neharris

Hi Laurens. I think you're doing a great job with the videos, especially how you talk about your ranges for all the big decisions. I think this format, reviewing zoom sessions, works the best for training videos.

A couple questions from the video:
What does your checkraising strategy look like on a JQQss flop vs a small betsize? The same situation that came up for your opponent. A friend of mine who plays NL and uses PIOSolver told me that in this spot for NL one strategy that the solver comes up with is to checkraise small with a very wide range and then check most turns, not having much of a flop chk/call range at all. What do you think about this?
The strategy I have been using is to checkraise polarised with QJ AQ JJ for value and hands like J765 5566 (K7)65 as bluffs and to check call all the middling KK Qx AJ, (J,PP)+(SD,FD), FD+SD hands, but intuitively it feels like the other strategy has a lot of merit.

My second question is regarding the AKKT hand at the end of the video. What bluff/semibluff hands do you have on the turn? It seems like it is just such a good card for us that it will be tough to find enough semibluffs to justify a PSB.
Thanks

Hi Phil. Really enjoying the series, and this video in particular had a lot of interesting spots.

In the K654ds 3 bet pot hand, is checking the flop clearly better than betting? We can get a lot of protection with a bet. Or do you think that most of those hands we protect from, pocket pairs and overcards that turn a pair, would fold to a bet on a turn brick anyways?

very nice video. I like how you discussed some advanced topics without getting too deep into the number crunching. I have seen similar videos where it can be tedious going through every step of the calculation

more videos very similar to this would be great

At the 21 minute mark, talking about flop cbetting strategies on KKTr, I wish Phil had expanded more on what he was saying. The split range 40-50% pot cbet strategy is interesting to me because it isn't something that I see a lot, meaning that my opponents won't have much experience playing against it.

I think that there are hands like AA, (T,JJ,QQ)+straight draw, which don't need much protection and don't get much value with a larger bet, which would play well as a check.

So we could check all these middling hands and then call/fold appropriately vs villain's bet sizing. We could also check KK KT which have the board crushed and will strengthen our range such that villain can't bet bet jam all his Kx for value.

Then in our betting range we would have the remaning Kx for value and all of our remaining hands as bluffs and semibluffs.

Phil, is this something like what you were thinking of? And do you think wraps without pairs would work better in the checking range? So that we don't get blown out on the flop and so that we have some potential bluffing hands when the flop checks through.

The 87o 3b sb vs btn was enough, I'm not watching more badreg coaching

Nice video. This is the best one you have done lately imo :)

A few questions from the video:
Folding A(KQ)8 from MP vs a BTN 3bet. Seems like quite a strong hand to fold. You are worried about being vs AA/KK? If he is 3betting around 5-6% of hands, with a mix of premium high card hands and smaller rundowns, he will have AA/KK about 40% of the time, given your blockers. Would you also fold the (AQ)87 you opened in the video? What about hands like JJ-KK with mediocre coordination?

You mentioned 3betting 25% SB vs BTN. Is this your strategy in this spot? That is the highest I have seen from a high stakes reg by far. Would you be folding those same Axxx broadway type hands vs a 4bet? If I see someone is 3betting that much in the SB I would adjust by making more 4bet semibluffs with weak doublesuited Axxx type hands, and 4betting KK/AKxx type hands for value. Do you think that is a good adjustment?

You flatted AJ98ds in the SB vs an UTG raise, MP 3bet, CO flat. What kind of hands are reasonable to call here? I have always been uncertain about what hands can coldcall a 3bet profitably. I play quite tight in this spot thinking that I don't have much money invested so I should only call the 3bet with hands that will have an equity edge or really good postflop playability (smooth doublesuited rundowns). I would have folded hands like the AJ98ds or, some other hands that I have seen in recent datamined hands, 689Tss, KQT5ds, A865ds.

Thanks

Hi Phil, I have a question about the A(KT)5 hand at 46:00 on the bottom left table. The action was you OTB vs BB, you check back a 8(53) flop, chk back (8) turn, bet Q rvr. Why not bet the turn?

Doing a quick sim you can get 2 streets of value if he would have bet his nutty hands on the flop or turn. I think that villain would want to be betting in 1 of those 2 spots since he will have a range advantage in terms of strong hands. Do you agree with this?

Getting checkraised on the turn would really suck. Is that why you checked it back?

