Great Questions!

1) It's marginal. I don't think I make any money here, but I'd lose less than 1 dollar if I opened it, so opening/folding has little effect on winrate.

2) The ace of diamonds has some nice properties like always being a profitable flop call, and have plenty of equity on the turn against his entire range. We have to balance the concept of blockers with the value of equity and implied odds and I think in this situation equity and implied odds are more important than the blocking card which blocks 3 or 4 more combos of hands.

3) I think my 3-betting size is one of my edges on the player pool, so I'm not going to sacrifice the edge to blend in. I think enough players use bigger sizings that it doesn't mark me as Tyler Forrester though it could mark me as a specific player in the pool when it's very small. My stacksize and postflop betsizes is likely to do this as well, so I'm not going to be completely anonymous with 5 players .

Thanks Demondoink! Positive :)

Theoretically, if you play one street too wide, then on the next street you need to be more passive. I'm at a big range disadvantage if I'm opening up 80% and my opponents are only calling 40%. The best way to offset this disadvantage is to check.

Now you raise a separate issue, which is that even though they play too tight preflop, they might continue to play too tight post. If this is the case then certainly c-betting would be more profitable. However, this is a more difficult thing to detect and exploit in short-time frames, so I choose to use a strategy that is stronger against good counter strategies.

Tyler Forrester ah okay yeah I forgot that you were opening up wider pre-flop, I am used to playing a 50% range where my range ends up being stronger on the majority of boards. but yeah if we are opening so wide and they are under-defending then your strategy makes sense.

Awesome man, stoked you enjoy the videos. I think this is more stylistic, but I think the slider is quicker to use than the buttons on ignition and gives me slightly more flexibility in sizing.

Thanks Hova!

The short answer is an anonymous pool, yes we should bet everytime if the player is overfolding.

The more complicated answer is we need to way to the chance our read is incorrect against the value gained from the bluff, so in practice we should choose hands that benefit the most from the player folding. So in this hand, we should be more willing to bet K-high than A-high, even though A-high could be a profitable bluff, it's less likely to be so.

Hey Mitch,
Really good question!

Yes and no, the simple fact is that balance assures us value not only when our opponents can exploit us, but also when we are unsure of our reads. If we try to play a purely max exploitative game with the wrong information about our opponents, then we are going to underperform because we are exploiting the wrong leaks. Because of this idea, it's important to only choose max-exploit lines when you are certain that your opponents play in a certain manner.

If we had perfect reads on the player pool, then we should always go for the max-exploit line. If we have imperfect reads on the player pool, we need to balance.

I had a small discussion yesterday with someone who was streaming. They were on the river facing a ~80% pot bet with top pair but looked very uncertain about calling. They had their mouse over the "Call" button for the whole time bank then clicked "Fold" at the last second.

I asked in chat why he does not just call at 1-alpha with his bluff catchers if he feels uncertain in scenarios such as that. His response was that the river is the street where the most money can be made by exploiting (which I agree with) and he plays a pure strategy game using player pool tendencies etc to shift his mixes one way or the other. For this reason he said he does not need mixing.

The conversation ended there as the stream ended bu the problem that he did not address was that with the player pool bet sizing reads he still looked uncertain about the fold.

Your response here vindicates exactly what I was thinking and that is that mixing is sometimes required unless you are absolutely certain your exploit is the correct exploit. That said - preaching and practicing are two different things and I am guilty of playing a pure exploitative game on the river most of the time. This is something I would like to better identify and utilize in game.

user_name thats a pretty lazy argument from him. if he was playing pure strategies on the river then he would never be calling certain board textures to river barrels and i think that would quickly show in your hud stats. for example if you are folding more than 50% of the time to river c bets then that seems like a pretty large leak and i would just up my river betting frequency in an attempt to exploit this.

he can say he is exploiting the player pool or whatever, but that doesn't even make any sense. let's say that 50% of the player pool bets 100% of their bluffs on the river and 50% of the player pool bets 0% of their bluffs in the river. then you could say okay i am going to call exactly half of the time with my bluff catchers because population is balanced and so i need to be too (i know stack size etc doesn't make sense for this example but lets just pretend it did.)

okay sure, if you were playing the player pool then this is the correct response. but you could simply look at villains' river betting frequencies and in one glance you could see if the player was type 1 or type 2. once will have a betting frequency of 100% and the other of 50% (again i know that my example isn't mathematically accurate but just go with at anyways.) so you just always call with your bluffcatchers vs the 100% guy and always fold vs the 50% guy. and then you print vs both strategies, rather than breaking even by playing according to the player pool tendencies as a whole.

