Ph33roX

Hey guys, gonna share some numbers I ran.

I think that at an SPR of 0.78, a nut flush and a baby flush are both nut hands for all practical purposes. 98 and sets are then near-nut hands.

I don't think that the fact that hero has more nut flushes can make up for the fact that he has overall less flushes, and less near nut hands. Like Phil has stated, this is definitely a spot where hero has a real range disadvantage.

I gave villain a 15% 3betting range in position excluding AA. I gave hero a 4.5% 4bet range. On the flop, I have split each player's range into 6 categories:

A - Nut Flushes
B - Lower Flushes
C - Sets
D - Straights
E - Two Pairs
F - Everything Else

here is the range distribution for Hero:

And here is the range distribution for Villain:

It's 27% vs 22% when comparing flushes and 38.6% vs 25.6% when comparing sets or better.

I ran some numbers for when villain holds KQJ9 with the queen of spades. So just a naked gutter and a blocker.

If he shoves the flop and hero defends with 2P+ and any top pair or overpair with a 2nd nut or nut blocker [ 76+,T+:(As,Ks) ], then hero is defending 57% of his range and the EV of villain's shove would be 883$. That's more than 100% of his equity in the pot which is 844$, and I think shoving is clearly better from his point of view under those assumptions.

It might be that KQsJ9 is just a very good bluffing hand, it might be that this calling range is just too tight for this SPR and it might be that hero's range is too weak to defend without lowering the stackoff standards to uncomfortable levels. It is probably a mix of all of the above.

If hero expands his range to call with any top pair or better with any spade, then hero is defending 68.6% of his range and the EV of villain's shove is 370$. We still haven't made the shove -EV, but we don't need to, because he might be better off checking and trying to realize equity at this point. We probably got him pretty close to indifference between checking and shoving (that's just my estimation) but it took some very light calls to get there.

I believe that villain should definitely have a healthy donkbetting frequency at this spot because he has a range advantage and a polarity advantage (if we accept my definition of nut and near-nut hands in this spot). Hero has a lot of bluffcatchers that want to see a free turn and I don't think it's in villain's best interest to allow hero to do that 100% of the time by checking his range on the flop.

I'm gonna study this spot some more over the next few days probably, would be happy to see what you guys think about some of the numbers I shared so far.

Even if you are going to make a thin fold vs a SB shove, it's still a bad idea not to bet the flop.

I would pot it and go with it. I'm not happy to get it in with the SB but we have enough evidence that his ranges are wide. Very happy to GII with UTG.

Whether or not you stack off vs SB won't change the EV of betting drastically since it's probably pretty close. It will remain pretty high regardless.

Very +EV spot to bet and call it off.

EdgeKing I don't know your screen name, you can share if you want.

AAKQhhdd is definitely at the lower end of villain's flop range because it doesn't have much backup equity or blockers.

If by good flop you mean above average, then yes this is a good flop for you. But you're not smashing it so hard that villain will go into checking mode with most of his range like he would on a J87ss board.

Synapse, the SPR on the flop is 2.2. I never said that SB is going to bet "near 100%", only that he can profitably bet/call with most of his range, i.e ore than 50%.

To verify this, I assumed villain would be able to profitably bet/call with 2p+, spades, J+ with a gutter, and AA with backdoor NFD + something (J 4, 8, As blocker). This comprises about 54% of his total range.

Preflop I gave you an 8% PokerJuice 3bet range and him a 3% PokerJuice 4bet range.

To verify that he can bet/cal all the hands in this range, I checked the EV for bet/calling a hand from the bottom of this range - AAK5dd no spades. I assumed you'll be stacking off perfectly vs his betting range, i.e, stack off with every hand that has enough equity. The EV of shoving this hand is 4 big blinds. So every other hand in his shoving range should be making 4 big blinds or more on a shove.

This is a good board for you, but not one that you are smashing. He still has 53% equity range vs range and given the SPR, he can still profitably bet/call most of his range. Different SPR would be a whole different story though, especially if he was OOP. This is when a board like this is REALLY good for you range vs range.

Villain can probably bet/call profitably here with most of his range. This board doesn't hit your range that hard. It doesn't mean you shouldn't have a leading range, only that it's not necessarily a spot where villain is ought to have a low cbet frequency.

Will probably chime in with some numbers later.

Sorry guys, I only now realized hero is holding the nut flush draw. Please disregard my previous comments in this thread.

We're ahead of pair+draw hands, but we're not crushing them. In most situations where you're either slightly ahead or way behind, your equity ends up being quite low.

The SPR when we get check-raised is quite high, so we need quite a bit of equity to stack off here. Will do some PJ work onthis later, but my intuition says this is a fold.

"How to be a Poker Player" is a very good book.

If you haven't read "The Mental Game of Poker" (both volumes), definitely grab those. They're an essential read.

I'd need a very, very strong read in order to stack off here against the turn check-raise. You are not doing well against a range of made hands and draws, simply because you're crushed by the made hands but you're not crushing the draws.

