Bluffcatchers
Posted by Tyler Forrester
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This is one of the most educational videos I have watched! It gave me a lot of ideas for how to improve both my optimal and exploitative play when bluff-catching.
Thanks Kalupso. I appreciate your very kind words!
Yup very nice as always, nice job in the department of simplifying.
So the two main takeaways I'm getting from this are 1) When villain has enough bluffs or more to balance his bet sizing, we should aim to call our bluff catchers with an appropriate frequency. When he has less, we can call less than appropriately or even fold them all. 2) If we have a variety of bluff catchers that have equal card removal effects, and we want to play a pure call or fold strategy with them, we should choose to call with the best ones from an absolute value standpoint. Do these sound good and is there anything else you'd add to this Tyler?
3) Sounds obvious, but this sometimes gets lost. If our opponent folds too much on a street, we want to make sure that we put get more bluffs to that street, and if we can't we should be turning hands with showdown value into a bluff.
4) If we are unsure about calling alpha we should think about what hands our opposition could be bluffing with. The smaller the range, the less we should worry about being exploited. The wider the range the more we need to call alpha. Being too foldy becomes much more expensive. On the inverse side if the range has fewer possible bluffs overfolding becomes less valuable to a max exploit strategy. These situations are analagous to having a strong bluff catcher/weak bluff catcher. Folding strong bluff catchers can be exploited much more heavily than folding weak bluff catchers.
All this makes sense, except "On the inverse side if the range has fewer possible bluffs overfolding becomes less valuable to a max exploit strategy," which is a bit hazy to me. Can you comment further on this?
If I have 2 value bets and 1 bluff and bet 1/2 pot, I'm going to win the pot 2.66 / 3 times or 88% of the pot against an optimal strategy. If I now face an always fold strategy I'm going to win 100% of the pot when I bet all my bluffs. For a 100%/ 88% (13% increase) against a the always fold strategy.
Same scenario but now I have 2 value bets and 3 bluffs. Now I'm going to win 53% of the pot against optimal strategy, but if I face an always fold strategy, I now win a 100% of the pot. This is 100%/53% = 88% increase in value. So always folding when my opponent has more bluffs is a much worse mistake then when ranges are tight.
How do you get 2.66/3? Thanks
2 value bets at 1/2 pot means my opponent needs 25% equity to call a bet. 3/4 of my hands must be for value. This means that my range must be 3/4 and 1/4 bluff. Since we know my value range is 2 combos and makes up 3/4 then my full range must be 2 / (3/4) = 2.666.
Hello Tyler, great vid.
I think that on the excel sheet you create around 29:00 you have a mistake. When calculating the EV of "Always Call" strategy you give OP a value-only range although his strategy on excel sheet is 50 val / 50 bluff. Obviously, the EV of always calling can not be 0% of pot, if he ever bluffs.
Thanks Dimitrios! I was assuming perfect play against my always call strategy (i.e. never bluff) and always valuebet. Since his bluffing range was small, this made the always call strategy to be worth no money (because we lost more to calling his valuebets then we made by forcing his bluffing ranges to check).
:)
Great video, the different models on PIOsolver helped a lot having a better understanding of the situation.
Many players, including myself, get often lost in the notion that they should either play a GTO strategy or always have perfect exploitative adjustments. Yet it's not so simple and having a clear understanding of the variables in play eventually helps choosing the right mindset at the right time.
Thanks Cloud!
The difference in explotability is because, if they know our strategy of only calling 66's for example, they can extend their value range?
Yes exactly, its going to be more exploitable to call weaker bluff catchers because our opponent would simply value bet thinly or adopt a "range - merge " strategy, where he bets middling hands expecting us to fold better often and then occassionally call worse.
Really great video.
In the first part, shudnt he vbet qq-aa and not just bluff 44 but also 1/2 of 55 combos? He needs 2 value for every one bluff and he has 18 combos of value so shudnt he need 9 combos of bluffs for pot sized bet? u said that bluffing only 44 gets u .75 of pot but wudnt including 55 increase this?
Yes it would. Good Catch!
Really liked this. just watched again to fully get it. i often get annoyed bc i feel like a lot of opponents are not bluffing enough and i just wanna fold near all bluff catchers. So, pretty much, i shud not attempt to do this if they have a lot of potential bluffs, but if they dont have that many anyway, i can better fold my range with less downside?
It just seems like huge mistake on river to pay off bet when they literally never bluff. Maybe i missed something, but what is the ev of calling the appropriate frequency versus guy who never bluff? Its lower than 0ev right? How does that mistake compare to always folding and the guy having a few extra bluffs and is able to now to expliot us by betting 100% and gaining full pot in ev.
It is a huge mistake if you calculate the EV of the call. However if you calculate the EV of your whole range on this street vs an unknown strategy, its maximum value. Of course we can do better if we know our opponents strategy and use better max exploitative strategy against them.
As to the comparing the mistake, it depends on how many bluffs our opponents could possibly have or how much of our range that our hand beats. Folding a 90% equity hand against the entire range will always be more exploitable than folding a hand with 40% equity against the entire range.
Tyler, I think Piosolver and CREV are both used to find GTO solutions... can you explain in what cases PIOsolver is better to use than CREV and also vice versa? (I am fairly new to poker and have not used either software package yet..)
CREV is a better intro tool at a much cheaper price point. It has 80% of the functionality of Piosolver for 20% or less of the price. Piosolver is really the enterprise version of poker software. People will often run PioSolver instances on servers to gain a deeper understanding of preflop and flop play. This is well above what a non-professional needs.
whenever you have a situation where it's nuts and air vs bluffcatcher, doesn't betting as big as possible make sense? Since the best the bluffcatching player can do is make our bluffs indifferent, whenever we bet with the nuts he loses more money because the betsize is bigger....?
Yes, that's a good characterization of bluff catchers vs polar. I'd make a minor change to your statement, against a GTO opponent because our opponent folds more, we actually continue to win the same amount when we bet. However, because we get to bet more times as a bluff, we now win more of the pot overall.
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