you should take player pool tendencies in to consideration in a decision, but at the end of the day you are playing vs one guy who may just suddenly feel the urge to triple barrel bluff with awful blockers because his friends are watching him play.

so you need to try to understand how your opponent is feeling in the moment-are they winning/losing, did they recently win a big pot, did they just see you bluffing, did you just station vs them, what strategy do they normally lean towards is it more about the red line or blue line, do they usually take this weird line, what do their hud stats look like. and THEN you can consider population tendencies, but that should only be a part of your whole thought process and not the sole decision making factor in it. you are playing vs 1 player and not 100 of them as some sort of hybrid avatar.

poker is like a puzzle, you just gotta put all of the pieces together and hope that it kinda resembles what is on the front cover. you can't just have one set rule on how to approach every single puzzle. because they are all vastly different and the skill comes from working it out by thinking and applying both logic and reasoning.

and even if you are playing on anonymous tables, you can kinda figure out within a few orbits if certain unknowns are too cally or too foldy. based on timing of call downs/the hands you see them at showdown with etc.

i think he is just an over-folder who knows he is doing this but doesn't want to admit it incase any of his opponents are watching him play. so he gives this spiel about population tendencies.

Hi Demon. I think what you are thinking and what he was speaking about are 2 different ideas. He was speaking about shifting hands with mixed strategies into pure calls/folds OTR. Not shifting any of his hands which are already pure strategies. A.K.A soft-exploits..

He isn't folding 100% OTR but simply folding hands with mixed frequencies at 100% if the player pool under-bluffs that run-out.

It does make total sense and work very well in practice. Actually it is probably the strongest ways to play. But when it comes down to a decision where he is just very unsure, even with pool tendencies, then it seems that calling at 1-alpha may be the best option. Not only for remaining unexploitable but also for keeping yourself sane. It is easy to beat yourself up over a call or a fold but if you call your bluff catchers at 1-alpha then you don't need to beat yourself up.

The conversation ended there as the stream ended bu the problem that he did not address was that with the player pool bet sizing reads he still looked uncertain about the fold.

Sup david! Im glad the stream generated some interesting discussion.

The only reason I hesitated in that call/fold decision was because I had very conflicting data points to deal with in that spot:

• Player profile overbluffs very frequently
• Line is overbluffed in most sizings

BUT

• Pot sizing is the least bluffed sizing in most spots
• River board runout decreases incentive for bluffing since it hits my range super hard

I would say 90% or more of my river decisions are very automatic since its pretty rare to find a spot where you are have so strong and opposing data points to make a decision. If you watched the stream or continue to watch, you are gonna say that I made/will make tons of very thin bluffcatches without even blinking.

In that specific situation I decided to fold because thats what I think you should always do when you face a grey zone decision - in other words, a decision you can not guarantee to be +EV. In those cases, trying to mimic GTO is a complete waste of energy, in my opinion, because I already came to the conclusion that the investment I'm about to make isn't worth much EV at all, IF any (it could very well just be a -EV investment). On top of that, every decision you make at the tables has an impact on your mindset and your future game quality. Avoiding grey zone investments will preserve your mindset and avoid frustration, allowing you to keep playing your A-game for longer, and using your mental energy in spots where you have a much bigger edge.

Most people just think theory is the answer because they don't know any better. They never cared to study enough or they simply view the game as if everyone was a GTO bot playing mixed strategies everywhere. I don't perceive the game like this. So I will always be trying to maximally exploit my opponents everywhere. And I believe I have a very good framework for doing so, with my large database analysis using H2N. Its obviously impossible to know exactly how population performs in every single spot, but I would say you can get very close.

And when you can't, in my opinion, there is absolutely no reason to rely on an optimal calling frequency for the reasons mentioned above.

To sum up, we can use Tyler's sentence:

If we had perfect reads on the player pool, then we should always go for the max-exploit line.

I completely agree, and I do research every day about multiple (6+) player profiles to understand how they behave in most spots to that I can exploit them. And I believe you can get much more vision than most people believe.

If we have imperfect reads on the player pool, we need to balance.

Here I disagree, because there are other alternatives to GTO poker that will perform very similar in terms of EV and that require much less mental energy and which can actually preserve your mental state during the grind.

Hope that helped with your confusion.

GL mate!

I should just quickly add that I think there is only one unique environment where trying to mimic gto is incentivized.

