Missed FDs usually check the river, so having spade here unblocks more 3barrels

That makes sense, so in a situation where villain is a weak regular at lower stakes and isn't aware that missed flushdraws are a bad bluff. Does that change the value of the blocker?

Yep, but at lower stakes you should probably massively overfold turn here because if the range is just big aces and high equity semis you get crushed unless you beat a portion of value region

I think a variety of strats are OK on this board. If you want to be lazy, betting 50% pot 100% of the time isn't a disaster.

I usually play something like X 10%, B small 50%, B big 40%, which is fine. I ran this spot and it likes 22% X, 22% small bet, 56% big bet.

The main point is that betting small 100% of the time is putting too little money in, and just betting full pot or something everytime is putting too much in. Full pot 65% of the time would probably be fine too.

I think you just need to look at a solver. Monkersolver is a good one.

I get variations on this question all the time, where viewers want to discuss complicated arguments about "why" which preflop choices are better or worse. I think thinking the why is important is a massive mistake, and so I think it's important I kind of ignore your question and urge you to look at the solver!

I seem like a dick but it's for your own development !

Hi cassoulet !
When you are on an ante table you are more incentivized to play more hands because there is more dead money than on a regular table.
That's the real difference between both scenarios and the reason why sb implements a much more mixed strategy to fill in that "weaker/wider" range (so limping comes into play)...of course it has to be balanced and sometimes limp with top range or you 'll get punish really hard.

Hope it clarifies

I was talking with someone about how to teach this.

You can think of preflop as kind of like memorizing your multiplication tables. Sure, everytime someone asks you 7x8 you can figure it out from first principles, but it's kind of tedious and you might make mistakes and the question is going to come up constantly in math. Being fairly close to GTO preflop is similar, where it's best to just memorize some solver outputs of fairly high quality and then each time a hand is played work off of that mental model.

I guess to answer the specific question more when there's antes you're getting better pot odds to complete, so it's often 1bb+1bb in antes+1sb in the pot and so you get 5:1 on the complete whereas in non ante it's 3:1. The way the math works out in most poker games is that when OOP and pot odds on a limp get bigger than 4:1 or so, a lot of hands will get played to the limp until you don't have any more hands to VPIP and then you'll start mixing raises, particularly with only one player left in the pot. Lots of exceptions though.

@10min: Take a look at some monker outputs. Since you're not cbetting often multiway here, it's probably a bad idea to be playing marginal hands like this as 100% cbets.

@11:30: Uhm, shrug? There isn't going to be any flatting here at equilibrium so I just tweaked my equilibrium range to account for the wider RFI and partially account for an adjustment by the 3betting regular. That seems a lot safer than making assumptions such that a 0reach preflop play gets used. On the other hand, it is true that flatting 3bets is almost good, and is good at certain stack depths and sizings; so it's probably a fine play and a fine spot for it.

You usually want to use smaller sizings multiway to more efficiently leverage the 2 villains against each other. There's also more slowplaying multiway so overbetting with a high freq on turn/river is exploitable. That being said, everyone caps themselves on flop MW so if you want to exploit that it might be a good idea.

So to expand on that, slightly, if you overbet for 2x pot, villains collectively defend approx 33%/2= 1/6th of range apiece. Additionally, when bets get that big ranges polarize a bunch and the required raise/XR freq goes down a lot; for 2x overbets it's often near pure call as a defense. However if you bet small on turn, say 25% of the pot, each villain has to defend around 3/8th of range and there's a bunch more checkraising/raising, and this ends up reducing the EV of the marginal defends for the middle player because they'll get squeezed a bunch, and reducing middle players' EV re-distributes it to the bettor and the last to act player.

Awesome, Makes a lot of sense thank you

I refer you to my semi rant about optimizing preflop using a solver. I'm not especially gifted at figuring out which preflop strategies are best, I just have the good sense to use the best tools to optimize them.

So I mean.... no. If I thought a larger size was better I'd have used it.

I don't understand why having a tighter range would make a larger size seem better in the first place fwiw. I think if you gave the solver the option to raise to <2bb here it might take it. That's "because" a lot of the EV for bigger sizings comes from pricing out some hands that flatcall from big blind that have fairly large EV such as suited or connected cards; but when RFI ranges get very tight these hands struggle to call anyways getting 3.5:1 because IP has an overpair so often.

It depends on the rake, but probably yes

The dead cards are partially known, because we can remove the weighting of hands they would have played.

So for a simple example, imagine a player in UTG with 2 possible holdings, AA or KK. They go all in with AA but fold KK. They fold. We're next to act with KJo. Looks pretty dead to me.

Same principle applies with the 14% UTG raising or w/e it is, the combinatorics are just more complicated than in my little toy example.

If I recall correctly, AA is something like twice as likely as normal when it folds around to small blind vs big blind at a 9 handed table. Some big effect size like that...

Okay, so because the first 3 players fold, there is technically more combinations of things like AQ, AK, KQ, AJ, AA, KK, etc etc in play. That is very interesting. I suppose this translates to us playing a more blocker intensive strategy and more big cards in general, and maybe folding some of the bottom of our range that is centered more around SC's in full ring settings then.

For example, a hand like ATo is going to be more valuable LJ vs 98s after the first three players fold, because we block more combos that 3bet us and we get to see more flops/realize equity. Whereas in a 6max setting, 98s wouldn't suffer as much from those removal affects. Maybe not the best example, but I typically mix 98s/ATo region depending on the game dynamics, but it appears, at least in a full ring environment, ATo would be slightly more valuable than 98s as a comparison.(also, viewing this through the lens of a small stakes/live grinder, where I think big cards are generally favored due to a value oriented post flop strategy)

2x seems implausibly high to me. Even if we assume players will play any Ax hand and no other hand when it folds to us in the SB there are 38 cards left in the deck (and all the As). This means there is a 6 / (38x37/2) = 0.85% vs 6 / (52x51/2) = 0.45%. So even in this most extreme case it is not 2x. And the difference between 6 max and 9 max is even smaller. 6/ (44x43/2) = 0.63% in this extreme example. (apologies if my maths is incorrect)

Yea you're right, Holonomy, ty! did some quick math and it's def a lot smaller effect size than this.