Thanks

I wouldn't call it pushing thin equity preflop. Potentially 12BB in dead money and UTG isn't likely to have the other AA, seeing as he reraised small and you have 2 aces in your hand

My approach here postflop would be to look at my range street by street and see how high this hand ends up in it by the river

Without doing the sim I think this would have to be a call after this action. I would have jammed 2pair on the turn for this board texture and SPR, so AA here is about as good as it gets.

Also I wouldn't discount K9 from UTG's range based on his flop bet. I think most people would bet all their Kx on the flop here.

cheers. see mathematics of poker chapter 20, examples 20.1 and 20.2. they do a very good job explaining it and going through some maths

re: GTO approach, it is incorrect to look at the river in a vacuum. they talk about this in MoP. your calling frequency also depends on how much you charged villain on the turn and how much equity he would have on the turn with a hand that is bluffing here on the river, not just the price you are being laid on the river.

the idea being that the more you charge villain on the turn, and the less equity that he calls your raise with, the less often you need to call his bet on the river after the texture changes. this is because he is paying a lot on the turn for the opportunity to be able to bluff a small subset of rivers. MoP does a much better and more detailed job explaining it than I can

this is a spot that I need to work on a lot too, doing some example problems for villain having different numbers of outs calling the turn raise.

If your read is that he is passive postflop you could make the assumption that he is underbluffing in this spot and fold everything worse than the hands in his value range. That would be the exploitive strategy.

If you aren't confident in making that assumption you can aim to call enough of the time that he would be indifferent from raising or folding with his potential bluffing hands. This is a concept that is discussed a lot in the book 'Mathematics of Poker'. They do some proofs showing how this calling strategy maximises our EV vs a 'nemesis' opponent, one who will maximally exploit you. I think that it is a good approach to take when playing without a solid read.

So, since he is risking 216 to win 116, we need to call 35% of the time to make him indifferent from bluffing (ie. EV of bluffing = EV of folding). So then I look at the part of my range on the river that can beat a bluff.

As for what hands he will bluff with, I expect to see AJ AQ. I am making an assumption here that, since his value range is so narrow, AA only, he will have enough AJ AQ in his range to cover all the bluffs that he needs. I could confirm this assumption by doing a simulation and looking at his range subsets on the river. The value of making this assumption is that I can account for villain blocking these cards when I am constructing my calling range.

So then I look at my river betting range that can beat a bluff and figure out which 35% of that range, accounting for villain's blockers, makes the most sense to bluffcatch with. First AA and TT, then full houses with an A, because they block AA, and then full house hands with a T, because they block a random TT slowplay. Then continue adding/subtracting different subsets until you arrive at 35%.

Doing a quick sim I got that we would want to fold 2/3 of our JT hands.

NL200 and someone raises the river in the most scary line ever, this video could be done in 2 minutes but we get into 30 minutes of self promotion and fancy words. I have liked some of the videos you have done in the past, but this one was pretty unnecesary sorry.

Hi Sam

I'm posting a link to a hand I posted in the thread. Can you please take a look and tell me if I played it correctly with all icm-implications?

Thanks, it would mean a lot to me.

http://www.runitonce.com/mtt/last-6-215-plo-mountain-series/

At 5.29 min. in the 84 off isnt a call ? getting these odds in a low stake MTT, just wonder as i would never fold atc there, TX, awesome videos btw.

Well 44 and 33 are still prob folds, 66 still calls tho?

At 42m you say mulad shouldn't flat the 3bet w pps that are sets on that flop. He only needs to call 6,5bbs and you are both over 100 deep, seems like an easy call no?

In my opinion it doesn't. It's too important information to leave out and reviewing progressive super KO's should only be done with actual footage. That being said the content is still solid.

Hi Lucas, love your video's. The way to calmly talk through every hand is very helpful for me to pick up the optimum amount of information to learn from.
I have a question about the 88 hand you open from the cutoff with the sb on 2.9bb's.
1. Would you ever consider opening to like 7,5 to 9 bb's here to basically isolate the bounty so the big blind has a much harder time coming into the pot as well?
It seems to me that obv when you open to 2,5 bb's whenever the sb commits the bb is going to come in 100% of the time while you are probably crushing both of their ranges.
I would estimate the sb to commit with 50 to 70% of his range so that makes an isolating open a huge profit.
2. Also when you do open to a much larger amount of BB's what would be the best bet size to make sure the bb folds anything but premiums?
Even if the button shoves you are priced in to call but that is still not that bad against his shoving range especially if he's aware of what you are trying to achieve by that non-standard approach.
Please let me know what you think about this strategy and what the downsides could be that I might not be aware of.
Thanks and keep posting your awesome video's!

