What is your usual decision making process
Posted by Ickebiwa
Posted by
Ickebiwa
posted in
Low Stakes
What is your usual decision making process
Hey guys,
I was wondering what is your decision making process when you play a hand?
Do you think you follow everytime the same process ?
If so, what does it look like? If not, what are you considering/ when and why do you deviate from your baseline process?
I wrote down my process which I usually follow if I am focused and not on monkey mind mode.
In this example it is a single Raised Pot and I have the initiative. I took it as an example because this situation prolly occurs most often.
- What is Villains VPIP/PFR/3B + Stereo Type ( I usually have figured out that preflop hence I adjust in my opening Ranges)
- What is his Range to get to the Flop with
- What is the Board Texture: Dry, Wet, Super Wet >> Do I want to have a checking Range/Polarised Range or do I cbet my whole Range out of simplicity. + Do I really want to bet 100% or just 80, 90% and jsut give up hands that have no real chance of improving by the River.
- Who has the Range advantage
- What are Villains Postflop Flop + Turn Stats (FTCB, raise CB, AF, WTSD, WWSF,)
- Which/ are there many Turncards I can barrel that improve my hand (BDFD, BDSD, 2 Overcards/ Potential scare cards for Villain)
- Considering especially Postflop stats, do I want to take the pot down now or is a delayed cb more profitable/ makes more sense
Step 4: I am not always sure + I am def. not super confident who has range advantage but I guess thinking about it is better then ignoring it. I am working on that weakness of mine but if you can give me some tips and or study tips in order to improve then I would be very happy.
Step 6. I think it is also better to think about my whole Range and which Turncards + how many Turn cards improve my Range but I am also not confident in this area and on lower limits I don´t think many people think about "Oh, should I call/defend on this Flop because so and so many Turncards would improve my Range". I mean that my Villains probaply not really consider this fact.
- How can I improve in this area? My guess would be to check out PIO "Runouts aggregated frequency analsis" on different boards. Any suggestions from your side are very much appreciated.
Why do I post this?
- I would really appreciate your guyses feedback on my process. Do I have some blind spots, and how can I improve in those areas?
Am I too rigid in my decision process and what changes should I make?
Good Luck grinding everyone and thank you for your attention :)
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I think it's a good thing to write down your decision making process, I did something similar. But I think you should take it as an abstraction of your real mental process, wich is non-linear and based on pattern recognition skills that usually run in the background (unconsciously). I mean, sometimes you just know what to do without consciously thinking about it, maybe you verbalize a couple of data points or variables in the hand, but the whole thing is on that "black box".
Our mind is powerful in this aspect, but it will fail -specially when emotions are involved-. You have to "train" it to look to certain things and evaluate wich are more important, so you can have an intuitive but well-trained process. That's where a list like yours comes into play, along with training away of the tables.
I have a similar process divided in three broad categories:
1. Looking for weaknesses (Profiling).
Here I look at my opponent's stats, the notes I have on him, trying to look for exploitable stuff in his game. I use profiling to fill in the gaps, using whatever population stats I have available.
Sometimes you can end your decision making process basically here, when your opponent/profile has a clear deviation, like folding too much. You look at your hand, wich is weak, then you bluff.
2. Strategic Framework (Ranges)
It's not needed to have a super defined mental depiction of our whole strategy here, it's more like "I'm going to exploit his capped range by overbetting here, and I'd bluff very frequently because he is likely overfolding on this texture". Something intuitive, we just have a few seconds to act, this isn't chess where you can think for a while.
3. Tactic Framework (Our hand).
Finally we decide what to do with our particular hand, and that's the important point. With the two previous points worked out, we will have a framework that reduces the options for your combo, maybe you only have one option so decision is made, but it's better to check it out a little bit to be sure, because you actually have a hand, not a range, and you really want to maximize the EV of your hand over everything.
On close spots you look at blockers and maybe rely on combo counting skills, and if you have some solver experience you can guess if the solver uses a mixed strategy or not.
The good thing about focusing solely on your combo is that when you don't have a well defined strategy framework, or you make a strategic mistake, you can still gain EV if your tactics are good. Maybe you value bet on a spot that you should check because you have a heavily capped range, but in low stakes you know, that strategic mistake is rarely being exploited so you gain some EV. Making a tactic mistake will always lose more EV.
Finally, these decision making skills will improve by training. Review hands/videos/forums and go over your process, filter a spot where you just learned new stuff, etc.
Also you can train particular sub-skills, like the many evaluation skills that we should use to play strong poker: opponent evaluation, range advantage evaluation, texture analysis and such. Drill yourself, combine different data points into your trainings, try to keep track of your progress. Also try to practice whatever is more important (= more winrate).
About your questions, I consider myself a beginner who wants to learn, but my two cents:
Range advantage is a fuzzy thing. You can objectively evaluate impact (how much of a range has something on a board) and nut advantage in my opinion. Try to train these two things, and check solver's results. The solver preferred strategy is a result of this advantages, if villian is capped and doesn't impact much -> bet with high frequency, if villian impacts but it's capped -> bet polar, if villian impacts and isn't capped -> check a lot.
Turn plans are complex, and I think that we can divide our work into different parts, and implement the patterns on our brain to improve over time. For example:
I don't think we should go into very deep strategic analyisis of turn play, at least when we are learning the "basics", but I think you can go a little bit deeper on your "tactic" analyisis (your particular hand), if you have a bdfd that CB the flop for example you may want to bet almost always when the draw comes (wich is something the solver does, although not always). If the draw comes but is a terrible card for your range, you may want to check some. I don't know, play with different hand types, check the solver but try to always exploit.
Well, I almost wrote I book. I've been thinking over this topic over the past few days, so I think investing time on writing this post helped me to organize my thoughts, and I also gained some insights reading your post. Good Luck!
recent Sauce video Triple-threat about similiar topic, if you have elite plan check it out
Generally I go like this:
- Can I make exploits ?
If yes -> Take max exploit approach
If no -> Try to play balanced/sollid/GTO for my range
How to do that obv comes with experience and doing a lot of off table work
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