Am I just completely tilted or this is not fold vs an unknown possible fish(40vp over 10hands), overcaller(60vp over 30 hands).?

Like I actually am tilted but I didn't truly know if it was a fold or not so I went with the tilt since it was close. Like fullstack I don't think I can get it in here, even if they are fishes, in general I'll be too behind in equity, but at these stack sizes it's just a really big mindfuck and probably close to break even EV.

Obv you're stacking off with over 30bb in the middle when the villains, who are presumably fish, started the hand with 60bb and 70bb respectively.

On another note; and this may come across as a little bit nobbish (If so, my excuse is that I'm tipsy), but like 90% of your hands are whines or bad beats and are not much fun to browse. After reading this back several times, this is actually being very kind.

I mean, I get it, I recently ran over 60buyins below EV in 2 months of PLO, and this was only in 100k ish hands, but if it's sympathy you're looking for, you're probably not likely to find it here. In my recent EV downswing I obviously experienced some tilt and did complain to some friends now and again, but in times like this more than any other, you need to be focusing on keeping mentally strong, on fixing leaks and improving rather than bemoaning your luck and putting everything down to that. Try to discuss interesting spots, focus on areas to improve instead of complaining about how bad you run. It won't help you and it's not fun for anyone else listening.

On one hand, I'm happy that the hands section has had increased activity during covid lockdown, but on the other hand, the quality of hands posted leaves a lot to be desired. I have more interest in NL theory than practice nowadays and I'd be happy to look into a lot of spots, run some sims and do some solver analysis if there were some interesting spots, but interesting spots are severely lacking on the hand section right now.

It's fine, a well written post for someone tipsy.

First about the specific hand, I was actually not sure, I knew it was close in EV, I tried running it with the solver(I'm not even kidding it's one of the few times I tried and I didn't manage to get the simulation running).

I tend to be on adrenaline when I post the hand, usually right after I lose. In the global sens of a run it's not even that bad, down about 16buyins and 10 under EV for june for 12k hands. I know I'm complaining way too much and in truth when I get put back in my place by someone I respect, I tend to do better later. This isn't a justification but I just post most of my big showdown hand. I do try to improve and I check back those hands later and see my own post it annoys me at time but I leave it as a reminder.

One of the few argument that remain for post bad beat/complaining is that expressing anger strangely enough seems to take less energy than not. I really was just posting my hands thinking people might just overlook them if they think I'm being annoying, which is what I do for other people; but I was aware that the volume of them would bug people who deal with the same shit and I'm sure if it was someone else I'd feel the same by now.

I'm all good to stop posting obvious coolers, should have stopped it before and all fine for me given the people of this site have helped me improve a ton, including you. Thx.

Tbh, now that I'm awake and totally sober I can see both sides. You do need an outlet to vent frustration, but also it's def not fun scrolling through almost entirely bad beat posts. I dunno what the best way for you to vent is tbh, and perhaps most people just scroll past your hands or don't care. It may just be me or a small minority who has an issue with you posting so many coolers or bad beats, in which case you should ignore me. Not sure though, obv can't speak for others.

Running a sim in this spot isn't possible without a 3 way solver, such as monkersolver or Simple 3 way. I own neither. I did own monkersolver for running PLO sims, but found 32GB ram and a now aging i7-5960X to be far too underpowered.

From lots of hands I've seen of yours, areas of improvement that I personally think you can work on include:

1) Preflop - It seems you are cold calling preflop way too frequently and wide. Preflop GTO solutions currently available are solved using pure 3bet or fold strategies when in MP/CO/SB and only allow for cold calling on BTN or BB. I imagine that a perfect GTO solution would be calling some hands in these spots, but the range would be very narrow. This is especially true in high rake games, such as 50NL. The PLO solutions available allow for flatting in all positions and still have infrequent calling ranges MP/CO and even more so in SB, and that's a game where hand equities run closer and you can get away with flatting preflop more than in NL. We can thus extrapolate that in NL cold calling ranges would be even more narrow than in the PLO solutions. I've also seen a few questionable 3bet calls or 4bets. Of course some of these plays can be justified against the right opponent, so I cannot say that your plays were outright bad in the hands I saw, but some of the preflop play I've seen should not be seen as standard. it may be worth you doing some database work and using filters to see how you're doing with some of your cold calls, although this work is always difficult and subject to high variability when dealing with small sample sizes.

