Thanks Phil, great stuff! I think you nailed it with stack leveraging and clearing up equity. It's admirable that you can make these high quality videos and adapt to people adjusting to your game. Looking forward to all your future MTT videos even if they're just "for fun"! Take care.

great vid phil!! You should make a series now on how to exploit people that raise or x/ raise flops too much.

Phil, great series. Really puts things into perspective. Just wondering what you think your avg buy-in was for this 66 hand sample? Do you think this kind of strategy becomes more and more viable as an MTT grinder moves up? Looking forward to more videos.

Please keep making this kind of MTT videos, I´m a Professional MTT player, very good content, looking forward mor more parts! tx

very good content for the both parts! thanks!

do you think that we can come up with a strategy when we defend from the BB and flop hands w/ medium strength that can not support barrels from villains? first things that comes into mind are that if we raise flop we are gonna have a hard life being OOP and villain is more float heavy comparing to the first 2 part concept of raising flops where we play IP.

in some scenarios SPR of 3 seems kinda loose to stack off for tourney players, and sometimes you feel dumb when get it in in a WA/WB situation but on the other side our hands do not support future barrels vs villain's perceived range and getting the pot right there seems like a reasonable chip up. ( this concept is kinda against the approach of a MTTer as you said before, that he likes to put in tiny bets/call downs and get to showdown, since he values his tourney life )

i agree that flatting pre and doing some postflop work when we can get SPR>3 on the flop gets us more ways to chip up instead of the usual preflop FE and flipping, where nowadays most players have those ranges for preflop battles at least at a decent level

i guess that leads to playing more aggro preflop with a well structured range when u cannot do lots of moves postflop because of the low SPR and at the end of the day u cannot skip the "flipping" way to go in the tourneys.

do you plan on making vids in similarish style but when Hero is in BB? or reacting vs 3bets OOP ?

i am super pumped waiting for more vids like these and was curious if you can share what topics will the next ones ( if there are any) will cover.

thanks!

I would like to comment that I really think 98s on TJQ is really a shove on the river against these ' fishy' plays. Maybe lot of players want to see turn and river first before they ' get value' for their set there.

So without read i think i would still shove, also the 'not shove bet' on the river... I think most recs with ak are more likely to shove there..

Anyone agree that in general it's a shove?

Maybe Phil had different read on player at the time although he now still says it's a call.

Or maybe I'm just stupid.

PG using the reverse blockers. siiiiiiiick. nice video
<3 chimpraiser <3

You've mentioned that tournament players don't slowplay much if the board is at all coordinated and thus end up being very capped when they defend vs flop raise with a call. Do you find since your flop raise percentage is so high (and includes a lot of one pair hands for protection) that when you just call your range is super weak going to the turn? How do you deal with this?

Nice approach about how to pause the video. :p
I just think you are the best professional player and coacher of the world. You can explain in a really easy/clear (ok, some times with lots of extra thoughts ;p) way everything.
I really wanna see the next parts contain some spr explanations. I think you probably treat about it alot in plo but i am kind of noob on this,
Keep doing mtts videos and nl holdem too! Ty

Phil, please stop making these videos :D

Hey Phil, just a side question, can you tell us what your bb/100 (All-in Ev) is in your database fore NLH mtts?

Hi Phil, great MTT video, hope you can make more videos like this in the future.
Btw, in your videos you constantly mentioned SPR, could you explain what does SPR means?

"The other topic I was going to move on to was defending vs. 3bets (IP and OOP), which sounds like it'll interest you as well, though I think it will be more a focus on preflop play than a ton of postflop spots (since it would take too long otherwise).
Let me know what you guys think!"

@Phil : sure, I would be very interested in this topic as well, and I believe many people too. So please go ahead!

Also one topic I find interesting but completely different, is how to analyse situations where the board becomes 4 or 5 cards straight (with split possibilities) , or even 5 flush cards. How to decide if we check for a likely split or if a bluff could be better.
Here is a hand played by a friend where Villain's play is very interesting (to me at least) and Im not really sure if that's good or not, I find it hard to analyse properly.
http://www.poker-academie.com/poker/replayer/ReplayerPokerAcademie.php?i=2189634&p=0&s=1&liens=0

Hand

Great follow-up to the first video! It helped me understand your hand selection a bit better. I've actually been trying this a bit more (mostly the clearing up equity/protecting/semi-bluffing (kinda) in HU as well as multi-way pots. My success rate at lower stakes has been questionable (like getting cold called 3way by combos that should obviously fold to two cold bets) but with some adjustment on my part I think I could fine tune it a bit for the table skill. Overall though, I've been getting more comfortable with doing it. I think it's a massive plus for us when the board makes villain very wary of reraising. Like when we raise on 743, even moreso rainbow, villains just won't be willing to repop it much because they may be drawing dead.

