You mean on the river?

Hey Daniel, I don't dislike your play on any street this hand at all (A8hh) but I just wanted to point out that while it is only 2 combos I think recs will check this turn almost 100% of times with AJss and AJcc which will obv call twice and stack.

Daniel - Sorry to post on a year-old video, but ontherise raises a point I was wondering about: whether you still would have shoved if the river wasn't offsuit? You say on the turn that "Any Villain hand strong enough to call a bet here and call a river shove would have led," but I wonder if flush draws are the exception to that. Thanks for the video!

Hi John,

Yes you're right villain is always x/calling hands like JTss and obviously not folding had the river been a 5s. So yes pair + FD (or even unpaired FDs if villain is on the especially loose/passive side) are an exception to the statement you quoted. I would still follow through on the flush completing rivers, though. FDs that get there are not a major part of his range, so bluffing is still going to be really profitable with the price I'm laying myself, especially considering that villain is likely to find a hero call with say KJ when the river completes a flush.

Hi julien,

I'd be betting pretty much any turn that gives me outs, except for a Q (so any club, 7, or T). The T does seem a little bit sketchy but I don't think it makes too much sense for him to be going for a c/r with AQ on that turn. I think I'll have some FE even on blank rivers as well after a T turn.

Definitely understand what you are saying - I think it mostly depends on how may hands I'd want to turn into a bluff (for example, are we bluffing A9?) The more you bluff the bigger we'd want to bet here, but I'm not sure that I'd want to turn a hand that is fairly high up in my range into a bluff here given that I think on this particular river villain will give up a lot since it's a bit hard for him to represent a lot of combos of straights, so our showdown value is relevant.

If we're looking at this spot from a theory perspective shouldn't we be picking the sizing that's most +ev for our value combos and then adding bluff combos accordingly? Our bluffs should be 0ev if villain defends well anyways (barring some kind of huge range imbalance I'd imagine) but a bigger sizing allows us to make more with our straights. I'm curious to know if you think I'm way off the mark here though.

As far as I know currently, RIO doesn't do SNG stuff, sorry.

Re: A9 - I agree with what you said. I think the more I talked about I came to the same conclusion as you did. My thoughts at the time were that if we're up against a very high c-bettor we couldn't x/c, but leading small-ish would likely be immediately profitable as there would be enough hands in his range that he basically has no choice but to fold (66, A4s, etc.). I just did a rough sim and it looks like if you filter his range to something like made hand <77+no fd he will fold basically exactly 1/3 of the time, so leading half pot would be immediately profitable. Not that you should - most of those hands likely check back flop and fold to a turn prob, so that spot was a definite brainfart on my part.

Re: 8x on T9637 - he can overbet, but his range matters too. Yes we have few 8's in our range when we check to him but since he doesn't have that many either it's not like he gets to go crazy with his whole range - and if he does then we can start calling with our 2pair hands as an alternate to adding more 8x hands to our checking range.

i have question about this as well. why are we 4betting vs a presumably recreational player with no reads?

I'm pretty sure he mentioned that he expects the recreational player to have a tighter 3b range thus making A8s better as a 4b.

I don't have much in the way of reads other than that he's probably a fairly right 3-bettor. Given I don't have much info I want to start off by playing a GTO-oriented strategy, and against a tight-is 3betting range in this spot I think A8s is one of the better hands to bluff.

If we think villain is a recreational player with a tight 3 betting range why are we 4 bet bluffing at all? Bluffing in this spot generally serves the function of generating action for our big hands but against a weaker player we don't really need to worry about him making exploitative folds vs a range that contains few bluffs. Additionally, we've barely played with him so he's not going to be able to make that kind of exploitative read even if he were a strong player. Finally, I'd assume that most recreational players who are 3 betting a tight range are generally going to have a linear tight range rather than some kind of balanced polarized tight 3 betting range. Thoughts?

That's the thing - we haven't played with him much at all so we can't make an exploitative read, so why should we be leaning towards an exploitative, unbalanced strategy that doesn't contain bluffs?

I think your approach/view on this situation is fair against the population of weaker/possibly recreational players, but I tend to aim for a GTO-ey game until given reason to do otherwise. You are never going to get many reads on villains' tendencies if you never bluff this spot.

I don't want to be overly argumentative cue being overly argumentative buuuuuuut you already make an exploitative read that he's 3 betting a tight range based on the stars that he has displayed. You change your 4 betting range based on what you interpret the villain's 3 betting range to be so we're already straying from a GTO type approach. Given that you're modifying your 4 betting range because you expect his 3 betting range to be tighter based on his stars wouldn't it make sense to use a similar population read that weaker players who 3 bet tight ranges tend to be depolarized? Or is that a population read that you would disagree with?

Also, it seems like you're deviating quite a lot from a GTO-esque strategy post flop when you assume that villain can never have a hand that can call turn and river once he's checked twice and therefore bluff basically 100% of your air. Do you feel more strongly about playing a more balanced strategy preflop rather than postflop?

The him having a small 3bet was off a HUD sample based off a couple hundred hands.

I do feel somewhat more strongly about being balanced preflop than postflop when you jsut have population reads. Even if he is not polarized here we don't know how he will play versus a 4bet, whereas I'm more comfortable with a population read postflop on this board.

I'm not trying to say it's a particularly great 4bet or that it's mandatory here - but if I was in the same spot again I would definitely 4bet again. The thing is, if you ever bluff here, this is the hand to do it with IMO, and I think you should bluff here at least sometimes, otherwise you're going to have a hard time determining how people play versus 4bets here.

Yeah, I think I butchered that hand pretty bad. In addition to what you said there are few hands he'll want to bluff on the turn and betting to get value/protect against sets has to be right.

I can't really imagine folding 33 there ever. By what parameters are you determining that it's -EV to peel.

With regards to his range being tight when he opens early, why do you think this is a bad thing?

Hey, thanks for the reply :)

I used a roughly ~17% ORange for EP and made very very conservative assumptions about our equity realization (60%) and this is of course the reason 33 being a -0.34EV call pre.No one really knows what the EQR will be here,

but I just estimated 60%, because:

-villains range is tight and strong
-he is likely cbetting most flops and even his bluffs(T9s/QJo etc.) with overcards have somewhat decent Equity around 25-30% + he might be barreling frequently OTT/OTR
-we rarely improve postflop, even if we call some flops it will be very hard for our hand to get to showdown or to be turned into a bluff on most runouts

so besides the 12% of the time we flop a set (and get coolered some of the time) it feels kinda rough to play that hand postflop and I would rather choose connected stuff like T9s etc.

What do you tihnk?