PepeLePew

Incidentally, 5 street bluffing would allow for 81x our flop bet on the river (assuming we pot every street). That's some pretty deep stacked toy gaming :)

Definitely interesting how three streets (or four depending on whether or not you count preflop as a street) in big bet flop games already allows for huge pots and lots of early street bluffing. I actually wonder, for those who have more experience in two street games like 5CD NL and 72SD NL, how do you feel about the balance of those games compared to NLHE or PLO?

It's kind of a thought experiment I have with myself occasionally. If we were to try to create the most strategicly balanced form of poker WRT made hands and draws, bluffing and semi-bluffing etc, what would it look like? Community cards or not, hi-lo or just one way hand strength, how many streets, what betting structure (this would have to go hand in hand with the rest of the game rules)? Obscure concept I guess, but I just always wonder which factors make a poker variant appealing or unappealing to different types of players.

Thanks, though really I didn't post how I got to those numbers.

@ bigfizsh: is the shortcut you're referring to, assuming 'b' the bluffing region of our flop betting range and 'v' our value betting portion on river and same size on every street, the following?

b = 1-v^3

In our example, that would give us:

b = 1-(2/3)^3
b = 1-8/27
b = 19/27

Had some trouble getting to this and probably the generalization only works if we bet the same on every street. For different sizings I guess we have to do reverse induction from river to flop to figure out the optimal contination frequency from one street to the next?

BTW, I found an interesting take away from these calculations is proof of a game theory consequence. Assuming we have a strict bluff catcher vs strict drawing dead air / unbeatable nuts situation, then the bluff catchers we continue with are 0EV on every decision point of the game tree. When reverse inducing though, it's clear that considering that getting to a future 0EV calling/folding spot costs a bet on the present street, then we have to be compensated for the investment. That compensation comes exclusively from villain checking the optimal part of his air to us, making that bet we called neutral. So essentially, as pointed out earlier ITT, we are exclusively dependant on villain having enough bluffs in his range that he has to give up with. If he doesn't then we are paying a premium on one street for the opportunity to flip for neutral EV on a future street, which is obviously always -EV.

I just thought it was interesting to stumble upon mathematical proof of this by hand. I'm sure it's obvious to anyone who's been less lazy than I in their study of game theory :) Just one little toy game and we get to special identities of flop frequencies WRT sizings, proof of the compounding bluffs effect and also a very clear illustration of why early street equities are far from the whole picture. I learned/confirmed a lot from the homework assignment so thanks to bigfizsh as well as OP for starting the thread :)

Reverse engineering from river and assuming Villain is barreling us with GTO frequency on every street (or attempting to) we need to demonstrate one of two things;

-accounting for indifference, villain's air should have EV = 0. So if his value has flop EV > 300 then we are better off always folding
-villain needs > 8 combos of air to make us indifferent with a pot size on the flop, which immediately makes our optimal strategy to just always fold.

I reverse engineered from river to turn (by which I mean did some very easy algebra with some difficulty) and found that villain is barreling 2 combos of T9 on river (fairly obvious) and 5 on turn (less obvious) in order to make our bluffcatcher indifferent and calling him 1/2 the time. At that point I got a bit lost and couldn't manage to go from turn to flop. Any tips? Is it very similar to the first step?

Not posting my work because it's fairly (needlesly) lengthy and messy but I got following EVs on the turn:

Assuming villain gets there with 8xT9 and 4xA2, we should have:

EV(air) = 0 according to indifference
EV(nuts) = 3001/2 (they fold turn) + 6001/4 (they call turn and fold river)
+ 1500*1/4 (they call turn and call river)
= 675

Overall Bettor's EV is thus:

EV = 2/3(0) + 1/3 x 675 = 225

Being a zero sum game, Caller's EV is 75.

Any tips on going from turn to flop? I feel a bit out of my depth figuring out the Bettor GTO value/bluff range on flop knowing the optimal turn range.

