Benjamin Wilinofsky

On the five-diamond board, shouldn't our split for bluffs be unblocking the K, since the most frequent no-diamond betting hands in our opponent's range will have a K in them? Given how easy it is to have one diamond in your x/c range and how hard it is to have 0, I wouldn't be surprised if we just bluff all Qx.

I think it's important how you expect me to size my bets when you check here. It seems a lot easier for me to put chips in thinly with an optimistic bluff with some pair+draw hand than an optimistic call, but I'm not sure if you lose more value from getting a smaller bet in vs my worse value hands than you gain by picking off bluffs with pairs.

Just kidding :P I've worked on learning how to use a HUD a couple of times and it's always fallen on the backburner.

The problem with MTTs (in addition to playing with lots of different people and not the same regs all the time) is that they aren't consistent. You are really playing several different poker games, so you have hands from, for instance, pre-ante full-ring deep, post-ante full-ring deep, pre-ante full ring shallow, post-ante full ring shallow, pre-ante shorthanded deep, post-ante shorthanded deep, pre-ante shorthanded shallow, post-ante shorthanded shallow, and then bubble and FT play in all of those when villain is short, medium, and deep stacked. There is simply no way to filter for relevant hands on the fly, so, while you can get a general sense of whether someone is tight or loose, your sample is a) distorted heavily by changing game conditions and b) never going to reach a relevant size for any one of those game conditions before the metagame changes significantly.

TL;DR

I think x/r > b > x/c on the turn. You have one of the best hands in your range to bluff with and it's really hard for anyone to call twice. I think betting gets close to x/r just because someone having the chance to check back AJ twice is pretty terrible for you, but someone almost always bets turn after flop checks around

I think flatting flop is superior since you have a bunch of draws that are too marginal to get in but too strong to r/f?

B/decide turn, it's a good card for your range so he can't really x/r that much and he has a bunch of hands with 10+ outs that you need to get value from. I'm going back and forth on folding or continuing if he x/r, on the one hand he shouldn't be x/r much since your range is so strong and he reps so narrow, on the other hand a lot of his diamond draws have enough equity that they're pretty likely to GII on the flop OOP. Who the BB is is pretty important here, and I've never played with villain, so you'd know better than me how frequently he flats vs 3b his AdMd and AdLd hands.

I don't know villain but he sounds French and I'd expect him to have way more J9/T8 than he should peel out of the SB (the unsuited combos, basically) and the board has a trillion draws so he's not always going to fold a pair if you rip it. Just call, you're getting a good price and you have position and can bluff sometimes and value bet kind of thinly if you think it's appropriate. Plus tournament life!

1% of your stack 600 BBs deep is a lot different from 10% of your stack 60 BBs deep. The biggest consideration you cited, as far as I could tell, was that when he calls and you win, he'll be tilted and you'll be deep and on his left, which is a good spot to be in. Your calculations had him calling the turn jam and you winning around 1/8 times, right? Or "momentum," which I guess was your word for not wanting to adjust to the way people were adjusting to you? You seem to have a pretty good idea of how the table is going to react to you losing this pot, I don't know why you're so opposed to counter-adjusting and insist on trying to force the game into a state where people are folding to you more.

I also offer coaching, you can send me a private message here for more details.

Really shocked that after finding out that your play is 7.5 BBs worse than the alternative you're still entertaining the possibility that it's better it for some tournament considerations. I'm not sure there are any tournaments in the world with a slow enough structure, high enough probability that no one involved will be moved, large enough edge, etc. to ever burn that much equity for future considerations. And I love doing stuff like this way, way more than most people.

I think you can just bet an amount that he feels uncomfortable raising his draws over/comfortable calling them. I'd either go with the livepro classic 10600, or 10K straight. They're big enough to keep your range looking strong and small enough for him to peel with marginal draws. He's also probably seeing the river with all his Jx and Qx hands. Bomb every river and expect him to fold >60% of his range to a 3/4 PSB.

Sure, it sucks when he x/jams turn, but I find it incredibly unlikely that it costs us more equity than 7.5 BBs

I'm almost certain if he has queens and decides to continue, he's going to shove and hope to get hero to fold AK. He's cold 5-betting 1/3rd of his stack over an UTG open, flatter, squeezer and cold 4-bet. He just has it.

A couple of hands that you said were easy shoves: A2o and QJo in the SB against a tight player. What do you think his calling range is and what do you think his re-shove frequency is?

I would be shocked if shoving the A2o shows a greater profit than r/f against this player for 13 BBs, same with the QJo. While shoving those hands might be optimal against someone with a wide GII frequency I think you can happily chuck hands that marginal into your r/f range against someone that is never getting in K9o etc. given the circumstances. You later r/f 45s with similar stacks to the QJo hand, but I'm pretty sure against this player's calling range they won't have significantly different equity.

