ST3

I'm back!

I started playing again during the lockdown and had some good success but naturally didn't want to be sat in front of a computer post-lockdown so stopped playing for a while.

I started grinding again last week to primarily fund my man cave. I'll be moving house soon and I thought it'd be good to try and fund the project from poker winnings. I also want to play WSOP either this year or next, so made sense to get back on the grind.

I fell short of my hand goal last week so I thought it would make sense to fire up this journal again to try and keep me on track. The aim is to update once a week noting how I fared on my goals for the week and what I want to achieve in the week upcoming.

This week's goals
- 4x gym sessions
- 10k hands
- 1 golf practice
- Only bet on the Premier League

I'm toying with the idea of buying Uri Peleg's cash game course too but I may see how this week goes before firing.

I fell short on the mini grind challenge but crushed the games and decided to enjoy some sunshine instead of grinding the last weekend of the month. Gained some life EV.

May Results

May went well on the whole, apart from the 100nl shot (again).

I put it a lot of hours and battle through a tough start to the month. Played some 100 towards the end but I just don't know what it is about that limit that I can't seem to crack. It's just short term variance and 3 BI shots aren't really big enough to handle it.

I'm going to aim for 35k hands at normal tables this month and 10k of zoom. I'm going to focus on 3bet pots for my study so I'm more prepared for 100nl.

Things have been going very well over the last week. I felt like I'm getting confused in a lot fewer spots, which is excellent. I only put in 8.4k hands but I beat the games at 11.38bb/10 EV adjusted.

A couple of things have really just started to click and some tweaks I've made:
- Over folding when facing aggression from unknowns/recs with marginal hands
- Focusing on spots where I can take an aggressive action betting or raising rather than calling
- Increasing button raise size to 3.5x. I used to 3x from the BTN and 2.2-2.5x from every position but have always felt recs and regs don't adjust to bigger BTN raises well. I then saw one of the best 500z regs doing it and decided to look into it a bit further and adopt it into my game.

May Mini Grind Challenge

I originally planned to get in 56k hands in May but slightly behind pace so I've started a 13-day mini grind challenge so I end up hitting my hand volume target. My plan will be as follows:

Day 1: 1750
Day 2: 1750
Day 3: 2100
Day 4: 2800
Day 5: 2275
Day 6: 3000
Day 7: 1750
Day 8: 1750
Day 9: 1750
Day 10: 2100
Day 11: 2800
Day 12: 3000
Day 13: 3000

I've already completed days one and two so fingers crossed we can keep up with the pace.

I'll drop an update in each day here with how I'm getting on and some hands of interest.

I took a look into my WWSF this week after feeling like I wasn't being aggressive enough in some spots in my study. It was kind of on the lower side of good, I read that 43-50 is usually where most good regs have.

I then dug into my own by position to see if I could undercover anything further:

I definitely feel like there's spots where I need to improve my aggression in the BB. Some which spring to mine are defense vs BTN and blind vs blind.

I have also been watching a few of ElusiveMark's videos this week and he's more aggressive in spots where I tend to play passively/give up too much. Some notes I made from his most recent videos:

• Betting small pairs 22-55 on mid paired boards - T99. The reason being we can't call later streets comfortably.
• C/R flush draw on paired boards 3 way 655hh, C/R Q2hh. I would tend to flat here, a reg cbet and a rec called, by raising it put the reg in a very tricky spot where he has to play straight forward.
• C/R some backdoors and boards that we check often, A7hh on 656r. I would bet this here, probably get floated and find it difficult to play turns or I'm check/giving up with a lot of my range so a c/r gives a nice balance.

Just digging into this further, SRP with one raiser:

vs BTN RFI in BB - 38.8 WWSF, 18.8% Check Raise
vs CO RFI in BB - 40.9 WWSF, 21.2% Check Raise

It's only a small sample of hands (~1500) for each position but it's something to think about.

That's correct, I give them ranges, bet sizes, and use the 49 flop subset from PIO plus I've added a few. It's 61 in total now, then let it run overnight or during the day.

Last week I focused on the reverse of the previous week, the BB vs. BTN cbet node. I also had a failed shot at 100NL :(

I messed up my sims the first time around, so I didn't get to study them until the latter half of the week. When I did begin to study, I found them very time consuming as I have to look through each flop individually.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any ideas on how to speed up creating heuristics when there are a lot more outcomes to go through, turns, and vs.. cbets spring to mind.

One thing which I did find very useful was just to put in more hours playing GTO Trainer drill games and try to create heuristics, or note down common mistakes that I'm making EV wise. It's also a lot more fun.

We've had two calls in the study group this way, and I've found them very useful. I'm focusing on this node for studying this week as well, I didn't feel satisfied with my findings last week so I don't want to move on without feeling comfortable.

Thanks for reading, and good luck at the tables!

A lot of people have become inactive so really looking for active members. We ultimately want to split the flops between a group and divide up the workload.

We're running one spot per week, creating heuristics, and then having a group call once a week to go through the spot on Simple GTO Trainer.

If this sounds like something you'd be keen to get involved with then feel free to DM me

A good week, I was studying the BTN vs. BB cbet node. I had a group call on Thursday with the study group, we went through the spot on GTO+ Trainer drill training, and chatted about each spot before deciding on our play. We'll be looking to do that twice this week.

