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ICM and Blind Battles: The Big Blind This is a companion piece to this article on the SB’s strategy for blind vs blind play under ICM pressure . In that piece, we saw that, though ICM incentivizes both players to avoid big confrontations, the BB has more leeway to grow the pot on early streets. Their position enables them to bluff , control the size of the pot , and realize equity more effectively than the SB, making it less dangerous for them to start growing the pot pre-flop. Though ICM incentivizes both players to avoid big confrontations, the BB has more leeway to grow the pot on early streets. The following chart shows the BB’s strategy for responding to both a limp and a raise from the SB at various stages of a tournament. All these simulations were run with 40bb symmetric stacks, meaning all players have the same stack size. Note that the final table solution was run for 35bb. Although the BB raises less aggressively as their risk premium mounts, they retain a robust raising range even under the most intense ICM pressure. At this stack depth, raising is simply less dangerous for the BB . Re-raising from out of position is extremely risky for the SB, so the BB can mostly expect to see a flop and continue exercising their positional advantage even if the SB does not fold immediately. BB’s response to a raise appears not to change so dramatically as the tournament progresses, but this is deceptive. As the risk premium increases, SB’s raising range gets stronger, yet BB’s raising and calling frequencies tighten only slightly. This implies that BB contests the pot with weaker hands relative to the SB’s range as the risk premium increases . The higher the risk premium, the more valuable the BB’s positional advantage, increasing their equity realization. The higher the risk premium, the more valuable the BB’s positional advantage, increasing their equity realization. Shallower Stacks With 20bb stacks, we see a clearer pattern of the BB playing more conservatively as risk premiums increase. This reflects not only their own increased risk, but also the SB’s stronger limping and raising ranges. BB can re-raise more effectively at this stack depth, as the re-raise is now primarily a shove that denies SB the opportunity to move all-in themselves and put BB to an existential decision. When ICM pressure is most extreme, there is even room for BB to develop a range for three-betting less than all-in. Despite the small size, this raise is extremely polar , as the SB responds almost exclusively by shoving or folding. Contesting a large pot post-flop from out of position is simply too risky a proposition on the bubble or at the final table; any hand good enough for the SB to call would be good enough to shove and would value the fold equity that comes along with that. The following chart shows BB’s response to a 3bb SB open on the final table with 20bb effective stacks. Hands in light red are non all-in 3bets.

Polarized Describes a range that is mainly very strong made hands or bluffs, with very few middle-strength hands.

Implied odds A calculation of odds that takes into consideration future betting, thus allowing players to estimate the additional bets they could gain on future streets should they make their hand. Reverse implied odds refer to the value lost when making a hand and losing to a stronger made hand anyway.

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(99-44) and many hands with good equity that don’t want to raise and be forced to fold against a jam, such as KTo, Q9s and 76s. The raising range is again polarized and is made up of the strongest hands that can call a jam, such as pocket pairs (66+), offsuit Ax (A8o+), suited Ax (A5s+) and the strongest broadways. The rest of the raising range is focused on having a blocker, such as A7o-A2o, Kxo and hands with decent playability in single raised pots, such as KJo, QTo, J8s, and 74s. (Hand Ranges 100-102). Hand Range 100: SB vs BB 25bb (Limp vs All-in) • Call All-in 15.2% / • Fold 84.8%

And also: We know that Villain’s calling frequency is 55%, so:

you have succeeded in confusing your opponent. It is much harder to make a hand then to have a hand so by betting you put your opponent to the test of having a hand or not. Do not push your hands too far. The cards will tell you how to play the hand; your job is to interpret what the cards are saying and how to react to your opponent. If you do not have a starting hand then you fold and continue folding if you never get a hand to play with. Patience is the strongest part of a poker player’s game. If you have been paying attention to the game, you will know how to exploit your opponent’s tendencies and avoid losses. Do not let your ego tell you what to do, let your understanding of your opponent tell you what to do. You are not going to win at every session. If you break even then many times you are actually ahead. If you still have the money then you still have the ability to make a profit in the next session. Avoid the thoughts that you are expected to win, or you have to win or that you are suppose to win. Even the best poker players do not win every session. On the other side of the coin, realize that you are not a bad poker player if you lose sometimes. Ultimately, if you do lose then you have to look at your game and thinking process. You have to be honest with yourself to realize what you may be doing wrong. Are you raising with poor holdings, making a continuation bet against too many players in the hand when you did not improve on the flop? Are you calling too many raises hoping to hit a good flop? I think this is the ultimate demise of many players; they never look at themselves to see what they can change or what has changed in their thinking. Sometimes the pressure to make money is so great that you start pushing your hands too hard. You may not even realize that this shift in thinking on your part is the reason your game has changed. By contemplating your game and way of thinking, you may unearth a change in thinking that has nothing to do with your actual skill level in poker but how you are approaching the game. For example, you were a winning player, accumulated $2,000 over three months. You decided to spend $1,000 of that money on a small vacation. When you return and start playing poker again you may think to yourself; “I need to replenish the $1,000 I used”. You are not as patient and start pushing smaller and smaller edges while risking more and more money. This would be a change from the patient accumulating style of poker. Your goal is to reach a point in your play when everything comes natural. This takes practice and long hours of study. Eventually you will reach that place where you see the board and

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success. As for the bigger hold 'em games, where players are capable of thinking at many different levels, an understanding of the information in this book, combined with a great deal of experience and some hard thinking about the game, is the only way to guarantee success. . Before the first edition of Hold 'em Poker for Advanced Pluyers was published in 1988, we debated for a long time before deciding to release the information it contained. We thought the strategies presented would make many of the games we played in much tougher, and we both derived much of our income from playing poker. However, after considering the avalanche of hold 'em books - most of which were inaccurate - that were reaching the market, we believed it was only right to go ahead and produce the text. Incidentally, Hold 'em Poker for Advanced Pluyers is not meant to replace Hold 'em Poker by David Sklansky. In fact, we still consider that book absolutely must reading for anyone interested in learning the game. However, we intend to discuss many areas of hold 'em which that text either only touches on or does not address, and we intend to discuss these areas at a level of significant sophistication. Six years after the first edition 'of Hold 'em Poker for Advanced Players appeared we put out an expanded edition. To our amazement, poker - and hold 'em in particular - had exploded across the country. This meant that if you became proficient at Texas hold 'em, there would be many good games to play in and lots of places where these games can be found. But the games had also changed from the time this text first appeared. Specifically, players who just played tight didn't seem Introduction 3 to be as prevalent as they were in 1988. Moreover, there were now many more players who played very aggressively (perhaps overly so), and loose, action play became much more common. In fact, hold 'em pots frequently become quite large, with a great deal of money sometimes going into the center of the table before the flop. This was very different from the way we remember hold 'em when both of us first began to play it. There were probably.many reasons why this happened, but it was clear to us that this text had a lot to do with it. Many of the plays that we explained - and that we only rarely saw before - were now commonplace. On the other hand, with numerous new players at the hold 'em tables, many of whom came to "gamble," it was not surprising that the pace of the games had accelerated. This change didn't really affect the strategies that Hold 'em Poker for Advanced Players provided, but it did affect when certain concepts came into play. Again, as we pointed out in 1988, there is no substitute for experience, and to ensure success, you should be doing a great deal of thinking about the game. So in 1994 we produced the second edition of this book. We

Diagram 85 Diagram 86

on the ground you looks at things in terms of being in control so the way he looks at it is when you're in position you're on offense you're the aggressor you're putting pressure on your opponent's you're acting on them and when you're out of position you're on defense you are trying to kind of hold your ground and you are reacting to the opponent's who are probably putting pressure on you because position allows you all the things that we mentioned in the previous slides okay so talking about control let's talk about how position helps us play with more control so a couple slides ago we talked about early position middle position late position and out of position but honestly that's really just for preflop which is part of the game but it's not the main part of the game most of the money is exchanged after the flop most of the money is wagered after the flop whether you're in position or out of position and so once we get back past preflop and you know that was just kind of a way to plan your preflop strategy you need to know that it's no early middle and late position you're either in position or you're not so yes you can have better position than others in multi way pots but truly having absolute position truly being in position is everything because better position you know well it means you get more information than the worst position you don't get control and what we really want when we're playing poker is control all over the action control over our opponents and here's an example here are two plays which can only be applied by the player in absolute position the players with relative position the players with you know second best position cannot apply these plays and you're gonna see that these are two really powerful plays that give us control over the action the first one is the free card play which is an old play that originated in Limit Hold'em because bet size increased on the turn so an Limit Hold'em you know let's let's say you're playing $0.50 a dollar for simplicity the bets preflop are 1 1 1 1 1 the bets on the flop are 1 1 1 1 1 you know 1 2 3 4 the bets on the term would be 2 4 6 8 and the best one would be 2 4 6 8 and the idea behind the free card play was if you had a draw in position and your opponent bet the flop for 1 and you expected that if you called his bet he was gonna follow through him bet the turn for 2 well instead of calling the flop bet and calling the turn bet to try to see if we could realize our equity by the river what you would do to execute the free card plays you would raise the flop to 2 to represent a stronger hand than you have hope that

Wide ranges are weak on more flops than standard ranges are. Tight ranges flop something strong more frequently due to containing a higher concentration of pocket pairs for low boards and better broadway hands to sometimes connect strongly with higher boards. Look at the following example: This is a situation where Villain's range will frequently be strong. What kind of hands does an 11/7 Nit call with here on the BU? We can estimate that his range is full of medium pocket pairs, maybe something like [77-QQ] then the best off-suit broadway hands like AKo and AQo and some good suited broadway hands like [AQs AJs KQs QJs]. This range interacts very well with this board. The bottom of it is AK and then there are a lot of combinations of good pair + gut shot, top pair, and sets. If Hero c-bets here he should expect fold equity to be pretty poor. Needless to say, Hero's pot equity is also pretty bad. The six outs he appears to have when called are likely to complete some two pair combinations for Villain and kill Hero's action if they do make him the best hand, cutting the implied

Defending Against Tiny 3-Bets Tournament poker is about precision . Cash games, where stacks typically run into the hundreds of big blinds, are more forgiving of slight variations in preflop raise sizing or calling ranges. There’s room to make up the difference later. In tournaments, savvy adversaries will size their 3-bets precisely, adapting to the positions and stack sizes to give you the most challenging possible decisions. For example, when facing a 3-bet with just 20 or 25bb, it’s tempting to purely play a shove-or-fold strategy. Tough opponents will combat this with tiny 3-bets , enabling them to profit from your folds while losing the minimum to your shoves. These tiny 3-bets offer a new dilemma: should you take the appealing odds for the decidedly unappealing proposition of calling and playing OOP after the flop against a strong range? And if so, how should you play after the flop to make the most out of the situation? The answer, of course, will depend on the flop. In this article, we will investigate a variety of flop textures to help you navigate the necessarily rough waters that come with playing a (relatively) weak range from out of position. Preflop Ranges When the raiser is IP , the strategy for 3-bet pots bears some similarity to single-raised pots between an in position preflop raiser (PFR) and the BB, and for the same reasons. The 3-bettor takes on a lot of risk preflop, especially when they are in early position. Not only are they raising into a strong opening range, but they also have to worry about all the players behind them waking up with monsters. They need a strong hand to 3-bet, and should they get fortunate enough to see the flop heads up against the original raiser, they have gotten lucky. Their reward is an equity advantage and a nuts advantage postflop. With such shallow stacks, they can treat their overpairs as the nuts , even on scary flops that, in other circumstances, would favor the caller. As for the caller , they are playing the role of the BB in a single-raised pot. They start with a strong range because they opened from early position, but relative to the 3-bettor’s range, they do not require a strong hand to call. They act with the knowledge that everyone else has folded, they close the action , and they are getting much better odds to call than their opponent had to raise. This means the caller should expect to be at a disadvantage after the flop. They should expect to check-fold often . They will have tough decisions about whether to continue to a flop bet, and if they do continue, whether to do so with a raise or call . All of that is part of the course when playing OOP with a range disadvantage. Their goal is to make the best out of a bad situation , not to make the kinds of super-profitable bets the IP player gets. When you’re out of position and call a 3-bet, you should expect to

you’re in a potential downside situation and that’s where you are with77. So heads-up, AQ or AK is relatively easy to play, while pocket 7s can be very hard. Now let’s flip things around and look at these hands in a loose busy game with tons of callers. You’ll see that the ease with which these hands play is exactly reversed. Say you limp with pocket 7s (for reasons already discussed, in this game you’re limping and not raising). You’ve got four callers scattered here and there and the flop comes T-8-2. Are you losing any money with pocket 7s? Of course not. With that much traffic, you now knowthat your hand’sno good and into the muck it goes, unmourned. You’re not worried about throwing away the best hand, as you’d be in a heads-up pot, so poof! The negative implied odds to the hand go away. Mid-range pocket pairs can’t (or at least shouldn’t) cause you to sail off when overcards flop against multiple opponents. On the other hand, if a 7 comes, you know that you’re almost always holding the best hand. No confusion, no doubt. With middle pocket pairs in a loose multi-way game, when you hit the hand once (meaning one card on the flop relates to your hand), you hit thehand huge: to a set. When you miss, you miss completely. No ambiguity. No tough decision-making problems. No negative implied odds. But tremendous positive implied odds, with plenty of callers to justify your set-mining venture. So once again, you have the math logic and the decisionmaking logic playing a harmonic duet. You know you’re getting the right price to try to hit and you know you won’t get into tricky trouble when you miss. Now let’s take that AQ and recognize that you probably have to hit the hand twice in order to feel confident that it’s good in a multi-way pot. If youhit it once (which is how we usually hit our hands), flopping either the ace or the queen, you have just one pair against multiple opponents. Becauseof all the traffic, you have to be worried about someone in that pot having made two pair or better on the flop. And even if no one has outflopped you, you still have to stave off everyone on the turn and river. Having one guy against you with three or five outs is no big deal. Having four against you with that many outs? Not so nice. Therefore, in a looselimpy game, you need a flop like A-A-x, Q-Q-x, A-Q-x, or if you’re a real dreamer, K-J-T. With the 7s, you hit the hand once, flopping a 7, and you’re good to go. With the AQ, you can’t feel completely comfortable unless you hit it twice. When you hit it in the usual way, flopping a pair, it’ll be hard to drive out the shoe clerks. You could be ahead on the flop, but then again maybe you’re not, and when the traffic catches up to you, you’ll have a hard time knowing you’re beat, admitting you’re

your opponent was drawing at on the flop and on fourth street. If you thought he made what he was drawing at on the last card, well, obviously, you’d check it, whether you were first or last to act. If you were first and you thought he was drawing at a hand and completely missed it, you’d still check. But this time you’d be doing it to give him an opportunity to bluff at it. If you were last and it looked like he missed his hand then he checked it to you, you’d just turn your hand over to avoid being wrong in your judgment. He’s not going to call you if he missed his draw. But if you put him on the wrong hand to begin with, you could get raised. A-K Before the Flop A-K vs. A-A or K-K. I’ve already mentioned that I’d rather have A-K than either a pair of aces or a pair of kings. A lot of players will probably find that surprising. But it’s not. You’ll soon see why. Of course, I know that an A-K would never outrun A-A or K-K if you played them against one another hot and cold. An A-K couldn’t even beat a pair of deuces. I know from experience. 378 Once, on a proposition bet, I took the deuces and two other guys took the AK. The proposition was to play the two hands against one another hot and cold. We simply dealt out five cards to see which hand would win more times. It was an even-money bet, and we bet $500 a hand. I won several thousand dollars before they quit. They weren’t convinced the first time, so we did it two or three more times. They’d lose some money and quit. They’d go away, do some homework, come back, and then we’d do it again. And I’d beat them again. But I’m not talking about playing hot and cold here. Now I’m talking about playing poker. An A-K is a better hand than two aces or two kings for two very important reasons: (1) You’ll win more money when you make a hand with it. (2) You’ll lose less money when you miss a hand with it. And I can’t think of two better reasons to choose an A-K over the very big pairs. You can make more money with an A-K because it’s a drawing type of hand as opposed to a made hand, like two aces or kings. I mean, you don’t have anything with an A-K unless you hit something, so you can get away from it real easy. You’re not tied on to it like you might be with a pair of aces or kings. And that’s why you’ll lose less money with it. Furthermore, when you have A-K and you pair the ace or king on the flop, if your opponent is playing something like two connecting cards, it’s much harder for him to make his hand than it would be if you had a big pair. For example, say

the gun player however what if the board comes 866 well take a second obviously this big blind range could be constructed in various ways it could be wider it could be looser it doesn't really matter let's just presume it is exactly this in this scenario in this scenario you see that there are lots of sixes available but under the gun has almost no sixes so on 866 while the big blind will i'm the under the gun player will have the range advantage they will lack the nut advantage and when you have the range advantage but lack the nut advantage you want to be betting frequently which is what your range advantage tells you but when you lack the nut advantage you want to be betting small so this is a scenario where when under the gun raises in big blind calls on 866 big blind's gonna check under the gun should then bet tiny like one and a half big blinds a really small bet because he has the range advantage but lacks the nut advantage all right in general as your range contains more premium hands you get to play more aggressively you get to apply more aggression so interestingly enough if you think about the big blind strategy in that exact scenario where big blind checks under the gun best 1.5 big blinds big blinds should now raise with all of their sixes or at least the majority of their sixes and also a lot of draws as a bluff so on eight six six what are draws well nine sevens to draw if they have it notice in the scenario 97 gets three bet but whatever they could have nine seven they could have stuff like seven five again that may get three bet in this scenario i hand like five four so uh gut shot straight draw if a seven comes in that's the gut shot um they have a straight that's a hand they can definitely raise if you have ten nine that can raise and like even jack nine jack 10 queen 9 these hands all could conceivably raise they're not good draws but they're very unlikely to be the best hand at the moment but if they have a backdoor flush draw meaning let's say it comes runner run or spade say the board is eight of spades six of clubs six of hearts if two more spades come and you have queen nine of spades you made a flush of two spades come so those are all hands that you may want to be playing aggressively so as your range contains more effective nut hands you get to play more and more aggressively finally position is very important you typically get to bet more from in position and you should be checking more from out of position that's because when you're in position you have a lot of control over the size of the pot so when you are out of position you don't really want to be betting