After some trouble, I get to 2/6 river bluffs, 5/9 turn bluffs and 19/27 flop bluffs. Considering villain gets to flop with 2/3 aka 18/27 bluffs, we should fold since his value range is >1/3 of his possible betting range. Therefore villain just bets pot with range and expects to always win 100. He does better if we don't fold. Do those numbers seem correct?

It's a really tough spot. Definitely agree the one tabling BTN is going to be FOS a ton (proof in the pudding with his A8s and then calling it off as well). How likely do you think it is that BB has previous history with BTN and has further confirmation that they're a fish? Also I noticed you didn't take into account our FE/Equity vs BTN. I mean it's negligeable kinda (though visibly he doesn't enjoy folding much) but can we treat this as a HU spot and be close enough when we're discussing < 4% equity edges?

great vid as always! Liked the sneak peek at the desktop wallpaper ;)

Thanks for the answer Owen, and sorry for my incredibly later reply. Didn't notice it in my feed + took some holidays. Definitely agree with all your points. Was mostly musing on how to adapt to tough tables and noticing Greenwood bros and other highstakes regulars tending towards more "appropriate" sizings pre and post. You're 100% right that this is not applicable to most situations unless we're a baller or applying awful table selection :)

My personal approach is generally to kind of vary my betsizes (even in weaker fields) according to effective stacks and how flatty (and multiway) the table tends to be, ICM problems of potentially being OOP on FT vs a sticky opponent, whole bunch of factors. Sometimes it creates a goofy meta where people imagine it's somehow related to hand strength or something they misread in the spot, but overall I feel like it's a good thing to give preflop sizing at least some thought as long as it's (mostly) not a question of holding.

Great first video George! Complete novice at this game, but I was surprised to see how easy it was to intuitively follow with some experience in razz. Really cool that you got added to the team and I think this vid struck a perfect balance.

Would you be comfortable sharing your imperfect ranges? :p
In all seriousness, that's probably a bit too kinky a confession even for RIO. Wouldn't mind if you'll go there, but I think anyone would understand if you won't ;)

People defending very wide in today's games (at least good regs, a bunch of fish have always done this) is more a question of getting rid of a previously common leak. I mean, at least to me, my perception is usually "ah this guy is defending correctly". Definitely agree it means we have to consider some of our holding as stronger than we have in the past and also pressure harder than we used to on certain runouts. Also means low card boards are not as awesome as they used to be as people flat way more 4xs combos. Still I feel like all these things are just us playing correctly vs someone who is playing correctly (contrary to before when everyone was crazy nitty in BB).

A thought I've been having recently which is way less sexy than postflop adaptation though... if people are getting used to what they should be flatting vs a minraise or 2,2x raise, do they defend correctly vs 2,5x? I mean sure this makes our steals considerably more expensive, but given dead money in the middle it's more incremental than it seems and if their calling range drasticly drops we should probably just be doing this. At some stack depths it also makes 3bets more awkward for villains because they're giving us a good 4bAI spot. I mean, preflop sizing is an area where we can take people out of their comfort zones and if the whole tiny steal strategy just isn't working like it used to, maybe it's just because it was always partly incorrect and exploiting BB. Sure playing a bunch of spots in position is good for us but maybe giving > 4:1 odds to BB isn't optimal in no limit.

For instance, often we'll have option A which is raise our usual 2-2,25x sizing but our hand flats poorly and BB is flatting wide or option B which is shove say 20bb because it's a +EV shove. It's not wild to imagine a villain whose flatting range vs 2,5x drops enough to make us happy while his reshipping range is tight enough to warrant a fold. Possibly rare-ish scenario. Just as a general rule though, there's a bunch of ways I think actually raising bigger than the field post antes into good regs or just (correctly) loose competition can work out in good ways for us.

I'd love to continue optimizing preflop risk/rewards as much as the next guy, but if we're butting heads with the competition to a degree where we are let down by this strategy more often than not, maybe the time is coming to worsen EV when a steal goes through in order to improve how often it actually does.

Thoughts?

