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I do agree that the samplesize is pretty much meaningless. However, very simple stats can be reviewed. Your CO and BU open are quite low as well as your 3-bet frequency.

well because if you have a general idea if a board is good for you or your opponent you have some idea of how to play your range/hands.
in this case, since this board favors your villain you do not want to lead out, you want to check-call to protect your range and by doing so you are seeing more SDs and winning more money

because you want to make the most profit with your ranges, not your individual hands. just as a simplification: if you make with your two best hands +10 points, with the next three hands +5 hands, but with the back or your range 0 points you'd be making 35 points. however, if you play your ranges in a way that they support eachother, you may be making +9 with your first two hands, +7 with the next three and +3 with two more, adding up to 45 points.
now this illustration is flawed on many levels but i hope it brings across the point.

right of the bat I'd say this is a board that favors villain what means in turn that we do not want to be cbetting all that aggressively. I would not be surprised if he had also 33 in his range given the loose tendencies.

Given that wide calling range pre flop I think his raising range is something like: QQ, JJ, TT, 88, 89s, 87s, 33, T9dd, 67dd, 65dd, 54dd, J9dd, JTdd, QJdd

I'd heavily discount QQ, JJ, JTdd and T9dd, that would be quite bad to raise. 65dd and 54dd are really, really unlikely. First, he would need to call them pre and given your tiny sample (all you have is a tendency of 17% in ~400 hands; what probably is 1 fold out of 6 times he got 3-bet) is not impossible, but is also not guaranteed to happen.
Secondly, with 65dd and 54dd he would need to check-float OOP with a two backdoors what is insane against your somewhat tight 3-betting range in CO vs an UTG opener.
If you gave him a 50% chance that he would flat pre and a 25% chance that he would float OOP the combinations drop from 2 two 0,25.
Now that all does not even matter if we gave him a realistic check-raising range, without the T9 or JT, just draws and 8x+, because against that range you're under a truck.
Now that obviously does not matter when you hold AKdd because you will be realizing more EQ than you have and it is correct to call due to potodds anyways. However when you have AA in this spot you may want to think about folding, because he will be jamming this river way more than 50% of the time, you most likely cannot call because he probably does not even have enough bluffs to balance his value out and it is totally a different story if he is even bluffing correctly. Also, the times this will be checked and you win at SD are going to be quite rare.
This goes without saying that folding AA is a disaster against anyone aggressive or overplaying their hands and in that case you would not do that, but it's worth keeping in the back of your mind that getting raised with AA on that turn is not going to be that much fun.

Now that I thought about the hypothetis of having AA OTT, I think it would be bad to barrel that OTT. Tx are not going to call you three streets and a 8x further strenghtens villains range and there is value in picking off bluffs OTR and betting ourselfs if checked to. If we won't barrel an overpair in this spot I feel like we should definitely check back AKdd and limit our bets to random 8x, possibly TT (?) and some minor draws that have less SD value than AKdd like 97.

I dunno, but when I put AA-KK, AQs, AK, ATo, A9o, KJo, KTo, QJo, A2s-A8s, 86s, 97s, K6s-K9s, Q8s-Q9s {which is my 3bet range on BTN vs CO} and I give us 8s9s and this board, Flopzzila shows me our hand has ~86% equity against that range.

Use Equilab or Pokerstove and instead of giving us specifically 9s8s give ourself the range that we would call the 3-bet with.
Also, I guess you just forgot to write them down, but I doubt it that your 3-betting range misses QQ-TT.

Depending on what he 3-bets and what you call this board is average to slightly favorable for villain. But being OOP really hurts your EV as we are always underperforming our EQ because our realization is poor and the board is super wet, meaning equities could change drastically depending on what cards come.

your hand is favorite against his range, but his range crushes your range. I suppose it would be okay to lead out against fun player you are never going to see again, but then again, anyone competent seeing this stuff knows what you are up to. hero has 2k hands on villain and he does not look like a big fun player.

looks pretty good for your first 10.000 hands. my stats certainly did not look like that haha. id suggest using EV bb/100 as it is a tiny bit more accurate in giving you an idea about your winrate.
there is really nothing out of line with your displayed stats and your opening frequencies look very resonable.
just try to do better day after day, read the forums and you'll be doing fine

not sure how to resize. upload the pictures to a image hosting service and post the link. cheers

That is certainly possible, however, I feel strongly that this is not necessary for us humans, mostly because the solution does some things that are quite difficult for humans to catch on. What I mean by that is that the solution is often going to pick random raises with a TP and various kickers because blockers are part of your range and the solution wants to minimize the information given out. Another reason is runout coverage what in this case is irrelevant since we are allin OTT, but I could see how that would actually make some sense in a real world 100bb game. Anyhow, I'd like to refute that logic because we are going to have 85s and 54 so we should have that handled.