One thing I thought I'd post about which I found quite interesting was winrates by position. I had a dig around and found these are what they should roughly be:

Winrates by position
SB: -18-20bb/100
BB: -30-40bb/100
EP: 8bb/100
MP: 12bb/100
CO: 20bb/100
BTN: 26bb/100

Mine are
SB: -20bb/100
BB: -33bb/100
EP: 10bb/100
MP: 23bb/100
CO: 10bb/100
BTN: 43bb/100

I then started digging into my CO winrate and found a leak:

Calling 3bets
CO: -878.19bb/100 - Fold to cbet - F:38.8%, T:46.4%, R:60%, Flop Raise - 15.3%, WWSF - 26.6%
BTN: -598.29bb/100 - Fold to cbet - F:26.6% T:42.1% R:33.3%, Flop Raise -12.5%, WWSF - 36.2%
SB: 26.27bb/100 - Fold to cbet - F:40.6% T:63.6% R:0%, Flop Raise - 12.5%, WWSF - 39.2%

This doesn't come as a surprise to me, but it is something I need to work on. I often feel lost postflop in 3bet pots, especially at times when I've been playing 100nl. There were a couple of spots yesterday in 4bet pots where I didn't know what the best line was.

I know you shouldn't try and study two spots at once, so I might try and bring in a 3bet pots spot into this month's study. This week we're looking at the opposite of last week, vs. Cbet node BB vs. BTN.

Thanks for reading, and good luck at the tables!

I don't mind checking the flop in practice here. I find villains tend to over buff in these spots when you check back because we always bet a K when we have one right?

As played, definitely need to call but think that's been voiced already. I think your own analysis has it spot on, we block AKo and he has plenty of broadway combos he can turn into a bluff.

I like betting here 1/3.

I ran this through a solver as I wasn't sure on the turn check. I used a 10% 3bet range and a tight calling range of 5.4%.

It looks like a solver prefers a pure check on the flop with TT (80%) and a pure block on the river to mainly get value from 8's and 9's.

Interestingly, 77 is meant to be a fold to a block on this board in theory 90% of the time. I don't think this is happening in practice at all, So I like the block even more in practice as I think Villian might click call sometimes too.

CO is 31/24, right? What do we have the SB?

As a default, raising flop is okay with the Kh and would agree to fold after flop 3bet.

Are you referring to all board textures and what kind of sizings (75%?)? I'll try and run a subset of flops and see what I find in PIO for you.

My instincts would be, if they're cbetting big with a high frequency, we can call down wider. This does feel a bit like selective memory which has happened on the odd occasion though, do you have any hand histories or stats on regs to back these thoughts up?

DM me buddy

shoot me a DM bud

I think 10 hours on the cbet node, creating heuristics, drill games, and HH's is fine. The two are interlinked, but it's not enough time to look at 2 nodes at once, and I would rather focus on one node at a time. We're using very similar ranges (100nl zoom solved ranges), so heuristics from board textures should be consistent.

In terms of 3bet or fold strategy, we're keeping it fluid and haven't got to those spots, yet so we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, but think ranges and preflop we're all reasonably aligned as we play in similar games. If someone wants to look at one spot in a different way, then it'd be interesting to see what they find. We're looking at the spots individually then discussing our findings, not necessarily all doing the same thing.

I've watched a tonne of videos over the last month or so and felt that study wasn't beneficial. I also think focusing on specific areas of the game to improve my GTO base is more productive than sweats and recordings from other players.

The study group is now up and running with 5 members so far, and we're splitting each week into different nodes. I suggested the below schedule for May, which everyone seemed happy with as a starting point.

Weekly Study Plan

I'm going to aim for 10 hours of study per week, and it'll be broken down into the following areas:

• PIO - running sims, creating and revising heuristics
• GTO Trainer - drill games & results analysis
• Video Study - videos on the topic for the week
• HH Analysis - marking & reviewing hands focused on the weekly node

I'm going to keep this reasonably fluid in terms of how the weekly hours are broken down per section because I don't want anything too rigid.

That's it for this update, onto studying!

Bartello82 shoot me a DM with the stakes & sites you play :)

shoot me a DM buddy

Discord channel is up and running, let me know if anymore fancy joining.

Feel free to shoot me a DM buddy

Hey buddy, had a good application yesterday and we've agreed to look for players who want the same things out of studying - solver based, scripting, figuring out range construction on different board textures. Sharing our findings and the workload so we can get through it a lot quicker. Let me know if this sounds like you.

Hey buddy, do you study with solvers? What site do you play on?

Hey buddy, do you study with solvers? What sites and timezone are you in?

4 way I'd be leaning towards a bit wider for value with fish (ATs/AQo/TT/KTs) and adding in A5s pure due to the blockers against UTG's range.

Exploiting 95/12 stations = bet bigger and thinner for value. This isn't really a sort of spot where you'd be looking to exploit him 4 way. I'd be flatting here and playing a turn.

Check/jamming is fine I think, he still has AK, AQ which will be put in tough spots.

Didn't realise you only had 44 left into the pot, I thought you were both $100 deep. Don't think you can fold, as much as it sucks.

BB the tighter of the nits - do we have stats here?

If we think the loose aggressive fish will bet here I don't mind going for a check/jam.

As played, I really don't think the vast majority of players at 50nl will pull off a bluff here. AJdd, ATdd and 9Tdd I don't think overcall, but you are deep so he may do at some frequency. JT would kind of make sense. I wouldn't be surprised to see him play AK,KK,QQ this way either, overcalling to keep the fish in the pot and then jamming to get called by your KQ/AQ.

I think the overall population at 50nl lack river bluffs in 3bet pots let alone deep so I'd be happy to sigh and fold.

Hey buddy, did you DM me?

Hey man, what sites/stakes are you currently playing?