Ah thanks a bunch. Felt like the 2p equity needed some severe skewing but I don't have your DB to work with :) So it seems even considering antes and small raises, with our value region EV dropping drasticly, villains who fire flops at a high clip pretty much crush any attempt to exploit we make. I guess this makes intuitive sense because well... we're defending low equity garbage so our R vs high cbettors doesn't help us out much and our bluffing opportunities are rare. So unless they're checking a vast majority of air this is definitely not the way we exploit this profile.

I tend to find very high cbettors check very strong on say... the obvious culprit flops like Axx, Kxxr etc. These same villains tend to check extremely weak on T9xss and the like because they're not exerting pot control much if at all, and have very few sensible traps. Would your experience mirror this? I know you're a CG player and really, at least today, people at your stakes don't really foam at the mouth when they see three and just bet because well... that hasn't worked for a while now.

So... I've done some tinkering with the Excel sheet you shared. Supposing we're playing MTT, obviously without rake, and under the fairly pessimistic conditions of .10bb antes at a 9handed table and us calling a minraise in the BB, having no flush equity, villain cbetting 75% and us stabbing for 1/2 pot as a bluff vs his missed cbets... we are printing money. I mean, we start losing money when villain folds less than 16,5ish% after missing a cbet, considering he's cbetting at a very high clip as is.

So pretty much antes and minraising would make folding anything bad because even the toughest villain isn't able to punish it? This seems crazy to me, even keeping an open mind. Does it seem reasonable to you? Do you get similar results? I mean, antes and small raises = we're definitely not looking to fold much. But these results are pretty extreme!

Is there a large deviation (and it needs to be large!) in hud stats against hero compared to overall hud stats?

I use HM2 and try to use this somewhat, in relation to 3b vs hero, fold vs hero steal etc. How much do you find yourself using this in-game? Like do you have vsHero specific pop-ups? Do you just study your opponents off the table to see if they are showing certain patterns against you?

This is one of the areas of the game where HUDs show the most limitation I think and I don't think it's a bad thing. I actually really like decyphering spots like "would he try this against ME", "does he realize I'd realize this is a bad spot to be light" etc. I just like to figure out what makes someone better at these things even if there is no straight answer.

Thanks for taking the time to answer everything as well as you are!

Also our fold to cbet numbers on his HUD are likely to be an collection of situations vs a variety of players so its unlikely that he would become aware of our exploit unless the entire player pool displayed the tendencies or we've played tens of thousands of hands against him.

Have all of my RIO hearts, could only give two. On this subject, how do you deal with playing better than this? Do you watch showdowns like a hawk and trust your intuition? It's really not an easy task, determining how much a reg is playing vs us differently than they are vs the field. Our HUD sadly only gives an answer to the latter. I'm particularly eager about this because again... MTT player. Knowing how someone plays vs the field is near useless once they know that I'm not the field and have a pretty good idea that I know as much about them too.

For example... we notice reg X seems to not follow through rivers enough because we see showdowns where they don't. OK cool except maybe he thinks villain was a calling station, or a "fun player" or just a random and his idea of the population tendency is that they're payoff wizards. So now we know what they don't do... vs some villain who isn't us. How long until we stop making weak folds vs them because we just don't know if they were exploiting and play us differently, or just don't bluff rivers enough?

I guess that's enough questions for one post but your thought process is generally so clear and grounded... want any advice I can get.

I get your meaning about board texture too. Like, on Q73r their low equity stabs will have less EV in the pot when they check than say.. 65hh on Th9d8d (maybe not the best stab example). So we should let them have it more on that board than on the former.

Of course, but its closer to 38% for a 1/2 pot cbet rather than 33% (toy game 1- A). It may even be lower because his weakest hands like 54o, 65o, and 64o should rarely improve enough on future streets to gain even a small fraction on the pot.

So essentially vs IP we should be check/calling somewhere in the 1-a to 0.85x(1-a) range depending on how airy their stab range is? Defending more if they stab very low equity. Is this in the ballpark of correct?

I tend to get the toy gaming aspects pretty well but get lost easily when applying to real game situations with equities involved. I'm a MTT player mostly these days but I think given overall small preflop sizings and inflated pots with antes, what you discuss in this video as well as some others is VERY relevant. That being said, it might be outweighed by the crazy high cbet% of a lot of tourney players.

thanks a bunch!

