ClouD

Why are gold diggers socially accepted and prostitution isn't? Give the same activity another name and suddenly many people develop a different opinion on the matter.

If anything the capability of buying hands gives everyone equal chances to analyze their opponents better. If it wasn't possible the guys with better social capabilities would be rewarded in a vastly superior way. So if we want poker to be a game were the most skilled players in the actual game are rewarded then hand histories should be available to everyone.

If there was a way to prevent everyone from sharing databases it would be a better solution because it would greatly improve the longevity of many poker ecosystems. But of course that's not possible.

Oh yeah and before you ask I play freerolls with the occasional nl2 when I'm feeling lucky. My winrate is approx. 1.75 ev bb/100 over a 60k hand sample.

I've never seen a tighter defending range in my whole life. Also who folds to 4bets 65%? Even if there are players who do they will instantly notice that you will 4bet them 30% of the times and they will most likely react with some random spazz. And your bluff 4bet range plays bad vs spazz.

Hey Nick, have you made available graphs and feedbacks of your students before and after they have taken the program?

On that board there are definitely several reasons to raise a portion of the 8x, especially the ones without a spade. pls.

Would you mind giving us an insight of his plausible thinking process in this hand? Did he figure out he gave a read and adjusted consequently or did he just get a read from your action?
Turn cbet seems very uncommon aswell and it isn't a great hand to induce a bluffshove with gutshots.

you sure know how to properly ask a question

It depends a lot on which hands you raise on the flop. If you get on the river with enough bluffs that don't block any flushdraw then use those. If you only have FDs then this combo you have is ok to bluff with. Remember that readless you want to balance value/bluffs for your betsize and if you don't have better bluffing hands you don't have much of a choice.

Yes please a video on how you approach multi street planning would be great

You are asking somebody else a question only YOU can answer. There are many unsatisfied pros and there are some who still make millions.
Will your effort be able to guide you to the situation you desire for yourself? How can somebody on a forum answer this question...

:)
Great video, the different models on PIOsolver helped a lot having a better understanding of the situation.
Many players, including myself, get often lost in the notion that they should either play a GTO strategy or always have perfect exploitative adjustments. Yet it's not so simple and having a clear understanding of the variables in play eventually helps choosing the right mindset at the right time.

Agreed on the hand choice part. If we straightforwardly 3barrel AJ+ we should have around 35 combos of value on this river and bluff 12 combos when shoving. The amount of air we have here changes drastically if we 3bet QTo and QJo. QTo is a bad choice for 3barrel while QJo has slightly less ev than 5c4c.
However as zaza said BU has a relatively easy time on this river (around 60% trips+ in his range) and it doesn't seem a spot where we expect too much fold equity. So even though 5c4c is a great 3barrel hand we have to be careful to control our frequency and not to bluff most our QJo and definitely never bluff any QTo.

It's unfortunate that snowie is solving only for these sizes because right now there are many situations where we know betting ~1/3 pot is better and easier to play than 1/2 or pot , and also smaller overbets than 2x pot also seem common nowadays.
Preflop advice for a 100bb game must be really solid though, maybe it's worth looking at if we want to use a mixed strategy from SB. But then again not sure how much it's worth since below nl1k rake becomes a significant portion of the pot and a bit too relevant if we start limping and flatting a lot.

This is a great HU video format, wish it was possible to make more of these.

Interesting question. Is it really worth splitting your range on the flop as a non exploitative strategy? Complicating the game tree on all future streets for a tiny bit of EV gain on the flop (if all subsequent streets are being played correctly with all of our ranges) seems like overdoing things at this point in time.

Hey Ben, I know it's not strictly related to the video but I was wondering what is your thought about the zoom 500 pool. For example what do you think would happen if a player having a winrate at nl5k in today's games would drop down to 500 zoom: do you think he would crush it for 5bb+ or would it take him some time and lots of adjustments to have great results?
Also do you think some the guys playing the highest stakes in mixed games at the moment are also able to somewhat compete with the NLHE best players or do you think there's a gap in thought process, balance and bet sizings?

Alright it makes a lot of sense, thank you.

