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show down. You win vs T987/9876 etc. Don't see much better u get to fold that gets to river.

If you assume villain doesn't have bluffs given his line, then this doesn't constitute a polar range.

Villain has no incentive to check-fold river. In fact, I would argue he has a ton of incentive to follow through, as we will have a bunch of showdown-able hands.

in constructing his betting range, he presumes he has full amt of combos of AQ, AA, QQ, since we block a big portion of his value range, he will naturally have too many bluffs.

Tough to justify conditions where flop peel gonna be profitable.

If he is polar, we do worse jamming as he folds all bluffs and only calls with reasonable equity. We should always be calling if we are certain he is polar btw 2p+/bluffs.

Since he can't have a ton of bluffs here, I would fold everything worse than a straight.

He likely is over-bluffing here, given we block AA and QQ, so he might presume to have more value then he actually does. If we fold every AQ combo, we are definitely folding >50% range here. Given we don't block spades, I would call against a decent reg.

As a standard, I think your strategy is fine and good. It seems that this strategy maximizes our value when we have Kx, given we are able to shove. However, I do have a few points/questions worth mentioning...

Given this is heads-up, prf 3b ranges will obviously be wider and our 3-street value region will be quite narrow (AA+) relative to the rest of our range. I wonder if we can do better by sacrificing some ev with our Kx to improve our bluffs like this one by betting smaller across all streets with range? Said differently, setting up a situation where he only needs to call with Kx+, doesn't seem great for us.

In regards to this specific combo, I believe we are crushing this spot if we can force folds with anything worse than 88+ for two small bets. This to say imo it gets rather expensive making his best bluffcatchers indifferent given how wide ranges are. I wonder if we can do better by targeting his lower-tier bluffcatchers and maybe splitting our range at river.

Good work though! I hope we can keep discussion going.

seems like an easy call. He shouldnt ever have KK and likely doesn't play 75 this way. unless its 75dd. So we lose to 1 combo of 75 and give 1 combo KK. He still has all 3 combos of 44...

This would be perfect for me as I would love to improve my fundamental understanding of the game using software but I am not sure how much value I could bring to the group...I live in the states and grind live 2/5 professionally in south florida. Without online, using software for regular analysis is a bit more challenging. However, this is not to say I am completely lacking in fundamentals. I would just say my strategy is not as nuanced given that I haven't put a load of time into software analysis (other than watching vids ;) ).

I could maybe offer a unique perspective in discussion and provide subtly different context for hand histories. Regardless, I am definitely interested. Plz let me know!

good post but I think SO range is way too wide. Villain's def not stacking off with every QJ9, AQJ, KQJ, or any pair+fd. Hero's range here is almost exclusively AA, so they have to fear AA+NFD a high percentage when hero stacks off. Maybe add a high spade to each category, but even then probably too wide.

As a std, pre is def too loose. If you can get away with calling then you can probably show a profit vs a weaker player in position.

Given action, flop is kinda meh...I don't expect to get c/r here often since we have so many good hands on this board. This makes me inclined to cbet, as you said, since this would fit nicely into our b/f region. But against a reasonable range, putting in multiple bets with our hand can get expensive. Not a great spot, hence not a great 3bet pre...

In the end, I would likely check this flop, but you couldn't go too wrong putting in one bet on flop or turn.

I obviously don't speak for Phil, but the fact that he starts bluffing this hand OTT, indicates to me that his range can't support enough obvious bluffs given his value region. This makes sense as 60% is just a relative frequency that depends on the width of the value region. IMO this hand seems reasonable to start betting OTT as 9s blocks a portion of Phil's continuing range and the Ad blocks a portion of Phil's check-back, flop range that continues on turn (mainly AK).

For me, this hand plays better as a pot-and-done bluff, and especially on this river. Phil's range sim had him effectively improving to Q-full like 8% of the time, and bluffing once to target TT-QQ seems reasonable with our blocker effects OTT, but bluffing twice with zero equity to fold everything worse than a 2 by the river seems mighty expensive. I could obviously be wrong about that though, as my thoughts are lazily compiled from intuition. Would this be an ev calc to determine break-even amount of fold equity to justify betting twice?