straight, which can be made with cards of two different ranks. Thus, nine-eight-seven-six is an open-ended straight, which can be made with either a ten or a five. Theoretically, jack-nine-eight-seven-five is also open-ended in that either a ten or a six will make the hand. The latter hand is also called a double belly buster. Outs: Cards which will improve your hand. Also, ways of improving your hand. The term is used particularly in reference to a hand that needs to improve to become the best hand. Overcall: A call of a bet after another player has already called. Overcard: A card higher than any card on the flop, or any card higher than those in your hand. Overpair: A wired pair that is higher than any card on board. Pair: Two cards of the same rank. Two eights is apair. Pass: To check. Also, to fold. Pay off: To call a bet or raise when you don't think you have the best hand. Pay station: A player who calls bets and raises much more than is correct. He's also referred to as a calling station. This type is great when you have a legitimate hand, but he's just about impossible to bluff out of a pot. Position: The spot in the sequence of betting in which a player is located. A player in first position would be the first person to act; a player in last position would be the last person to act. Appendix B: Glossary 321 Positive expectation: The amount a wager may be expected to win on average. A play with positive expectation is a play that will win money over the long run. Pot: The total amount of money wagered at any point in a hand. A hand itself is also referred to as a pot. Thus, three people in the pot means there are three active players still playing the hand. Pot odds: The ratio of the amount of money in the pot to the bet you must call to continue in the hand. Put someone on a hand: To determine as best you can the hand (or hands) an opponent is most likely to have. Pure nuts: The best possible hand. If the board is AV7+8+K444 a player holding a 65 has the pure nuts. Rag: See Blank. Raise: To bet an additional amount after someone else has bet. Raiser: A player who raises. Rake: An amount retained by a casino from each pot, usually no more than $2 or $3. Represent: To make your opponents believe you have a better hand than you really do. Reraise: To raise after an opponent has raised. Reverse implied odds: The ratio of the amount of money now in the pot to the amount of money you will have to call to continue from the present round to the end of the hand. River: The fifth and last community card. 322 Appendix B: Glossary Round of betting: A sequence of betting after one or more cards have been dealt. A round ofbetting continues until each active player has

you're playing online even if you have a pretty big Edge the most you're going to be winning is something like 10 big blinds per 100 hands you're going to find that online games are usually much tougher than live games for all sorts of reasons we're not going to get into that today if you are a big winner in live cash games you're going to be winning something like 25 big blinds per 100 hands maybe even more and if that's the case you don't actually need money at all you see here you only need 2,000 big blinds or about $4,000 you may say I only have 400 bucks and one two is the smallest game that I can play what should I do well the answer is you should probably play online for tiny sakes and grind up your money when I started playing poker I had $50 to my name not a whole lot of money so I played really tiny sakes online and I grinded it up realized that poker is a great way to get rich slowly it is not such a great way to get rich quick assuming you actually want to get rich now if you just want to gamble and shoot your money in there sure do whatever you want it doesn't matter but I'm teaching you here how to actually succeed long term you have to have a little bit of discipline so in cash games there actually is not a whole lot of variance but in tournaments there is a lot of variant because say you play a thousand person tournament how often are you actually going to win that tournament well I don't know one in a, one in 500 if you're good not a lot which means you're going to go on big down swings so you're going to find that the amount of variance you experience in tournaments is going to be a little bit different based on how many players are in the tournament now it's very important to determine your return on investment we're going to discuss that in just a second how to actually do that these numbers here presume you have a 30% return on investment three 30% return on investment which is what most pretty good poker players who are winning in the game will have in most softish tournaments if you're playing High Roll rollers in the pokergo studio maybe you have 10% return on investment or less if you're playing super duper duper soft tiny Stakes tournaments with no rake against the worst players in the world your return on investment will probably be higher if you're playing a gigantic field Main Event your return on investment may be higher but these are the requirements if you have about 30% Roi so notice here that the number of players in the field impacts the bank rle you need because as there are more players in the field you will inevitably experience more variants because you're not going to win the

turned over my hand and he showed the king 10 off suit just said he can't have the kington off suit go figure um i think this king tends probably just to fold if jake's watching this he told me he's a member to poker coaching um if he is watching this i would tell you i'm pro like find some bluffs find some logical bluffs i mean seriously there's like none i could have asked at clubs but notice that blocks some of his auto folds right what can i have call the flop would i call the flop with like ace five of clubs i mean i guess for the small bet i would nine eight would i bluff the river with 9 8 when you bet flop into multiple people bet turn and then bent river in a spot where you just have all the nuts in your range i think it'd be pretty insane i mean i i got i can't even find logical bluffs here i'm sure i'm under bluffing and against players who i perceive to be loose and splashy in general then i think they just call a lot so if they're going to call a lot i'm probably under bluffing anyway he called the king 10 pretty quickly and i think this is just a it's just the fold it's an annoying spot they certainly don't like it but i mean there just aren't very many logical bluffs like i'm not playing queen eight right so if i'm not playing random queen eight and i probably won't even bluff the ace x because notice that blocks pocket aces it blocks ace queen as well but it blocks pocket aces blocks ace king these are the autofolds i want them to have what am i really bluffing with nine eight of clubs and eight seven of clubs that's it notice those blocks and flush draws that i like them to have to autofold just to fold i'm not bluffing very often here if the river was a three i think it'd be way more reasonable because then while he does have straights he also has like a lot of two pair that could go for value like this and then he's a little bit more inclined to call i don't think the two changes a lot in terms of my like super relative hand strength but i do have some sets like this that do get stronger anyway i raised it up he said i've called me and we got some chips but where'd they go who knows like i said if it's just like a standard flipping spot i i'm not going to show it because i don't really remember i honestly don't really care there are a lot of spots in poker where it's just like 30 40 big blinds each ace king against queens kings against jacks whatever you're just in so don't be too afraid of playing big pots sometimes you're gonna win and sometimes you're gonna lose all right carrie

bets, you are next, and a few players have yet to act behind you. This is a raise-or-fold situation for you. A call makes it easy for players behind you to stay in with hands like A-K or K-Q, which are drawing quite live against you. And, for one bet, they probably will call, but might fold when faced with calling a raise. There is one additional benefit to raising with the two sevens here. Your raise screams out “I have a jack!,” and this will probably cause a few hands to fold that have you beat — 8-8, 9-9, and T-T. Anytime you can raise and induce a better hand to fold, you have earned yourself a pot. Over time, the players who are capable of making these sorts of plays are the ones winning the money at hold’em. However, you should exercise some discretion here. If you are familiar with the play of the bettor, and know that he is a very solid player, it is likely that you are trailing in this situation. You don’t need to raise with your two sevens every time this situation arises. Against solid opposition, a fold is often the best play. Tip # 20 of 52 With a bet in front of you, fold if there isn't a good chance that you hold either the best hand or best draw. Perhaps the biggest edge you have over your opponents in lower-limit hold’em games is your ability to fold. You often find yourself in games in which several players stay until the river, and then whoever winds up with the best hand wins the pot. If you make it a priority to remain in the hand after the flop only when you hold either the probable best hand or a good draw, you will be miles ahead of some of your opponents. Some players believe in “taking one off” after the flop. That is, even though the flop didn’t necessarily help their hand, they call the cheap bet on the flop hoping to develop some possibilities on the turn card. The problem with this strategy is that, with several players in the pot, the flop is very likely to have helped somebody. Often, they flop a hand that requires their chasing opponents to catch runner-runner (two consecutive improving cards) to beat them. Calling the flop bet in a six-way pot when the best hand you can make on the turn is a pair is nearly always a mistake, even if you hold A-K or A-Q. Your pair will often be someone else’s two pair or flush card. So, get out cheap and wait for a better opportunity. When you hold a hand that stands a chance of winning unimproved — J-J for example — you don’t need to catch another jack on the flop to stay in the pot. Flops such as 4-6-T are typically quite good for J-J, so play the hand aggressively. However, when overcards hit and several players are in the hand, it is time to get out. A good example

Draw, Heads-Up, In Position, With the Lead You raise before the flop with A♠K♠ and the blind calls, so you’re in position heads-up with the lead. The flop comes T♦-6♠-2♠. The player out of position now checks to you. What do you do? Bet that same half- to three-quarters-pot bet you would if you had a set. If he calls, you got a great price on just the draw aspect of your hand (3-to-1 on a 2-to-1 shot with 15 outs and one to come). If, instead, you get check-raised, that’s even better; you can re-raise or shove. This will trigger a fold from most players and if you get called, it’s no big deal, because your worstcase scenario is about a 2-to-1 underdog, though you’re often a favorite. Combine that with your fold equity and the re-raise is a huge moneymaker. Now let’s say you’re the pre-flop raiser, you get called by the blind, but he leads into you. What do you do? That’s easy. Again, it’s the same thing you’d do with a set. Raise big. Go all-in if you’re close to the right amount. You’re the favorite, remember. And you want to end the betting action—or the hand—right there. Big Draw, Heads-Up, In Position, Without the Lead Now let’s give the other guy the lead. You call in position against an early-position raiser with a hand like A♠K♠ and that same flop of T♦-6♠-2♠ comes down, giving you two overcards and a flush draw. If our friendly raiser continuation bets, as you’d expect him to do, you do the exact same thing you’d do if he took the lead away by betting out. You raise big, for all the reasons previously discussed. But here’s where things can get a little tricky. What if the pre-flop raiser checks to you? That’s weird, isn’t it? And weird play makes us suspicious. So here our strategy departs from that of playing a set on a coordinated board. Remember that when you have a set and the pre-flop leader checks to you, you’re happy to step into his tricky check-raise trap. He thinks he hasa big hand, but actually you hold the monster. But when you have a big draw, things are different, because all you have at that moment is ace high, and if your opponent is holding big or huge (anything from AA to a set), your hand is no longer big. His AA costs you your high-card outs, and his set turns some of your flush draw outs into kill cards by pairing the board. Against such hands you could be something like a 3-to-1 dog with two cards to come. Your hand doesn’t seem so big anymore, does it? When a pre-flop raiser checks to you on the flop in a heads-up pot, your radar should be beeping big time—that usually signals a big hand andyou should take the infinity-to-1 odds on offer. Basically, he’s telling you that he doesn’t mind giving a free card. Well, you don’t mind taking the free card he’s offering you here, because the

and interesting probabilities. A classic mistake that many players make is miscalculating their chance when there .are two cards to come. For instance, if a player can catch nine cards to make his hand, he knows he is a 38- to-9 underdog on the next round, assuming 47 unseen cards. However, he incorrectly doubles his outs to 18 when figuring his odds for both rounds and thus arrives at 29-to-1 8 (38.3 percent), a figure 3.3 percent too high. We will not bother you with the proper technique for calculating these odds. Instead, we have provided a chart that shows the zxact probability of making your hand with two cards to come, assuming 47 unseen cards. No. of Outs 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 ~bability of ( - Percentage 67.5 65.0 62.4 ' 59.8 57.0 54.1 ' 5 1.2 48.1 45.0 41.7 ' Straight flush draw 3 Straight draw mpleting Har No. of Outs Percentage - 38.4 35.0' 3 1 .53 27.8 24.1 20.3 1 6S4 12.5 8.4 4.4 ' Flush draw 4 Two pair or gut-shot draw 310 Appendix A: Probability To change a percentage to odds (to I), subtract the specified percentage in the table from 100 and divide the result by this same percentage. For example, to change 27.8 percent to odds, subtract 27.8 from 100 giving 72.2. Then divide the result by 27.8 giving 2.597 (to 1). Thus 27.8 percent is the same as 2.597-to-1. If you hold a wired pair, you will flop three-of-a-kind or better 1 1.8 percent of the time. If you hold AK, you will flop at least one ace or one king 32.4 percent of the time. If you hold two unmatched cards, you will flop a split two pair 2.02 percent of the time. If you hold two suited cards, you will flop a flush 0.8 percent of the time, and a four-flush 10.9 percent of the time. Two suited cards will make a flush about 6.5 percent ofthe time, but this figure assumes that you will stay in with a three-flush on the flop, hoping to catch two running cards. In a 10-handed game, the chance that someone holds an ace and another card of a specified suit is about 9 percent; however, this figure decreases if you flop a four-flush. Thus your king-high flush will be beaten by an ace-high flush less than 6 percent of the time (when there is a three-flush on board). You are two and one-third times as likely to be dealt an AK (or any two unmatched cards) as a pair. Consequently, a player who will raise with AA, KK, or AK is more likely to have specifically AK than the other two hands combined. If you flop trips, you will wind up with a full house or better 33 percent of the time. If you flop two pair, a four-straight, a four- Appendix B: Glossary Action: The betting in a particular hand or game. A game with a lot of action is a game with a lot of betting.

what they’re trying to convince you to do and disappoint them. If they’re exhibiting what I term “involuntary tells,” they’re not acting, and if the tell is strong enough, you should react directly in accordance with what it implies. Be aware that the most experienced players in the biggest games exhibit tells less 93 frequently. And when they do, the tell is likely to be a more subtle variation of the one you’ll see when confronting weak and average opponents. One of the core principles governing acted tells is that a player looking away is always more dangerous than a player staring at you. A player staring away from the approaching action, as you see here, is pretending to be uninterested in the pot. Actually, he has a strong hand and is preparing to get involved. He’ll probably raise if you’re silly enough to bet a vulnerable hand into him. If you see a player staring away like this when it’s your turn to act, beware! TIP 32 Here’s one of the most misunderstood and most profitable tells in poker. It’s not acted. It’s a natural reaction that your opponents can’t control. You’ll occasionally see this even among a few top players in the biggest limits—and when you do, you can save a lot of money by folding. I’m talking about a suddenly shaking hand. Please pay attention to what I just said—a “suddenly” shaking hand. If your opponent’s hands tend to be unsteady most of the time, this tell won’t help you much. But, fortunately, few players exhibit constant trembling. So, what happens when—all of a sudden—the opponent bets and his hand begins to tremble. I’ll tell you what happens in a lot of opposing players’ minds. They think, “Look at that hand shake. That guy’s nervous. I’ll bet he’s bluffing, so I’m going to call” Now, there’s a thought that’s guaranteed to cost you money! Typically, players who bluff bolster themselves and often become rigid. They don’t allow themselves to shake, because they’re afraid the shaking would make you suspicious and prompt you to call. When you see an opponent shaking, it’s a release of tension that comes automatically when the suspense ends. That opponent has made a big hand— often a truly monumental one—and expects to win. If this seems counterintuitive to you, start watching. A suddenly shaking hand signals the happy ending to a drama. It indicates that the player has gotten lucky and is mentally already stacking those chips. The trembling means a strong hand, and you should almost always fold—unless your own hand is also very powerful. 94 TIP 33 We talked about the calling reflex, and oddly, most opponents are instinctively aware of it. They’re not aware to the extent that they’re able to harness their own calling reflex, but subconsciously they’re aware that the other players have one—although they’ve probably never put it in words. Because of this vague awareness, your opponents are afraid of triggering your calling reflex after they bet weak hands. So, they instinctively make themselves less noticeable. Sometimes they freeze

THE CONCEPTS 189 no one player could expect a bluffto succeed often enough to be profitable. So the bet is likely to be what it represents, a strong hand. For example, say you are playing $10–$20 with $4,000 stacks and have A♡Q♡in middle position. Someone limps in early position, and you also limp. Two players limp behind you, the small blind calls, and the big blind checks. Six players are active in a $120 pot. The flop comes A♠9♡7♢. Everyone checks to you, and you bet $100. The two players behind you call, as does the big blind. There are still four active players, and the pot is $520. The turn is the 5♡. The big blind checks, and you also check. The next player bets $400. The other two players fold. You too should frequently fold. You are out of position with a hand that’s unlikely to improve against someone who has made a very powerful turn bet. The pot is now $920 and you’re getting $920-to-$400 odds to call, but if you call, you and your opponent will both have over $3,400 left. If you call now, your opponent may well bet $1,000 or more on the river. Despite having top pair, you likely can’t continue profitably. Concept No. 51: In tournaments, other things being relatively equal, prefer small river value bets that will often be called to large river value bets that will seldom be called. Put another way, if a smaller bet has a bit less EV, it is still right to make it in most tournament situations. Earlier we discussed how to size river value bets correctly by max- imizing your expectation. We came to the somewhat surprising conclusion that you should sometimes make a huge bet with the nuts, even though you won’t often be called. In those situations, it’s better to win huge every once in a while than win a small amount more frequently. In tournaments, however, you should usually prefer smaller, more consistent wins to big, infrequent ones. That’s because chips change value in tournaments: $100,000 in tournament chips is worth less than twice as much as $50,000. In tournaments, since mere survival has value, each chip you win is worth less than the last. That is, your last remaining chip is worth a lot more to you than your second-to-last. Similarly, you’d usually prefer winning $1,000 eighty percent of the time to $8,500 ten percent of the time. For more on this concept, see pages 44–45 of Tournament Poker for Advanced Players by David Sklansky. Concept No. 52: The play of check-raising to knock people out, an important tool in limit, should rarely be used in no limit. In limit, since the bet size is restricted, sometimes you have to check vulnerable hands and hope someone else bets. Then you can raise and use the double-sized bet to protect your hand. In no limit, this tactic is no longer worth it. The cost versus gain is too high. Concept No. 53: In heads-up pots, whether you are first or second to act

fundamental problem the game presents, and you can now set about to determine your ultimate goal for any hand of poker you play. When you’re playing hold ’em, you’re required to make your decisions with incomplete information—far from complete, in fact—meaning youknow what your two cards are, but you can’t see your opponents’ cards. Let’s pause for a moment and compare poker to another dense, complex, complicated, and infinitely variable game: chess. If you ask the general public what they think is the most difficult game out there, they’ll probablysay chess. This is because in chess, you have to think many levels deep to be really good. You have to think through the implications of every move you consider in terms of what your opponent’s possible responses might be and what your possible responses to his possible responses might beand so on. The more levels deep you try to go, the more complicated the decision trees become. The best players in the world can simply thinkmore levels deep than everyone else. Now, I don’t disagree that chess is an intensely difficult game to become good at. That said, in chess you can see the whole board. It looks like this. In chess, you have complete information. You can see all of your opponent’s pieces right there in front of you and there’s only one opponent, which kind of makes things easier, too. On top of that, there’s no random element. No little chess gnomes come running up during the game and randomly steal pieces off the board. Because you can see the whole board and there are no random elements, you can theoretically make aperfect decision at each decision point. The only thing you don’t know for sure is what your opponent has in mind, but since he has a theoreticallyoptimal move, you should be able to come up with the mathematically best move all the time. Is poker like chess? Sure, yeah, exactly … except that the board looks something like this. A little different, huh? Imagine playing chess where you could see only half of your opponent’s position. That would be a really difficult game, wouldn’t it? Then chess would be a game of decision-making under conditions of incomplete information as opposed to what it is, decision-makingunder conditions of complete information. Now imagine a game just like chess that has all the complexity of the decision-making process in terms of how many levels deep you must go, but has incomplete information and that’s poker. So when I say poker is a game of incomplete information, I start from the premise that almost all the information you need has yet to be collected. How much is almost all? Consider a 10-handed game of Texas hold ’em. You know your cards … and that’s all. There are 18 cards you don’t know, along with nine independent thinkers who represent complex—and capricious—problems to be solved. Once you understand that poker is a game of decision-making under conditions of incomplete information, you can easily see what your primarygoal in the game should be. REDUCE

your aces cracked. The opposite is also true. Just because you’ve run well doesn’t mean you’re owed any bad luck. The truth is that variance in poker is far beyond what humans are capable of truly conceptualizing. If you’ve ever played around with a poker variance calculator, you’d find that it takes tens of thousands of hands before you can see a statistically significant edge materialize . Confidence intervals One of the most common questions we see is “how many hands do I need before I can be sure of my win rate?”. The problem with this question is that it doesn’t have a real answer. In math, we use confidence intervals to address these unknowns! Confidence intervals follow the 68-95-99 rule: 68% of the time your results will fall within 1 standard deviation σ of the mean 95% of the population is within 2 standard deviations (2σ) of the mean 99.7% of the population is within 3 standard deviations (3σ) of the mean Distribution of Variance μ = Expected Value -1σ to 1σ = 1 Standard Deviation (ie: ~2/3 of the time, your results will fall within this range) -2σ to 2σ = 2 Standard Deviation (ie: 95% of the time, your results will fall within this range) -3σ to 3σ = 3 Standard Deviation (ie: 99.7% of the time, your results will fall within this range) Let’s look at an example: Let’s assume your “true” (mean) win rate is 2.5 BB/100. This is your expected value. Your standard deviation (σ) after 100k hands is 3.16 BB/100. A better way to write your win rate would be: 2.5 ± 3.16 BB/100. (Winrate ± σ) In other words: 70% of the time (~1σ) your results will fall between -0.66 BB/100 and 5.66 BB/100 95% of the time (2σ) your results will fall between -3.82 and 8.82 BB/100 In science, unknown variables are assigned margins of error and confidence intervals rather than exact numbers . Your win rate is an unknown variable. Therefore, it’s impossible to assign an exact number. The best you can do is assign some margin of error. The formula for your margin of error is a function of your standard deviation and volume. Putting in more volume, or lowering your variance, will lower the margin of error and increase the confidence of your results. The formula is as follows: Where σ is your standard deviation in BB/100, and hands is simply the number of hands you’ve played. For example, above we see a standard deviation of 100 BB/100, and 100k hands played. 100 * (100,000/100)^0.5 = 3162. In other words, the results are plus or minus 3162 BB, or 3.16 BB/100. This is shown as “standard deviation after 100000 hands” in the above picture, but it’s easier to think of this as a margin of error. Managing Risk Variance can be calculated by free computer programs based on the aforementioned inputs. Some recommended websites for this purpose are Primedope and ReviewPokerRooms . Understanding the bounds of variance is a great way to put your results and expectations in context.