Don't have a lot of live experience, but I did come across an article about this subject on CardQuant. Here's the link.

Good luck.

Thanks, I was very happy to read that.

Indeed some good stuff coming up soon.

If anyone on RIO wants to suggest a topic for an article, you can use this thread or send me a private message. I love the community on RIO and would be very happy to do whatever I can for you.

Do you mean someone to watch his videos or someone who offers private coaching?

Kerith, you can check the likelyhood of trips by using the questions feature of PPT.

Give each player an approximate preflop range, then ask:

How often
at least one player
flop hand category is at least
trips

Well played hand if you folded against the bet and the call.

if I wanted to know the likelyhood of trips+ here (indeed a key stat for this hand) I would have used PPT rather than the method you used. But it's definitely better than nothing =)

Yep.

Odds Oracle can go a long way if you're on a budget. It's a one time fee.

PokerJuice has a monthly subscription, but in my opinion it is well worth the money.

You need Odds Oracle anyway to run PokerJuice, so i'll start there. You can try PokerJuice for a month for 1 Euro to see if it's a good fit for you.

Thanks man, it means a lot coming from you.

A couple of times a month usually. I should have a new post up tomorrow.

Thanks, much appreciated.

Some of the content can be easily read and understood even by beginners. A few of the articles might be a bit overwhelming for novices but I'm always available for questions if someone needs help.

Thanks for the kind words everyone. I am very happy to read your responses and it means a lot to me.

Thanks for the lengthy response Phil. Everything you said makes sense.

I think it's worth mentioning that if BTN bets with all his stackoff hands, and bets 30% of the time he doesn't have a hand from the stack off range we gave him, his overall betting frequency will be 57%.

If SB will shove with all his stackoff hands (42%), it means that the chance of the flop getting checked through is 0.58 (Chance of SB not flopping a SO hand) * 0.43 (Change of BTN not betting) = 0.25%. So most of the time we can expect our check/jam attempt to be successful.

If BTN chooses to check back the more marginal part of his stackoff range, we will see a turn more frequently. In that sense it matters how merged/thin BTN is willing to bet when checked to and not only how much he bets with air.

We seem to differ in our opinions on how "bad" it is when the flop gets checked through. Obviously hero always has a decent expectation when holding a nut draw, but since our nut draw is naked and doesn't have SDV, on too many turns hero's equity against a 3-way betting range drops below 30%, forcing him to fold his equity in the pot when facing a big bet.

The upside of betting the flop is that hero is never forced to fold his equity in the pot in any scenario. Given that folding equity at low SPR situations is costly, there's merit to taking a line that avoids it altogether whenever this line is viable.

Good point about BTN being able to peel and stack off on non-clubs. I think a good and rather simple exercise would be to test how much BTN gains by employing this strategy with a hand like KQ65 against hero's potting range.

I might take on this exercise if other people find it interesting as well.

Hey, Minute 3 of the video we have a 3-way 3bet pot with the NFD on 654cc:

I don't think hero will have much of a bet/folding range in that spot given that he's just not going to have enough fold equity. I will get to this later, but for now I want to talk about the EV of pot/calling.

I gave BB a preflop range of 15% (not top 15%, but a 15% OOP 3bet range comprised of high playability hands) excluding AA. We assume BB with his short stack will stack off with any 2pair, any FD and any pair+oesd (67,75,74 hands). This range is 42% of his preflop range.

BTN on the other hand opens 65% and will stack off tighter on the flop. He will only stack off with a flushdraw if he has a pair or a nut gutter to go along. Overall BTN stacks off with 39% of his preflop range.

Hero's equity for stacking off HU vs BB is 52% and his equity in a HU all-in vs BTN is 45%. Our equity in a 3way all-in is 36%. Overall we have good equity in every scenario and on top of that we have a 35% chance of both players not flopping a hand from the stackoff ranges I gave them - in which case they both fold and we win the pot. Now, 35% is a ton of FE when you have great equity when called, however with a hand that wants to bet/fold you're just not going to profit on a bet in this spot. Which in my opinion means that hero should be either bet/calling or checking.

Here is the EV calculation for pot/calling flop:

Hero nets 30.5$ on this line, which is actually higher that his equity share in the pot (25.5$). That means that hero realizes more than 100% of his equity by pot/calling. We can obviously play around with our assumptions (I'll be happy to follow input from people) but we can already see that potting here works pretty well with this hand in a vacuum.

The EV of checking is much tougher to figure out, but I think we can agree that the main point that we should focus on in our decision is how often BTN will bet when checked to with a hand that would otherwise just fold against our bet. But it has to be a decently high percentage of the time, or else we just sacrifice too much by allowing the flop to get checked through sometimes (as demonstrated by the result of this hand). As Phil mentioned in the video, our hand doesn't play great on turns - most of the time we turn nothing, which means not only our equity plummets but also our ability to realize it becomes much poorer.

