but even in this hand A4 is pure barrelling turn for your size which is very well found and I looked up a lot of other hands, they where played very well

You're correct, I have this mixed rake free and an easy fold with 500z rake. I'm definitely quite sloppy on my preflop mechanics atm due to not playing very much.

Agree with your analysis regarding C betting. Sauce checks range in multi way pots as PFR.

Also will second your props for posting a video where every decision we make seems to be incorrect vs opponents actual hand. We've all had these type of sessions many times and they can be extremely tilting and cause one to question their game/strategy, so it's good to see even the best experience this from time to time.

I think there's very little cbetting with medium strength hands like this that don't have some blockers are backdoor potential. The CO cbetting freq on this texture is going to be very low as well.

After hearing you say this half pot sizing would get a lot of regular to call, I started to mix more half pot sizes into my game. You are 100% right on this! The pool just hates folding against half pot sizing and I'm getting called by all kinds of craps and some very odd floats! People floating T7s oop on AJ5r 3way for whatever reason! Definitely need to use more half pot sizing in the future.

This is actually quite an interesting exploit spot for IP. OOP is supposed to lead this river around 30% of the time. OOP bluffs some very strong hands here; I'm seeing TT-JJ with a high frequency. If OOP finds these bluffs, then 7x has 0EV in the XX line, and gets promoted to an elite bluff. OOP is also folding 6x on turn. If, instead, OOP plays some XC with 6x and doesn't find the river leads, then it seems like we'll checkdown more EV and should bluff with J9 and more air. Overall, I'm not sure how OOP is playing this spot, my guess is that the leads do not get found often enough. NH by my opponent to find the lead !

I know some top players who pay a ton of attention to timing and gameflow type of stuff. It's definitely a thing, particularly at higher stakes and when you're not playing tons of volume so that it's possible to focus very intensely. It's not usually a good use of attention because you must concentrate constantly to look at each timing your opponent makes relative to what they must be thinking at the node and then get inside their head to infer what parts of their range are more likely given timing. Timing is most useful in spots where there's a lot of pressure and our opponent's focus might crack as they're overwhelmed by emotion or processing of other information. For example, suppose it's a complex river spot where their range must balance a checking region and betting region and after tanking a long time on the turn they snap check the river-- that's probably a spot you can discount a slowplay and increase your betting frequency.

This stuff is particularly important in some forms of poker I've played a lot of. An example is high stakes hu mixed games, where typically one table is played. In limit, there are so many nodes you're making quick decisions at that it's very tempting to not balance your timing. However, against a great player this will allow them to gain a pretty big edge.

There's also a part of this that's hard to define analytically. Sometimes if you just concentrate very hard on trying to figure out what your opponent has, you'll occasionally get intuitions of varying strength about what they probably have. You then have to balance these intuitions with the GTO nature of the node you're at, and see if you have a good combo to make a low risk deviation with. Sometimes you don't even know what they have, you just know what they're going to do with it. The other day a regular got in a spot that's complex to figure out river sizing with, and then did almost no tank at all and bet a medium sizing (which looked fishy to me). I kind of got the idea that they were busy and didn't know quite how to play the spot and just bet the size their hand wanted, so I raise bluffed, figuring they'd end up overfolding, and say to themselves "I probably balance this sizing with plenty of good continues," when in fact they don't.

I do think overall poker has gone a little too far towards the "passively execute GTO strategy" side of things and too far away from "go crush your opponent" side of things. Often when everyone is focusing on GTO side it's a good time to first master the GTO side and then spend your time doing things that aren't on their radar.

Obviously the problem with this approach is that if you get reliably out of line one way or another (consistently overfolding, overbluffing, overcalling etc) then it becomes easy to counterplay.

For example, suppose it's a complex river spot where their range must balance a checking region and betting region and after tanking a long time on the turn they snap check the river-- that's probably a spot you can discount a slowplay and increase your betting frequency.

This tell has a big impact on river decisions when a flush completes or obvious straight completes. When opponent snap checks river hero is able to value bet a bit more thin rather than checking back. When opponent thinks a bit and checks, can assume villain was thinking about donk betting river, XR, or maybe just busy with something else. Timing tells & live reads (sizing tells) at low stakes as well as live games play a pretty big impact long run, at least 5-10% online and would say at least 15-20% in live games. Great insight into this Ben Sulsky

Yea fair points.

I have also noticed the rake sims tend to favor less flop cbetting as the big blind defending ranges are tightened up a lot; this makes bigger lower frequency bets stronger at equilibrium on most boards.