Zach Battles Doug HU
Posted by Zachary Freeman
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Great vid, love this format and the use of PIO for all of these spots.
Cool. I enjoyed playing and reviewing the match.
This is awesome.... do more of these
good video. I think you should use the pio feature "square size proportional to weight"; it helps me understand the postflop ranges much better.
Yes I agree it's useful.
Some of the postflop ranges are not correct, especially on the boards where you checked until the river. Most of the hands PIO shows in the betting range aren't in your flop/turn checking range, so you have a significantly weaker river range in contrast to what you see in PIO.
Am I wrong?
Even if the solution shows a hand checking half of a percent on flop it will then show on turn as part of our range. As rickoso pointed out, that can be misleading if you interpret it to mean that you have all those hands at high frequency. Square size proportional to weight helps us visually see the composition of range and frequency of combinations
Loved the video. Turns out Doug is good at HU, who woulda knew.
Great format, looking forward to more reviews of live hands in future.
Betting or checking the flop in the KK KK8 hand is about a 50/50 split in PIO if you add overbet all in sizings to the sim, so flop check looks good regardless of exploitative reads. I imagine the more opportunities for large turn and river bets you give PIO the more it will favor checking this spot.
Yes, good point. Using Pio solutions as a metric for deeming a play correct or a mistake is dangerous. Mostly because the assumptions and truncation of options in sizing etc will skew the results. That said, it does serve as a guide to what the optimal play will look like approximately.
I think Doug picked a pretty good hand with Q9 on the 4 flush board to raise with. Q9o has some showdown value, is too weak to call, doesn't block your 6-8 high bluffs. Assuming he calls KJ, I can't think of a better hand to do this with. I doubt he is overbluffing this spot because his whole game is based on being balanced. This spot isn't too difficult to balance if he knows roughly how many Qd, Jd, 9d he gets here with.
Best mixture of fun and knowlege
Fun video. I like checking hands vs Pio as the structure!
In general, I would be careful to draw specific conclusions about what is or isn't a mistake for Doug given that you've made a lot of assumptions about the availability of options in the game tree regarding bet size options and also some assumptions about his preflop ranges.
For example, I would think I could construct some reasonable assumptions and ranges where x/f w T9 on the QcTc2d6s double barrel isn't a mistake.
I think it would be interesting to make a video or two comparing how your strategy changes by changing bet size options and preflop ranges for villain in a couple of hands.
I agree that we/I shouldn't draw hard and fast rulings on the quality of our decisions directly based on results of Pio. That goes for Doug's play and my own. Although, in the case of the Tx9c the Pio solution shows this as a 100% call which implies that the parameters of the model would have to change significantly for it to become a fold.
Doug told me that his hand was a fold and that approximately half of his 2nd pairs become a fold on turn. I can see that the 9c kicker is an ideal one to fold if we fold any. I still would find it surprising if any of the Tx are fold though just from a 1-a perspective it seems that we would be overfolding considerably.
Neopolitan ice cream, nice one :) Would love to see more of this video type!
really great video!
Zach you're really good at using Pio in a video! It's easy to get bogged down over-explaining or over-narrating the solution. I thought you did an awesome job hitting the important points while keeping the pace moving. I know you don't play much NL but more videos like this would certainly be welcome! Thanks for doing it.
Thanks very much for the great compliment.
How did you learn to use PIO solver? Any tips?
Watched other RIO vids and some instructional ones on YouTube.
I'm not sure I will be able to express myself accurately but I will try. Hand JTvsT9 44-45min, you mention that you both made a big mistake where you bet a hand that you should only bet 5% of the time and he snap folds a hand he should call 100% of the time. Am i correct to assume that you betting too much is much more of a mistake than him folding where he should never fold. What I'm trying to say is your action should be GTO, and his reaction to this GTO play should be GTO. But since you made a mistake or let's assume Polk can assess that you're not GTO in this spot, his fold is not necessarily a mistake whereas your bet is.
What I'm trying to say is Polk is probably aware that T9o is never a fold in this spot which makes me think he picked up something on your play to make that fold given it's a call 100% of the time. It's much different from a 70-30 (call-fold) spot where he chooses to fold.