Blind vs blind you don't mention that IP has less of an incentive to bet as he has some guaranteed equity when he checks back. This is supposed to make us defend a bit less than 1-a OOP isn't it? We're making him indifferent to checking back positive EV, not folding his hand so we should be OK with him making some money when he bets, shouldn't we?

Calling ranges are a lot harder than shoving ranges, since we can shove regardless of opponents with a bunch of hands. We can do better by shoving even more vs weak opponents or r/f instead of shove but overall, unexploitable shoves are always a winning decision at the very least. Now calling... Calling takes crazy amounts of experience. I really like the way John plays around with ranges to figure this out and it really is more of an artform than a science since our opponents DO matter in this case. I mean sure, we can call and spew vs an overly tight range and say we compensate when they walk us too often but the fact is we lose a big pot or bust. Also GTO calls ensure we can't lose vs an opponent's overall strategy, but nitting it up vs a nit ensures that we do win vs their strategy because they miss EV by walking us AND don't get the EV they deserve with their good hands by shoving too little.

All of this is obvious I guess, but just wanted to point out how difficult of an art calling correctly is, and how relevant it is. Calling incorrectly is a mistake and it's not a minor one in my opinion.

Right, I actually meant EV. No idea why I said equity :) All that being said, do you just go by experience/feel for this? I mean, there's a bunch of common sense ways of weighing pros and cons of options, which is something I think is fantastic. Phil does this a ton for instance and I don't mean to say it isn't a super valuable way to approach decisions.

Let's take the AQ example. It's usually kind of easy to put villain on a gii range and figure out what our 4b EV is from there given FE + equity vs their shoves. Do you ever feel like you have as much confidence in the EV of calling? We often use common sense to say calling is better (and it's definitely easy when 4b/gii is just plain bad vs a tight 5bettor) and in a lot of instances we kind of fit one decision or the other into our overall range and see which way is best for our range as a whole.

I just feel like as a general rule, I can know pretty firmly that aggressive option A leading to playing stacks pre or post will have a given EV. When I decide that more passive option B will have a higher EV, I rarely feel quite as confident as I'm generally going with what makes sense but haven't really confirmed with raw data or straightforward math.

We generally say for instance to avoid 3betting good single raised pot hands, which totally makes sense and is kind of a big disaster for our overall range if we do it more than a small fraction. We also say if villain is folding some excessive amount then at some point of weak exploitability on villain's part, then maybe just winning money pre supercedes taking a flop vs them. How do we decide where this point lies though?

TL;DR with more proper linguo: how do we get some confidence in the ACTUAL EV of the more passive option given it complicates the gametree to a pretty crazy extent, so simple math simply doesn't come close to giving the answer?

shameless bump?

This is definitely true, but I don't think it accounts for the night and day difference in graphs. I mean... those rebuy graphs look like SNGs which doesn't seem right to me, specially given the FO graphs. In any case, if these graphs are entirely accurate I don't understand why anyone with this run would bother with FOs whatsoever. Just open accounts on more rooms and print money variance-free on rebuys no?

Well either they have terrible game selection and should clearly stop playing FO tournaments or your read on how SS accounts for rebuys seems correct. It's not always easy to extrapolate a ton of stuff from results. Do you know these regs? Are they particularly LAG or would you have a reason to think they would more or less follow the "rebuy until you have 5x average" strategy in rebuys? I definitely agree with you that the disparity between the FO and rebuy results on these samples is a tough sell with this sample size... Do you have any idea what the average rebuy value tends to be? If we know we can find how much we need to skew them from the mean for their rebuy results to be in the same ballpark as the rest, should give some idea of how realistic that is.

yea remember that hand :)

I remember a previous vid (think it was a previous one) where Phil got a "lol so bad" before an opponent left :)

around 23:30, would the word you're looking for be "aggregate"?

Cool vid series so far!