you don't see a whole lot of hands like a sex offsuit and King X offsuit re-raising whereas you will see those hands re-raised as we get shallower stacked okay again notice against the hijack range we do not defend all that many offsuit hands we see Jack 10 folding every time 10 9 folding every time Ace nine folding every time these are just not good and then obviously all the weaker hands fold too we do get to defend a lot wider with suited hands though and you're gonna find that suited hands are usually pretty good especially if they have some sort of straight potential so now we see stuff like King five suited Queen 8 suited Jack 8 suited 9-6 suited seven five suited five three suited calling in this situation what a lot of people do wrong and the big blind facing arrays is they call with stuff like Jack 8 off suit and then just check fold a lot of the time and that's not good you want to make sure you have some post lot playability and the great thing about the suited hands is that they let you flop flush draws and back door flush draws that you can more confidently play aggressively you're gonna find that you do a decent amount of check raising from out of position we're gonna be discussing that later in the post-op section now against a button raise when the raise comes from the button this is when they should be the widest and it is therefore when you get to defend the widest okay when they are raising with a wide range you in turn get to defend with a wider range kind of like we discussed earlier and they're naturally going to be raising wider from the button so let's take a look at this now we are re-raising nines and better Ace 10 suited and better Ace Queen also even better King drag suit and better and king queen just nice strong value hands and then a bunch of medium suited connected type hands this is a rather interesting strategy and almost no one re-raises correctly in the spot if you give most players Jack 10 suited 10-9 suited 10-7 suited Jack seven suited King Nine suited most people call these hands every time because they think I don't want to re-raise and then get format and then have to fold but you have to realize if you get four bet you're probably super duper dominated and you can just easily fold stuff like Jack seven suited or 10 7 Suited so these are very very nice hands to re-raise because when you do get called they flop extremely well like I said earlier not a whole lot of offsuit hands are re-raising we do see a little bit of offsuit junky boss with stuff like King Jack King 10 Ace 8 ace5 but not a lot right most of the Bluffs are going to be tilted towards hands that flop very well when you

and it's becoming even more polar when we get to the button loads 6-4 suited as a v-pip 86 suited to Savita King five suit is a v-pip um all right and then the small blind three betting range is linear as we saw quite a lot of v-pipping as I mentioned in the uh when we went over this Deuces here is even a call Jack ate suited as a v-pip here so you're vpipping quite wide um always make sure that you're playing in flow poker is a game of flow if you know if you if you've been very aggressive you should tighten up and if you're then very tight you should you should be more active uh you don't have to you know you don't you could use all of these grids to find creative ways to play with the people who you want to play with at the speed you want to play with put pressure on on the right people all right enough of that big blind three betting very uh not very much debating at all six percent half of this is going to be Bluffs so we're three betting you know this Top Value region makes about three percent of hands Aces they're queens and Ace King that's you know it's amazing Point suited that's going to be about three percent hands and then all this red down here is going to be about three percent and it's 50 50. okay um let's look at some 60 big blind we'll look at this time we'll look at a middle position open foreign so we are shorter stacked now and we're opening from later position hijack we're seeing the same principles we're three betting to a smaller amount polarized strategy a lot of V pipping I guarantee you that everyone here is not calling Queen nine suited jackknine suited as much as they should be three betting 10A suited as much as they should be able to say generally the population is under three betting and under re-pipping pre-flop it's really just incredible how many hands that you can play and then we'll just look at a three bet here to see our response as an MP player so three bet is going to be 3x these two players fold and this is MP's response so we have about an 18 for bets when we do four bets we are going mostly 2.3 x so we're formatting about one in five times that we get three BET our four beds are going to come from Queens plus and then just kind of a mixture of different hand combos with blocker values like I keep saying you know it's not important that you are three betting Ace or four betting Ace to suit suited at this frequency um but you know these are the types of hands that you want to be rebluffing with from time to time and then over a 30 big blind uh 33. stack we'll do a hijack open all right so

pot continues to grow even if Villain decides to pot control a weaker hand with SDV

cautiously when you are potentially at risk in a somewhat marginal spot and in no limit Texas Hold'em a lot of your spots are going to be very marginal also you can flip this concept on his head and when you're the bigger sack you can look for scenarios to put your opponent at risk when you know they have to be overly tight essentially your total Equity required accounting for the risk premium is essentially the normal chippy you need based on just straight pod odds plus some additional amount of risk premium so we're gonna discuss how to figure that out you also need to consider risk premium when you are both betting and calling a bet okay it's not always if they bet how much more Equity do I need it's also if I'm about to Bluff how much more Equity do I need also you're gonna have a different risk premium against everyone at the table so say you have a medium stack against the shorter sack in that situation if you lose the hand you sell some chips left if you're the short stack though against the medium sack your risk premium is going to be huge or say you're a medium sack against another medium sack now you have to be way more cautious compared to when you're against the short stack because if you lose the hand you're out of the tournament right understand though that your risk premium is usually much less or when your risk premium is less than your opponents you often get to apply a whole lot more pressure which is why you see the big sacks often playing very aggressively here's a risk premium Matrix again like I said this is a Rough Guide it's often difficult to impossible to know exactly how much the risk premium is in your specific spot because of all the reasons we just discussed but here's some rough guidelines specifically for when you're at a final table facing an all-in or mostly all in bet and this often applies specifically on the bubble a large chunk of the time sometimes the wrist ring is bigger sometimes it's smaller so realize that you need your normal amount of equity based on the Pod odds let's say in a scenario your opponent pots it on the river and you know you need to win a third of the time to break even okay if you're in scenario with a lot of payout implications you want to look at this chart and realize that if you're a short stack against let's say a big stack meaning if you call and go broke you're out of the tournament you're going to need an extra 9 to 15 Equity to justify calling it off in the spot so if you normally need to be 33 to win maybe need to be something like 45 to win or 50 to win maybe even more if there's a one big blind stack there on the bubble you may need like 70

points: (1) If you just called before the flop, you’re through with them, and you don’t put any more money in the pot from then on. (2) If you raised with them, you should generally try to win a small pot by betting on the flop. But if you get called, you don’t want to bet again on fourth and fifth, and you should try to play showdown without any more betting from that point on—unless you think your opponent is on a draw, in which case you continue betting. (3) If you get raised, you throw away your hand. Playing Small Pairs When You Flop a Set 388 It’s a different situation entirely when you flop a set. That’s what you played for. And you should play them fast. That’s what I do, in almost all cases. I don’t always raise with them, but I never check them. Needless to say, if I was the raiser and I flopped a set, I immediately bet right out. As you know, I wouldn’t need a set to do that. However, I would make an exception if I was in the pot with a very weak player, and he was the only opponent I had. I’d check in this case. Say I had called before the flop, then I flop trips. If someone checks it to me and there are people behind me, I’ll always bet. As you know, one of my favorite plays in hold’em is to lead right into the raiser with trips or even two pair, especially when I think he’s got a big pair in the hole. I over-bet the pot right there, and if the raiser has what he represented, a big pair, he’ll almost invariably go ahead and move in on me. I’d make that play when I’ve got a small pair, say threes, and the flop is 10-7- 3. I lead into the raiser, thinking he’s got an overpair in the pocket. But a better flop would be one with a face card, say Q-10-3. Now the raiser’s got to have some kind of combination with a flop like that. If he’s got two aces or two kings and he’s any kind of a player, he’s got to raise. If he’s got A-Q, he’ll probably raise with that too. If he’s got K-Q he’ll probably call. If he’s got a straight draw he’ll call, and it’s possible that he’ll raise. So I lead right off into him. If he’s fortunate enough to have my hand beat, well, again, there’s nothing magical I can do about it. I’ll have to pay him off. If someone had called in front of me and bets on the flop when it comes like A-8-3 and I put him on a pair of aces, I’d probably play my three threes slowly. I wouldn’t want to take him out of the lead. Another time I start over-betting the pot on the flop is when I make the underfull, such as when the flop comes 9-9-4 and I’ve got two fours in the pocket.

at that point did you shout hey come on actions on you to the guy it was on now most likely you were as quiet as a church mouse that tends to be most people's modality they're like the saber-tooth Tiger waiting in the bushes to pounce so if the button player is one of those guys who looks at his hands before it's his turn to act and he's doing anything ostentatious flipping through his phone looking at the basketball game looking exasperated then that generally is an indication he's not at the top of his range he might have ace queen but aces are unlikely it's something routine this was an actual hand I had in Baltimore effective stacks were about 50 big blinds where should I be looking here so it gets dealt to me I have King deuce of diamonds it gets folded to me on the high jack alright so we're going a little beyond cut off there you should start with the cut off to start stealing buttons but you can even take it out to highjack alright or should I be looking here 9 out of 10 times the small blind and big blind can't 3bet enough so you're looking at these guys dealer in cut-off and you should be watching them from the beginning of a tournament the two guys you're laughs like the others having obviously pay passing interest but the two guys to your left do you really want to have an eye on right when they slide their ID see where they're from I know some players that like to make buddy-buddy with the people on the left eye I've never been able to do that but it's not a bad idea you just want to know what's uh I was playing WSOP see Baltimore and I kept getting this open right here on the hijack it was like having three buttons it was incredible I loved it these two dorks kept looking at the 76ers playoff game whenever they didn't have much but they tried to look disinterested upon the action when they wanted to play oh my god it was glorious you earn these buttons by paying attention this is why it's ridiculous when you see guys on their cell phone the whole time are playing on their iPad that is just indication that you cannot play now let's discuss two more situations that come up often all right take a look at this situation for a few seconds okay that's about all you get usually if you wait for your turn to act what should you do here I'll give you about 10 seconds here so what do you guys have we got a 3x we got a few folds we have a lot of people guessing D and F e Footwear I love it when everybody's all over the place I like making my quizzes tough if the practice should be tough that way you can have more fun while you're playing like practice should be tough

visualize the governmental departments of the future steadily losing ground until eventually the morning memorandum on the desk of an executive will have to do with events which occurred in his grandfather's time and the Chinese ideal of identification of the living with their dead ancestors be wholly realized. II The chateau had sustained a direct hit, killing a few tens of servants and guards, as Ling would put it. The chauffeur had taken Ling and me out the Chengtu road. The students had hidden in an old Buddhist cave. So it was that we moved to an apartment high up the promontory at the confluence of the North and Yangtze rivers. The offices occupied the caves below the apartment. The Donkey and his radio-intercepting operators took the first and second floors, while I was given the third. T at last had a tiled bath with four bedrooms and a large living room with three charcoal fireplaces. The kitchen and servants' quarters were on the top floor. My suite of apartments had a private entrance which opened on the street. 'This is an opportunity,' I told Ling, 'to get rid of those five guards.' 'The Service pays them,' he had said. 'What do you care?' 'I care a lot. I have to tip them every month, and getting kowtowed to when I come and go isn't worth the money.' 'Not every foreigner is kowtowed to,' Ling returned. 'You are Honourable Adviser,' he said slyly. 'Not every foreigner pays for it either,' I grumbled. The next day I came home alone and found Hugh Gibbs, my American embassy friend, who had turned on my gramophone and was dancing with a Chinese girl. 'What goes on at the embassy?' I asked. 'Oh, the usual horse and bull. Near bomb hits on the embassy here, destruction of missionary property, a few deaths. That sort of thing. You know the crowd.' 'Maybe a little fun might help.' I looked at his companion. 'Chinese girl, for instance.' 'Lose face,' he said. 'No women at the embassy?* I asked. 'What do they do for women?' 'They don't. They stay at home and practise the embassy's indoor sport. That reminds me,' he laughed, 'the Chinese have a word for it - "naughty".' 'Naughty in Chinese is Wan Pi,' I said. 'Sure, Wan Pi, play skin. Even girls say "Ni shih wan pi" you is naughty.' 'I'll leave you two in a moment and let you play any way you want. By the way, you remember Marguerite, the young Chinese girl who was teaching me Chinese. She's in Chengtu visiting friends but will be back in a month or so. I want to ask you something about her. You are a Chinese scholar. One night I helped her down these dark stairs to the street and we stood talking a moment. There were ricksha coolies sprawled on the sidewalk around the entrance and they laughed and said something that made her tremble. What could it have been?' He laughed gustily. 'Well, Osborn, you sure are naive. They said, "Yang-kueb tse

Hand Range 171: BB vs LJ (40bb) • All-in 0.2% / • 3-bet 7.8% / • Call 54.2% / • Fold 37.8%

cards are good this hand, and in a prior hand that you won, your cards were weaker. Your strong hands may be losers if tight-aggressive players are not respecting your bets. STRATEGIES 89 Life Analogy - Investment scams In recent years, the news has been full of investment scams. All scams have a common element: to induce herd behavior and then run in the opposite direction. What makes something a scam is the element of dishonesty. Scam artists say things they know to be untrue for the purpose of profit. The direction of the stampede does not matter so long as the scam artist goes the opposite way. For example: Pump and dump. The now-classic example is Enron. By use of phony accounting, the top executives created huge demand for their company's stock into which they sold their shares. By the time the public realized that their shares of Enron were worthless, the top executives had cashed out hundreds of millions of dollars. Trash and stash. This is the same basic idea as a "pump and dump scam," but it is done in reverse. A notable example occurred on August 25, 2000, when a college student concocted a phony press release distributed over the Internet, stating that Emulex would not meet earnings expectations. In less than an hour, the company's share price fell 62%, wiping away $2.5 billion of market capitalization. Of course the scam artist shorted shares of Emulex prior to his hoax and covered his short position with cheap shares purchased while the sellers stampeded. While these are extreme examples of herd behavior brought on by dishonesty, they illustrate a truth that applies to honest investment decisions. The truth is that you will never make money when you are part of a stampede. To profit, you must be standing apart from the crowd. 90 THE INTELLIGENT GUIDE TO TEXAS HOLD'EM POKER Analyzing Game Characteristics To think about poker strategically is difficult. Most people play the game by looking for the right cards. They hope that their starting cards are good, that the flop hits them, that they will outdraw the other players, and that the other players will not outdraw them. Thinking never progresses beyond what cards will improve my hand, and what cards I should fear. To go beyond the superficial analysis of cards, you need to develop the mental discipline to analyze the kind of game you are in, both before, during, and after play. While your name is on the waiting list, scope the games you might enter. During the game, think about whether the table dynamics have changed. After play, think about the key decisions you made. Keep a poker diary and analyze which plays worked and which did not. To orient your approach to the game in terms of the strategic grid (figure on Page 73), here is a list of questions you should ask yourself while observing games: *Are raises frequent or rare'? *Are showdowns frequent or rare? *On average, do many players pay to see the flop, or just a few? *On average,

hey everybody this is alexander fitzgerald or assassinato today i'm going to be discussing with you how to exploit microsix players if you've ever seen one of my videos you know that i believe the best way to learn is through doing through action through application through practice so i'm just gonna make you practice and then we're going to discuss how we could better play against micro sticks players i know many of you who are watching this video you like playing micro stakes games you're excited about poker you want to learn how to beat these tournaments with thousands and thousands of players it feels like it should be a little bit easier because a number of these players are recreational in nature and don't always play the exact form of poker that would lead to results so you know there must be a way to exploit them but you're not sure what that way is well today we're going to discuss a number of the ways you can exploit micro 6 players and get results and have a little bit more fun playing these uh these games so let's go ahead and just start so here you have queen nine offsuit villains who you actually just got moved to this table so you don't know much about either of these players so what would you like to do here full color raise and for most of these decisions i have a succession of pre-flop flop turn and river decisions that i'm going to test you on with the pre-flop decisions i'll give you about five seconds uh with the flop decisions i'll give you five seconds-ish turn maybe 10 river 15 and yeah so just be prepared for that if you'd like to get more out of this lesson i'd highly encourage you to take notes okay so you you've looked at this spot now for a few seconds so this is one of the first ones i want to discuss with you guys so most micro stakes players i talk to and i i've done thousands of personal lessons over 10 years if you don't know me if you don't know me i i've done a lot of private coaching that that's been my main thing i do have w coupons scoop wins wpt final tables ept final tables i won the 250k on acr last year but my primary focus has been uh coaching that that's definitely been what i do and i with a focus on database analysis and one of the things i do notice with microsix players quite a bit is they just call here when i'm analyzing players who play micro stakes games and i'm going through their databases one of the things i do notice is that they they call here every single time and i go why do you do that and they say well i'm getting really good pod odds and i go okay so how do you know you're winning here and i think what do you mean and