Just thought about this some more so I'll add a few thoughts. The problem with raising all of our 3+ combos is that we make our check/calling range severely capped.

I gave us $FI20 - $3b8o,AA. On the flop, villain has a 55-45 equity advantage with his 6% 3betting range. However, we have 7% nutted combos (3+) while he only has 4%. On super dry boards, more nut combos can be leveraged quite nicely, but no so much at a low SPR. A hand like KQQ8 has 53% against villain's range, so folding it seems wrong if he's cbetting range. However, it would be pretty hard to get to showdown with it if we cap our range at KK when calling, giving villain a full 39% of his range that he can play as the nuts (KK+). If he's not cbetting his entire range, this 39% will grow really quickly. For example, if he's cbetting 72% of his preflop range (any 8+), when we check/call he has KK+ 56% of the time. That means he can shove the turn with a huge range and we'll still not have enough equity to call with QQ for example.

So after thinking about it a little, I'm not so sure raising is great in this spot if villain is playing well. I just think that by cbetting his full range he opened himself to being exploited pretty badly so we can get away with just raising any ace blocker.

No, seems like he used the $4b6 range. I just downloaded the hand history and ran shove module against a $3b6o range. With our actual hand the EV of the shove is 112$ and with a hand like 99TT it's 64$ (assuming he stacks off with KK+). Having the ace blocker is a very big deal since most of villain's bet/calling range is AA. Removing the ace blocker gives him a stackoff hand 48% of the time compared to only 35% when we have the blocker.

In any case I think the optimal strategy here if we have a raising range would be to minraise with a range just wide enough to keep AA indifferent to calling, assuming we shove the turn a good percentage of the time. Turning this into a two-street game will probably allow us to get away with bluffing a bit more.

The cool thing about this hand is, even if villain stacks off with A8+ he's still folding 46.7% of the time and we make a profit on a shove. This goes to show that cbetting any four cards is probably not the optimal strategy in BB's shoes. It allows us to go to war with a very wide range and force him to fold a ton.

I did some number crunching on hand two and as I expected shoving the flop is very profitable. Here is a snapshot of the spot:

I gave villain a 8% OOP 3bet range in PokerJuice and I assumed he stacks off on the flop with every hand that has sufficient equity to stack off against AA.

As it turns out, he is folding 52% of the time. 48% of the time he stacks off and hero has 16% equity against villain's stack off range. Overall hero profits 43.25$ on the shove.

Hero has 48% against villain's preflop range on this board. This equals to a 70$ share in the pot. However since hero holds a very middling hand it is very unlikely that he can realize all of his equity or close to it. Shoving the flop allows hero to realize ~62% of his equity in the pot and I think that's gonna be hard to beat using other lines unless we have a very good read on how to exploit villain.

This is a situation that I have covered pretty well in an article that I've written:. I hope it's OK to share here because it is very relevant to the discussed situation.

I did the math on the 3bet pot in minute 10 of the video, where we bet 98 on 985dd when checked to, to check our equity against a check-raising range. We need 40.2% to break-even on stacking off here after we bet.

I gave villain a 10% OOP 3betting range. On the flop I gave him a check-raise range of {67,Add,9+:dd,T7+:dd,8+:QJT,55+ } and I was quite surprised to see we're not doing well at all with only 37% equity. This is even though villain check-raises 36% of his range and only a quarter of this check-raise range is made hands.

I tried expanding villain range to include 98 and (QQ+:T7+), bringing his overall check-raise percentage to 41%, however we still only have 38% equity and we're losing 24$ on stacking off here.

Another interesting fact is that we only have 53% against his preflop range on this board. I thought this number would be higher. It makes it easier to understand though how our equity drops below 40% when he removes the weaker part of his range by check-raising.

If anyone wants to play around with the assumptions you can download the PokerJuice HH here.

Hey Jens,

This was a great video. Please don't apologize for stopping the action, we watch your videos because we want to hear what you have to say.

Your narration is top notch and the pace is great, please don't try to change it or force a faster pace. This never results in a higher video quality in my opinion.

Hey Phil, minute 39 of the video you contemplate raising river for value with nut boat. I did the range distribution on this one and it appears to be a profitable raise.

I gave villain the following frequencies: Opening 100%, cbetting 75% of his range and barreling 66% of his range. I can go into exact assumptions if requested, but usually when we're dealing with very high frequencies, different assumptions about the exact range composition (IE what 25% or 30% to leave out) produce very similar results.

On the river I assumed villain bets for value with the nut flush or better. The following is the distribution of his river value betting range:

Better hands: 7%
Same hand as us: 13.6%.
Weaker hands: 79.4%.

In fact if he's only calling our river raise with A3 60% of the time that he has it and never considers bluffcathing any other hand, we'll be profiting on our river raise. This is because he has 12% A3 and 7% 33+ in his river value betting range.

Tightening his river value betting range to include only boats had a pretty mild effect. We can still rely just on A3 calls and be good.

If anyone wants to play around with the assumptions on PokerJuice, You can download the HH here.