Hi Arnaud!

I’m glad you like the video and the format and thanks for your suggestions!

For my coming videos I will keep talking about how I approach and play in cashgames by going over the rest of the footage. Exploitation, especially in zoom, takes some time so I feel it is important to go over a fair amount of footage and talk about different spots. And because it is hard to get accurate reads in one session, my plan after that is to discuss different player profiles and go over hand histories (including all my notes). So that way I will hopefully provide you with the basis of my note taking/player profiling, but also the adjustments once you manage to get some accurate reads on your opponent.

I definitely want to make a series explaining the main differences between cash and MTT, but as you might guess it will probably take me some time before I get there, so I will go over your questions here:

Note taking in MTTs: Yes, I do make a lot of notes in MTTs as well. It might be even more effective in MTTs as you usually play one table for a while and thus can instantly apply information you gained from your observations. Just having one accurate read can already lead you acquiring a lot of chips in the tournaments from where you can keep pressuring your opponents and increasing your chances of getting a deep run. But of course you can’t follow all the action so in general my focus will be on weaker opponents because they have the most predictive patterns.

GTO/exploitation in MTTs: This is a very broad topic and would make an even much bigger post if I explain it in-depth, but in general MTTs favor an exploitive game style I think. The main reason is that in MTTs ranges are often constructed differently, for example depolarized cbetting strategies, tendency to fastplay hands OTF and relative honest river aggression. Where in cash you really have seen, and this is still going on, a development of GTO-minded strategies where players generally put strong(ish) hands in what are perceived capped ranges in an attempt to prevent exploitation.

Success factors in MTTs: The way MTTs play out is very different than cash and skills like patience, solidness and having a strong, consistent mental game are very important I think. When you switch from cash to MTTs you will have a significant skill advantage postflop because you are just way more used to play deep, but on the other hand I had to do a lot of work improving my shallow game, push-fold ranges, sizings and stack awareness.

Hopefully this answered most of your questions.

Hey JerseyGrinder23,

Thanks for your feedback, appreciate it.

So once I had my master degree and started to make poker more seriously in 2012 I was already a winner at 100NL, although a small one. I gave myself a period of 3-4 months to see if I could improve enough and also to see if I would like the lifestyle. It can definitely be rough switching from part-time to full-time but as long as you stay disciplined and passionate about the game, I'm sure you'll manage.

To understand GTO more deeply I read the Mathematics of Poker and also watched videos online about game theory - I found the free courses of Yale University helpful. I also had coaching from someone who is very good in GTO/math and how to apply it in poker.

I mainly build my preflop ranges in CREV and Flopzilla myself and I would always advice to do the same, because you learn the most once you play around with ranges yourself. It's very hard - if not impossible - to have GTO preflop ranges so I looked at what makes sense intuitively to play from each spot preflop (opening, defending, 4betting, etc.) and then finetune them in such a way I can't be exploited - for example by facing a 3bet. I also used my database to look at some of the grey areas and check my profitability.

My HUD is divided into 3 sub-sections - top preflop, middle as PFR and bottom vs PFR. That way I have all the relevant stats grouped like how they come in a spot, for example how much an opponents cbets is linked to cbet/fold and check/folds as the PFR, and the fold to cbet is linked to checkraise flop and IP stab flop. About the fold to steal stat, I think that stat should be enough as well but I personally prefer to see how an opponent plays from the blinds vs a steal when I open the BTN or SB because these spots come up very often.

Nice, how did you balance Grad School and poker? I think I need to start scheduling my poker sessions, instead of playing spontaneously at times. Sometimes my sessions go on much longer than I expect. Always fun to play a MTT when doing a paper though. Probably ruining many possible reads though lol.

I heard that Mathematics of Poker is a great book, do you know of any other good GTO books? I was thinking "Poker's 1%: The One Big Secret That Keeps Elite Players On Top" might be a good book, but not sure if it goes in depth about GTO. Is Mathematics of Poker the nuts for GTO?

Going to start building ranges once I have some more time. Bought Flopzilla awhile back, but only have a basic understanding of it. I will also make some adjustments to my HUD based on what you said. Do you think I need both Flopzilla and CREV when starting to build ranges? Or is Flopzilla fine for someone just beginning?

Hey sorry, somehow missed your reply.

It was definitely not easy to combine work/study with poker, but I mainly played in the weekends and in the evening when I was feeling well. When you have less time available, I think two things become more important: 1) to try to make a good evaluation each time you want to play whether or not you are able to play well and 2) playing smaller sessions and focus on playing high quality poker. That way you probably increase your chances to play your best poker and still learn/improve your game, and not mindlessly grind your valuable time away.