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guy who moves all in for 175,000 there's actually a mistake here he was actually in the LoJack not the hijack so this players in the high the LoJack and moves all in for 17.5 big blinds and it's gonna fold through us in the big blind and we have ace Jack offsuit so a couple things here this player was very aggressive he was a good player he kind of he knew what he was doing he was also a little spew II he got out of line a little bit he was an aggressive three better preflop and he had just recently lost a kind of annoying pot and I wasn't sure kind of what his mental state was so basically we have an aggressive player who's shoved all in now for seventeen and a half big blinds my stack was like 210 thousand so I have 210 thousand just barely covering him it's basically for all my chips and I need to find out if I should fold or if I should call here and the questions I want to ask here are one is ace Jack kind of in real-time what I kind of do here in real-time is and this is my thought process is like what would I do with one hand worse so if I had a son off here what would I do and I was pretty confident a son off is a very easy fold ace Jack offsuit felt like the borderline hand and then if I had a screen off suit so I go one above and one below ace queen offsuit I knew I would be calling I thought ace-queen offsuit was a very easy call ace 10 off suit a very easy fold and so now I kind of have this middle-aged Jack han which I'm not sure what to do with anyone else having a problem with the audio cutting in and out so this ace jack-off suit I'm not sure what to do with seems like Bob it seems like everyone else is having the audio is doing just fine maybe refresh Bob that might be the best bet so basically I ended up calling with the ace Jack and we're not even gonna look at what his hand was we're not gonna look at what his hand was because it's irrelevant but we made the call here with ace Jack so question theme of this webinar how do I find out if I made the correct call or not so we've set up the situation here and we are gonna use hold them resources calculator this little program here this is a cool little program so Hold'em resources calculator I've already run the hand I'll show you really quickly how we would do this we're gonna go to basic hand I already have this all loaded in here everyone has a hundred and seventy-five thousand chips 5k 10k blinds it's a ten thousand Bay boy Danny but I just put a thousand that's about close enough it's

important that you be able to identify the cards that your opponent needs in order to call the flop. Ask yourself, “What are the possibilities out there, and what might my opponent have?” Suppose the flop comes Q? 10? 7?, and you have two black queens in your hand. If you bet and someone only calls, you can pretty much infer that your opponent has a straight or flush draw. If he had both, he would probably raise. And if he had an underset, he would probably reraise. So, if you have a set or top two pair and somebody calls your bet, there is a high probability that he is on a draw. Your job is to guess what hand might have made him call your bet. 272 Now let’s take a look at another situation in which reading the flop is critical. Suppose you have pocket threes, and the flop comes J-7-3 rainbow, giving you trip threes. You raise and someone reraises. Most people would not reraise you with an inside straight draw such as 10-9-8-x or 6-5-4-x. So, if there isn’t much out there and you get reraised, you can pretty much infer that your opponent has the top set, unless he’s bluffing. If there isn’t a big draw possibility on board, then it is more likely that the raiser has top two pair or a set. So, this might be a good time to fold your bottom set. Here’s an example from a hand that actually happened in a big pot-limit Omaha game with a $75,000 cap. The pot was raised and reraised before the flop. Five players—David Grey, Chip Reese, Johnny Chan, Jay Heimowitz, and I—put in $15,000 each to see the flop, a very rare occurrence. The flop came Q-7-5 rainbow. I had the 8-6-4-x, so I had the bottom straight wrap. I bet $60,000 to try to pick up the pot, and David called with essentially the same hand that I had, the low straight wrap. Chip was next and he called with the 9-8-6-x, the high wrap, much better than mine. Johnny had raised the pot before the flop with two aces, and with three of us already in on the flop, he called, thinking he could still win the hand if he caught an ace. I think he also had a backdoor flush draw. Then it was Jay’s turn. He had pocket queens and made top set on the flop. Now he has all these guys in the pot with him and he’s sitting there with trip queens! The next card off was a 6, which gave David and me the bottom end of the straight and Chip the top end. When a blank came on the river, Chip won the hand and $375,000. To this day, that is one of the biggest pots we’ve played in our game. And it’s a good example of why you don’t want to put your money in with the bottom end of the straight. This reminds me of the old saying about a guy who owned

bet so often. BB has the nuts advantage . Although their range is equal overall, BB is more likely to flop the very best hands like straights and two pairs. There are no worthless hands . Both players’ very worst hands retain around 25% equity. At worst, they will have either two overcards to the board or one overcard plus a gutshot. This last point is what makes continuation betting so valuable. BTN profits from betting so often because even if BB folds only their very worst hands, they are still giving up a quarter of the pot when they do so. And if BB calls, even BTN’s very worst hands have a fair chance of improving. Even if BB folds only their very worst hands to a continuation bet, they are still giving up a quarter of the pot. This is also what makes betting dangerous for BTN. They have many hands that benefit tremendously from folds and are in fine shape when called but will struggle to continue to a check-raise. If BB turns their aggression back on them , then they are the ones in danger of being denied equity . At equilibrium, BB can leverage their nuts advantage to check-raise at a higher frequency than their equity alone would permit. Even hands as strong as overpairs are in a rough spot if BB check-raises and then continues to barrel turns and rivers. So, the threat of a check-raise compels BTN to check behind with many medium-strength hands that would love to deny equity to BB but are in danger of having their own equity denied. Once BTN is assured they will not get check-raised too often, they can run wild. The Medium Coordinated Flop Now, let’s see how this experiment plays out on a different sort of flop. Here’s the Equity Distribution Equity Distribution A line graph or scatter plot of a player’s hand vs range equity, sorted from weakest to strongest, such that the equity of every individual combination in the range is represented. Commonly used in game theory analysis. graph for J ♥ 7 ♦ 5 ♣ . What do you notice? How does it differ from 632 r? What do you expect the implications of that will be for continuation betting and check-raising strategy? To begin with, BTN has a larger equity advantage on this flop, 54.6% to BB’s 45.4%. They also have the nuts advantage as the only player with JJ , the literal nuts, and overpairs, which are very close to the nuts on this board (though that could easily change on the turn). BB flops a lot of strong hands as well, but their only advantage lies in the middle, where they are a bit more likely than a BTN raiser to pair the 7 or the 5 . They are also more likely to whiff entirely , and when they do, their worst hands have less equity than they did on 632 r. BTN leverages their nuts advantage to use mostly the 100% pot bet, which makes even BB’s middle of

ranges and where there are many draws and pair + draw hands that have good equity against an overpair. Of the very best hands here, both players can have all of the sets since Hero will be happily flatting [77-99] pre-flop. Both players can also have JTs and probably 65s because the presence of the Fish in the BB entices both pre-flop ranges to open up a little. The only real difference in the two pair and better hands is that Villain probably has JTo where as Hero might not flat this BU vs CO, but again, flatting this hand would not be horrible due to the fish behind. Range advantage is slightly in Villain's favour but by nowhere near the same margin as in the earlier hands. This factor is not too adverse for having a raising range. 2. Urgency of Value: This soaking wet board can deteriorate for both players' ranges, and fast. This means that the urgency of value is high and when Hero has a hand like JTs or 99 he'll want to go after his value from overpairs, draws and lesser sets quickly. Any diamond, J, T, 6, or 5 can make it harder to extract value from weaker hands as well as hurt Hero's equity. This makes a flop raising range very desirable. 3. Fish Behind: There are no Fish behind so this factor is simply neutral. 4. How Bad is a Capped Calling Range: Being capped on the flop and turn is not such an issue since most of our pairs have extra equity in the form of draws to help them call bets and get to the river. We'll be able to realise a lot of equity here even if Villain does barrel aggressively on the turn. Of course it isn't ideal to cap our range those times Villains blasts three streets at us, but this negative is outweighed by the importance of getting value sooner. It's better to play value hands fast on this texture. 5. Representing Strong Hands: Here we can represent considerably more value hands than in the earlier hands and so having a bluff raising range is a lot more justifiable. Overall having a raising range here makes a lot of sense. Factor 2 above is the most crucial one. Q2. Does KdQd make a good candidate semi-bluff? There is a problem with choosing this specific hand for the job of raising. This draw is not to the nuts and its equity vs. better hands is not sufficient for Hero to want to get a huge amount of money in on the flop. Against a set, this hand has only 26% equity. At the same time, it would also be a travesty to raise this flop, get 3-bet and then have to fold such a great chunk of equity with implied odds vs. strong hands. In addition, any nut flush draw that villain continues vs. the raise will have us crushed. As a result this specific part of Hero's range should be one of the draws that merely calls the

It's not that we know that this is definitely true of our Villain here, but it's certainly likely that an Aggro Fish will try to bludgeon his way to fold equity with weak hands and still have the innate Fish instinct to slowplay the nuts a lot of the time. This means that Hero needs to fold fairly infrequently here whenever he has SDV or decent non- made-hand equity - his focus should be on making money against air. It's probably good for him to slowplay his big hands and allow this very aggressive player to keep barreling and only raise as a bluff with lower equity draws that will have a hard time calling turn bets. This kind of unbalanced strategy should exploit Villain perfectly. Regarding playing 99 and similar weakish SDV , it might be tempting to want to raise to protect that equity. After all, we'd c-bet this flop and raise a min-donk so why not raise vs this larger donk bet too? The problem is that by raising vs. an aggressive player, we lose value vs his air, while inflating the pot vs his rarer value hands. This is a disaster for our EV and a worse price to pay than not protecting our hand from 6 outs or so at most (Villain won't be folding stronger draws than this). It's okay to c-bet for thin value/protection facing a check as Hero can expect to get called by worse hands sometimes, and more importantly, has no reason to expect Villain to blast the turn with his air like he does in the actual hand. Protection, in that case, would be a higher priority. It would also be okay to raise a min-donk as again Villain would not seem to be building a huge pot with his air in that case either. Hero thus loses less future value from Villain's bluffs by raising right away. Moreover, when Hero raises the min-donk, he doesn't create such an uncomfortably massive pot vs. Villain's better hands as when he raises the 4BB donk-bet. Hero should just call in this hand, leaving Villain's range wide and able to spew future streets while keeping the pot size manageable. It would be very unpleasant to raise and then face a 3-bet in this situation from a player who could well have a higher than average flop 3-bet bluff frequency. It is true that there will be some awkward turn cards to make decisions on. Hero will need to be making some close choices as to which boards he can call down to showdown on, but this is just a spot where Hero needs to be brave and keep it in the back of his head that Villain's donking range is very likely to be extremely weak. Just because a line feels a bit uncomfortable does not entail that it's

and now the flop comes ace high that's no longer a bluff so you need to have more hands in there so you still have Bluffs on the a side board in general people don't fold and they call way too much so I'm not as interested to having as many bluff combos and rather have more value combos so they're against good players you're gonna want to have more Bluffs because a lot of your Bluffs are gonna turn into value hands on the flop and then you need those other Bluffs that you had to to exploit them I hope that makes sense Ryan asked about having a short bankroll and going to try to make polka much day job any word of advice have a lot of money saved up on the side you don't want to be drawing your expenses from your poker especially when you have a short bankroll vini asks he was at my table in a hand were and under the gun player open and under the gun plus one three but and I for that jammed for thirty to thirty five big blinds he asked do I have any for bet bluffs in that jam range no it's gonna be pretty much just a linear range and just a really tight linear range like probably Jack's plus an ace king I don't I would have to have a read that under the gun plus one is three betting with too much to be going really wide there but it's just gonna be a linear jamming range someone else will I have a webinar on post-flop game and it's a good question because I haven't covered any post flop stuff and the reason I have not is because preflop you need to have really really solid preflop fundamentals before you get into post flop play and a lot of post flop problems that people have can be solved by like mistakes preflop so if you can fix people's this hour I do my coaching is I always focus on preflop first and then go into post flop because you solve a lot of mistakes when you have solid preflop fundamentals it sets you a better front of the flop and then you take it further when you have really good flop fundamentals like see betting fundamentals that step set you up better for the turn and so kind of when people are like on the river like oh I got to the river and I don't have any Bluffs or I feel like I'm having to call to wired with weak hands on the river it's because previous streets like the turn and the flop that you're miss playing that are sitting you've got poorly later on two more minutes I'll pick up last couple of good questions that I see Eric so do you recommend three betting a higher percentage on the big blind I don't see a lot of three that's on the big blind these days yes go watch my webinar from

perfect accuracy. Generally speaking, low-frequency actions will disappear and become lower EV, whereas actions taken at a reasonable frequency will remain part of the strategy. This is why actions taken at less than 3.5% frequency are marked as an “inaccuracy”. Let’s take a look at another example: Example Example 2: A7o mixing calls despite calling being higher EV Here we see A7o mixing between a call and a fold; however, calling appears to be significantly higher EV than folding. Calling is about 1.7BB higher EV than folding. So why does it mix folds? Well, we need to put this into perspective . The pot after you call will be 200.05 BB. So a 1.8 BB error is only about 0.9% of the pot. In reality, this is much closer than it looks. A 1% margin of error looks much bigger when the pot gets bigger. The problem with calling everything is that you would become exploitable. Imagine calling all of these borderline bluff-catchers. Now all of a sudden you’re overcalling and can be exploited by a value-heavy opponent. Why not just solve to perfect accuracy? Perfectly accurate solutions are simply not feasible at the scale of mass production. The problem is that solvers converge much more slowly as it approaches equilibrium. It takes about as much time to go from completely unsolved to 0.5% dEV as it does to go from 0.5% to 0.25% dEV. Doubling the accuracy doubles the time it takes to solve. And there are diminishing returns . A solution that’s accurate to 0.3%dEV is almost identical to a solution solved for 0.15% dEV, and both would still have solver noise. The alternative is to create very simple trees that are easier to solve. This creates its own problems, as oversimplifying your game tree leads to artificial distortion caused by the solver exploiting the limitations of that tree. So at the end of the day, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to obsess over incredibly high accuracy and microscopic EV. The solution is well beyond human levels of exploitability anyway. Here’s an example of one of our solves. As you can see, progress happens quickly at the start, then gets slower and slower as it approaches equilibrium. This one solved down to 0.3% of the pot. What to take away When you see the solver mixing between actions, instead of looking for the highest EV action, you should instead look at the highest frequency actions. This is because any EV discrepancy you see is due to noise in the solution. Treat mixed actions as if they were the same EV. Any discrepancy you see can be thought of as the margin of error, (all hands are roughly +- that EV). The point of GTO is to find the highest EV strategy that cannot be exploited. The marginal errors you see are found in every solver solution. Your goal is to abstract higher-level strategy and develop GTO reasoning, not to memorize frequencies. GTO Wizard the #1 App for Poker players Study any spot imaginable Practice by playing vs. GTO

Overbetting The Flop in Cash Games CASH Although most commonly analyzed on turns and rivers, flop overbetting can be a devastating weapon that generates… 27/06/2023 8 min. / 48 sec.

See Nemesis strategy. would earn, but you make that EV back, with interest, in other ways. Mostly, you benefit from your opponent’s tightness in subtle ways you won’t even see, like when you win a pot from the big blind with a hand you would have folded to a raise they failed to make. You benefit from your opponent’s tightness in subtle ways that aren’t obvious, because they are related to an action that did not take place. How Do I Make These Calls Profitable? Much of the discomfort around defending with “garbage hands” stems from not knowing how to capture the EV of solver-advised calls. There are two solutions to this dilemma: Much of the discomfort around defending with “garbage hands” stems from not knowing how to capture the EV of solver-advised calls. There are two solutions to this dilemma: Call anyway, accepting you won’t realize the full value anticipated by the solver. This is a good solution when calling promises a substantially higher EV than shoving or folding. In those cases, calling may be the best option even if you make some small mistakes after the flop. Luckily, the bulk of a call’s EV often comes from fairly obvious plays like calling a continuation bet when you flop a pair or draw. The less obvious lines also tend to be the less profitable ones , so it’s not the end of the world if you miss them. Shove or fold , depending on which is more profitable, and plan to study the spot later . This is the correct approach when calling is barely better, in theory, than the best alternative. In regards to studying the spot later, the “later” might mean quite a while later. Because the EV you’re giving up is minimal, improving your play in these situations should not be a priority. Your efforts would be more profitably spent elsewhere. However, if you’re eager to tackle those types of close spots and become better at capturing value with more marginal hands, there are some articles here on the GTO Wizard blog that can aid you in these studies. Counterintuitive Calls and Flatting Ace-x Hands Shortstacked both address this subject. Learn More GTO Wizard offers an enormous, potentially overwhelming amount of information. Fortunately, it also offers a wide variety of tools for visualizing that information. Learning to use those tools well will help you make practical use of this valuable information. Check out this video to learn more about how to use the EV comparison tool! GTO Wizard the #1 App for Poker players Study any spot imaginable Practice by playing vs. GTO Analyze your hands with 1-click START CRUSHING NOW JOIN DISCORD Author Andrew Brokos Andrew Brokos has been a professional poker player, coach, and author for over 15 years. He co-hosts the Thinking Poker Podcast and is the author of the Play Optimal Poker books, among others. Latest article Preflop Raise Sizing: Examining 2 Key Factors It amazes me that, after nearly twenty years of playing no-limit hold ‘em professionally, I… How to Handle Loose-Passive Limpers

opportunities if you automatically fold these hands. Position influences when these types of hands become playable. It is probably best to play 2-3 and A-4 hands when you are near the button, as you can more accurately gauge when an opponent has you beat for low. Also, if a 217 few good players have already entered the pot, you’ll know your low draw is assuredly not the best. Additionally, the cards you need to flop—aces in the case of 2-3, and deuces and threes in the case of A-4—are probably not live. Therefore, folding is usually the right move. Sometimes the field will fold around to you in a late position when you have a hand like 2-3-4-7 (suited). In the case of the 2-3-4-7, it is likely that the ace you need to make the nut low is quite live in the deck, which makes your hand more playable. Also, you will have position on the blinds. A raise is probably your best play, especially if the blinds are tight players who will fold without a strong hand. Calling is fine if there are loose players in the blinds. However, if it’s folded around to you on or near the button and you are holding A-4-6-8 (suited), you should probably raise rather than call. There are three reasons for this: (1) You have one of the aces in your hand, making it less likely for one of the blinds to have a good hand. This may increase your chances of winning the blinds. (2) You’re unlikely to make the nut low, and raising may cause an opponent with 2-3 or A-4 to fold. (3) The blinds are also likely to fold hands dominated by middle cards, which increases the high potential for your own middle cards. If a late position player has opened the pot for a raise, and you are next with a hand like A-4-5-K or A-4-K-Q, you should consider reraising, hoping to play the pot heads-up. Unless your opponent has two aces, your hand has a good chance to win the high. Although your opponent likely has a better low draw, you hold better high potential. You also have position, which should allow you to steal the pot if your opponent doesn’t connect with the flop. When several players are in, hands containing 2-3 or A-4 might still be playable. Generally, you want to play these hands for only one bet, though, and it is important that your other two cards have some value. Hands such as 2-3-4-6, 2-3-Q-K (suited), A-4-6-Q, and A-4-10-J are probably worth a call when several players have limped in front of you. However, hands like 2-3-7- 10, 2-3-9-K, A-4-8-K, or A-4-7-9 belong in the muck. 218 Having Backup Cards for Low Help How helpful is having backup cards for low help? The short answer to this question is: very helpful! Take a look at the following figures: (1) When you flop the nut low draw without a backup card, you will complete the hand about 57% of the time. (2) However, you will

CONTENTS iv Raising Before the Flop 68 Reasons to Raise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Raising for Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Raising for Isolation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Raising to Steal the Blinds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Raising as a Semi-Bluff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Raising for Deception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Raising to Manipulate the Pot Size . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Final Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Sizing Your Preflop Raises 76 Deep Stack Raise Sizing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Make Bigger Value Raises Against Straightforward Players . . . 78 Make Bigger Raises Against Players Who Fold Too Much Postflop 79 Make Smaller Raises Against Players Who Call Too Much Postflop 79 Short Stack Raise Sizing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 If You Want Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 If You Don’t Want Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Final Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 A Preflop Strategy 83 No Limit Hand Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 You are First to Enter the Pot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Exactly One Player Has Limped in Front of You . . . . . .

