Brett Banks

It's anon, why not take it a step further and 3/4 value and overbet all the bluffs?

Solves have been made with all the options available. Bigger is used OOP and it isn't really debatable.

I assume you're talking about including some really large turn probes?

6:55 - on the AT6ss board why don't you want all your premiums in the big size?

In sims I've seen, when an overbet is available on these boards frequency of smaller sizes goes to ~0. gtowizard uses a fair bit of 75% but mostly is betting 125%. 50% and 33% sizings are used 4.5% of the time

In GTO wizard General sims where 33% if the smallest size available to BTN, cbetting is 53.3%

In the Complex sims where the smallest size available to BTN is 23%, cbetting is 67.2%.

I think it's just the 33% isn't the best small size to be using on all textures. I know in particular for mono and paired boards very often even smaller is preferred. Probably true on some A high as well

Luke Johnson Hah sorry for not providing that context, I forget that you played this months ago while I just watched it!

The hand starts at 6:37

In the Ac6s5s you mention you aren't sure about how to play this board but that Ac9s5s is pot/check. Forgive the super long and dry post, I bolded my questions and italicized my hypothesis on the answer to my last question at the bottom. Feel free to skip the details, it's kind of a lot.

How are you arriving at a pot/check approach being optimal for Ac9s5s? What's your process for determining the ideal sizing on a specific texture?

Then separately, the two best sims for that spot that I have access to don't seem to me to indicate much of a preference for a pot size. Can you help me understand the strategy shift from these sims to your conclusions?

The sims are from GTO Wizard and are using preflop ranges from monker and 500nl rake. The "General" sim uses a minraise pre and offers 33 50 75 125% plus all in options on flop, a similar number of well selected raise sizes and bets are available at each other node. The "Complex" sim uses a 2.5x pre and offers 13 sizes from 23 to 350% plus all in on the flop and then later streets typically offer 31 69 and 150% plus all in.

The "General" sim is using 33p 33% of the time, 50p 22%, and 75p 11%. So the 75p size represents about 1/4th the betting volume and 50p and 33p represent about 3/8ths of the betting volume each.

The "Complex" sim is more painful to break down that way so I won't but it does seem closer. 125p and 100p are the two largest sizes that see use and they represent about 86% of the betting volume that goes through the two most frequent sizes (also the two smallest) 23p and 32p.

In the "General" sim after a minraise there is more air to deny equity from with a small bet. So it makes sense why the "Complex" sim polarizes a bit more given there's less trash in BB's range. All I can think that might cause your sims to show an even bigger preference for large sizings is that in an even lower rake environment BB should have a good number of offsuit gutshot combos on this board that we can deny equity from with a large bet.

It's probably best to use pre-computed ranges at least to start with. GTO Wizard is great in that it has pretty solid preflop ranges and virtually every postflop spot.

If you want to get into preflop solving, I'd recommend checking out the Holdem Resources Calculator Beta. You can get good results with it, it's very cheap right now, and it is far less time and resource intensive and easier to use than Simple Preflop or Monkersolver.

And then keep in mind that sim design is a bit of an art both pre and post flop.

Another big factor here is the liveness of your outs. When you have 99 with a club and turn or river a 9 it isn't on a flush card. Without the 9c your set outs are tainted and force you to put in more money but with much lower equity.

This comes up often in solutions - how can your hand improve and does that improvement have reverse implied odds?

You use the term "defect" several times throughout the video but I'm still not clear what it means. Given my familiarity with the term from Prisoner's Dilemma and context it seems that you're using the term to describe taking an unbalanced greedy action - betting big with strong hands only for example.

Can you clarify?

As you've demonstrated, taking notes like this while playing more than 1 or 2 tables is fairly difficult.

Do you think there's similar value on a tracked site going over showdowns for regulars and building out similar profiles post session?

There are a bunch of cheaper options than range converter. Better quality too.

All the sites with GTO libraries have them - gtowizard (my favorite), gtox, odin, and probably a bunch more I can't think of.

Zenith poker has free, high quality, multi-size, preflop ranges available. Just don't buy anything from the guy, he's not trustworthy.

Uri's site Guerilla Poker has good ranges. And then there are tons of people reselling those rangeconverter ranges, the one I know best is preflop guru.

gtowizard is great and all but you need to think about how people actually play. They have much more suited hands than a gto range would so you need to play more cautiously when the obvious draw hits.

In spots where both players have relatively equal amounts of nutted hands there isn't a lot of incentive to go huge. Both players have a lot of AJ J9 on KTx Q.