I read Poker 1% for a bit, I believe if focuses on frequencies and so it should cover some GTO related stuff, but I'm not 100% sure. Mathematics of Poker is a good, but tough book.

Flopzilla is nice because I think it is a bit more user friendly, but it misses the in-depth information that CREV offers. So usually I use Flopzila for the more simple spots, and CREV when it gets more complex. I think you should be fine using Flopzilla when you are just getting started building your ranges.

Very good question.

So GTO-wise/readless, in general my stabbing strategy includes a lot of follow ups on the river when I think it favours my range and check a ton when I feel it favours my opponent's range including checkraising and turning some hands into a bluff. However, we still need to be careful leaving some strong hands in our double check range if we don't want to get exploited by a delayed cbet/barrel, so we might end up having this Q6dd in to our double check range to achieve this (we will need to make a decently sized CREV file to get ranges that look fairly balanced though). This is also under the assumption that our opponent plays a fair amount of GTO and/or might be very aggressive vs our capped ranges.

But I feel in practice these spots still play way differently than this. In general a lot of players are still fairly capped/weak in their check back ranges on these semi wet mid-high flops, so that's why I think I can be aggressive on a lot of runouts that favour my range. Besides that I also checked his checkback range as PFR in the Notecaddy notes and saw it was indeed a weakish range so far, and that mixed with his so far low aggression frequency/showdown stats I feel I can get away with overbluffing a fair bit here.

So the actual river is interesting because it is probably a card that slightly favours my opponent, as he can have hands like AJ and AK in his range (but I still feel that the majority of the time hands like this will get cbetted so it's really close). So if you play GTO-minded again than you may want to check a decent amount of your range OTR and indeed add some checkraise bluffs like a hand as Q6dd (again you will need CREV for that)

But from an exploitive standpoint I think this is not our best play because his low river aggression frequency likely indicates that he is honest on the river and probably not a good thin valuebettor - and he indeed checked back two pair, which is probably his strongest two pair there. So once (most of) the 'thin' valuebets go out of our opponent's perceived range, that means his range becomes more polarized between nutted hands (set 88 and flushes like T9hh etc) and bluffs (Ax with hearts and weak draws that missed), which means that the value of our decent bluffcatcher goes up. And then for our option to bet the river it is basically the same, because often players who don't valuebet thinly are also not the type of players who will make a light call with Tx or weaker, so that's why I preferred check in the first place.

Hey, thanks a lot for the thoughtful response. Good, well-reasoned analysis. Will go back and finish the vid soon!

Yes, I learned a lot by studying regs who I think are good and/or are tough to play against. What I usually do is to go over all their stats in HM/HUD/popups to see if there are things that are unusual, and then filter hands for that. Then I go over the biggest pots I have on them to see if I can understand their logic in key spots.

I started with a database analysis sheet a while back where I compared stats and winrates of my play compared to an alias of the top players in my game. I might make a video about that once it is finished and if people want to see that.

Yeah at the beginning of the video I paused a few times just to show and talk about it, because I felt it might get a little confusing when I make notes and simultaneously play other hands. Later on the action will get more smooth and I will make sure not to talk too long about standard spots.

Funny that you mention grindcore, I've been coached by him for quite a while.

Yeah theres some resemblance i guess.Kinda not thrilled youre making vids now that i know that :), micro guys should defo look to get a lof out of them.

Funny you mentioned Grindcore I was thinking exactly the same thing once I saw the time stamp on the notes :)

Grindcore was my favorite coach on DC.

"Funny that you mention grindcore, I've been coached by him for quite a while."
Does this mean you're still being coached by his today?

No it has been over more than 2 years since he coached me.

Good to hear and thanks for your suggestions!

I've been playing overrolled on 200z for several months because I wanted to get a decent sample first on my winrate before I would move up to 500z. Then I started to play MTTs and because I was in process of learning them, and because the variance can be very high, I decided to be conservative with my bankroll and mainly play low/mid stakes MTTs. I invested a lot of time/money in MTTs because I wanted to get a good sample first before moving up to mid/high stakes and also because I enjoyed grinding a ton during the big MTT series, which was all new to me.

To summarize, I'm a bankroll nit.

(fwiw, lately I've been playing some 500z and since last month mid/high stakes MTTs)

Hi Ducky7,

Thanks for your feedback!

I started myself by studying the more basic stuff of math in poker (pot odds, EV calcs, etc.), then moved on to general Game Theory and then how to apply it in poker. For this I read The Mathematics of Poker, which is a good, but also tough, book. For studying the basics of Game Theory I found the free course material of Yale University helpful. There are also a lot of great videos out here on RIO that cover different parts of GTO. I think Ben Sulsky's Toy Gaming part 1 should be very good as a start, as he starts with an explanation of some definitions and basic concepts of GTO in poker.