This board heavily favors villain, we do not have AK, we do not have QQ and we may not even have JJ. Villlain on the other hand has 9 set combos, 16 nut straight combos, possibly K9 and possibly 98. We are also out of position what means we are always going to underperform our equity. If we donk here the top of our range any thinking opponent will understand that fundamentally our game is flawed. This exact spot may not come up all that often, but there are plenty of spots where it is important to protect our ranges and if he thinks they are out of balance and if he is capable he can apply more pressure on our weaker range, making us fold more. Now obviously one can argue that this is never going to happen at lowstakes and while I agree, I still think because we are such a dog against villains range that we should practically never lead out here.

I do not have a good reason why we should not check-raise allin. I'd be interested in that answer too.

I'm not so sure that river is a fold because of villains stats. He does not like to fold to 3-bets and cbets and his WWSF is high. I think this is an easy fold with the Ac, but without that gives villain a few more legitimate hands to bluff the river with. That may not even matter at all if he decides to stab turn aggressively with hands like AJo or KQo. While I agree that villain is going to have quite a few combos of straights, sets and possibly twopairs, we would only need him to bluff with 7-10 combos. I think that is certainly possible.

I think flop play is more interesting though. I don't think that betting is particularly bad because most people are simply not going to play back often enough. We have loads of unpaired high cards in our range with whom we would want to bluff. We can't really do that if we are only betting some TT's and 65s here.
It's going to be a funspot once we're raised, but I feel like we are able to play that spot quite decently. Against aggressive players we're going to be calling and calling vs jams on most turns and against nits we fold it right away. Thoughts on that?

I agree with the two posters above, this is pretty much always a cooler expect against people who cbet very polarized in this spot, meaning, against someone who is going to check back AA, AQ ect it is sort of pointless to check-raise because we're pumping money in from behind. I think its important to understand this distinction and have a general idea how the opposition plays. Knowing he likes to run tripel barrels is not as helpful and if we thought that that's our opponents leak than we should be check-calling instead of check-raising to capitalize on that.
Preflop is fine, folding cannot be an option against someone aggressive OTB.

This is a interesting spot. I already wrote a paragraph saying that I'd fold this pretty much all the time, then went back to thinking that it might be a bit too paranoid just to go back to this answer I'm about to give you right now.
I doubt this spot is going to do much of your bottomline if you fold or call here. They happen kind of infrequently and calling off a set is not going to kill your winrate in the longrun.
Anyways, I believe this is a fold. First on foremost because this is 20nl and not 200nl. People are simply not that aggressive and before they checkraise a KQ in that spot they check-call it. It is true that the combos of KcXc, AA, KK or other kinds of flushes are quite limited and pretty rare in combos and frequency, but villain jamming here a bluff is in my opinion even more unlikely. I'm happily calling off the occasional flushes we got and I gnarl and fold 77's here.

so we bet allmost all air and check weak pairs and TP. So when he bets on our check he has almost no bluffs, since we fold only ~10% of weak pairs which we randomly bet OTF and if he doesn't bluff we can't call AQ and need to fold.

I don't follow your reasoning here, why is he having almost no blufffs and why would we only fold 10% of weak pairs? Where does this number come from?

I think it would not be the worst idea for villain to bluff a 1cFD or even turn a 7 into a bluff when you are seriously considering folding AQ. I also think that it certainly helps to put some flushes in your checking range OTT. Against competent players who realize that they cannot simply bomb every time you check here you get to see more SDs and there is inherent value in checking some flushes when people are bluffing way too much.
If you don't want to check flushes, you still are going to have some occasional twopairs or pair+1cFD. It's not like you are going to be folding your entire range on the turn when you actually are check-folding AQ.