2) Cbetting too often out of position in single raised pots - Seems you cbet out of position too frequently, this is especially an issue on low or mid board textures where IP calling ranges hit often, you have too many whiffed overcards and your overpairs will suffer unfavourable runouts very often. I have noticed in comments on a couple of hands you were venting about lots of bad runouts, but this is often going to be the case when you bet weak or vulnerable hands flop and turn and get called twice on boards that are dynamic. You will find yourself having to check lots of turns or rivers and make difficult decisions if you are aggressive on earlier streets, not to mention it's really tough if IP has an aggressive raising strategy and you are betting too many air hands or weak vulnerable hands out of position on boards that are not favourable for you. If you work with solvers some and you put some tight IP calling ranges you'll find that on quite a few 'bad' board textures for OOP it's checking 100% of range, or has a small cbetting frequency. If IP is a fish with a mega wide range then cbetting becomes better again. If IP is a passive player who never stabs, then a good adjustment is to start cbetting strong hands as you need to build the pot and IP won't do it for you, but in GTO solutions in single raised pots vs GTO button calling ranges, OOP cbetting frequency is low on most boards.

3) Bluff catching river too often - Seems to me you bluff catch river unsuccessfuly in a lot of the hands you post, lots of these situations were, in my opinion, avoidable. Again unsure about villains so maybe some of these were okay, and I would have to go through your hands to find specific examples to really expand upon this much, but I do recall seeing a lot of river bluff catches where I thought to myself that it was a trivial fold against most of the population in these games. Might be worth you doing some database analysis using some filters for your bluff catching too.

Interesting stuff, I'll skip over the bad beat/tilt part since it was already discussed. I already decided to stop posting cooler for as long as I can; and don't feel bad about your post it's pretty justified and also helpful.

Would have thought solver required less power than that but it's fine I always did without. My desktop is from last year and I only have 32gb ram anyway.

1) Interesting, I was under the impression cold calling was fine from CO and BTN. I was sitting at around 31/24 VP for a while but I've been toning it down as an attempt to tighten up, currently at 27/22. I tend to flat call PP(low or mid) from just about any position if I do not think 3b is appropriate. I do 3b them from the blinds tho. If I flat from the blinds then it's probably only to set mine with very little intention to stab at it. I was under the impression that mixing cold calling and 3betting (also folding bad one vs nits) in position was profitable. About 3betting, what sizing do you use in position, do you vary it much if at all hands with different hands? (Assuming you do vary it depending on players). I've seen a lot of 3x in position but I have a bit of a hard time with it since it allows a lot of cold calls with high equity hands. I tend to 3.5x inp and 4x OOP but I don't 3b enough probably, I'm only at 7% 3b and cleary not enough from sb since I do flat call.

2) I believe I do cbet a bit too much (around 72%), which I've been slightly tuning it down. One thing is checking seems to bring a problem too, which is you still face the bets but you put the money on their terms(not just allins I mean regular bets). It's a bit hard to answer here considering there are too many scenarios but you would be checking midpairs, overcards, marginal draws, perhaps overpair and let them choose when they bet? There are so many small bets nowadays that it's very hard to play out of position in these spots if you end up check calling too much as they will increase their sizing later on turn or river. I have more trouble understanding how to play in those scenarios this way, but that doesn't mean that it's less profitable, but still without a good general understanding of how to play those hands in theory it's hard to pull it off in practice.

3) About bluff catching scenarios, I tend to get baited by small raise on river a bit too often when I have good pot-odds and it's a large pot but it's sorta obvious they must have hit something. I think overall versus fishes I have a pretty good winrate in bluff catching
vs fishes. I used to not do it very much and I've been more often making money with them. Strangely enough it seems I fold too much to turn and river bet, perhaps because I'm there too often in the first place, but I still fold to cb on flop over 50% of the time so it's strange.

Edit: Do you use PT4? I'm trying to figure out how to run an analysis on cold calling scenarios to see my profitability. Atm I'm not getting too much useful statistic but strangely my most losing position (other than blinds due to blinds) is the Cut Off position.

1) From what I gather, most of the better regs aren't flatting CO much, if at all, at 100bb stacks in all reg lineups, but may introduce hands if there are whales behind that they want to play a pot with. You'd have to check your database to see if cold calling pocket pairs has been showing you profit in your current sample. I tended to find it was a roughly breakeven proposition on the button when I did some analysis a few years ago when I was still playing NL somewhat frequently, I imagine it's worse than that from MP or CO. Again, you can probably find scenarios where it is showing profit (Whales behind plus people behind who don't squeeze enough), but there's also scenarios where it's definitely not good (Noone behind who is gonna come along and dump 100bb on 1 pair 3 way, people who squeeze often).