A good place to start in terms of constructing your postflop GTO ranges is to think about current flaws/leaks in your current game. You can do this by checking your database. For example if you check/fold 70% as the PFR on the flop, that strategy should be easy for your opponent to exploit. So from there you can try to simulate your ranges (using CREV, Flopzilla, etc) as they are now, and come with other strategies that fix your leak in a way that it is hard for your opponent to exploit you. You can do the same of course for boards you struggle with, just like you suggested. A coach generally speeds your learning process by finding leaks in your game and providing you new insights and tools to fix your leaks.

Thanks ill be sure to check that out

Hey thanks for your comment!

I think most of my color coding is a result from playing lower stakes in the past. But usually I look at how many entries they play, and if it´s 1-2 I think they are most likely a weaker player, and if they play 3-4 I mark them as a reg. Other than that, I just do the usual stuff, search player, look at stack size, screen name, check if they limped in small sample, etc. and then decide how to mark them. Hope that helps!

Hey Najamq!

Thanks for your question. I learned GTO from reading books, watching videos (also non-poker related), discussing it with other players, hiring a GTO coach and doing a lot of work/study. I think the books of Will Tipton are very good and should definitely help you a lot when you want to understand GTO better. You could also start with the Toy Gaming series of Ben Sulsky, his first episode gives a good explanation of GTO. But really there are a ton of other great videos here at RIO that cover GTO concepts that you can check out as well.

Hey Wolfske, great to hear you enjoyed the video!

Personally, I feel GTO is a bit overrated for micro/low stakes to be honest and that is also one of the reasons why I decided to make this series. I feel it is definitely important to know and understand theory in general, but often I think it's not that great to implement the concepts into your game at low stakes (like bluff:value ratios, calling down 1-a, having perfectly balanced preflop frequencies/ranges), but it is better to rather use the theory to identify opportunities to exploit your opponents. Like I said in the video, I think it's good to start with a default GTO-minded game but from there your main focus should be to be observant and try to see where your opponents have tendencies/leaks and try to exploit that. That is by far the most profitable way to play at micro/low stakes in my opinion.

GL at the tables!

Hey moment!

Good question, been thinking about this quite a bit lately and I go back and forth on this.

For the most part I do what you described, although sometimes when I'm tired/not playing great I stop doing this as then I don't trust my exploitative skills as much and rather avoid some of the high-variance spots involved in exploitative poker and rather focus on playing solid/having a steady mental game.

I can definitely be convinced that my style of play is not maximizing my hourly, I guess it's just a style I made myself comfortable with. I also tend to autopilot a ton whenever I tried to mass-table in the past and I felt that was not only losing me money, but also the joy of playing. On the other hand, I've never really gave it a good try and usually stopped mass tabling after a few days.

That said, if you really want to improve your game and decision making, I definitely feel it's better to focus on "quality" poker, lower the amount of tables, be observant, make notes, try to figure out what your opponents are doing and why, in-depth hand reviewing, etc.

Hello, moti!

Can't guarantee a 100% accuracy, but I believe XFaspfr is check-fold as preflop raiser; fvturnoopstab is fold versus turn out of position stab; xfturnafercbf is check-fold turn after raise cont bet flop; delcb is a delayed cont bet; ipflopstab is in position flop stab; dbf is donk bet flop.

Hey, sorry for not getting back to you earlier. FrozenSense is right about all the stats, except for the xfturnaftercbf; that should be xF turn after cbet flop.

Hey thanks!

I think setting a minimal sample or not are both fine. I personally don't do it, because even though samples might be small, combining all the stats together is also important to get an idea of your opponent. So a check/raise of 100% over 2 samples isn't worth much in isolation, but if you could combine it with high stats such as PFR, 3bet, cbet and high aggression frequency/wwsf etc, it adds another piece of information that your opponent is more likely to be an aggressive type.

I don't think you can tag someone as a nit based on PFR only. I usually do it based on a combination of low VPIP/PFR (22/18 or lower), low 3bet (7 or lower) and high fold BB vs steal (70 or higher). The last one is very important. You can also use postflop stats such as low aggresion frequency/wwsf etc.

I think it is a great spot to apply a ton of pressure because a lot of players will be capped. So to exploit, you (obviously) want to apply an exploitative strategy, and I think overbets will work very well to increase FE. With a weakish TP I don't want to overbet as I still want to get called by worse and incude light calldowns. So basically if you suspect that your opponent is capped, you can use very exploitable strategies such as valuebetting normal with made hands, overbet with (semi) bluffs. In practice, I would still balance my ranges out in my games, but I wouldn't be surprised if the exploitable strategy I just mentioned would be very effective at lower stakes.