Lastly, I feel like if villain cannot bluff then we should not be worried at all about having our ranges balanced. Just fold more than you "should" and keep an eye on these situations in the future.

I think this is a super interesting spot. I think there are a couple of important factors that we would need to consider to make a good decision.
Our opponents preflop range matters, is he ever going to 3-bet/call a hand like 87s here? What is he doing with AQo or A5s? Even thought it is a small sample, I would assume that because we have no indicators of our opponent being particularly aggressive preflop and because Hero uses a massive sizing preflop we could dismiss suited connectors and aces and for the most part AQo as well.

Despite villain not having all of AQ's and very, very rarely having AA he has nevertheless a pretty strong range. Betting AK does not make particularly much sense against that range, what are we going to get value from on the flop? Even if he showed up very occasionally with AJs or calls JJ, what are we going to do on virtually any turn? We hit the best possible card and are still hating life.

I think checking our entire range on this flop is going to be ideal, our opponent is going to bet his good hands and we are always going to get it in against those hands, we really don't need to worry about losing value. This way, in the longrun people cannot just bet every time the flop once we check.

It sounds quite outrageous, but I believe checking and folding AK might not be the worst idea against a nit. We may call AK with a spade in our hand, but for the most part it is going to be quite difficult to be bluffing for villain. Most people check back JJ and those rare random other Ax hands.

As played, once you get there OTT there is no way you could possibly do anything else but jamming. True, you get called more often being crushed, but there is simply way too much money in the pot.

FWIW, I dislike your sizings. I think preflop meh-okay since you're slightly deep, but flop is way too big.

If you had a 2k sample on villain and he would still be 3-betting this little I'd be calling instead of 4-betting quite happily.

I don't like this, even more so with villain starting the hand with roughly half stack. I'm surprised that you got him to fold anything here.
I think that you can have plenty of better hands to get it in here light, namely flushdraws, pair+gutter (9outers), oesd and so on. Shoving 55 here is really loose, it's true that you don't need him to fold too much, but at the same time, any draw is never folding and I don't see why he cannot play A8 or K8 like this.
The fact that you block the nuts does not play a role at all, you block maybe eight combos, what is really little compared to his calling range.
IMO the only valid reason to check-jam turn is if you are playing against someone who bluffs way too much with random hands like QJ that do not connect at all with this board and in that case you are not bluffing, you're just folding out his share of EQ in such a relativly big pot compared to stacksizes.

I think against any normal opponent you can just safely fold OTT. If he is in any way aggressive I think you got to call down, there are so few combinations of hands that beat us here, I'd expect sets to raise most of the time OTF and that leaves us with some A4s and 54s. I'm not saying that it's good, but he could be potentially bluffing with a FD. I don't even think that it matters if we have A6 or TT to be honest. If someone is really aggressive then I expect him not to be good enough to realize that he shouldn't bluff much at all thus I expect them to be overbluffing pretty much all the time. Actually it matters if we have A6 or TT because of the rare occasions that he has and decideds to check-raise an overpair.

thanks for the input guys!

I like checking the flop here because I believe betting makes our checking range really weak. I'm also not sure if we stack off AQ all that often. Additionally, it would not make too much sense to bet with AK because we are ahead against all his bluffs and a better hand is not going to fold. By checking we avoid having two ranges. Also, on save turns and rivers we can still get it in if we want to.

As played I'm not sure what is best OTT, I guess betting something smallish cannot be too bad, gives him the opportunity to call spike a bad draw OTR.

I agree that at the end (min: 37.00) it's a little bit confusing when you say that checking is less than betting. I suppose you mean checking loses less money than betting, correct? I thought first it was just a typo, but you say this out loud so I'm not quite sure.

Mhmm, the more I think about this hand, the more I get confused. I got something stuck in my head what goes like this “defending x% of the sake of defending may only compound a mistake”, or that his range is actually stronger than mine because he has more sets. I also don't understand who is actually going to make a profit if we both were to play a balanced strategy.