Doug was not making an exploitive adjustment to over fold. He was folding T9o because he thought it was the correct GTO play. I know htis for 2 reasons 1) Because he didn't have any reason to have a read that I was betting too tightly. 2) He told me that folding about half of his middle pairs there was GTO.
He may be correct but a) my intuition says he is incorrect. and b) my simplistic Pio model suggests he is incorrect.
Something I want to add up and I feel it's important to mention. When you're talking about going with your gut or your feeling depending on whether he is strong or weak, I feel like this is an important thing to do. I have read a book about body language recently and it mentions the fact that sometimes your gut with tell you that something is wrong about someone (ie, he's lying) but you can't tell why you are feeling this way. That is actually your unconscious mind processing the information about the other person, without your conscious mind realizing or understanding why you feel this way. So you feel it but you don't have the knowledge to explain why you feel that way. I like this hypothesis a lot! The book is: The definitive book of body language.
I agree.
@36:30 w K 7 on 9 7 2 2 A board. Pio says we should donk bet 36% of the time on the riv. What is the ev of check calling the riv opposed to betting? and if we always check call a 7 in this spot would it be a huge leak (lowering our EV of check call if we always do it 100% of the time).
I like your adjustment to bet your 7s with low kickers and check the K7, Q7 which blocks his calling range so he will have more bluffs.
Are we supposed to check call all 7s with a low kicker that we decide to check with if we play like pio, if he bets a sizing like pot. (pio says check 7s with a low kicker 40% of the time) i dont know if pio always plans on check calling these hands or folding if opp bets big. Although i understand an A doesnt hit his range too often but he could be cbetting a hand like AJo+
first time watcher great video, thanks, learnt a lot.
With Pio (GTO), anytime there is a mixed strategy the ev of the betting or checking will be equivalent because Pio finds frequencies of strategy choices such that we are in equilibrium. If you chose to always check or always bet that would change. And my guess is that always checking would outperform always betting.
I did not look at the action when we check 7x but I believe that we are always calling 7x to a bet up to pot.
In response to SlotMachine, I node locked a bunch of strategies for Zach, including betting all his JT/KT/AT, as well as adding 100% of top pairs, and T9 is still always a call. Thought this was interesting. I've also bought Doug's HU course and I've noticed many differences between what pio advocates (I get exact ranges and strategies so there's no guess work). Doug's strategy is super "well balanced" such that every line cannot be easily attacked. However, since he is a staunch advocate for never using solvers, his "balance" is not always the highest EV. Perhaps in his strategy, he needs to fold half of his second pair hands in order to keep other lines/ as well as the x/c x/c line balanced in his mind. However, his fold with T9o seems like a very clear mistake from an EV standpoint.
Also fwiw Zach, as long as you're not overdoing betting all your Tx, JTo/s does not realy affect the EV of your strategy as a whole. After nodelocking JT/KT/AT as part of your turn bet strategy, you lose like $2 dollars of the pot which is basically negligible.
thanks depolarizing. Since you told us that betting J 10 only loses 2 dollars of the pot. How much does folding 9 10 lose???? that info would be super helpful.
@Depolarizing
Thanks for all the good posts lately. I'm glad to be following you. And sorry I missed this post for so long.
I went ahead and ran some sims for this using what I believe to be accurate preflop ranges and depending on exact turn bet size, we should be folding in the neighborhood of 10-20% of our Tx on the turn if we work from the assumption he only has JTo-T6o, 50% of T8s and all of T7s-T2s as his Tx in preflop flat range.
Solver shows us folding some T9 and some T8 and a sliver of T7 though T9 has the worst EV of the three facing a turn bet, so preferring to fold T9 over T8 and T7 would be fine if we know villain won't figure out what we're doing and exploit us based on blockers.
Did you use the preflop ranges Zach used in his Pio sim? I think we will find a much tougher time finding a fold in that case.
I ran this simulation awhile ago, so I can't remember exactly, but usually whenever I run a sim from someone else''s hand, I try to use their ranges, so I probably used Zach's. If I remember correctly though, I inputted my own ranges while simulating this spot and still got basically 100% call with T9. Could you screenshot your ranges? Thanks :)
It's also quite interesting to see how these strategies differ based off slight tweaks in preflop. Just goes to show how much human error can happen in using pio.
Thanks for looking into that and your findings are in line with what I would have expected.
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