CreepyHawking

Apocalypse: Ok, you know, that's a valid point, but then the whole business about "recapturing the intiative" is an exploitive move, designed to exploit the onus that villain puts on the initiative. Are we sure we are really exploiting villain when we do this?

With guys like this I really look at how light they call rivers

Can you say specifically what stat you look at? Is it "saw showdown", "won at showdown", "called river bet", or something else?

Yeah, I really need to buy Odds Oracle. (And then I can play around with PJ. It looks awesome and you certainly take it out on tours de force.)

I think the difficult thing to analyze here is not so much villain's range, but rather our own ranges OTT and OTR and, consequentially, how wide we have to bluffcatch. I find it particularly hard to do this estimation because I don't know hero's 3bet range here.

This is a really tough spot. I'll try to write down my confused thoughts.

Firstly, I don't like 3b here this deep with these weak aces.  My 3bet range OOP is actually almost 0% this deep.

OTR I'm probably not good enough to fold, even if fold is correct. We have so few bluffcatching candidates that are better than our hand, and that makes me uncomfortable.

Let's think of what our bluffcatching range should look like. Definitely any Kxxx:hh. And definitely Kxxx:Ah. Then we need to choose between KA hands and nut flush hands. I'm not sure what's better. It probably depends on how wide villain's value range is OTR.

Does villain value bet flushes OTR here? I would probably bet many flushes OTR. Maybe all flushes. But I wouldn't size it so large, so there's that. So if we think villain can't vbet flushes with this sizing OTR, then we should be bluffcatching mostly with Kxxx hands. And if we think villain is vbetting flushes OTR with this sizing, then we should probably be bluffcatching with our current hand.

But how does our range even look? OTT we have many AA hands and we have some high card hands, many of which contain KA. But then we c/f at least some of them on this bad turn. So the range we get to the river with is actually pretty heavy in flushes, and probably pretty poor in Kxxx hands. Which indicates that we might not even have enough Kxxx hands to bluffcatch with OTR.

Maybe ZenFish will do some analysis here, it's a really interesting spot. Overall, I think bluffcatching here must be at least fine. But I'd love to hear other opinions.

20:00 (the AJ76 hand where we call down): Tom's comments are hilarious. I agree that folding the turn is best: Not because we expect to be behind right now, but because we're not doing well vs villain's range equity-wise and our visibility is very poor.

However, once we get to the river, I think we can't fold. Villain is repping a set, a straight, or maaaybe an optimistic A8. On the other hand, our range is very capped: we rarely have a straight or a set and the flush missed, so villain has a great barreling spot with his entire range. Especially given our blockers, I think we have to call the river.

@ZenFish : thank you. Couldn't have said it better myself.

@Zenfish :
I tend to disagree that villain wouldn't x/r trips much:

- I think villain can use low trips as a good semibluff. Hero doesn't have JT or JJ in his range, so villain has decent equity with low trips, and villain will get us to fold various draws that still have equity. Villain can also hope to get us to fold weak trips ourselves (case in point: many people ITT advocate folding top trips).

- villain might be checking a hand like TQ because he figures it's hard to get called by worse. And then when it gets back to him he looks, sees he wants to continue with the hand, and realizes that rivers will be hard to play OOP, so he just raises. I agree it's not a good play, but a multitabling reg can easily make this bad play.

Overall, I think these options are overall way more likely than villain showing up with JJ or JT here.

I think most villains never have a boat here. I mean: is he checking with JJ or JT on this semi-wet and semi-heavy flop, hoping that one of the two players behind him will stab into four players? Or, on the turn, is he checking a vulnerable T3 boat? I think he'll very rarely have JJ or T3 here, and he could certainly have KQJT or QJT9 but those are very few combos as well. I think mostly he'll have Txxx, or a combo draw like KQ:hh. (Note that he knows you almost never have a boat either, so a hand like KQ:hh is doing reasonably well even vs the value part of your range.)

I wouldn't fold here. I'd probably just shove, to get value from combo draws.

You can't possibly fold here. The three spades on the board block incredibly many of villain's flush combos, so you're good an overwhelming fraction of the time.

Put a 24% range in pokerstove and check what you get: The only combinations that the board doesn't block are ATs-A2s and T9s (and I guess lower suited connectors, if he opens those in MP). That totals at around 10 flush combos. On the other hand, he has more than 40 combos of Tx in his preflop range, so even if he check-raises the river with 1/3 of these, you have to call, and that's before putting *any* bluffs in his range.

About #3:

3) When you arrive to river it is optimal  arriving there with an
effective potsized bet left. Reason for that is because you do not need
to make an overbet to be allin, and you do not have to risk having money
left after betting and therefore having more difficult to create
optimal ranges because the risk of being raised.

This is wrong, IMO. It is true when you're IP. But when OOP, having a river SPR of 1 actually harms you, because you can't x/r big, so your positional disadvantage is icnreased.

midori says:

I totally agree with the last paragraph.  Unfortunately, this approach cannot be applied to earlier streets :(

why?

maybe we can't do it in PQL right now, but it is mathematically well-defined: we calculate the equity of our actual hand vs villain's range, and we calculate the set of equities of all the hands in our range vs villain's range, and we see how the former ranks inside the latter.

Zen, where do you get these numbers from? Is it a program you wrote yourself, or is there a resource available online? I wrote my own python script to do this, maybe I should post it if there's nothing freely available.

Fun video. One comment, though: this business of "re-capturing the initiative", especially in the last hand (but not only in it) is tilting me. This vid is from a year ago, so I hope you realized by now that the initiative is a made-up and meaningless concept. You're in position, what else do you need? I don't see any reason we'd want to have "the initiative", at a cost of lowering the SPR IP. If you're making small 4-bets for balance reasons, go right ahead, that's fine; but "re-capturing the initiative" is not a reason, IMO.