Maybe one "really" too many! Jokes aside, yes it is a good spot to squeeze. In general, a hand that would be near the bottom of your calling range is a good candidate to use in your bluffing range. Especially in a spot like this where you have a very useful blocker, and one that even has some SD value to it inherently. I passed up on this spot largely because of my personal aim in for this table which was to play very solid ranges and not spew. A lot of the time I would be squeezing this hand in this spot. However, I'd prefer a hand with more playability postflop (duh), because I'm going to get peeled a fair amount - SB is going to have a playable range, though it may be wider than average depending on how he perceives villain and just by virtue of his game in general. I also expect CO to call wider than most or than he should. 

Long story short, your recognition of this spot as being a good one to squeeze is correct. 

(yet), haha. First of all, good - I'm glad you're enjoying the series so far and are tuned in to future episodes. 

Cool question man! I thought about the points I was going to cover in this hand for a good bit of time before making the video, but you've brought up further points, which are great. In short, no, I don't think there is any reason or rule that should make us have to play our range just one way here. We like to play some hands in our range a certain way, and other hands in our range a different way. That's just fine, and likely produces far more EV than  playing them all the same. We just have to be careful to balance each, of course. 

Getting to the turn, I imagine my JTs and T9s bets flop. That leaves KJs and KTs as my broadway hands to bet the turn, along with AK AJ AT possibly A9s. Other hands I've to are 55 66 77 and possibly 22 and 33. I also likely have JJ TT 99. I notice two things about my hands here: 1. The range as a whole has a fair amount of SD value, and 2. It's capped at a pretty weak absolute hand value threshold: TPTK. I think because of this exposure my range has, and the real (though admittedly unlikely, both in terms of villains possible hands and whether he bets his value bets OTT or seeks a x/r) that villain can x/r me here, I'm better off checking my Ax. I'm certainly checking my 99-JJ again, so the only hands left that I haven't addressed what I'd do with OTT as small pairs (with a bit of SD value and KJ/KTs. Those hands do want to bet twice, hmmm.

As I think this over again, I think I'd check my whole range OTT. However, it is fine to have both a betting range and a checking range. I think I'd accept the undesirable action of checking the turn with my 55-77 and KJ KTs in exchange for the benefit checking the turn does for the other hands in my range 1. Protect against a x/r and 2. As you said, protect/strength my turn checking range so SB can't just auto-bet half pot and make money off of me. Downsides are we get to the river with bluffs that only have one street to make his bluff-catchers fold, and they likely won't fold (they didn't fold in the actual hand) and 2. We lose value when villain has Ax himself. 

I may be thinking about this spot a bit too exploitatively, but I think the range concepts I'm discussing are reasonable. And one final thought, I think the stacks are pretty good for a x/r. He's giving himself a good price by x/ring 1600-2000 over my potential turn bet, and setting up a PSB OTR. I realize the deeper the stacks the better when one's aim is to pound on capped ranges, but I think there is enough depth here for him to expect it to be effective. 

Whoa man, great post! This is really useful information. I respect the way you're approaching video-watching: which is actively. You're attentive and catching quick comments that I don't expand on, and you're thinking deeply into, and running numbers on, close spots. This is going to be so much more beneficial that throwing a video on in the background while you're doing something else.

But holy smokes! I didn't realize how strong my cbetting range is here. Quickly sketching my combos, 40 for KQ+ looks good. As for bare diamond FDs, I don't think I have quite in the 10-15 range. 6 if I had to commit to a number (I don't think I have half of Ax suited here). 9 gutters look good, and a few too many backdoor spade combos. These details aside, I have a pretty strong range here, with a healthy amount of combos. I think adding Adx works extremely well in my cbet range here, that was a very keen observation. It's striking to realize how powerful your cbet can be when you have the discipline to check fold some pure air, and when your range has so many more nutted combos than the flatters behind. And bonus points for your thought about how betting Adx here toughens up my turnrange when a diamond hits. Great stuff, Yoren. 

I'm surprised T9o is as low as 36-38th percentile. I had assumed it was ~30th percentile. Pokerstrategy Equilab has it right at a 30th percentile hand. I suppose Nash has it so differently based on the fluidity of the context of a given spot, as opposed to the vacuum ranking taken from a hand chart? I am painfully weak on my Nash, and I must admit I have done very little actual work on these spots. I've relied on shove charts for my shoveranges. I realize they aren't as accurate as Nash, but I'm surprised by the degree of difference. 