FYI you're using "effective" incorrectly here. I you had a $400 stack and were in a heads up pot with a player that has a $200 stack, you are $200 deep effective. It's used to acknowledge a difference between your stack size and the maximum stack size at risk.

In this 3 way example it doesn't really apply since there are two different stack sizes to be considered among the 3 players.

Approximate GTO response is treating a limp as if it were a min open. So you'd ISO with a similar range and sizing as you would if you were 3betting a minraise. Same thing with over-limping. Treat it as a call of a minraise.

At 15 minutes you note that calling the 3b with ATo is very bad. Having seen this, how are you adjusting your preflop and postflop strategies against this player?

On the one hand, playing your normal game against him will win money. On the other hand we can consider some significant changes having seen this.

I'm only 15 minutes in but in the K53ss example, how much does preserving your outs factor in? For example if you were to raise with Ax4s or 7x6s, now when the turn comes another spade we aren't very happy to be putting more money in the pot. Whereas when we just call villain's range is still wide and we can put in another bet on turn/river fairly comforatbly.

The naive pot/(pot + bet) calc doesn't even apply in most situations for a few reasons.

For example, to even have the opportunity to bluff you here, he needs to have made a 15bb squeeze into 2 fairly strong ranges with a hand that can be considered a bluff on river. Then even his naked AK combos have some showdown value here so most of his bluff candidates have greater than 0EV in the check line. This means that you need to fold even more than you think for him to be exploiting you by bluffing these hands.

Snowie has way too tight of a range arriving at river here IMO anyway.

I caution looking at winrates for specific hands and even hand classes. You need an absolutely massive number of hands to make any determinations based on that info.

You're pretty much on the right track. Imagine for a minute starting with a strategy where you never check any strong hands UTG v BU caller. BU's max exploit strategy now will involve lots of thin value betting and bluffing.

Because BU is now bluffing constantly and valuebetting so thin, UTG's max exploit strategy will now start checking all its strong hands because they now can get more money in the pot against a weaker range by checking than they can by betting themselves.

And it goes back and forth like this until an equilibrium is reached. Ultimately in our checking range we have a lot of marginal or low equity hands that face bets less frequently and thus better realize their equity because of the presence of strong hands in the range. This is the "protection" side of things that people talk a lot about. The other side that you touched on but is less frequently talked about, is that the strong hands also have a high check EV by virtue of having weak and marginal hands in the check range, incentivizing BU to stab and value bet himself.

Absolutely disagree. There was so much valuable insight into identifying how our opponents think about poker so that we can better exploit them.

I'd love to hear the response to this as well.

But thinking out loud, is it so bad to c/f air in a bunch of small pots when he's going to give it all away whenever you do have something? And it's not like we need a pair to call him down so we are pretty capable of defending appropriately.

RIT you've been way out of line in this video's comments from the jump and it's only gotten worse.

OOP with high stack to pot ratio is actually one of the more complicated spots and UTG v BTN call is one of the rarer spots too. Even playing range check or a single size you're going to have a lot of mixing between bet and check or raise/call/fold vs bet that will be unintuitive.

I'd recommend starting with a more common spot as that will be more impactful on your win rate. BTN v BB is a good spot to start or even SB v BTN 3b. Both of those come up more frequently than UTG raise BTN call.

Also, "Assuming the simplification results in increased balance." I think is thinking about balance incorrectly. Balance in poker is simply having correct ratios of hand strengths in a range for a given action to maximize EV. One size vs 5 size strategies that the solver outputs will both be balanced. 5 sizes may be more complicated and thus difficult to play. But it may also give you better insights into the preferred lines of specific hand classes.

Using my AKx example, if you don't give an overbet or even pot sized option to the solver, you'll never know that our advantage in AJ-AQ means that those hands have a very strong preference to put in a lot of money on the flop.

You can go to a single flop sizing without losing much theoretical EV though the ideal size varies by board and position. Turns out 50% is pretty ok in most situations but like for example on AKx boards BTN v BB you lose a fair bit of EV by not having overbets.

It teaches a good default strategy

Which video of Saulo's are you referring to?

get a preflop chart bro. I guarantee you won't be playing 17/12

Flop check is good. We're supposed to check a lot multiway and also OOP so combine them and we're probably checking most of the time on a board that doesn't connect well with our range.

We also have the board locked down so you're praying for floats if we bet. Checking lets them catch up, bluff, or can trap two bets when BTN stabs with whatever and BB calls 66 or ace high

As for your question, it's pretty reasonable to play a mixed strategy on the button regardless of who is in the blinds. If there is a particularly bad player it does improve the EV of calling so you may want to bias towards it. But I wouldn't switch to a pure call strategy as it will negatively impact your board coverage in 3bet pots.