I tried to come up with some ranges with what I would cbet the flop for value and I got something like: 12 combos of AQ, 12 combos of AK, 4 combos of random twopairs, 1 (probably 0) combos of straights and 3 combos of sets. How do I build my defense vs a flopcheckraise? Do I have to defend 71% of my entire flop betting range (including airballs) or the 71% of my value range? I've read very mixed things about this and I think that I should be defending 71% of my valuerange. However, that leaves me wondering because if we defend only 71% of our valuerange, but bluff this board a little bit too much then we're folding way more than the 57% he needs me to.

Also, obviously AK, AQ and twopairs for that matter are only bluffcatchers and AA and 54s are close to the nuts. Do AA and 54s count as defend hands or not? I guess what I'm trying to say is if we can add additional bluffcatchers because AA and 54s are so strong and are ahead of villains range.

How do we account for FDs in villains bluffing range? I imagine I should call down much less when villains bluffs actually have equity.

Hey guys,

At the beginning of the summer I knew that this was going to be a summer with lots of alcohol
and parties, but I was sort of hoping that it wouldn't be that extreme. Anyhow, that's the past. I'll be participating in the community starting from now on and updating I want to update this
blog regularly.

Sorry for the delay these days, I'm not playing much at all, god damn world cup. Also spend quite a bit of time with a nice girl and that's sort of a problem when you want to play nights :-). Add rock-climbing, chilling at pools and BBQs and you have your recipe for playing rarely.

This week I want to be a more consequent than the last week and my goal is to play tons starting from today till Thursday. Thursday probably going out, watch football and get drunk a little. Friday play some more hours and then I'm off.

If I had to guess why I would get frustrated I'd say it's because the status quo drives me nuts. Also, I think it's pretty obvious that I have mindset problems when I don't even know that I beat the games. I mean yeah, I feel like I do but what do I know. There is certainly a little uncertainty there.

Playing poker and learning the game does not cause me grief, very often I like to do that a lot. What causes me grief is when I do not play poker and I fail to live up to my expecations. I get down when I violate my standards and do not meet my goals. I feel like a piece of shit when I drank one more beer then I wanted to. I get pissed off when my energy level is low and I don't perform at my best.

It might be better for me in the short-term to quit poker but I seriously think that's not the issue here. I must learn how to deal with it, otherwise I will never achieve anything meaningful in my life ever and that is certainly not what I want for myself. It just takes me a little bit longer than everybody else, but what the hell.

Anyhow, despite some setbacks I feel like I'm moving in the right direction. I really feel good about my progress, sure far away from ideal but I believe that I will get there. I'm also trying out something new, Paraliminals. Now if until up now someone did not think that I wasn't crazy, this is going to do it for you. Essentially I'm listening to hypnosis recordings to stimulate learning.

A year ago I spend around $700 to $800 for an entire series to what I never listened to. One of my tipical attempts to change something with a quick fix. Anyhow, I got really annoyed after the first time and never really started listening to them until a two weeks ago. I've read an independent article the other day and I decided to give it another shot. I was really sceptical at the beginning (and I still am), but as for right now I like how I feel. I don't want to be to hopeful about this, but I'll continue with this program and I'll keep everyone updated! Worst thing that could potentially happen is that I "waste" 20-30 minutes napping each day and I feel good afterwards :-).

I'd check-fold the flop and I think it's not all that bad?! After all, villain can have quite a big variety of hands OTB and if he is not folding bottom pair why would we even bet at all?! Betting to get called by worse for me feels like betting to increase the pot and get bluffed off our hand on later. At least that is what happens for me if I bet here, I'm not necessarily looking to go to SD.

As played I think OTT the only option is to call and OTR to fold. Checking-calling twice looks really strong to me, you could easily have a weak Q in your range and I doubt it he is going to bluff you off it.

good fold. I'd 3bet def more, especially deepish. Probably checking back the turn, there is not much value we can get. I think we can also get some more value OTR against someone bad, so I'd play it bet-check-bet.

Yeah I'd be happy as well if you keep posting in both!

About FPS: Try to gain as much information as possible, when you do it, why you think you would do it at the time, what you say to yourself ect. It might not be even ego, you might just be bored and therefore you play more hands. You might not fold because you are too optimistic and/or believe that you can win every hand. Of course would not not believe such a thing now consciouisly, but the way you described the hand before I'd say it's a good bet that you think that of yourself.

FWIW, I'd fold AK OTF. AK is definitely not at the top of my range there and this board hits recreational players pretty hard.