Do you remember what Krab said about this in the past? I know I have made alot of mistakes in the past by just auto giving up missed flush draws. Fwiw I ran a pio sim of that hand and 34s is definitely a better river bluff than bigger flush cards. I guess because it blocks less of opponents missed flush draws.

therapist - Indeed! I'll post Kevin's exact response below. And thanks for your "fwiw" info; I appreciate it!

"I think the most practical advice I can give is that we basically never prefer bluffing these combos, so we only use them when necessary. In some situations we run out of air combos with a wide value range, or we make our bluffing range too predictable in other ways if we were to never use our fds. I'd try to avoid bluffing them but be willing to use them if there are not good alternatives." — KRab

This thread is the first time I can remember where past-Kevin gets involved before current-Kevin even reads the comment, so thanks for digging that up!

I guess you can tell the answer is closer to 'it depends' than anything else, but I see no real flaw with this logic. Small FDs are systematically more likely to bluff on a given river spot than large FDs. We rarely want to give up our pure air bottom of range hands unless we have a large quantity of effective pure air, and in 6max that will usually require a unique board texture like high double paired or something.

Most important is that we don't regularly bluff with hands that interact with an actual missed FD that our opponent could have so therapist is likely correct in pointing out the reason for the sim results!

i think in this instance the 43cc hand is a pretty good bluffing combo cos it unblocks many of the pocket pairs that are going to be mixing call/fold on the river. Kevins turn leading range is likely to consist of Kx/Jx for value, and then flush draws/straight draws for bluffs. as the IP player is cbetting most of his flush draws, and preferring to check back with a hand such as QQ/TT etc, then on the river we don't mind having the low FD blockers as they don't really interact with the IP folding range and we instead unblock many of the folding combos.

if we were to bluff with a more 'intuitive' combo such as QT/Q9/T9 etc, then we would actually block more of the folding range, thus increasing the IP players calling frequency.

and finally, you could say that 43s blocks 44/33 that would sometimes fold on the river, but again, if the IP player actually arrived on the river with these combos, then they should probably prefer to call over QQ/TT due to the unblocking effects to our bluffing range. 44/33 literally only blocks some random low suited FD's (which don't amount to many combos) where as QQ blocks 16 combos of QT, 16 combos of Q9 as well as the Qxcc etc.

Thanks for the questions! Unfortunately I don't have a reliable number for you on my winrate - my volume on tracked sites has been too low at any one game in particular since I stopped playing HUNL full time. 6max has never been my full time game but I'm trying to make good content nonetheless :)

I'm curious of your sim result for the first one and I'll set a reminder to do the same myself. This is a play I use on many different board textures and I think the size gets used in a wide variety of spots.

22min - I think this is a more extreme conclusion to draw than I had in game...to make shoving good he needs to be totally out of line (although for 50-60bb we might be able to approach this situation). I don't mind your way of organizing things and I definitely could have considered a small size 4bet bluff, as I think I alluded to in the video.

40min - I think my bet sizes as the BB on river would only be large. I can't think of many combinations that are strong enough to block bet 3ways that benefit from not checking. Also, we have to check more Kx on turn than any other player in the hand, so we will have a wide range of hands that want to lead out large on river, meaning it should be easy to design a strategy for that size. Hands that are 'too good' to lead 3/4 psb can check/raise instead.

So I can't take full credit for landing on the same solution as pio, but I will try to summarize the logic, which I try my best to extract from general trends I notice in solvers.

When I'm block betting river with air, I want to make sure my hand is both weak enough that it must bluff, and also lacks negative blockers that would have me run into the better portions of villain's range too often. With this hand, I identified that I must bluff, but I worried that i was blocking dead bottom of range type holdings: weak fds, Ax combos (with my small turn size, I assume random A4 type hands with an overcard are supposed to peel? maybe not...), small pocket pairs

I also questioned whether a river blockbet would even be used often by my value range. In spots where I have a wide range of blockbets, I may not be so concerned about the negative blocker properties, and simply block the bottom of my range as a bluff. Here, it seems there are very few hands that want to block, and a larger set of hands that want to size up, so I justified bluffing this for the large size because there seemed to be no reason why it would be bad at bluffing the large size.

Was the solution you ran using a block range much at all? I'm curious what would fit into that range, perhaps something like Kxs for value (especially K5/K6?), I might bluff 987 at low freq if I arrived here...

I think btn vs bb is not the best spot to cbet range, especially vs an aggressive player with two low cards on the board. Villain should find lots of backdoors/draws/pairs to play back at me with on this texture (compared to K93 or something where I'd likely cbet). I also have a weak backdoor myself, equity I'd like to realize, so this is the type of hand I'll check when my range advantage is not so large.

I am with u looking at it in bb imo is so annoying...just my 2 cents not trying 2 be rude lol...

Basically, yes. As we get shorter effective stacks the 3bet size doesn't need to be as large. Although this would start to disappear as you get very shallow of course, we wouldn't want to offer too good of an immediate price.