If you are playing High Stakes NLHE against the best players in the world, and you do so very often, I think there is no other alternative but to rely on theory and try to mimic it, because most players wont be too exploitable and you shouldnt make yourself exploitable in such environment.

In every single other environment, I don't think there is any incentive. But thats obviously my opinion and everyone is free to disagree.

At the end of the day, you can win money playing many different strategies in poker, so it all depends on which basket you wanna put your eggs xD

I really enjoyed the conversation.

I'm always hesitate to reply this type of conversation, because the argument usually is that "I know how to exploit my player, so I don't need to balance", which if we assume the former is fatuously true.

The hesitation comes from my viewpoint that I often don't know how to exploit my player, so I need to balance. However, I understand that many players actually disagree with this statement and trying to change their opinion is tantamount to calling them a bad poker player, because a good poker player would understand that max-exploit line against all players, so I'm going to avoid the argument.

Consider my view on balance a compensation for a personal weakness (that I don't know how to max-exploit most players) rather than a transferable strategy option.

This is interesting as these days I lean all my mixed strats towards "gto-or-better" which would be the maximally exploitative option - or at least what I believe is the best exploit. I think the reason I am doing it is to test out other play-styles rather than maximizing EV everywhere in the tree.

But over the past few years I did really well in mid-limit games by mixing almost every combo on pre-flop, flop, and turns with an RNG of what I felt GTO would look like. Not only would I mix but the color of tag/notes would determine if I should be betting/checking/calling/folding more often. eg. Some players are decent but may slightly over-bluff later streets and therefore a combo I believed should be bet 75% and checked 25% OTF may end up getting 40% bet/60% check so that my range would capture more of his aggression later on. If the player was a total LAGG TARD then that 75% bet my turn to a pure check OTF - it really depended on the opponents level of aggression.

The advantage to this (I guess you could say minimally exploitative play-style) was that I was never over-adjusting. You could argue that my perception of the tree could have been totally off (and it is probably true) but I would argue that my winrate determined that the strategy was good enough to pull a decent clip.

The mixing of the strategy was nice because some combos would obviously be pure but most combos would have some mixing. In certain areas it reduced EV but many times that EV would shift to other areas of the game tree where opponents would try to exploit an imbalance most players would have yet my range would be protected (at least better than other players).

Here I disagree, because there are other alternatives to GTO poker that will perform very similar in terms of EV and that require much less mental energy and which can actually preserve your mental state during the grind.

It is true that if you are playing against a GTO opponent that the only type of mistake you can make is an EV mistake so this makes a lot of sense. It really does not matter which option you take if it is a mixed strategy as both options have the same EV. So leaning everything to the "GTO-or-better" strategy really does seem very good, if not the best strategy everywhere.

At the end of the day, you can win money playing many different strategies in poker, so it all depends on which basket you wanna put your eggs xD

That is very true. It is an ever-changing environment and even if you did maximally exploit everywhere you are unlikely to make a mistake against a GTO player if you really understand the game.

BTW I still feel that against good opponents that mixing OTF and OTT is more necessary. The river less-so. But back to the basics of the conversation which was if an option is "iffy" then why not mix? I guess you could always fold unless opponent value-bets worse as it is probably the GTO-or-better option but I am not good enough to say what is best. Also, I believe it is highly dependent on your opponents abilities. If they are able to adjust quickly then it may not be the best option.

I think having a cold-calling range here is mandatory, now if our opponent is isolating over 25%, 88s is going to move into a 3-betting range. However, I think most players here are between 15-20%, so I'm going to flat 88s.

Postflop, I think in generaly giving the situation, I'm going to be 3-betting a lot of my AQ, AJo combos, so I'll need more than 6 diamond bluffs here. That being said, I think you raise a good point that I may be overbluffing in this spot.

Makes sense, Id also have both flat range and 3bet range. It would look something like this:

3B: TT+,AK, AQ,AJo,KQo,KJo,K9s,A6s-A9s
Flat: 22-99, A2-A5s,ATs,AJs,KTs,KJs,QTs,QJs,TJs,T9s,98s

My logic would be to mostly 3bet offsuit broadways for blockers and because they play less good in multiway pots. My flatting range to look to play with the rec and have nut potential, flop sets, good draws with the SC's and Axs.

Is my logic alright here ? Probably need more 3bet bluffs and wider for value ?

3-bet ranges looks good. I'd look to flat more (suited or connected) hands, because of the big blind discount.