BTN does still contain calling ranges in the preflop solutions that I've seen, though the ones I have are for 500z rake structure and you should be more inclined to 3bet or fold at 50NL where rake is higher since you do not pay rake if the hand ends preflop. As an example, in the 500z preflop solution the 3bet percentage BTN v CO is 11.72% and the cold call percentage is 5.44%. It's still not calling that much even in this rake environment and is doing it with a lot of hands that are mixing between the 2 options.

I think typical sizing in position is about 3x the open raise and OOP about 4x plus or minus a tad depending on the open size. In the preflop GTO solutions it has players open raise to 2.5bb, with IP 3betting to 8.5bb, SB 3betting to 10.9bb vs that open size and BB 3betting to 11bb. I don't think these sizings are going to have a giant impact on winrate as long as you play decent ranges and don't go massively too small or too big. As the 3betting ranges are largely linear, it's not actually bad for you if people want to call wide against your 3bets when OOP. You'll have a fuck ton of fold equity postflop and get into lots of situations where you are on the nice side of domination while being in position and able to control the size of the pot with a range advantage.

Rough guess, but I think in 6max games most of the better regs are between 8 and 11% 3bet stat. This is largely an effect of playing 3bet/fold in lots of spots. It isn't surprising your 3bet stat is lower when you're cold calling more than 3betting. For your 3bet stat to also be that high and also cold calling you'd have to be entering pots with some wacky hands in a lot of spots.

2) I believe 72% might be a reasonable IP cbet stat, but is too wide if you include IP and OOP. It's very difficult to play those single raised pots out of position no matter what line you take really, and yes, it is very difficult to answer here since it's possible to write a fucking book just on this situation and analyse all sorts of different board textures against different preflop strategies and node locking different postflop strategies etcetc.

I was largely of the school of thought that conceding betting lead and letting IP control the betting is overall bad in these spots, but spend lots of time in the solver and you'll see this is the way forward if opponent is playing an optimal strategy. It takes a lot of getting used to playing a heavy check strategy when OOP and you notice before too long that different player types react to it VERY differently. Learning how the villain thinks and making adjustments is pretty huge in spots like this. Some people will stab all sorts of air, some will stab everything they have, some will merge too much, some never stab bluffs and basically only strong hands etc and they all require different adjustments.

I wouldn't suggest you auto check 100% of hands on 100% of boards vs 100% of opponents, that would be ludicrous. If you have a strong hand and playing someone IP who is super wide and cally but never puts any money in of his own accord without a strong hand then you're better off just betting, and fuck any theory ideas off. You can find some nifty check folds against certain opponents, some wide and profitable check raises against others. If a guy is betting 100% frequency when checked to, then it doesn't make much sense to really bet any part of your range. Your strong hands don't have to bet to make sure money goes in, your middling hands will now make more profitable bluffcatchers than they do bets. Although your weak hands are now gonna face a bet all the time and are largely going to fold (Still some can be profitable check raises if they have some good equity and opponent is bet/folding tons), money is mostly made through your good hands and maximising on those and not through bluffs anyway, so this is not a great sacrifice to your overall range EV. Really the only way to get better at playing spots you're unfamiliar with is studying and practicing, same as anything.

3) Yeah I noticed you calling river raises in a lot of spots where I would expect population to be bluffing extremely seldom. Just depends on the situation I guess. Def fish are bluffing a lot in a spot where you bet flop IP turn goes check check and river comes whatever. I mean if they have like fold to cbet % of 30-40 and almost all of those hands are continued by calling then they just end up at rivers with so many hands with no showdown value and have to bluff a lot. But by the time you've bet twice or three times and they get to the river and raise, it's a spot where a lot of their weak hands have been eliminated by virtue of the fact you bet twice so the weak hands folded. After you show this amount of strength the bluffs just go way down. Fold to flop cbet >50% likely is a result of the fact you're playing a lot of multiway pots, and probably with too many weak holdings.