I also wanted to add that even if nlh isn't one of Zac's best games, this still doesn't mean he's not "qualified" in some way. As far as I know, Zac is a live crusher, who plays big stakes on the west coast. He is clearly an intelligent, successful guy who would have a valuable perspective to add from any game.

We shouldn't jump to criticism if it appears someone is stepping out of their comfort zone either. Phil said, in the recent past, how it can be a little intimidating to make theory-esque vids, which are imo the most valuable material on the site. If the first thing he saw in the comments was that his work and insights were a little off base, he would probably be inclined to revert back to what he's comfortable with (after rsp to just about everyone in the comments...like a BAWZ).

I def get what you're trying to say AP, but making general criticisms like 'ranges are lil off', 'not your normal game', 'feels forced', don't seem to be positive or constructive in any way. Criticism is a good thing, but I feel like it should be more specific and have substance to back it up.

how do u know what game/software Zac is most comfortable with? He has made primarily plo videos, this is true, but he could shy away from nlh since RIO already has so many coaches producing quality videos in this game. And as such, would not need crev for his past videos. This in no way translates to his familiarity with nlh.

It bugs me when people make this kind of selective, confirmation bias. This is like some people auto-liking Sauce's comments without full consideration of context and content.

I will defer to u GT on topics here, but I'm not sure I can get on board with this part:

So even when you're extremely unbalanced and get exploited, you still
make a profit. So the profit does not come from playing GTO or even
balanced, it comes from the betting structure and the range
distribution.

See if u can follow me here - from a theoretical perspective, a simple, intuitive argument against this claim would be that any deviation from a balanced strat should necessarily lead to exploitation, followed by a loss of ev. So, in this game, while you still profit when unbalanced, your ev is not maximized. And it will only reach max by playing a balanced strat, forcing villain to pay off our value bets as often as allowed and given the betting structure.

I feel this is the subtle distinction OP was trying to get at. Making the most profit involves maximizing our ev such that we get paid when we have it. We do that by betting as large as we can get away with and include the requisite bluffs to encourage calls from our opponent.

This all may be semantics but maximizing ev does come from a well-defined, GTO strategy and the betting structure and range distribution should be implicit. After all, you still profit in this game by always checking since we have 60% of the pot already.

Makes sense. Thanks for the good explanation SP. I've run into this problem before.

I must say that this material is, at the very least, worthy of an elite membership. Somebody give this man a promotion!

I wanted to point out that @ 8:30, I believe there is a mistake with your mdf estimate. From your previous videos: A = a/(1+a) where a is %pot that is bet, and mdf = (1-A)

So, button 4bet reps (21/30.5)p. -> A = (2/3)/(5/3) = 2/5 -> 1-A ~.60

mdf ~.60 makes sense to me, as against pot-sized bet mdf = .50. Here, we should be defending more to prevent auto-profit when villain risks less.

So much here depends on ranges, but one thing for certain is that cbetting this turn would not be part of a balanced strat, but that's okay. If you presume oop to check-raise Q8+ at high frequency, this turn bet should show a nice profit, as he can't have very many 83 combos. However, if Villain always calls KQ+ on this turn, it may not be as good, but since we hold Ac Kd, it still may be profitable as we block some Q combos that peel flop.

Flop seems like a delicious board to cbet with our backdoor world draw and since, as you said, we shouldnt expect to face a check-raise often. Turn is very situational, but in isolation, my default is to check.

I believe you meant shove or fold, and I agree...at this stack depth it will be tough to show profit here by calling oop.

As far as pof, I do not like the turn bet. Against what is a presumably narrow cold 4bet range, even tho the flop checks through, I do not expect absolutely anything to fold that checks flop for one bet. Consequently, you will have to fire twice to gain any fold equity, and when compared to checking, I would take our three nut outs, see a cheap river, and realize some bluffing opportunities there.