Nuts advantage An advantage coming from having proportionally more "nuts" (very strong hands) than another player. This allows the player that has the "nuts advantage" to polarize with large bets/raises. See: Polarized.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer@. While these two browsers are slightly different in appearance, they are nearly identical in function. Use of one or the other is a matter of personal preference. Most computers come with at least one of these browsers (often both) preloaded. Once you are using a browser to surf the Web, the difference between the Windows and Macintosh operating systems is not readily apparent. From the user's point of view, Internet Explorer works close to the same way in either operating system. The same is true of Netscape. Once yoor Web browser is launched, you go to specific Web sites by typing the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) into the window at the top of the screen. The URL is the Web address that usually begins with http://www. For example http:/ /www.sambraids.com will take you to my Web site assuming you have established an Internet connection. Internet connection: By itself, your computer will not connect to the Internet. You must subscribe to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to have access to the Web and other Internet features such as e-mail. There are two basic kinds of Internet service: dial-up and broadband. Dial-up subscriptions range between $1 5 to $25 per month and work over your existing phone line. You connect the cable that goes into your phone, into your computer instead and program the computer to dial the phone number provided by your ISP. Dial-up connections are inexpensive and easy to set up. The disadvantages are that they tie up your existing phone line and are slow, unstable, and unreliable. For real-time poker, the transmission delays and sudden disconnects in the middle of hands are a nuisance. Online poker games are programmed as a courtesy to automatically put players "all in" if, when it is their turn, they don't respond within 30 seconds. What going "all in" means is that a player does not have to match further bets to contest the pot. If the disconnected player's hand is the winning hand. his or her account is awarded the fraction of the pot present at the time of the disconnection. Bets placed after the disconnection TEXAS HOLD'EM ONLINE 29 go into a side pot and are awarded to the second-best hand. However, the "all in" courtesy is usually extended only once per day to avoid intentional disconnects motivated by players who want to finish the hand without paying. Broadband connections are faster and more stable. However, they are more expensive ($40 to $60 per month), more difficult to set up, not available in all areas of the country, and not completely free of glitches. Your broadband connection will also experience sudden disconnects, though not as often as a dial-up. Broadband ISP's include providers that connect through the cable TV lines with use of a cable modem, and providers that work through the local phone company by using ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) or DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) services. Find out what services are available in your area and their set-up costs and procedures. Set up of a broadband connection is more

made hand to deny a free card, or he might be trying to win the pot cheap with a drawing hand or a bluff, and/or you don’t care what he has, because raising makes your decisions easier. Shut his ass out. Raise him. If he re-raises, that’s just paradise, because you have the best hand and no more decisions to make. Big Hand, Heads-Up, Out of Position, With the Lead, Textured Board If you’re out of position with the lead, you might think you should just bet, because checking away the lead will raise suspicions. But there are suchbig advantages to check-raising on an ugly board like this that you should pause for a moment before c-betting and consider how likely it is that thepre-flop leader will bet this flop if you check. Remember, you don’t want to be giving free cards, so if you think your opponent is likely to check behind, you need to bet. If, however, you’re confident that your conventionally aggressive opponent can’t resist pouncing on any check, you should check here and let him do his thing. Then you get to check-raise with your huge hand and if he folds, it’s no more decisions on an ugly board. If hecalls and either of you is all-in, also no more decisions. The check-raise is a nice result: It stops the turn decision and lets you put a lot of money inthe pot when you know you’re a favorite. Think about how great this check-raise will work against someone who has a hand like a good ace. If you check-raise on such a highly texturedboard against, say, AK, that player can come up with lots of reasons for your check-raise. He might put you on a semi-bluff check-raise with one of the many available draws on the board. This can cause a player with a hand like AK to massively overplay his hand, re-raising on this kind of flop. That’s obviously a good result for you. Then again, if he folds to your check-raise, suspicious that you checked away the pre-flop lead and raised his bet, that’s a good result too; you’redone with a difficult flop that you have to play out of position. You get your money in with the best of it and without having to make any toughdecisions. Interestingly, this isn’t only how you maximize your win against a hand like AK, but also against a hand like a flush draw. Let’s see why. For starters, as usual, there’s 1,000 in the pot. Now, against either AK or a flush draw, if you lead out for 600, they’re both likely to call, which could make your situation tricky on the turn. If either raises you, that’d be fine, but they would have almost always bet if you checked away the leadanyhow, so it’s six of one, half-dozen of the other. But when they flat-call, one of two things happens. Either you get a safe card, bet the turn, and end the hand against the flush draw, or you get one of a million scare cards and

the CO, they at least get a nice double-up; if they beat both players, they more than double up and make the money. If they beat the SB but not the CO, the SB bubbles, and the BB busts with third-place money. If the CO has the best hand and SB has the 2nd best hand, the SB still bubbles and the BB still gets third place money, because they started with more chips. It’s only when the CO beats the BB and the SB beats everyone, that the BB bubbles the tournament. Interestingly, the BB calling range gets wider when the SB calls the shove. They can call with this range: 3.8% TT+ AQs AKo This is because the BB has an excellent chance of not bubbling now that the SB has committed all-in. If they beat the CO, they at least get a nice double-up; if they beat both players, they more than double up and make the money. If they beat the SB but not the CO, the SB bubbles, and the BB busts with third-place money. If the CO has the best hand and SB has the 2nd best hand, the SB still bubbles and the BB still gets third place money, because they started with more chips. It’s only when the CO beats the BB and the SB beats everyone, that the BB bubbles the tournament. Just for fun, this is what happens when there is both a 400BB mega stack in the CO and a 2BB micro stack in the SB: These are the Bubble Factors: The BB has a Bubble Factor of 7.71, which means they need 88% equity to call the shove. Even Pocket Aces is not that strong in this spot, so the BB’s correct strategy is to fold everything (they would need JJ + to call if the SB called the shove). One more time, here are the finishing distributions: This sums up why the correct strategy is to tighten up whether it is a mega or micro stack at the table. The BB is only 6.6% to win and only 3.9% to bubble. Both of those results are outliers. The BB is 89.4% to come 2nd or 3rd, plus they come 2nd more than half the time, which looks quite appealing right now. With ICM guiding us, the most profitable thing we can do against outlier stacks is to avoid bubbling, ladder when we make the money, and then pray we get lucky heads-up. Conclusion An ICM calculation looks at the chances of each player finishing in each position and then guides the strategy accordingly . The presence of a micro or mega stack at the table creates a degree of certainty about which position some players will finish. The mega stack will almost certainly win, and the micro stack will almost certainly bust next. ICM will always guide us to make the most profitable decision, not the trophy-seeking decision, so the correct strategy for those with middling stack sizes is to let the inevitable happen. Let the micro stack bust

Takeaways There is generally less 3-betting in ICM scenarios, pre and postflop The degree to which you cover a player dictates how aggressive you can be Solvers choose small bet sizes to extract value when the opponent would otherwise fold often to medium-sized bets Solvers also choose small bet sizes to lower variance The covering player can be more aggressive regardless of position or range advantage GTO Wizard the #1 App for Poker players Study any spot imaginable Practice by playing vs. GTO Analyze your hands with 1-click START CRUSHING NOW JOIN DISCORD Author Barry Carter Barry Carter has been a poker writer for 16 years. He is the co-author of six poker books, including The Mental Game of Poker , Endgame Poker Strategy: The ICM Book , and GTO Poker Simplified . Latest article Preflop Raise Sizing: Examining 2 Key Factors It amazes me that, after nearly twenty years of playing no-limit hold ‘em professionally, I… How to Handle Loose-Passive Limpers Solver charts and presolved solutions do not offer much in the way of explicit guidance… Top 5 Mistakes in Spin & Gos As a Spin and Go poker coach, I regularly encounter common mistakes that players make,… An Introduction to Spin & Gos I was playing Tournaments for the first decade of my career. But after my first… Relationships and Poker In my more than 15 years of poker coaching, I’ve helped hundreds of clients improve… Do Multiple Sizes Matter? Should I work out the other tools or just stick to the crowbar? Solver results… The Science of Learning Applied to GTO Wizard The way we were taught to study in schools was flawed and has negatively impacted… Check-Raising a Single Pair In this article, I will address a question raised by Twitter/X user ’Matt Riley’, who… The Turn Probe Bet Imagine yourself defending as the BB caller vs BTN preflop raiser in a 100bb cash… When To Encourage Multiway Pots in PKOs I was recently shown this fascinating PKO hand from the GTO Wizard PKO library. Somebody… Protect Equity and Prosper When we think about the best hands to bet in a given situation, we tend… Do Solvers Have Targets? Targeting has long been a staple of exploitative poker thinking. When you’re value betting against… Disciplining Big Blind in Limped Pots When the BTN open-limps off a short stack, the postflop play against the BB should… I’d Rather Be Drawing Which is the better hand on a K♥8♦5♦ flop: K♠T♣ or 7♥6♥? OK, I’ll admit… The Curious Case of Open-Limping Buttons Before the advent of solvers, open-limping was considered the province of passive, gambley recreational players… Cleaning Out Sticky IP Callers A “sticky” player on your left, one who calls your preflop raises too often and… Defending Against Tiny 3-Bets Tournament poker is about precision. Cash games, where stacks typically run into the hundreds of… Heads up! Exploiting SB’s Preflop Mistakes Heads up (HU) tournament play presents unique challenges to the average player. Many tournament players,… C-Betting As the OOP Preflop Raiser Position is an extremely valuable advantage in

this flop actually the H has a a massive Equity disadvantage we have 45% Equity against 55% from IP IP will have uh all the sets here nine sevens and uh 10 um he will also have a lot of like top pair and and traps with Aces and Kings so it's a pretty pretty strong range in this this in this flop that's why the hero checks um and facing the small bit I didn't use the exact same bed size um when I build my simulations I just like to put like you know um a a standard is bit uh big and small bet sizes because mostly what you want to see in the simulations is not how to play against the exact bet size that your opponent use but you want to do but what you want to do is to draw conclusions right you want to create tics okay if I check in this sort of situation I put bet small what do I do oh should my Pon bet big or bet small right if I only input the exact bet size the vill and use um I will not get that information from the simulation right so what we're trying to do here is not just see how to play a single hand but to understand the spot and see if we can uh draw conclusions that can be used in different situations that are similar to this one because that's what poet is all about to uh be constantly uh you know facing different situations analyzing them and trying to generate juristic or create sort of rules that can be extended to different similar situ similar situations okay uh so here um the villan got it right he should be wearing um smallish in the 25% or 3% of the PO bet size and with the pocket kings we can um uh with the black kings um check race um or check call sometimes um it's not a big deal we you should be Check Racing here with some frequency with something like you know an open Ender with ace8 king8 um some of the you know the the over sorry the overcard the over pairs with a straight draw are really good uh pocket n sets then slow playing the top Set uh is a really good um combo to have when you just check all the Flop and then check all uh a bunch of over cards and high cards right um as play CH hero check calls and the turn is the Queen of Diamonds I'm actually going to finish uh first replaying the hand and then go back to the simulation so Queen of Diamonds in the turn hero checks villan goes all in for 116k chips left so a little bit overp and the hero um FS H even before looking at the simulation I knew that this is a massive mistake um you just you just can't um make a lot of money playing pocket if you're folding

BET-SIZING FOR INFORMATION 54 In no limit, though, the right information at the right time could save your whole stack. So the potential upside is much greater than it can be in limit. Also, the information tends to be somewhat more reliable. In aggressive limit games, a flop bet can be almost a dare to raise. If you follow through and actually raise, you’ll often be met with a three-bet, sometimes made seemingly on principle alone. In no limit, only the most reckless players would raise and reraise so blithely since the penalty for putting in a “light” raise (with a weaker-than-average hand) can be so much harsher. Instead of being charged an extra small bet in a pot ten times its size, light raisers can be met with enormous reraises that they can’t call. Also, a mere call transmits much more information in no limit. In limit, a flop call can frequently mean almost any range of hands: any pair, overcards, any draw worth discussing, and other holdings so bad we don’t have the stomach to mention them. Such a call is, by no means, a sign of a strong hand. In no limit, though, good players call with far more consideration. Typically a call will signify a good made hand, a strong draw, or occasionally something weaker. But even the weaker calls often portend an ominous turn of events. In any event, betting top pair on the flop and getting called in limit is usually a good thing. In no limit, it’s often a sign of trouble ahead. If the pot’s $150, you bet $120 with top pair, and two good players with $1,000 stacks call, you very likely should give up on the turn. (One exception to this rule is when the bet and call are small, compared to the stack sizes. If the pot’s $20, you bet $15, and one or two players with $1,000 stacks call, you aren’t necessarily in trouble. They could be “fishing,” relying on the implied odds of the deep stacks to reward their speculation on weak holdings.) Big bets and calls are telling. Small bets and calls aren’t nearly so. Thus, you sometimes have the opportunity to “pay” for information by making a somewhat larger bet than you otherwise might. If your opponents will call $15 with lots of hands, but $30 with only good ones, it often behooves you to bet $30. You don’t do it because the $30 bet makes you more profit; you do it because it helps you to save a large chunk of your stack when beaten. It’s often cheaper to bet $30 with a mediocre hand and give up if called than to bet $15, get called in two places, and have to follow up for $60 or more, out of position and clouded in uncertainty. So look for opportunities to bet a little bit extra if it will give you reliable and useful information about your opponents’ hands. These information bets are particularly useful when you are out of position, as they chip away at your

When OOP, Hero c-bets at a higher frequency across almost all flop textures, except for monotone boards which will be c-bet at a similar frequency. From OOP, Hero will use bigger bet-sizes compared to when IP. After 3-betting from the blinds, Hero likes to c-bet low boards at a high frequency, given they have a stronger range with many overpairs. Middle boards get checked more often when they have possible straights and straight draws. Qxx, Jxx and Txx boards are some of the most checked boards because they connect well with IP’s range. Diagram 87 An interesting difference is seen on Axx boards that get c-bet 77% of the time when Hero is OOP but only 53% when Hero is IP. In both situations, the players’ equity distribution is similar, and so the main difference seems to be that now, playing OOP, Hero doesn’t want to give the option to the Villain to have a free turn when IP. If the action goes x/x on the flop, it is Hero who will have to act first on the turn, giving away more range information. So, Hero decides to mostly bet on Axx flops and force IP to fold some weak hands on the flop with a higher frequency, avoiding complications by taking a passive line too often. C-bet Defense

KJ, QJ: 24 combos (repeat the same process used for top pairs). JTs, J8s: 6 combos. Bottom Pair (15 Combos) K9s, Q9s, T9s, 98s, 97s Pocket Pair 1/2 (12 Combos) KK, QQ: Pocket pair 1/2 means pocket pairs between top and middle flop card. Pocket Pair 2/3 (6 Combos) TT: Pocket pair 2/3 means pocket pairs between middle and bottom flop card. Underpair (39 Combos) 33: We have the 3♦ in our hand so there are only 3 combos left of 33. The other pairs (36 combos) are 88, 77, 66, 55, 44, 22. Draws Villain has 72 drawing hands, made up as follows. Flush Draw: (8 combos) Straight Flush Draw: 6 combos: K♥Q♥, K♥T♥, Q♥T♥, Q♥8♥, T♥8♥, 8♥7♥ Nut Flush Draw: 0 combos: the nut flush draw is also top pair and it has already been accounted for when counting the top pairs: A♥K♥, A♥Q♥, A♥T♥, A♥8♥, A♥7♥, A♥6♥, A♥5♥, A♥4♥, A♥3♥, A♥2♥. Second Nut Flush Draw: 1 combo: K♥8♥ Other Flush Draws: 1 combo: 7♥6♥ 8-Out Straight Draw (18 Combos) QT: There are 16 combos of QT, but we already accounted for Q♥T♥, so there are only 15 combos left. T8s: We already accounted for T♥8♥, so there are only 3 combos left. 4-Out Straight Draw (36 Combos)

BET-SIZING 38 For instance, if on the turn you have bottom two pair and you put your opponent on an overpair, he has eight outs. But that fact is largely irrelevant to your bet-sizing decision. Your bet should be significantly more than the minimum onethird pot-sized bet that having eight outs would suggest because your opponent isn’t counting on having to improve to win. Your opponent is likely to call a sizable bet, so make one. However, even when you’re choosing a large bet size because your opponent may think he has the best hand, you still should consider whether he has outs. If he has no outs, and you think that he will call X dollars 100 percent of the time or 2X dollars 50 percent of the time, the two options have equal expectation. But if he has outs, the bigger bet is better because you now gain something when he folds. You Might Not Have the Best Hand Our analyses thus far have assumed that you always have had the best hand, and your opponent always has been drawing (or second-best). In practice, unless you hold the nuts, you will never be certain that you hold the best hand. The more likely your opponent is to have you beaten, the less likely you should be to bet at all. If you are sure you have the best hand, then the trick to bet-sizing is to find the amount that causes your opponents to make the biggest aggregate mistakes (given your hand and their possible ranges). But if you aren’t sure, then betting at all could be a mistake for you. The larger the chance that you’re beaten, the bigger that mistake becomes. As the chance you’re beaten rises, you may be better offjust letting your opponent draw. Checking is usually best if you aren’t the favorite,11 and you act last. If you are out of position, however, sometimes you should make a small bet even if you aren’t the favorite. You do this if you frequently expect your opponent to make a large bet if you check. This sort of “small bet to stop a large one” is called a “blocking bet,” and we analyze it in more detail in the “Blocking Bets” chapter starting on page 91. Final Thoughts You now have a solid theoretical understanding of how to size your bets. As a quick summary, here are the rules we learned: 1. Bet enough so that your opponents can’t call profitably. 11You aren’t the favorite as calculated by combining the chances that you are beaten already with the chances you will be outdrawn.