Sup dude. Nice video. I was doing some experimenting with calculating bluff and value combinations using the formula provided on the video and came up with a small dilemma I was hoping you could help me with.

Calculating a spot where I'm overbetshoving 152.75 into 108 on the river on a spot where I have 33 valuecombos villains getting 152.75: (152.75x2+108=413.5) = 152.75 : 413.5 = 0:37
=> so to be balanced we should have 37% bluffs

37% bluffs 63% value
33 = 63 X = 37
33 * 37 / 63 = x
X=19,4

We should have 19,4 combos of bluffs here.

But then when I change the betsize on the river to betting 80 into 108 instead, for the formula I get: villains getting 80: 268 = 30%

To be balanced 30% bluffs
30% bluffs 70% value
33 = 70 X = 30

33*30 / 70 = X
X=14,14

Therefore we could have 14 bluffcombinations with a bet of 80 into 108.

I don't understand why with a smaller bet our bluffcombinations decrease, could you explain what's the reasoning behind this / any errors in my thinking/calculations please?

This is the full hand history in case:

Hand History for Game 14551575424
$1/$2 USD NL Texas Hold'em - Tuesday, May 05, 18:12:39 ICT 2015
Table Longueuil (Real Money)
Seat 2 is the button
Total number of players : 2/2
Seat 2: HERO ( $206.75 USD )
Seat 1: Player1 ( $285.32 USD )
HERO posts small blind [$1 USD].
Player1 posts big blind [$2 USD].
* Dealing down cards *
Dealt to HERO [ Kd 6d ]
HERO raises [$3 USD]
Player1 raises [$12 USD]
HERO calls [$10 USD]
* Dealing Flop * [ 4s, 3h, 8d ]
Player1 bets [$16 USD]
HERO calls [$16 USD]
* Dealing Turn * [ Jc ]
Player1 checks
HERO bets [$24 USD]
Player1 calls [$24 USD]
* Dealing River * [ 2h ]
Player1 checks
HERO is all-In [$152.75 USD]
Player1 will be using their time bank for this hand.
Player1 calls [$152.75 USD]
Player1 shows [ 7s, 7d ]a pair of Sevens.
HERO doesn't show [ Kd, 6d ]high card King.
Player1 wins $412.50 USD from the main pot with a pair of Sevens.

Hello. Great video. You are producing the best PLO content on the site currently IMO.

I have a question about what you were saying re: the AJT2ds hand vs skervjoy on a (A5)4 flop

You said that you felt it would be a mistake by your opponents to be continuation betting hands like AKQJ, a nut flush draw, or pr+oesd. To me this seems to conflict with what you were saying earlier in the video, and in your previous video about playing OOP as the 3bettor, regarding needing to bet more marginal hands on the flop in this spot.

It seems to me that if we are check/calling hands like AKQJ/nfd we will find ourselves in many more spots on the turn where we will be forced to fold, instead of having profitable bets. It would suck to have to fold these kind of hands to a flop raise but, vs the kind of people who we would have to fold against, we are still going to be making a large profit with the bet due to our fold equity on the flop, and the equity of our turn play, where we will be able to play our uncapped range vs a villain's range that likely primarily contains medium strength made hands and draws.

What are your thoughts on this? Thanks.

edit: we might not even need to fold them to a flop raise, instead calling and shoving appropriate turns that weak our opponents range enough

at 47:40 did you mean to fold (AK)Q4 on table 2 in the small blind vs a CO open? I'm asking because you folded some pretty good hands preflop in other spots when you were busy talking about hands on other tables, but I have also seen you play quite loose from the blinds

also folding 6(78)T in MP on table 2 at 59:30. I am asking because I saw you fold (I think, can't find the hand again now scanning through) 9(76)5 or something very similar UTG earlier in the video, which is a hand I have been opening in all positions, so maybe these low/mid rundowns with a top gap are standard folds for you in EP and MP

25:40 you turn your hand (T857) into bluff on a T99 board, and you say you do fine against overpairs. The problem is that if he calls  you still have 3+ SPR, and he has a huge advantage in position. What is your plan on turns?