Totally agree with this. Balance is progressively less important on later streets because of lack of history. It's not impossible to spot (likely) river imbalances in mtts on smallish samples (from a couple of showdowns for instance) but we need to be careful. Villains can be playing mixed strategies either intentionally or unintentionally (wasn't feeling it so didn't bluff for example). Also it's not easy to tell if someone value bets too wide or bluffs too little on a given river because their opponent is a perceived CS, or because they're just bad.

It's definitely way way easier to spot preflop and flop imbalances because larger samples and also because people tend to play these streets in a much more automatic fashion (i.e. they just follow their default gameplan, mostly). People are wrong to do this, as we're obviously saying they should be exploiting a lot on these streets, but it is what most randoms do. Some guy told them it's good to steal blinds, so they raise 90% OTB. Some guy told them it's good to resteal so they just shove any garbage, assuming your friend told you to raise 90% OTB. They heard cbetting is fun etc.

Not sure how much John's experience at the tables will mirror this but it's what I've observed in most softish fields. So yeah we should definitely be more wary of our own play on these streets. Even fun players notice we raise their BB constantly, or cbet every flop. One thing I've noticed though, fun players have a fairly biased recollection of spots. They will remember us betting or raising, but typically checks or give ups don't register all that much. For instance I recently played a live tourney where on day 2 I just gave up a bluff on the river, slightly regretting my turn barrel when I saw how little credit I had. Villain proudly announced they were calling river with bottom pair, because they play the player. They proudly announced this after I specificly did not bet as a bluff, making their logic moot to a significant extent. So they noticed I bet flop and turn with a bunch of cheese, but my lack of follow through on the river did not leave a mark and did not change their line of reasoning.

Actually as a general strategy, the following works quite well vs randoms: if you're always taking a lot of cheap stabs, they will notice this. Therefore they will get stupidly stuborn when you empty the clip. It's a very old fake LAG strategy that works incredibly well live (people get more proud) and still works really nicely online. It means we have to be wary of multiple street bluffs vs randoms with SDV though. "But it's the first time ever that I 3barrel" isn't an excuse. The reality is they saw you bet a ton of flops, they saw you bet a bunch of turns. It's pretty reliable that unless they're actually good, they actually didn't see you check, ever. It just doesn't seem to record, like by default checking and to an extent folding are non-actions. Again, curious to see if others will mirror this experience.

Happy to make you happy. As a former teacher and current coach (and player first obv) I know how much feedback can mean. I think you're an excellent teacher, for what it's worth. Honest and always aware of your limitations, consciencious and so willing to participate in discussions. I don't think anyone on here would say you should question your teaching abilities or natural inclination. If you keep with the attitude you've always shown, even way back in your 2+2 first well discussions, I don't see how you wouldn't continue to be one of the most formative content makers out there for pretty much any level.

WRT to your choice to make videos like these in variants you don't feel like a solid authority on, I don't think you should worry. I can't speak for everyone, but I think most of us probably value your thought process considerably more than your ability to give the holy "this is the play" answers. I'm pretty sure as a whole, RIO is about learning to fish (hurrhurr) considerably more than being given already filet'd lines so it's not all that relevant whether or not your play is the best ever. Would I trust Lissandro over you in S8 or razz as far as having the answers? Probably. Would I still want to compare my approach to the game and yours? Most definitely!

Great post Zach ! Even someone who's never played PLO8, or any omaha variant, could understand your points perfectly. Really admire the ability to verbalize that well in poker.

Also thanks for these Phil, it's really fun to see you try to grasp the subtleties of a variant you're not confident in. Your thought process particularly in PLO type games is always such a joy to follow. Anytime the grind feels like a grind, just need to watch you mull over options for a half hour and I remember that poker is only routine if we make it routine, and that usually means we're playing poorly and for sure aren't improving in any areas. And congrats on the wedding of course!

Your reaction was definitely fairly blunt ^^ Would like to have Sam's opinion about the spot though, I feel like maybe he discounted over-limping as a viable option. Btw James, really like your thought process wrt to meta and just your general game so far. I should get around to watching more of your older videos!