On a related note to that 743r board. I've been musing lately about combinatorics vs how people perceive ranges. I think due to lack of theory and time spent actually working things out, a lot of recreational players seem to have some heavy incorrect biases. For instance, people seem to always want to believe we have a flush draw if the board is two-tone and seem to both be scared when a flush hits and try to rep it too hard themselves. I mean, depending on seats, it can get pretty hard to actually have two suited cards of the right suit. I know you've been playing a ton of HS cash for years now, but can you relate to this population read that some families of holdings get more credit than they should while some get way less?

Future topic which I think would be really attractive:
How I Exploit You: Sizing Tells And Merging

You point it out in this video and even address the "leaks" you are creating for yourself with some of your strategy. The general population in MTTs tends to bet too often at a lot of different SPR while often bifurcating their range into two sizings. This isn't true of top regs, or even good regs but this is not representative of the population unless we're playing pretty high... For instance, in a lot of river spots I'll see a lot of pretty abusive value attempts because we checked, so they feel they have the best hand and think it's reason enough to bet, as long as you make it cheap enough that villain can call.

Shaun Deeb was already saying this years ago: when it looks like they want a call, they just do... so you just fold. It may not be 100% true, but to this day it remains a pretty widespread tendency. I'm guilty of this myself, A LOT, but I think it's something we can abuse pretty hard if someone doesn't "respect" our game. I'd really be interested in something dealing with abusing overly weak/merged/awkward value regions, or something having to do with gaining info from villain sizings and how you handle that. Folding, calling, raising for thin value, raising as a bluff... according to sizing. Soulreading sizings I suppose :)

If you're up for something about how you decide on your own sizings in an exploitive way that would be amazing as well. Sizing according to villain range region we target, sizing according to the option we want SPR to give villain... I don't know, you're the one exploiting us :) Just throwing out a couple of topics I'd really like to get better at myself

Please keep making these, but also please stop! I'm torn...

great video phil! great to see your NL content. at 41min with AA, this is a board that favors djks range a lot. he has all combos of 87, 96, 95, 65, 55, 66, 99.. where you are very over card heavy. You have obviously one of your best hands and you raise to 2100, If i were him and i had 98, i think its just such as easy 3b to like 4600 and then barrel turn and jam river. You are raising on board that is just really good for your opponent, who is definitely a capable player, so i think he's more likely to turn 86 or 97 into a bluff then to call you down (so ur bloating pot with what turns into a bluff catcher with no blockers).
As played, on the turn, i think betting is prettttty marginal because if he did peel 98 or 86 i doubt he calls again. he just isn't going to expect to be raising hands like AJcc that will barrel this turn because flop is so good for him you definitely are not incentivized to bluff. When you bet, he has a large incentive now to turn 98 into bluff and force you to fold given how horrible it would be to stack off here with AA 180bb deep. I think you may want to check back turn and potentially Vbet river if he caps his river range by checking to you. This is also easy to balance because you will have give ups on the turn that can bluff river to balance with this once he caps range. Further, if you raise this hand, id assume u r raising JJ-KK as they need more protection, and therefore id expect you raise sets as well, and then maybe some Qjss to have some air, so ur pretty much playing a raise or fold strat here, which seems crazy to me considering that this deep you have a range full of bluff catchers versus his range.

I'm sure this is dumb question, but w/e...
What is "spr " or sbr " that your talking about often in these videos. Thx!

Your next video should focus on how to play 14 hours of heads up without reaching your Z-game.

What elite pros or any on here have videos discussing "spr" , ICM, hand ranges in all parts of MTT's ?? Thx! Loved both your videos especially how I can understand you. (From a verbiage stand point)

Great vid Phil! Sometimes I feel that MTT vids from great players who don't play MTTs wind up being more informative since so many MTT players wind up doing the same things and thinking in similar ways. You do a great job zagging when they zig.

Now that I've buttered you up, do you feel that making these plays live will have the same effect? Obviously everything is read dependent but from what you've seen at WSOP events what is your opinion on the subject?

I liked it!

Phil these are really interesting and informative videos and you're humility is commendable. Hopefully I'll start winning again soon.

would love to learn more about defending vs. 3bets (IP and OOP) Phil!. Also, is there a video that talks a bit about SPR ?

Hi Phil, will you continue with this serie?

How I Exploit You (Part 3: Check-Raising Flops)

Cliff:
- Raise a lot of flops
- Don’t try this at home

Now I’m gonna go crush my local casino reg’s weak merge range with a shit ton of bluff raise.

Thank you very much Mr. Galfond

Great video Phil!

You are excellent at reading board textures. How strong different ranges are on different boards, turn and rivers. Like when you said 345 was bad for his 3betting range. What would be a good way for me to improve this in my game? Or do you know any good videos about this topic. Or maybe you can make one!

Again, great video!

Hey, great video, thank you!

Quick question about the hand where you defended your big blind against a small blind open and the flop came AQ2hh.

Do you think this is the type of spot where we can just avoid having a flop raising range considering our range is very capped? The small blind has all the AA, AQ, QQ, AK combos that we do not have since we did not 3-bet.

Any thoughts are appreciated!

Thanks again!

thrillingly enlightening~~~but it's been 4 years and there's no sign of the third episode, that I began to wonder maybe that's it? this series ends here? please don't...