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and you have a huge portion of your range that's like you have way more good top pair you have way more good over pairs um well so when I say best frequently I don't mean like that 100 or anything but to be fair I probably would have bet like every Aces here I just I would have and yeah I would definitely check some stuff like top pair marginal kicker Like You Know Jack 10 10 9 yeah stuff like that I think like The Logical hands I would have checked I would have basically done what the tournament masterclass had to do which would have been use such a mixed strategy here I guess all the bets are coming with diamonds are almost entirely diamonds right yeah exactly this is kind of a fun spot where it well actually no it's mixing all that up as well look yeah so what I was going to say is it's kind of a fun spot where like it's the opposite of The Last Hand where your nines with no Spade one and two bet for protection but in this spot you're really deep and so your Aces with a diamond want to put money in the pot because they have a lot easier time defending verse check raises and aggression and then you're balancing your strategy out with single Diamond hands um it can easily call some streets so you have like like tens with a diamond let's see I assume 10's no diamond checks a lot a queen with a diamond so I mean you have to have high Diamonds the check back right so you can call a lot of turns presumably exactly yeah okay and it is it is pretty mixed throughout someone spots like this where you know it's pretty mixed throughout what do you do when trying to play well I just try to mix all my hands at a reasonable frequency yeah because that's basically what it's doing to some extent you're gonna be off by a little bit here and there yeah yeah I mean it sounds like this where you know it bets two-thirds of the time with almost everything you just bet two thirds of the time well I mean for my specific hand it's like if I have Asia with a diamond here I'm going to be really inclined to just bet pure like myself where I don't know Ace of Diamonds Ace of Spades that's 100 though but I know I'm supposed to bet these spots about two-thirds of the time what can you do or nothing study more um well it's gonna be it doesn't mean like I'm telling you what I probably would have done here I would have checked back a lot of the top hair bad kickers and middle pairs that's mostly what I would have checked back and I would have checked back some like Ace of Diamonds X some portion of the time and some King of Diamonds at some portion of the time

pop quiz you're playing a six max cash game and you're in the low jack and look down at 10 of diamonds queen of clubs you roll high so you decide to open 2.25 x and the big blind calls assuming the big blind checks to you should your sea betting strategy be similar on these two boards the answer is that the optimal c betting strategies on these boards are actually very different in fact ten of diamonds queen of clubs specifically is bet nearly 100 of the time on the ace jack 6 rainbow board and checked nearly 100 percent of the time on the ace jack 5 2 tone board if you're interested to learn why this is this video is for you in poker strategy videos you'll often hear people talk about range advantage as a critical factor in determining strategies so what exactly is range advantage and why is it so important well to start we should probably define what a range is in the first place since each player's dealt two cards face down that the other players cannot see poker is known as a game of incomplete information this means that in the vast majority of cases we don't exactly know where our cards rank relative to our opponents however we still need to make betting and calling slash folding decisions based on our probability of winning the pot so the logical way to address this dilemma is by assigning certain cards to our opponent that he's likely to have based on his prior actions which is referred to as range construction right initially everyone has an equal probability of receiving all the 1326 potential hand combinations in the deck but once players start to take actions we can make rational judgments about the types of hands the player should or should not have based on such actions for example i recently played a test hand in a six max cash game where i was cut off and opened with sixes my opponent on the button three bet and i called in this case when the button three bet he's signaling that he likely has a strong hand that doesn't mind playing for a large pot in other words unless he's mike possible it's very unlikely that he's holding a hand with very poor equity like 7 deuce off so we can rationally remove some of these hands by process of elimination the collection of all possible hands a player likely has at any given point is his range and range advantage generally refers to a situation where one player likely has a greater percentage of stronger hands in his range than the other given the board texture and we emphasize that the range advantage is determined by having a higher percentage of strong hands not based on having a higher absolute number of strong hands this is due to the fact that poker is a game of probabilities so we want to know who has the higher likelihood of holding the best hand which

possible so a lot of hands that while quinferno may want protection with and also it may be a spot where a strong King would call the All In so I wouldn't be surprised if we see a check shop here just with how draw heavy the board is but if he wants to keep his opponent semi Bluffs in and give him a chance to keep barreling at it maybe he wants to represent he has a hand like eight seven or something maybe he just calls so that he can go check on the river and give sinterest the opportunity to um three Barrel him off his hand which I think it's pretty unlikely to get folded so cinderos could wrap the back door flush draw does not do so just checks it back and uh welcome Inferno picking up another pot there and this could be a spot if Inferno gets lucky Centaurus picking up a TENS if he just goes for a Min raise it's a good spot for Inferno to put him to the test if he goes for a shove for 13 not sure if uh welcome Inferno will call off with ace4 suited here because he's he doesn't need to be in a rush to busts and tour us out of the tournament but first is the Min Rays he's certainly going to go for the reshuff there's some Hanson Tauruses raised folding and even when he runs up against it 30 of the time it works every time uh no 10 no King and Centaurus gonna be our third place finisher maybe a little bit unlucky losing that 70 30 there but we did see him get lucky earlier winning a 25-75 against Deja with the ace three versus Ace King so that's in Taurus gonna be our third place finish taking him 609 730 dollars and eight cents I'm going to raise from the jonak King nine welcome Inferno definitely a defendable hand here with Jack 10 and we will see some chips going in the middle here that's without a doubt it's mid pairing an open-ended straight draw for welcome Inferno it's bottom pair and a gut shot and an overcard for dijonik the trade notes here to John x two pair would give Inferno the straight inferno's two pair would give dejanic the straight and both players make the other two pair on the turn that does not give either a straight it is queens and tens for Inferno going for the value bet it is queens and nines for dijonik who's not going to be laying it down for a single bet here May fold for the second bet the reason he may call the second bet if the river's a brick though is that uh Jack X misses Hearts Miss diamonds Miss so there are a lot of semi-bluffs that welcome Inferno could have been leading with on the turn that have missed on the river 7-8 does get there but they're a lot more of the other two

Maximally Exploitative Strategy (MaxES) A strategy that will perfectly maximize value by taking advantage of all your opponent's mistakes. See: Nemesis strategy.

most poker players think they have a very good idea of when to continuation bet and how much but I can tell you they do not most people either continuation bet far too often or not nearly often enough so in this video we are going to be discussing the fundamentals of continuation betting so you know how to play this very common spot very well first things first should you just continuation bet every time that's what we did back in the day I actually wrote to do exactly that about 15 years ago in my first book because people folded far too often so you should always ask yourself will my particular opponent fold far too often and if they will you actually should continuation bet a lot probably every time well your opponent rarely raise you meaning if you do have some nonsense Bluff like one overcard you'll actually realize your Equity sometimes if that's the case you should also continuation bet a lot a very powerful strategy and most games is to bet frequently using a small size because if your opponent folds to off to off to often you will immediately profit let's go through some basic poker math the equation to figure out how often a bluff with 0% Equity needs to work is the bet you're making divided by the bet you're making plus the pot now this presumes you have 0% Equity when you're bluffing you usually won't have 0% equity and no limit Tex is holding because one of your cards is live some portion of the time or you have a gutshot straight draw or an overcard or something like that right so in this spot let's say you bet 10% pot what would the equation be well it would be1 divided by 1.1 right .1 divided by 0.1 plus the pot which equals 9% that means your bluff with no equity needs to only work 9% of the time if you bet 10% pot which means your opponent has to defend by calling or raising 91% of the time it is difficult to defend 91% of the time especially from out of position because if you consider how often you connect with a flop with a pair or some sort of decent draw it's only going to be about 40% of the time so they have to find another 50% of hands almost everything to stick around with and most people cannot do that they fold far too often also you're going to find that your opponent should raise a lot versus a small bet but most players do not they call far too often and for this reason small frequent bets actually are a very good exploitative strategy especially when the board is not great for your opponent's range now realize a 10% bet may be egregiously small maybe even smaller than is allowed based on the rules of No Limit Holdem consider a 20% or 25% pot bet though notice you at 25% pot you now have 0.25 divided

players would describe the comfort zone… Overchoice: Making Sense of Multiple Sizings Solver solutions with multiple bet sizes often involve a lot of mixing between those sizes,… River Refinements: When Your Opponent Won’t Check-Raise One of the biggest strategic differences between playing in versus out of position involves betting… Turn Barreling in 3-Bet Pots There are two articles on the GTO Wizard blog that make good prerequisites to this… The Right Way To Think About Protection Suppose Paul the Protector is in a 200bb cash game and opens A♠A♣ in the… The Importance of Board Coverage The first public version of the GTO Wizard announced AI upgrade already has some useful… How To Adjust When Villain Has No Bluffs “They always have it!” is a common, semi-joking expression in poker to describe the tendency… Adjusting on Later Streets After Exploiting Flop The key to exploiting opponents profitably is knowing when to stop. I’m not referring to… C-Betting IP vs Passive Poker Players A preflop raiser enjoys a significant range advantage over a BB caller, enabling them to… C-Betting Against ICM Preflop Ranges You raise from early position (EP) in a multi-table tournament and the BB calls. Both… The Art of Bluff Catching Bluff catching—calling a bet with a modest hand which you expect to win only if… Exploiting Excessive C-Betting by IP On some flops, it is simply not possible for the preflop raiser to continuation bet… Is Limping Pimping? In a past Discord post, one of our members noted that an upside of implementing… Exploiting Excessive C-Betting by OOP A preflop raiser who continuation bets too often is always a potential target for exploitation,… Preflop Button Mastery in PKOs Playing from the Button presents many unique opportunities in any tournament format, especially in PKOs.… The Worst Turn Card Greetings from GTO land. In today’s article, we will use the Turn Reports feature to… Navigating Range Disadvantage as the 3-Bettor Picture this: We’re playing a NL500 6-max cash game, and we’ve won a few pots,… Mastering Three-Bet Pots In Position in MTTs Playing in position against a three-better is a lesson in playing to your advantages. As… Mastering Three-Bet Pots Out of Position in MTTs Three-bet pots are scary. Playing out of position is scary. Put them together, and you’ve… The Greatest Final Table in Triton History Today, we’ll examine one of the most epic final table battles I’ve ever witnessed! Our… Mastering Thin Value Bets in Checked-Down Pots Valuing your hand appropriately—determining whether it’s strong enough to value bet or so weak you… Maximizing Value on Monotone Flops Monotone flops tend to provoke great anxiety among poker players. It’s easy to imagine that… How to Defend Against Turn Donk Bets Responding effectively to donk bets on the turn is tricky;, there’s no getting around that.… How and Why You Should Use Turn Donk Bets Donk betting–taking the betting lead away from the previous street’s aggressor–on the flop is rarely… How Stack Sizes Change Your Range In this series, we have looked at factors that can influence ranges in otherwise identical… How

someone calls, and the BB squeezes. How should you construct your strategy?… Crushing a Top HUNL Poker Bot In 2022, Philippe Beardsell and Marc-Antoine Provost, a team of Canadian programmers from Quebec, developed… GTO Wizard AI Explained We are excited to introduce GTO Wizard AI, formerly known as Ruse, the world’s best… GTO Wizard AI Benchmarks GTO Wizard has combined the power of artificial intelligence with traditional solving methods to bring… Table Management in PKOs Perhaps the most important strategic consideration in Progressive Knockout Tournaments (PKOs) is making sure you… Overcalling From the BB In poker, overcalling refers to calling a bet or raise after another player has also… Understanding Which Mistakes Cost You the Most Money I am fortunate enough to have worked for many years with the mental game coach… Overbetting The Flop in Cash Games Although most commonly analyzed on turns and rivers, flop overbetting can be a devastating weapon… Using New Skills at the Poker Table How many times has it happened to you that you make a mistake only to… Flatting Ace-X Hands Shortstacked Playing out of position is tricky, but it’s an essential part of tournament play. With… Playing Limped Pots as the BB in MTTs Success as the BB in limped pots begins before the flop. The BB’s equilibrium strategy… The Absurd Game Theory of Chopped Boards A “chopped board” in poker is one where the community cards make up the best… Playing Limped Pots as the SB in MTTs MTT confrontations between the small blind and big blind force no-limit players into uncomfortable situations,… The Art of Learning Poker In his book The Art of Learning, chess and Push Hands champion Josh Waitzkin describes… Is Donk Betting for Donkeys? “Donk betting”, or betting from out of position into the player who was the aggressor… Delayed C-Betting This is a companion piece to Probe Betting. It stands on its own, but understanding… Probe Betting As far as rules of thumb go in poker, “check to the raiser” is a… ICM and Blind Battles: The Big Blind This is a companion piece to this article on the SB’s strategy for blind vs… ICM and Blind Battles: The Small Blind ICM incentivizes more conservative play, which means that at stages of the tournament where risk… The Initial Bettor’s Advantage The mathematics of poker holds a little-known secret: the first bettor enjoys better bluffing odds… Mastering the Chiplead: The Scalpel and the Sledgehammer When you have a lot of chips at a final table or in another situation… Flop Heuristics: IP C-Betting in Cash Games Our never-ending quest for money and fame leads us to the flop. We open the… How ICM Impacts Restealing From The Blinds When I first started working with preflop solves, one of the features I found most… The ICM Benefits of Late Registration in Poker Tournaments Why do so many professional poker players register late for tournaments when they clearly would… Flop Heuristics: OOP C-Betting in MTTs Playing against an in-position cold-caller is dramatically different–and dramatically more difficult–than playing against a caller… Counterintuitive

U.S. House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee on online poker legislation and the U.S. House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee; she continues to be a leading voice for online gaming. Annie has also become a prominent television personality, and is recognized worldwide for her runner-up finish on Donald Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice.” Today, she is League Commissioner of Federated Sports + Gaming. She’s also an instructor at the World Series of Poker Academy. Her website is annieduke.com. ♠ ♠ ♠ John Vorhaus has written more than two million words on poker, including the Killer Poker book series and the poker novel Under the Gun. Hehas also penned the “sunshine noir” mystery novels The California Roll and The Albuquerque Turkey, as well as dozens of television and filmscripts. He travels the world teaching and training writers—26 countries on four continents at last count. “As a poker player,” says John, “I’m a pretty good writer.” He lives in Southern California and secretly controls the world from johnvorhaus.com, where he always welcomes your visits. About Huntington Press Huntington Press is a specialty publisher of Las Vegas- and gambling-related books and periodicals, including the award-winning consumer newsletter, Anthony Curtis’Las Vegas Advisor. Huntington Press 3665 Procyon Street Las Vegas, Nevada 89103 “Annie is the rare player who not only plays well, but is also an amazing teacher. She and John Vorhaus have closed an important gap in the poker literature by writing about the art of poker, not the mechanics. This is an essential book for anyone who wants to take their game to its peak.” —Erik Seidel, 8-time WSOP braclet winner, 2011 National Heads-Up Champion, all-time tournament-poker money leader HE WHO HAS THE BEST PLANS WINS THE MOST HANDS Ask the great poker players how they’d play a hand and the answer is always, “It depends.” That answer can be infuriating. But guess what? It really does depend. The key to becoming a great poker player is in knowing exactly what it depends on. At last there’s a book that gives you that answer. Poker is a game of so many variables: table position, flop texture, the number of players in a hand, the personalities of your opponents, and somuch more. Decide to Play Great Poker teaches you how to identify and analyze those variables, interchange them within basic game-situationtemplates, and become knowledgeable, comfortable, and confident in any poker situation. Instead of just dictating a bunch of rules that work onlysome of the time, this book teaches you to become a great poker thinker and strategist, so that you can expertly navigate any poker challenge that you encounter. Most players think that the goal of poker is to make money. They’re wrong! The goal of poker is to make good decisions. Money is simply the way you measure how well you’re meeting that objective. So if you’re ready to start making world-class decisions at the poker table—and to reapthe substantial rewards that those decisions will yield—all you have to do is decide: Decide to Play Great Poker now. You’ll never be vexed by “it depends” again.

Top 5 Mistakes in Spin & Gos Spin As a Spin and Go poker coach, I regularly encounter common mistakes that players make, affecting their… 12/03/2024 9 min. / 36 sec.