Great post. Even though I'm far from that category of stagnating players you described I am still very interested in what you said.
My longterm strat so far was trying to simplify decisions without making insanely hard exploits and be consistent in putting opponents in tough spots. But that's not the right way to rise up to 8-10bb winrates. You advise to go for the hard exploit line even though it could make our game overly complicated, which is very reasonable for anyone who wants to excel at what they do. I think that's a great approach for the times you know you are capable of bringing your best game to the table. Yet it requires an entirely different level of proficiency and that's why people like to stick to GTO. Humans are instintively drawn to certainty and that doesn't always work to our favor.

I don't even care about PLO but playing 40k without prior experience is badass (or crazy depending on personal preferece), that's why I loved this video. Nosebleed stakes footage is always the best!

Juan I have a question about your small blockbet valuebluff strategy. And maybe you can also clear some doubt about this also because Sauce too does it a lot (he likes it more on the river, you seem to use it more on the turn).
Basically when we bet small with a certain subsection of hands we willingly give our opponents the information our range is extremely capped to the hands that benefit from a small blockbet. I'm a relatively new player to midstakes so there's definitely something I'm missing but I don't understand how it can work favorably. If I were to face such a strategy I would just employ a very wide raising range with extremely big bets because that's what you are supposed to do against capped ranges. Sure then you can start mixing in some strong hands when I start doing that but then aren't you just complicating your game tree for very little value? Also you are giving your opponent the opportunity to make way more profit with value hands (as he can valueraise really thin) and have a wider and more polarized bluffing range, which should increases the overall EV of his turn or river betting range (?).

So do you just do it because people don't react properly or you think it's perfectly fine and you are not worrying about being put in difficult situations?

Thanks for the quick answer. Even though you say there isn't an answer the logic you are giving here is pretty straight forward: MTTs are more profitable because with the same amount of commitment and quality of work a tournament player can compete in higher games (hence win more) than a cash player.
I'm a winning reg at cashgames but I was always considering if I should switch to or mix MTTs because they seem so soft comparably. Perhaps that would be the wisest choice (and I guess that's also why you decided to switch).

Hey Chris, I've been watching your videos for some time now and since now you switched discipline I wonder what you think is more profitable. Cashgame or MTT?

I play on pokerstars.it where regulars are much worse and some of them have high fold to 3bet. From my experience people adjust to fold to 3bet rather quickly (maybe not optimally, but they still 3bet a lot more) but of course this statement is not worth much.
What makes me think this exploit has to be done partially is that there were many people opening the button a lot (60+ RFI) in the near past and this strategy almost completely died out in recent games. If it's a profitable trend my guess is that people would still be using it.

Liked before watching.
Spammed without regret.

What.
Wtf?
Nobody defends these frequencies on any stake. Except whales?
Anyway the exploit you are advocating is so high frequency that even the worse regulars in the field will be able to adjust to our high fold to 3bet. Wouldn't it be just better to be as loose as possible without overfolding to 3bets?

edit: reread original post. Excellent thread, superb necromancy skills~

You picked very interesting hands, I would definitely like to see more of this

Hey Ben, great to see another vid.

10:45 left table don't you think your river betting range benefits more from a huge overbet (possibly all in)?. Ideally I would guess we should have mainly two sizes there and if we are trying to represent a nutted hand and our range is extremely polarized shouldn't we bluff with all of our stack? I think Tyler Forrester just analyzed a similar situation with PIOSolver in his latest video and I believe the program suggested to overbet the river.

I am just wondering what your thought is on the situation and if you have an opinion about trying to implement a more overbet heavy strategy. Also exploitatively it appears to me that it might open up more room for mistakes as the caller.

Welcome Mikhail, it's great to have you here. AJFenix often said on his livestream you were one of the best (if not the best) in the zoom 200 pool playing many spots differently from most regs and it's cool to see how you approach the game.
I enjoyed this video a lot and especially the way you explained your thought process. You are good at this format and I am happy to know you will be doing more live play videos in the future.

Also props for your great english, I have many russian friends who speak it well but you are the best I've seen so far!

Your joke wasn't very funny because I think someone mentioned this before but will there ever be RIO hoodies in the store? Phil was wearing one I think sometime last year, and a RIO member asked about it and someone said it'd be out but it hasn't. I'm curious as to if they will show up in the store someday? :)