Why does his small flop raising range make you more likely to lead strong hands?

3 BBs is an extremely high expectation for one hand of poker pretty much regardless of format. In a form where you only start with 40 BBs it's crazy good. I think the more important issue is how wide his UTG opening range is. Most UTG ranges don't have a lot of hands that want to 4-bet/fold to a small 3-bet in position. You have to put a lot of weight into your image to make it a likely play, and he has to be paying lots of attention on a Sunday for that to work. I'd recommend just flatting the first raise and going on from there.

I think pre is close between folding and calling the 4-bet (it's obviously a 3-bet), and flop is close between folding and calling. We'd need to put a lot of weight onto the 97o hand to make the tighter decisions either pre or on the flop. Given that it's only one hand and that it belies a not very advanced thought process, I wouldn't tend to get overly fancy here and I'd just default to the GTO decision to call flop and fold turn.

If he's calling 97o then it's pretty unlikely he has 4-bet bluffs here that want to barrel this turn. It's a pretty bad card for him to try to get you to fold a hand on and you're at pretty much the stone bottom of your bluffcatching range, right? I'm assuming you get to turn with mostly TT+ and NFDs and flat most of your suited Tx that might be inclined to hood it up when he 4-bets flats the first time anyways.

All that being said, he sounds like an idiot and you have a pair higher than all of the cards on the board and you lose to 18 combos plus random 7x so I wouldn't fault you for calling down (plus extra bullets make everyone extra stupid!)

Your hand isn't less face up as a weak one-pair hand if you bet 1/6th pot rather than check and you would have to be leading this flop an insane insane amount for this to be the top of your river range when you check. I wouldn't hate a call now but your river bet accomplishes absolutely zero. Think about his range for a second and how narrow his range of worse one-pair hands is to begin with.

I haven't followed your match that much and haven't played PLO with Viktor. How much 8x does he expect you to get past the turn with? I assume you're jamming a lot of 8JT and maybe even 8TQ 8JQ hands on the flop? If that's true, most of your 8x would be 8x with clubs. Seems like if you don't have many 8x without clubs or overpairs without clubs on the river, it's a decent spot for Viktor to jam his big club hands that airballed. If you don't expect him to have weak KK and weak 8x based on the flop sizing then I think you should call.

Why did you bet the river?

In the hand at the end of the video, you say that his bet sizing is transparently a hand that wants to get to the river cheaply when he bets that small, which is bad, but then you let him get to the river cheaply with a hand that has 5 outs against yours and you take a line where you have 0 bluffs against what you said was obviously marginal SDV. What alternative lines do you think you could take to exploit his sizing better? Personally, I think turn is a pretty trivial lead for a lot of reasons, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts on what else you could have done here.

Hey Jason,

When you had JTo in the SB vs Amak, you spoke a lot about possible pre-flop permutations, but earlier in the video you mentioned that Amak is very capable postflop. What do you think the expected value of the permutations where he flats is? What sort of range do you think he's continuing with when you lay him >4:1 here to peel one off?

Hey Phil;

At around 20 minutes you flop top 2 with no redraws on K75 two-tone. You spend a lot of time talking about the turn bet size but didn't say much about betting a little less than half pot on the flop. Can you discuss your flop sizing a bit please?

Bet the river much smaller than this so you can be excited about calling when he jams. If you make it closer to 46.5K you look like you're thin value-ing 88-TT and he's going to be less inclined to call with A-high and more inclined to bluff with it.

Turn is a really interesting spot that we need more information to make a good decision on. I think I like betting more than checking principally because it makes it harder for him to v-bet thinly on the river (unimproved with a ten, or when he improves to a jack, for example). I also think the metagame doesn't involve much turn raising; if we knew villain would raise sometimes with KJ/J9/AJ hands I think this spot becomes a real headache, and someone with a decently balanced turn raising range might move this into our flop x/f range.

What do you think of the merits of x/r/f? Villain has a pretty wide range of SD + 2 overs hands that are getting pretty close to the correct price to peel when we bet this size, especially when 89 is going to bluff us on a K river. I'd expect a lot of floats to bet and shrug-fold turn because his range has a lot of Qx in it. Are we costing ourselves too much against his Qx/stubborn Tx hands and giving up too much equity when he decides to check back K9?

I think with stacks the way they are you should be leading the flop. You can comfortably get all in against the fish over three streets (or Dominik if the run-out dictates). I think you have a much tougher time stacking the fish when you x/r than when you bet without some specific history that will make him think you're x/r this flop light. I think checking is good against competent aggressive regs who are going to barrel more thinly and battle sometimes if you elect to x/r.

While you're losing the chance to get a bet trapped if fish c-bets and Dom calls, I think you're losing that value by handcuffing both players by being the third man into that spot, whether it's calling or raising.