side, if you continually barrel this spot and don't find yourself getting looked up by a 9 here particularly often then that's the green light to increase your frequency with your more rogue bluff hands. Single overcard stuff like K6 will be incredibly sensitive to how people play with their indifferent hands here because the EV of that hand is almost entirely tied to the amount of immediate folds you're getting as it's equity is minimal.

What a lot of people tend to do is that they just try to become passive ev generating gto bots that just catch the punts from fish and play reasonably vs regs. This isn't a terrible way to play and is certainly less mentally taxing especially if you wish to play lots of tables but when you start to get a good intuition for what the indifferent hands are going to be in a certain spot and you also develop reads on how your opponents are playing those hands it allows you to make fairly nuanced adjustments, for example you may think that someone is over calling turn as they don't ever want to fold a flopped top pair to 2 barrels (looking at doug polk here) but then as a result they end up overfolding rivers.

DNegs98 Okay that makes sense. Your basically saying for simplification you can build your calling range linearly and then the indifferent hands, you exploit by calling one way or another and because they are indifferent villain would need to basically be clairvoyant to exploit you. Do you not think that we lose a fair amount by then not thinking in terms of unblocking bluffs? For example blocking the offsuit broadway bluffs in some spots with a hand which is top pair, good kicker but actually makes a terrible call.

Ah here's the thing, I don't actually simplify to not include blockers, hands with good blockers won't fall into the indifferent category. So in the example above our last pure call hand class is 9x w/ unblocker or 9x w/ overcard kicker and our indifferent hand class is the rest of the 9x, might not have made that completely clear but 9x isn't just one hand class that I'm entirely lumping together. The idea is that the more you look at sims the more you get an idea for where to roughly draw the line for pure fold and pure call and then you can be a bit more improvisational with the hands that fall in between. If you're a bit off with your pure call or fold line it's not going to be a massive deal as the hands at the margins are only only slightly off 0ev but I think recognising that there's this murky hand class in the middle that is a gto mix gives you some room to improvise which is key to both being balanced and developing more advanced exploitative play.

If you want a lot of practise with this sort of thing heads up is great for it because you find yourself with indifferent hands with very meh blocker properties all the time.

DNegs98 Right yeah, that makes complete sense. I like the way you look at it with the different categories of hands, makes it easier to visualise in game I would imagine. Thanks for the explanation, definitely a gap in my understanding / execution that you have helped fill.

Thanks kingkong