Runner runner A hand made by having hit on both the turn and river, when it was necessary that both streets hit in order to win the hand.

consider sizing it up a little bit shallower stack you're going to want to consider sizing it down a little bit as we see again we're in this region now right where we really do not have much of an advantage without much of an advantage you're just betting your best hands and your draws and um that's it nice and easy so let's take a look at some examples if you consider the flops that going to be bad for the initial razor against the big blind it's going to be the middle low connected type board so let's look at 975 can already tell you we're not going to have much of a range advantage and we're going to be checking a lot so notice 975 40 big blinds deep we are betting 55% of the time and it's just with a good strong polarized range take a look at what's betting mostly it's King Nine and better right notice acees slow plays which is fun um also you'll notice like pair plus straight draws a pretty good hand it usually likes to get money in the pot like 98 here 98 is apparently like better quote unquote better than 109 just cuz it has additional equity and then we're embedding with Bluffs what are bluffs any hand with an eight any hand with a six two overcards ideally with a back door flush straw are very good Bluffs also notice some just total air balls are bluffing which is kind of fun to see what about if our range is wider well now notice again same rough range is betting for Value notice 98 and 96 get after it um over pairs top pairs lots of eights are betting lots of sixes are betting and then random overcard same story right notice you can be a little bit more selective with the back door overcard draws like King jack of diamonds here because with King Jack and diamonds now you don't really need to bet that you'd rather bet a lower Equity hand like King 10 off suit okay fun and good what about from out of position in this scenario in this spot we are again betting not that often about half the time and again with a relatively polarized range it's a neat spot here because the opponent's range depending on their strategy may or may not actually line up with this board all that well some of your opponents who are looser and call every Studio connector they're going to nail this board and you have to check way more often some people who don't play those hands because they're nits well they're going to have a whole lot of hands in this region in which case you can just blast them so this is a spot where I'm going to be playing pretty far from GTO against a lot of people what about 743 another spot that hits the big blind very well notice now we have a lot of overpays a lot of back

Low variance means results are spread closer to the average and high variance means results are spread farther away from the average. How is Variance Calculated? If you use poker tracking software, it can report the standard deviation of your own results. Variance is simply the square of the standard deviation. If you know the standard deviation S, you can calculate the variance as follows: Alternatively, it can be calculated by hand using this formula: Where: For example, in a small data sample with only three data points such as (1, 6, 11): Then:

gives you the greatest number of wins and the smallest number of losses. First Position Play in Practice Let us now see how first-position play heads-up on the end works in practice. Suppose in draw poker you draw three cards in first position and make aces up. Your opponent draws one card. He may have two pair, or he may be drawing to a straight or a flush. You feel that this type of player will call with two pair if you bet but will bet them for value if you check. How should you play? There's no mystery here. Clearly you should check and call. By checking and calling, you may save a bet in one situation and Heads-Up On The End 215 gain a bet in another. With two pair, your opponent will call if you bet and bet if you check. So you win either way. If your opponent was drawing to a flush or a straight and makes it, he will of course bet if you check, but he will call, or probably raise, if you bet — which will cost you an extra bet if you call the raise. With a busted hand, your opponent will not call if you bet, so you gain nothing by betting. However, your opponent might bet on a bluff if you check. In this single instance you win an extra bet by checking and calling. So checking and calling has greater expectation than betting. And to repeat: The object of poker is not to win pots but to win money; it is with these extra bets won or saved that you win money. Here is another draw poker situation. You draw one card to two small pair, and your opponent draws three. You don't improve. You know your opponent suspects you were drawing to a flush or a straight, and you also know this player's a pay station, the type who will call "to keep you honest." How should you play? You should bet. Assuming your opponent was drawing three to a big pair, you're about a 71 percent favorite to have the best hand. Any time you're even a small favorite against someone you know is going to call virtually every time, you should bet. In this case you're wagering even money as a 71 percent or 5-to-2 favorite. Clearly that's a wager with positive expectation even though you expect to lose 29 percent of the time. Suppose in hold 'em you have (Notice that there is no flush possibility.) You are first to act. How should you play? You should probably come out betting. If you are up against something like A, 10 or K,10 or J,10, you lose either way. If you check, your opponent will surely bet, and you will call. If your opponent has Q, 10, you may lose a double bet by betting out since your opponent will raise. On the other hand, if your opponent has hands like 10,8 or 10,7 or 10,6, you win either way; if you check, your opponent will most

worse implied odds with your gut shot draw or whatever you have and when people bet larger usually they have a more polarized range and usually more polarized ranges continue betting on the turn which is not good for you because you want your opponent to check a lot on the turn so the opposite of this is or the inverse of this whatever the right word is is that you want to be floating more as you're facing smaller bets because you're getting better pod odds and implied odds and usually as people bet smaller they're usually betting with just their entire range which will lead to their range on the turn being somewhat weak also you're gonna want to float tighter as stacks get shallower because again you're lacking implied odds and also your opponent can more easily stack off with clearly marginal hands like middle pair right like imagine someone raises you call on the button and they have ace jack on a queen jack three board in that scenario you probably can float with all sorts of gut shots and whatnot when you're playing 100 big blinds deep because you can put that ace jack in pretty bad shape on the turn in the river with a big turn in riverbed on queen jack three if they have ace jack or jack ten or what not right but if uh they're playing 20 big blinds deep they're just not going to fold it right so that's the scenario where as you get shallower and shallower you should usually float a little bit less because the marginal hands can more happily stack off so we know we're not gonna be doing much floating out at all from out of position our floats from out of position are just gonna be good hands is what it amounts to like good reasonable draws so from in position what are the best hands to float well they're usually going to be hands with decent equity and i'm just going to start from the top and go all the way to the bottom right we're going to call flush draws floats even though they're not really because those are like clearly decent hands um but like if you do call with a low flush draw on the flop you're calling it like nine high or whatever with the idea that you're gonna either make a flush and win when you make a flush or your opponent's gonna check and that's gonna give you a chance to bluff right so flush draws your hands that you're always gonna want to call or raise and from in position you're gonna find you wanna call a whole lot more often compared to when you're out of position when you're at a position with a draw that lacks showdown value assuming the stacks are not set up such that your opponents can just rip it in on the turn i'm sorry i'm sorry rip it in if you check raise the flop because you don't want to

hope of drawing out on you. By not calling he made a mistake, and you have gained. (You gain even more when that sixth street card makes you two pair, and your opponent folds the best hand.) Example 5 Just as you are rooting for an opponent to fold when he is getting sufficient pot odds, you are rooting for him to call when he is getting insufficient pot odds. Thus, it is frequently correct to play a strong hand weakly on an early round — the converse of your plays in the previous two examples — so that your opponent will make a bad call when you do improve. Look at the following two hands from seven-card razz: Opponent A good play against some people with this hand would be to check and just call if your opponent bets. Many players would now put you on a pair or a bad card in the hole. If you do catch a 4, 5 or 7 on board, giving you a 6 or 7 low, your opponent will probably still call, even if he is drawing dead, because your earlier play along with his pot odds make him think it's worth a call. This is exactly what you are hoping for. Your deceptive play early has caused your opponent to make an incorrect play on a later round. Example 6 Any time an opponent is not getting close to proper odds against you, you are rooting for him to call, even if by calling he has a chance of drawing out on you. If in the flush example at the beginning of this chapter, the pot were $20 instead of $80, you would be rooting for your opponent with the four-flush to call your $10 bet because he is a 5-to-1 underdog getting only 3-to-1 for his money. If he calls and makes a flush, those are the breaks. Nevertheless, his play is incorrect because it has negative expectation, and you gain any time he makes it. 24 Chapter Three When you have a hand that is rooting for a call, you should not try to make your opponent fold by betting an exorbitant amount in a no-limit or pot-limit game. Such a situation came up one day when I was playing no-limit hold 'em. There was one card to come, and I had a straight which, at that point, was the nuts — that is, the best possible hand. I bet something like $50, the player to my left called, and the player behind him called the $50 and raised the rest of his money, which was about $200. Since I had the best possible hand, the question was, should I raise or just call? There was something like $500 in the pot. Because the third man was all-in, I only had to think about the man behind me. I knew if I reraised, say, $400, making it $600 to him, he definitely would fold; in fact, if I raised almost any amount he would fold. But if I just called the

bet and 33% pot raise , with the usual caveat that smaller raises call for slightly more aggressive responses: Shallow Stacks With shallow stacks, both players play much more aggressively. Many more hands are strong enough to get all in, and protecting and denying equity is at a premium . The following chart shows UTG and BTN responses after a 33% pot continuation bet and 55% pot check-raise 20bb deep: As discussed above, I kept the bet and raise sizes the same as in the previous charts for the sake of comparison. However, shallow stacks are when GTO Wizard most prefers smaller sizes . In an UTG vs BB confrontation, UTG mostly uses a 20% continuation bet and BB a 33% raise, which produces a response more in keeping with what we see at other stack depths: The smaller sizes lead to BB raising more often and BTN folding less , but the three-bet frequency is in keeping with our earlier simulations. How do we square this with the fact that UTG can play for stacks with many more hands when the stacks are 20bb and that, on paired boards, those hands often benefit from protection? Why does UTG not fast-play all their medium pairs on T22 r , as we’ve seen in other simulations? Three factors are at work here: UTG needs to call more often after a tiny bet and tiny raise. Many of those calling hands will be rather weak, which gives BB incentive to keep betting the turn. Consequently, UTG has more incentive to trap with their pairs and induce that bet. With such shallow stacks, if UTG did manage to cooler BB with a better pair, they can often get stacks in even on bad runouts after calling . For example, if BB check-raises T6 on T22 r and a K turns, they won’t keep betting, but they will check and call a bet. UTG can still value bet their JJ or AT and get the most of the value they would have gotten by three-betting. And that’s a worse case scenario. On safer turns, BB will keep betting and call a raise. UTG loses the value of position if the hand ends on the flop, whether by BB folding or by BB shoving over the three-bet. With deeper stacks, a three-bet often results in BB calling and playing out of position on the turn and river, but with 20bb, there isn’t much room left to play. Thus, the in position player often prefers to call and force BB to play the next street out of position rather than end the hand immediately. BB has more incentive to end the hand immediately, while the in position player has more incentive to let it play out on future streets. This last point is a big part of why BB raises the flop much more aggressively than UTG does with 20bb stacks. All things equal, the BB has more incentive to end the hand immediately, while the in position player has more incentive to let it play out on

Table 122: BB Strategy Breakdown vs UTG 2/3-pot c-bet on A♥Q♦3♠ ♦ The only set the BB has is 33 and it gets x/r 100% of the time. ♦ Two pair gets x/r 42%, with Q3s being x/r 100%. A3s is x/r 1/3 of the time. AQo gets x/r 40% and AQs only gets x/r about 7%. A3 needs some protection and benefits from reducing the SPR, while AQs helps protect the calling range and can be x/r on a later street. ♦ Top pair is never folded on the flop and gets x/r about 15% of the time. If the BB happens to have AK, it gets x/r every time. AJ gets x/r 63% of the time and all the other Ax get x/r about 6%. ♦ Second pair gets folded 25% and never gets x/r. The strongest KQ gets called 100%. The middling QJ-Q9 get folded about 53% of the time when not having a BDFD and the weaker kicker Q8s-Q2s gets called 100%. In this set-up, mid pair low kicker has better equity than the mid pair high kicker because most of the time the kicker is live. ♦ Pocket pairs between the queen and the three are always folded. This includes some pocket pairs as big as JJ and TT that would make bad bluff-catchers, as they have only two outs which aren’t even clean outs. ♦ Bottom pair is folded 66%. They can get called or even x/r sometimes as they have a lot more equity than a pocket pair such as 77. Any 3x can have up to 5 outs (another 3 plus the kicker). In this case, the weaker kickers are also more valuable than the high kickers, and hands such as K3s get folded 100%, while a hand like 53s can be x/r 43%, x/c 20% and x/f 36.5%. Usually bottom pairs are not great hands to call down, but they work well as semi-bluffs. ♦ Big gutshots such as KJ can be called most of the time. The weaker KT and JT play a mixed strategy, sometimes calling and sometimes folding. Wheel gutshots that can make an A-5 straight can be x/r some of the time when they have a BDFD but are mostly folded when they don’t. ♦ King-high no draw and all the rest of the air makes up 48% of BB’s range and is simply folded every time. Flop Strategy Example 2

There are a lot of positives for c-betting here, but one factor is very poor. Can you spot it? The good factors are: Hero is in position against a very fit-or-fold looking passive player who's unlikely to get out of line without a good hand. The board texture is bone dry and should yield a lot of fold equity. The bad factor is Hero's equity when called; he usually has two outs. It's also worth noting that future fold equity is not likely to be much better and though Hero can sometimes turn a gutshot, that isn't going to make much of a difference. So is a c-bet +EV? Well to find that out we'll need to know how often it needs to work to be profitable (RFE), and to know that, what kind of sizing we'll be using. With the board being so dry and Villain so likely to fold when he misses, and with Hero holding such a low equity hand, a small size is imperative. If we bet half pot, we risk 4.75 to win 9.5. RFE = Risk/(Risk + Potential Gain) RFE = 4.75/(9.5 + 4.75) RFE = 33.33% Since Hero has his humble two outs when behind, he'll need slightly less fold equity than this in reality. Hero should certainly expect to generate more than 33.33% fold equity by betting against such an opponent on this dry of a flop. Of course c-betting being +EV is not a sufficient reason to c-bet; it needs to be higher EV than the alternative line of checking. We have good reason to assume that this is the case. By betting Hero protects a vulnerable hand when he is best and avoids the potentially costly spot where villain bets the turn and picks up the pot with a hand that would have folded to a c-bet. Checking back this flop to make bluff catching calls on the turn is not a good idea against such a passive player, but that doesn't means that Villain will never bluff and that Hero will never fold the best hand later on if he checks behind here. Hero bets 4.75BB. So that analysis we just did with risk and reward is a type of out of game analysis.

Hit When the cards on the board improve or connect with the cards in the hole. For example, a player holding 99 on 27K9 has hit the turn, as they have made a set.

The steal with 72o yields a profit of 27.4bb/100. This raise is only profitable because Villain defends the big blind way too tightly, allowing you to exploit by stealing their blind with any two cards (ATC). From the BB’s perspective the defence should be at a frequency of: The BB’s minimum defense frequency is 57% hands, but the BB’s GTO solution in this spot is to defend 82.1% hands (Hand Range 26) which, for many players, sounds crazy. Later in the book we will study BB defense strategies in depth and understand why this is possible.

Heuristics: OOP C-Betting in MTTs Playing against an in-position cold-caller is dramatically different–and dramatically more difficult–than playing against a caller… Counterintuitive Calls Solver outputs such as those provided by GTO Wizard are models of no-limit hold ‘em,… How To Negotiate Final Table Deals Most people’s first introduction to the Independent Chip Model (ICM) is not from studying bubble… How does ICM impact PKO strategy? If you have read The Theory of Progressive Knockout Tournaments you already know why we… Understanding Blockers in Poker Often when looking through a solver’s meticulously crafted grid of deception, one of the following… Flop Heuristics: IP Cold-Caller in MTTs A Cold-call refers to the act of calling a preflop raise when you don’t close… Flop Heuristics: IP C-Betting in MTTs In the world of poker, the flop is a crucial stage of the game that… Flop Heuristics for Defending the Blinds in MTTs The field of Game Theoretically Optimal poker is extensive, and thus, to simplify our strategy,… Multiway strategy in Progressive Knockout Tournaments Progressive Knockout (PKO) tournaments are much more complex than traditional MTTs. The fact that players… How To Calculate Raises In Poker One of the most frequently asked questions in poker is how to calculate the size… Principles of River Play The river offers the least complicated strategy of any betting street. With no further cards… Exploitative Dynamics GTO solutions are designed to be unexploitable, performing reasonably well no matter how your opponents… How ICM Impacts Postflop Strategy Most players understand how the Independent Chip Model (ICM) in poker impacts their strategy preflop,… 10 Tips for Multiway Pots in Poker While lots of work has been placed into research and explanation of heads-up pot strategy,… What is the Bubble Factor in poker tournaments? The Independent Chip Model (ICM) shows us the real money implications of tournament chip decisions.… The Theory of Progressive Knockout Tournaments In poker, a PKO (Progressive Knockout) tournament is a type of tournament where a portion… How To Analyze Turn Textures In Poker Master the art of turn analysis in poker. Understand how the turn card changes the… Principles of Turn Strategy Learn the principles of turn strategy in poker and discover what makes the turn unique.… Poker Strategies: Tournaments vs. Cash Games Tournament poker is not as different from cash game poker as people sometimes assume. Most… How Solvers Work A Game Theory Optimal solver is an algorithm that calculates the best possible poker strategy.… The Most Powerful Play in Poker The central strategic implication of stack depth is the question of how much equity a… When does ICM become significant in MTTs? The Independent Chip Model (ICM) was invented in 1987 by M. Malmuth and is one… How to Study GTO Solutions Tools like GTO Wizard and other solvers should not be used to memorize specific strategies.… Principles of GTO Game theory, or GTO (for Game Theoretically Optimal), is best understood not as a rigid… Interpreting Equity Distributions GTO Wizard’s range vs range equity distribution graphs are an excellent tool for visualizing which… What is Leverage in poker? Leverage

the SB 3-betting range is in general less polarized than the BB, so it doesn’t mind getting called as much as the BB does. If the 3-bet size requires you to invest over 1/3 of your stack, you will be pot-committed unless your hand is absolute trash, so I wouldn’t recommend investing over 1/3 of your stack with a terrible hand. In that case, you are better off going all-in instead, reducing your opponent’s strategic options to calling the all-in or folding. With fewer than 40bb, all 4-bets are only all-in because if you choose non-all-in 4-bet-sizes you would either be pot-committed or would have to use an extremely small size, which will give the Villains too good of a price to take the flop and realize equity. With 50bb to 100bb, you start to see non-all-in 4-bets to 2.25-2.5x when IP and 2.5-3x when OOP. All 5-bets are always all-in. In modern online MTTs, some players still use smaller bet-sizes than recommended. This is mostly because people still fold too often to small bet-sizes. However, as the games evolve, bigger bets will become the norm because players now understand that calling small raises and realizing equity is always an option. This is the reason why the old silly click-back 5-bets and 6- bets are now pretty much extinct. As explained in the General Guidelines for Pre-flop Bet-sizing section in Chapter 4, the earlier the position the smaller your bet-size should be, so use a slightly smaller bet RFI and 3-bet sizes from EP. Increasing your bet-size as you move closer to the BN is a valid strategy that I use in my games, but it comes at a cost of increasing the complexity of your strategies and I haven’t found solid evidence of this having a really large impact on your bottom line. So, using a simpler, easier to execute strategy with fewer bet-sizes is recommended. Short Stack Push/Fold Charts The following charts (Hand Ranges 88-95) were generated with HRC using FGS. The numbers in the cells represent the maximum number of big blinds that can be pushed with that hand for each position. Hands in black can be pushed when having 10bb or less. For example, the SB can only push 95o with 5bb or less, but can push 95s with 10bb or less.