As far as making a -cEV shove goes, yes I think there is a place for this. The reason is for future EV. I'm okay with losing a tiny bit of EV in a hand if it means that it creates significantly higher EV spots for me in the future. I think this is a common outcome set in spots where you have 4-8bb. Say you shove 5bb knowing that it's slightly -EV. But it's still going to get through or result in a double up just under 50% of the time. Let's call it 48% of the time. Then 48% of the time you get to earn additional EV in future situations, most notably when the BB comes around in a few hands. You'll often get +EV situations from this seat and <10BB, so having an extra 2.5bb from getting your shove through a couple of hands before can result in extra gain on a forthcoming profitable situation. A disclaimer is that I don't have a formula or a body of work that quantifies this idea. I've been relying on crude estimations to this point. Another common spot where I'll take -EV shoves is in a turbo (or reg speed, it just happens far less often) where the blinds are going up in 1 minute or less. I'll take a -EV shove spot from EP here if I think it will be a better alternative than having the blinds go up when I'm in the BB. 

Was T9o here a good example of this idea? I say it's reasonable/yes. My reasons are both players in the blinds are unknown to me (and I have a pretty good grasp on the player pool), or known to me in such a way that makes me think they're not calling 5-6bb shoves as wide as they should. I imagine they're calling plenty wide though, so this reason is thin. Plus they both have a lot of chips, which will widen them. I also can make it 2.5x and fool multitablers a small percentage of the time. This reason is also thin, especially given that both players in the blinds (where it matters most) aren't mulitabling, and thus not likely to be fooled in this manner. Being that I was one tabling, I'm sure that I as was aware of when the blinds were going up. If it was 2 minutes or less, I like this much more( looking at it now, this wasn't the case). Hmm, as I run through my reasons I'm not doing a good job of convincing myself. Most notably, I don't see any spectacular gains in future EV by making this shove here. So, if it's minus EV, I should just leave it at that very simple and clear fact and fold. I think the most important aspect of this decision was that I was overestimating the profitability of a shove with T9o in the first place. 

Awesome post man, thanks.  

Oh my goodness, this is powerful powerful stuff Yoren. I can't thank you enough for sharing it. I can see that it took some time to run through all of these scenarios and calculations. I wish I had gotten to responding to this sooner so that others would have a better chance of seeing it. This is valuable information for this example specifically, but the framework for addressing these situations is incredibly useful. 

Your conclusion that flatting QJo figures to produce more EV in general, and vs. the entire spectrum of potential villain ranges, is somewhat intuitive. Nevertheless, it's crucial to have mathematical confirmation of this intuition, as well as the exact numbers so one can see the degree to which one option is more profitable than the other. I imagine we can over-realize our equity quite often here, comfortably assuming that we'll play this postflop spot better than our opponent. As you said, it's a very playable postflop spot for us. How important do you think it is that we have a better idea of our range than our opponent has of ours? Is this even true? I imagine it must be, given that opening ranges Bvb are pretty easy to estimate to begin with, plus our HUD data will be useful here. From SB's point of view, he will have less sample on us defending the big blind, and more ambiguity in estimating our range for VPIPing here (villain's have very different tendencies in these spots) and with what hands we're flatting specifically. For example, I think most villains would assume we're reshoving QJo here pre. Are you concerned about a potential falloff in EV of our reshoving range by taking hands like QJo out of it? It seems like this would be an easy counter by including hands with similar equity vs SB's raise/call range, but have worse playability postflop. This assumption requires that SB knows our BB strategy, which isn't going to the case too often in MTT encounters. 

Mike, thank you for this awesome post. I very much appreciate it. Cheers man. 

Hey Moss! I'm glad you're liking my videos. I would also recommend Jason Koon, James Obst, and Steven Chidwick - they're some of my personal favorites. I haven't seen a video from every coach, so I'm sure I'm leaving out some quality stuff in my recommendations simply by not having had viewed it personally to this point.

In this specific spot, as well as almost all of the time in similar spots, I am folding this to any shoves. To be clear, that is I'm folding to shoves when villains have these stack sizes in this positions. The one possibility that would be very close was as you noted, if fankjeee shoved. I do thing this would be very close, as my initial read on him is that he's looser than most. That said I think it's be a bit too marginal/borderline/breakeven, and I'd prefer to fold and seek out opportunities in the future for more clear-cut situations where my correct action is more obvious, as well as situations that simply produce more EV for myself. If someone made a small reraise, there are definitely sets of circumstances in which I would peel. For me to want to peel, I'm primarily looking for two things: 1. A 3b size to about 2x my raise (4x the BB total) and 2. A villain who I think can both be wide for value with this size 3b, and also be bluffing sometimes. If his range is such, I think I can make money by taking my pot odds to call preflop, and getting it in on a fair amount of flops in which I flop some sort of equity. 

I agree with the small pairs, but not necessarily the suited connectors. The lowest SC I could imagine is T9s. This situation would is solvable relatively easily. I'll give you the tools to do so. The steps are: 1. Estimate villain's (fanjeee) shove range. 2. Use a program like this one to calculate our equity with KTs vs his (estimated) range. 3. Determine how much more it is for us to call, and what pot odds we're getting. 4. Using the chips we win/lose from the pot if we call and win or call and lose, and our equity when we call, we find a solution for how many chips we make (or lose) in this situation on the whole.  

I use it after when I'm reviewing my play and looking through hand histories. It's too involved of a process to do while playing, I find.