Here is the youtube link from the hand in question: https://youtu.be/HAwaTNhA7SA

So I looked at a generic sim for this spot, and Limitless' specific hand is supposed to be folding turn. it's actually a large ev loss to call the 88 on the turn without a club. Also, even 88 with c is folding pure on river when we get there...

So now I feel like a few things could be happening here, but my main suspicion is that this is some kind of hard exploit. Villain's turn play seems quite delicate as he is required to hold back on firing a lot of his more "natural" looking bluffs. If Limitless thinks villain is overdoing it on turn by a lot and consequently getting to river with too many bluffs then he's going to want to bluff catch more. Okay fine, ill buy that.

But like damn, shouldnt we just start calling pure with all the indifferent hands, and hands with marginal ev loss first? When does it become acceptable to be taking hands that are substantial ev losses and using them for exploits? I actually see a lot of this crazy shit in the high stakes HHs and it makes me wonder about a lot of things... Are these guys leaning more on intuition/feel than we might think? Are these plays really just some brilliant genius-level exploits?

Sauce made a video a long time ago reviewing High stakes HHs and one of the topics was some ridiculous bluff catch that LLinus made with J high. Similar to this hand, the play was a substantial ev loss in solver but Sauce steered the discussion towards speculating about how much ev loss can we recover when we know our opponents are making a mistake... Essentially he reasoned that if our opponents are making large enough errors then it may be possible to turn even largely -ev theoretical plays into + ev ones in practice. But how much ev loss is too much? How do we gauge this when deciding to go out of bounds and leave the confines of the simulations?

I guess my post is somewhat open-ended but I will tell you that I was inspired to write this because this is something I have always wondered about. After studying solvers and having the effects of that rub off into my play, I sometimes feel very constrained as a poker player. I actually hate not being able to make particular plays that I want to make in the moment just because I think a solver wouldn't make them. I am naturally very creative and daring at times when I play but after reviewing some of my plays in solver I get discouraged when I find out "I should have just folded" or "I would have never lost my stack if I just followed my ranges etc."

But then, here I am looking at some of the best players in the world and they routinely do things that are very far from solver approved. I know every player has their own style and differences in the way they view poker but I would like to know what you guys think about this. How do you guys handle balancing theory and practice?