Abstraction A method of reducing the state-space complexity of poker in order to make it computable. Common abstraction methods include: betting tree abstraction (restricting what bet sizes can be used) and bucketing (grouping similar hand classes together).

you can also call in position if you think the opponents really wide but if the even if the opponent's really why they're often gonna have stuff like king queen and a sex and just like stuff that has equity right and you don't really care if your opponent folds out of equity Plus Jax is gonna end up folding a little bit poorly post flop like say it does come King Queen blank in the opponent has a is five and they bet you just fold and your opponent gets the block through right anyway we call here's a great example I would just check check the flop I would check behind on the turn because if you bet the turn and the opponent calls or jams you're unhappy and if it just checks down you're gonna end up winning a lot maybe you're thinking you can make a hand like Kings fold but I'm not trying to buy people off Kings also the opponent could just be checking with a sax to try to induce the bluff realizing that if he bets and gets called he's pretty unhappy so I don't think you want to bet here because when your opponent Bowls are usually folding out pretty perfectly unless they have exactly kings or Queens Lehman kings or Queens may not fold to a 10 K back so here I think you have a pretty clear marginal made hand I get any betting so that you don't face a river bet but like I don't know what a kid means here if the kid might just jam you all in with some random junk like king queen thinking that you're making some thin protection bet or something like that then clearly this is awful to bet and then fold to a jam so I think I would just check and just check it down and be content with that in general when you have a marginal made hand that can win if it checks down you want to just be checking it down obviously you'd rather bet with like Jax I think then Kings here because Kings can Kings isn't so worried about getting out drawn on the river where Jax kind of is cuz the king or queen could be pretty bad but I don't like it really matters all those he has just want to check just checking it in the showdown you're gonna win a decent out of time and nobody's holding an ace right so when people fold here they're folding out usually unpaired hands that you crush and lone pairs like pocket 7s that isn't gonna put money in anyway so I think you'd rather just check alright 50 big blinds hasten or limp three big blind raise I'd probably just flap if you get rear ace here you can fold pretty awful flop for you should we bet as a bluff if they check to us this board should line up okay with your range should also line up with the weak passive players

it to GTO Wizard, and… Understanding Nash Distance Understanding Nash Distance. One of the most common questions when studying with solvers is “Why… Combinatorics Poker Puzzle Today we have a special puzzle for you that will test your intuition as a… The 10 Most Important Concepts for New Poker Players The 10 Most Important Concepts for New Poker Players. Fundamentals are one of the most… What is GTO in Poker? The meaning of GTO in poker is Game Theory Optimal. Game theory is a study… What does GTO aim to achieve? So what exactly is a GTO strategy? What makes it “unexploitable”? What does it try…

mistake of calling in such situations, but unless the pot is large, the correct play is to fold. Let's work it out mathematically. You lose almost automatically 48 percent of the time. Of the remaining 52 percent, you'll win an average of six out of 11 hands (since you estimate yourself to be a 6-to-5 favorite). In other words, you'll lose almost half the time when you're a slight favorite and virtually all of the time when you're a big underdog. You stand to win the hand only 29 percent of the time in all. To call the bet then, you would need to be getting at least 7-to-3 effective odds from the pot, which is not very likely in an early betting round. Hence, the correct play would normally be to fold. The Difficulty of Defending Against the Semi-Bluff To illustrate the difficulty of defending against the semi-bluff, we'll take a seven-card stud hand from our discussion of semi-bluffing in the preceding chapter and reverse roles: Opponent Suppose you bet on fourth street, and your opponent raises. Knowing your opponent is fully capable of semi-bluffing in this spot with something like a pair of 7s in the hole, you still should probably not call with a pair of 9s. He may in fact have a pair of queens or jacks. Or he may be semi-bluffing with a four-flush. The problem is that your pair of 9s is no favorite over a four-flush with a jack and a queen. Thus, if your opponent has a pair of jacks, a pair of queens, or two pair, you may lose because he already has you beat; and if he has a four-flush, you may lose because he outdraws you (which with his overcards as well, he's a favorite to do). Even if your opponent has nothing better than a gut-shot straight draw, your two 9s with a king kicker are not a hand to be excited about. Consequently, even though you suspect this opponent is semi-bluffing, it doesn't do you much good to call with a poor hand because you have two ways of losing: You may lose to a legitimate hand or by being outdrawn. Defense Against the Semi-Bluff 107 You 108 Chapter Twelve Suppose you grit your teeth, close your eyes, and call your opponent's bet. The dealer raps on the table and deals the next card: Opponent What in the world do you do now? That nine of spades your opponent caught is a very scary-looking card. It might have made your opponent a flush. It might have made him a straight. If it didn't help him at all, well, then he was probably betting on fourth street with jacks or queens so that now he has a big pair and at least a three-flush — maybe a four-flush. All you can do is check, and when your opponent bets, as he surely will, you will probably throw away your hand, perhaps cursing the poker gods for delivering the 9 to your opponent and not to you. So here is a

tight still only 5.2 percent of hands total but we get to call a whole lot more because now we are uh gonna be on the button in position and there are only two players you have to act who can shove whereas when you're in the hijack seat there's four players you get to act two kashav so we see a relatively similar shoving range relatively similar three betting range but a much wider calling range of more suited connectors suited hands um and and pairs plus a few more big cards I would say in general if you wanted to air towards folding out stuff like Queen Jack and King Jack pre-flop and King set six and King seven and queen eight and Jack eight Suited I think that's probably fine uh but you do get to call decently wide even 25 big lines deep when you are on the button now let's take a look at button versus hijack so the difference here is that the hijack is Raising with a much wider range than under the gun remember I said as the raise is going to be from a wider range that should result in you going all in more often right that's a very common adjustment so we see here we actually do go all in a decent amount more often we were shoving two percent of the time against under the gun now we're shoving 4.4 percent of the time a lot more over twice as often but with a similar selection of hands right we see instead of Ace King only we have Ace King and Ace Queen instead of King Jack suited and queen Jack suited it's now King Jack suited King 10 suited quintan suited Queen Jack suited Jack 10 suited some portion of the time also we show up with more middle Pairs and we do see more low suited Aces opting to shove too interestingly enough our calling range is similar right we're really not calling all that much wider against the hijack than we are against under the gun which is cool to see the change here is that when the opponent's range gets wider we are shoving more often we're not necessarily calling all that much more often because to be fair the hydrax range should be reasonable right if we go over here the hijack's raising with this range that we discussed earlier and it's not particularly weak so it's not like you can just blast them all right that's how to play facing a raise when you're in position what about when you are out of position but when you're out of position you're gonna be doing a whole lot more shoving in general um we'll be discussing specifically from the small blind now and then the big blind next so small blind versus Under the Gun Rays you're gonna have to be pretty tight but note is still a pretty wide calling range this is because when they raise the two big blinds and you're in

do have to call perhaps wider than you may be used to like King high is pretty good A size pretty good especially with over cards you really want to have over cards to the nine over cards to the nine with Showdown value is pretty good let's say we do call River's uh seven of clubs probably gonna see a ton of betting right yeah we see a ton of betting why is there a ton of betting here well they have a lot of Threes And also they improve to a lot of pairs and straights and whatnot right so it's not something about everything on the seven of clubs what about the Jack of clubs not nearly as much because all these hands down here missed they have a ton of garbage when your range contains a ton of garbage you have to do a lot of checking all right let's suppose though we do make the small bet on the Flop from the low track now remember on queen queen two we check raise everything and folded like 60 something percent of the time on 633 though we're calling way more because now we have a whole lot of hands that have decent Equity that are getting the right price to continue because on 633 hands like King jack off suit are good enough to continue but on queen queen two hands like nine eight or not so as you have a range of hands that has just more equity in general you don't want to raise as often now we still are raising a lot of the time notes we are raising with a lot of threes and a lot of sixes and a lot of backdoor draws and and front door draws right uh whenever you are raising small and your range is very very strong you can raise stuff like seven five and five four because now you're less concerned about getting re-raised off of it what happens if we do raise five four and get shoved say we do raise We're not gonna get shoved all that often say we do get shoved we do have to call it off with the five four just so you know so it's not like you're you're not loving it there but you do got to call it off if you do put in the race but you don't really want to be there which is why um you know better every single time right um okay so say we do bet face a 1.4 bat opponent calls now the turn is a jack they check every time this is bad for the big blind now we see a ton of bedding because the jack is bad for the big blind right what about on a turn Ace what do you think lots of betting because it's bad for the big blind what about a turn five does the big one lead here they might they do look they do lead sometimes here lots of fives lots

raise cut off calls flop comes ace queen four this is a pretty coordinated board that should connect well with the cutoff and also we have a very clear marginal made hand with our middle pair so we're gonna check call turns to five we're gonna check the opponent keeps betting this is a situation that is definitely dicey and i realize i'm showing you a few dicey spots where we are out of position but they don't always go this way right very often it's going to go check bet call on the flop and opponent just checks down and we end up winning with our king queen also realize i'm going to check the flop with some of my weak aces like ace six suited or he's too suited and the plan is to check call flop and check call turn and check call river so we're not always just losing these scenarios and this spot though i think calling is actually fine because they're actu there are a decent amount of draws available right here if the opponent did have um seven six of clubs and they decided to take a stab at the flop now they are gonna feel at least somewhat inclined to keep bluffing on the turn say they had um king nine of spades or nine eight of spades they would definitely bet those on the flop and they would keep betting on the turn so even though we do lose to all of the better made hands we do beat some bluffs and there actually are a pretty good amount of bluffs rivers and nine we check and the opponent bets again this is kind of a dicey spot now if i did have an ace i would call remember how i said if i had ace two i would check call flop check alternate check call river this is a spot where i would do that with my king queen though i think folding is probably fine if a spade came in i would definitely fold if um like an 8 came and it's particularly bad because 7 6 gets there if you know your opponent is a little bit overly aggressive i think calling is actually fine it's not a great spot to call but it's probably okay in this scenario though i think folding in general is fine because we lose to all the strong aces that we keep betting right and if we play our range intelligently are we're going to be able to check call a lot with the slightly better hands when we have an ace this time though the opponent did bet with jack ten of spades and they make us fold the best hand and that's gonna happen realize that you're gonna fold the best hand sometimes that is part of poker and i think our opponent played the hand well right they should definitely call our pre-flop rays they should definitely bet the flop with their obvious draw they should definitely bet the term of

7. So how often should you reraise in a short-handed game when you are defending out of the big blind? You should probably reraise about one out of four times that you play. Playing Short Handed 297 5. Assuming you reraised, what should you be prepared to do on the flop? A lot of betting. 9. Example? If you reraise with JVTV and the flop is 9V442+, you go ahead and bet. 10. What happens when it is three-handed and the player on the button raises? The combined calling frequency of the blinds should be only a little more than it was for the big blind (when playing headsup) and the little blind should play about half as often as the big blind. 11. On the flop against a very aggressive player who is automatically going to try to steal, what should you do? Pretend that the top card isn't there or turn it into a deuce in your mind. 12. Example? You have Q4TV and the flop is A+9+44. Just change it to 9+442+ and continue to play since you have two "overcards" and a backdoor straight draw. 13. Should you be betting every time? No, you don't want to make your strategy completely obvious. 14. What is another idea that is important in short-handed play? To throw in a raise with a hand that seems like it is only worth a call. 15. Why do you do this? To thwart the strategy of players who are doing a lot of semibluffing. 298 Part Eight: Questions and Answers 16. Example? You have Q4TV and the flop is QV8+5+. The right play might be to call your opponent's bet on the flop and then to raise him on fourth street even though your hand only looks like a "pay off' hand. 17. What if you are against someone who will always bluff on the river if you only call on the turn? Then it doesn't do you any good to raise. 18. What if he is a real aggressive player and will reraise with many hands? Then you are better off just calling. 19. When should you just call with some hands if you are first in on the button? When the players in the blinds are very loose or at least highly apt to defend their blinds. 20. What are three ideal hands to do this with? Small pairs, small suited connectors, or a hand like A+6V 21. What is another reason to just call before the flop? You make it more likely that you will steal the pot if they both check on the flop. 22. What if you are one off the button? You should not usually make this play. Now you fold the A+6V. 23. Why should you frequently lead on the flop? It is highly beneficial to be able to bet out and sometimes pick up the pot. Playing Short Handed 299 24. How do you preserve this highly profitable play? By not autonlatically checking to the raiser when you have something. 25. Heads-up, what hands does

your range affect your strategy? Advanced players will often tell you that your range affects your strategy. Visualizing implied odds Implied odds are the value you expect to gain over and above your raw equity.… ICM Basics As a tournament player, you may have heard about the concept of “ICM”, but what… What is Equity in Poker? The term “Equity” is ubiquitous throughout poker theory. Equity refers to your chances of winning… Range Morphology “Morphology” is the study of form or structure. You’ve probably heard terms thrown around such… What is Expected Value in Poker? Expected value (EV) is the most fundamental metric in poker. Every decision you make is… Why doesn’t my solution match GTO Wizard? So, you’ve got your own solutions to some spot, compared it to GTO Wizard, and… Understanding Nash Distance Understanding Nash Distance. One of the most common questions when studying with solvers is “Why… Combinatorics Poker Puzzle Today we have a special puzzle for you that will test your intuition as a… The 10 Most Important Concepts for New Poker Players The 10 Most Important Concepts for New Poker Players. Fundamentals are one of the most… What is GTO in Poker? The meaning of GTO in poker is Game Theory Optimal. Game theory is a study… What does GTO aim to achieve? So what exactly is a GTO strategy? What makes it “unexploitable”? What does it try…

hold ‘em professionally, I… How to Handle Loose-Passive Limpers Solver charts and presolved solutions do not offer much in the way of explicit guidance… Top 5 Mistakes in Spin & Gos As a Spin and Go poker coach, I regularly encounter common mistakes that players make,… An Introduction to Spin & Gos I was playing Tournaments for the first decade of my career. But after my first… Relationships and Poker In my more than 15 years of poker coaching, I’ve helped hundreds of clients improve… Do Multiple Sizes Matter? Should I work out the other tools or just stick to the crowbar? Solver results… The Science of Learning Applied to GTO Wizard The way we were taught to study in schools was flawed and has negatively impacted… Check-Raising a Single Pair In this article, I will address a question raised by Twitter/X user ’Matt Riley’, who… The Turn Probe Bet Imagine yourself defending as the BB caller vs BTN preflop raiser in a 100bb cash… When To Encourage Multiway Pots in PKOs I was recently shown this fascinating PKO hand from the GTO Wizard PKO library. Somebody… Protect Equity and Prosper When we think about the best hands to bet in a given situation, we tend… Do Solvers Have Targets? Targeting has long been a staple of exploitative poker thinking. When you’re value betting against… Disciplining Big Blind in Limped Pots When the BTN open-limps off a short stack, the postflop play against the BB should… I’d Rather Be Drawing Which is the better hand on a K♥8♦5♦ flop: K♠T♣ or 7♥6♥? OK, I’ll admit… The Curious Case of Open-Limping Buttons Before the advent of solvers, open-limping was considered the province of passive, gambley recreational players… Cleaning Out Sticky IP Callers A “sticky” player on your left, one who calls your preflop raises too often and… Defending Against Tiny 3-Bets Tournament poker is about precision. Cash games, where stacks typically run into the hundreds of… Heads up! Exploiting SB’s Preflop Mistakes Heads up (HU) tournament play presents unique challenges to the average player. Many tournament players,… C-Betting As the OOP Preflop Raiser Position is an extremely valuable advantage in poker. Most players would describe the comfort zone… Overchoice: Making Sense of Multiple Sizings Solver solutions with multiple bet sizes often involve a lot of mixing between those sizes,… River Refinements: When Your Opponent Won’t Check-Raise One of the biggest strategic differences between playing in versus out of position involves betting… Turn Barreling in 3-Bet Pots There are two articles on the GTO Wizard blog that make good prerequisites to this… The Right Way To Think About Protection Suppose Paul the Protector is in a 200bb cash game and opens A♠A♣ in the… The Importance of Board Coverage The first public version of the GTO Wizard announced AI upgrade already has some useful… How To Adjust When Villain Has No Bluffs “They always have it!” is a common, semi-joking expression in poker to describe the tendency… Adjusting on Later Streets After Exploiting Flop The key to exploiting opponents profitably is knowing when to

with post-flop fold equity gained from isolation. In either case, having a bigger pot is great with both value hands and bluffs, and so, for different reasons, our sizing remains balanced against this kind of player too. 3. Pot Odds/Implied Odds When we use a tiny size that results in favourable RFE and terrible FE, our opponent is calling us very wide because his pot odds and implied odds are excellent. We must be careful as the 3-bettor not to make 3-bets so small that our value range will be successfully mined by the likes of 55 and 76s where this is avoidable. Again, it's a delicate balance because if we render our opponent's implied odds too dreadful, then in turn we make it fine for him to fold a large chunk of his range. His EV skyrockets vs. huge sizing each time he does have a very strong starting hand decreasing the need for implied odds in the first place. One other important point here is that the bigger Villain opens, the smaller the stack to pot ratio and so Villain's implied odds to call a 3-bet are already naturally cut. As a result we don't need to size so big vs. larger opens to reduce implied odds, but we need to go bigger vs. smaller opens. 4. Position In position Villain has an easier time making +EV calls vs. our 3-bets. Out of position he'll have to fold more of his range. It follows that Hero gets more FE in position and can use smaller sizing there to make RFE all that more juicier. Out of position he'll have to accept a worse RFE in exchange for getting the fold equity he needs when bluffing or 3-betting a weaker hand in a linear range. Our job as the 3-bettor is to at least hit the sensible sizing zone in Figure 61 with our bluffs and balance that sizing with our value hands too. The following table is a recommendation for common situations that fits these guidelines. Study it, but be sure to think about why each size has been recommended for each spot. We'll then finish up the chapter by looking at an example where stacks are shorter than usual.

Diagram 14: BN Defending Frequencies Your flatting range is made of hands that have good post-flop playability and offer good board coverage. You protect your calling range by slowplaying hands such as QQ (22%), JJ (52%), TT (59%), 99 (72%), and AKo (23%), as well as hands that can call against squeezes and play post- flop such as AQs (30%), AJs (37%), ATs (71%), KQs (65%), KJs (67%), KTs (30%) and QJs (41%) (Hand Range 62).

nan

This hand could well be a call pre-flop against most opponents. Few Regs are flatting as wide as this

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be allowed to respond with a fold, a call, or a 33% pot raise— regardless of the opponent’s c-bet size. After taking note of the raising frequency against each bet, we will nodelock BB to raise at roughly half those frequencies to see how that changes BTN’s continuation betting strategy. All other betting and raising options are determined by the Automatic bet sizing feature , with one important exception: we will force the BB to check to the raiser on the flop . Boards where the raiser has the least incentive to bet are the ones where BB has the most incentive to donk bet. But the forced check is important for our nodelocking experiment. It serves to prevent the BB from compensating for the reduced check-raising frequency by donk betting more often instead, which would confound our results. Forcing the check is also consistent with the assumption that BB is too passive . A real life human opponent who does not check-raise enough will probably also not make aggressive use of the donk betting option. We should expect that, when the BB is not allowed to donk bet, BTN will have an even lower continuation betting frequency than they otherwise would. To reiterate, these experiments may not be perfect examples of how you should play these spots. What they will demonstrate are some general principles about how to exploit overly passive blinds . The Low Connected Flop Here is BTN’s equilibrium continuation betting strategy on 6 ♥ 3 ♦ 2 ♣ when BB is forced to check: They bet infrequently and mostly for a large size in this spot. This is because much of their range consists of unpaired overcards , hands that have significant equity and could even be ahead but would struggle to continue to a raise. In the rare case that they have strong hands, they are generally overpairs, which are vulnerable to losing their value on later streets and therefore prefer to get in a lot of money immediately. The threat of a check-raise compels BTN to check behind with many medium-strength hands that would love to deny equity to BB but are in danger of having their own equity denied. How do you expect this to change when we force BB to cut their check-raising in half? Try to make a few predictions of your own before you read on to the results. When we nodelock the BB to raise half as often against all continuation bet sizes, BTN bets much more often . MUCH more: They also use a smaller bet size, on average . The pot-sized bets are gone entirely, with 67% pot now being by far their most frequent bet and also an increase in the use of the 33% pot bet. To get a better sense of what’s going on here, we can examine the Equity Distribution graph : There are three important things to recognize here: BTN has the overall equity advantage , roughly 52% to BB’s 48%. On balance, their hands are stronger than BB’s, which is why they can

Hand Range 206: SB vs CO 4-bet (60bb) • All-in 20.6% / • Call 41.8% / • Fold 37.6%