What is the argument for betting turn? I just don't see it.

LOL

I realize that producing theory-specific videos are probably intimidating, and work-intensive, but since poker isn't really solved and no one should be considered an "expert", you of all people shouldn't have anything to worry about.

For my money, I very much value theory content and discussion as much as possible as I feel it extends my ceiling for improvement. And I agree with your statement that playing fundamental poker involves much more than approximating MDF with ranges, although I am unsure where to go from there (hence -> vid material plz).

However, I understand the need for a balance between in-depth and more casual content for the reasons you mentioned. I just wanted to throw my opinion out there.

Mr. Freeman doing WORK ITT! Good stuff!

I know this is nit-picky, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think your ratio of value to bluff in method 2 is a little off. Given pot odds we offer, in nuts/air we should have corresponding ratio of value/bluff to force indifference with villain's bluffcatchers. So the correct interpretation is when we bet, we are bluffing 31% of time, not that we bluff with 31% frequency. Bluffing with 31% frequency implies we bet 100% with our nuts and 31% of our air, which does not provide the proper ratio to ensure indifference.

Given we offer 2.25:1 pot odds, by my math we need -
12.5/x = 2.25/1; x ~5.6%

But this is very minor. All in all, very impressive work Mr. Degrees-of-Freedom.

Good stuff PG. I really like the concept. This video reminded me of the thread you started in regards to the 4bet pot vs Sauce on the monotone board. There was a lot of great posts about what your flop play should be with your range.

An interesting thing from the thread was the practical use of indifference concepts, which seem particularly appropriate here. When discussing the potential for a profitable bet or barrel in relation to under-defending, it would make sense to determine threshold hands in which if folded would yield positive expectation for the bettor. So, for example, in your first hand with AQTTss, if you rank your hand class according to the range distribution, after accounting for AJ+, the next biggest class of hands are your bare NFD and Qdd. Given his sizing, you need to defend ~55% in isolation, so if you're folding a decent chunk of these then his turn bet should show a nice profit.

So, focusing on this hand class, I would like to know how we make this group of hands roughly indifferent? Is it to simply to size our bet such that we deny pot odds? But if we do this then it could yield a profitable call with other parts of range, like worse 2p. This concept came up in the thread and I'm unsure how to apply it. Again, great video.

def not folding flop here.

Given his sizing pre, can't u discount premiums a bunch? Having Ac kinda sucks, but he gonna have to show me.

I don't like the c/r otf. As played, it looks like a fold.

GTO response - crushed with efficiency

If utg only raises 99 for value here, I would strongly consider 3bet-GII. If utg ever has Q9 here at reasonable frequency and always raises, I think we can fold. If utg only raises 99, Q9:[(cc,hh),KJ+], I think we can over call and play rivers pretty well. What range do you think bb would shove given you over-call? If he only jamming sets, we have profitable over-call.

I would like to continue what Sauce started with his toy game model of bet sizings...but I am not 100% certain I follow the model, so let me restate what is going on, as I understand it:

goal - we want to maximize EV on river by varying betsize while preventing counter-exploitation. To do this, we must also make villain indifferent to check-raising for thin value.

We have two betting regions: one that benefits from 2p and another that benefits from p. When we bet 2p, villain calls often enough to make bluffs indifferent, so we gain 2/3p when we have a value hand. When we bet p, villain defends 50% vs this sizing with 42.5% call and 7.5% check-raise (5% value; 2.5% bluff). What I don't follow is shouldn't we be losing our bet here if villain is clairvoyant and check-raises when we bet p?

It doesn't make sense that villain is allowed to check-raise when we bet p, and yet his relative EV is higher without this strategic option. After all, villain could just always defend by calling when we bet p and achieve a higher EV, since our EV = .50call(1pot) = .50<.725

No man, you did help clear up some confusion about whether Isildur's check raise was, in fact, a pot-sized check raise. It's just my original question was a technical issue of how much of our range should we be defending here, in isolation, vs this sizing.