Edit: Do you use PT4? I'm trying to figure out how to run an analysis on cold calling scenarios to see my profitability. Atm I'm not getting too much useful statistic but strangely my most losing position (other than blinds due to blinds) is the Cut Off position
- Nah i use HM3. Should still be able to do some analysis with filters though, prob worth a search on the old Google or YouTube. If your sample is just 12k hands then your winrates by position won't have had time to converge anyway. If cut off is worse than the other positions after significant sample then something is definitely up as it clearly should be better than UTG or MP. Could be that cold calling...!

I made a lot of these changes in my game (And many others) a long time ago and found that checking more often OOP and playing largely 3bet/fold did have positive effects on my winrate. The spots where I really started to struggle back in the day was when I expanded my BB calling range and struggled to play BB vs RFI single raised pots well. Old Lefort and Sauce/Galfond theory videos had me calling way wide and then I was just leaking hard postflop. It's the single change that hurt me most in my poker career I guess. If you make any drastic changes to your game try and see what your winrate is before and after in a specific scenario using filters and evaluate any changes after a period of time. Somethings may be good in theory, but don't always work for humans since implementation is a huge deal. Also one thing I learned is to try not to implement too many things at once.

I found the statistical analysis tool for range which I didn't even know existed in this form so I'll need a bit more time till I can get out the proper stats and winrate for scenarios.

However I have one question; when you are referring to cold calling do you include flat calling a preflop raiser(with no middle caller) or not? I think I might just do both too much but I want to know if we are discussing both flat calling or calling with other flatters in the hand. I assumed cold calling meant flatting a raise regardless of flatters in the middle.

Anyway, from what I've seen I seem to be losing a moderate amount of out of position, but it seems to be most clear that I lose quite a bit when "cold" calling (actually referring to the pt4 stats here). I'm not sure if I attribute it to doing it when I feel I would be slightly behind his range but want to call in hope of hitting but ending dominated/playing too weak or not knowing where I am in term of strength relative to the board. Surely a combination of those factor because I know I usually flat preflop when I believe flop has to improve me and the more I look at it I end up in imperfect scenarios that get harder to solve with the lack of initiative and the lack of position when from the blinds and the increased variables involved with flop/t/r.

Btw I didn't think you were suggesting checking 100%, actually how much if you have an amount in mind would you suggest checking?(don't have to try since this is hella wide of a question). Either way you would be "stuck" a good portion of the hands to play that way and with multiple mid hands with unclear equity. But maybe this isn't so bad considering good regs can still make it very hard if you cbet and raise you appropriately, checking keeps pot size relatively smaller; but they are from what I've seen better at using varied bet sizing including fullpot or overbets. I used to think initiative overcame the advantage from smaller pots but I think that's not so true.

One of the common scenario I have a problem when checking without position as initial raiser is the small bet and then they are allowed to choose what to do on turn unless I would include leading quite a bit more but that also leaves some hard scenarios. This is especially true in sb v bb, which is why tend to tighten up when they give me too much action; either flat or 3b (if I'm the SB), but still those hands happen regularly.

Not sure I made total sens but I hope I did. Also, thanks again this is a lot of help.

i dont stack off here often!

On June 11 2020 21:02 Oddeye wrote: I found the statistical analysis tool for range which I didn't even know existed in this form so I'll need a bit more time till I can get out the proper stats and winrate for scenarios. However I have one question; when you are referring to cold calling do you include flat calling a preflop raiser(with no middle caller) or not? I think I might just do both too much but I want to know if we are discussing both flat calling or calling with other flatters in the hand. I assumed cold calling meant flatting a raise regardless of flatters in the middle. Anyway, from what I've seen I seem to be losing a moderate amount of out of position, but it seems to be most clear that I lose quite a bit when "cold" calling (actually referring to the pt4 stats here). I'm not sure if I attribute it to doing it when I feel I would be slightly behind his range but want to call in hope of hitting but ending dominated/playing too weak or not knowing where I am in term of strength relative to the board. Surely a combination of those factor because I know I usually flat preflop when I believe flop has to improve me and the more I look at it I end up in imperfect scenarios that get harder to solve with the lack of initiative and the lack of position when from the blinds and the increased variables involved with flop/t/r. Btw I didn't think you were suggesting checking 100%, actually how much if you have an amount in mind would you suggest checking?(don't have to try since this is hella wide of a question). Either way you would be "stuck" a good portion of the hands to play that way and with multiple mid hands with unclear equity. But maybe this isn't so bad considering good regs can still make it very hard if you cbet and raise you appropriately, checking keeps pot size relatively smaller; but they are from what I've seen better at using varied bet sizing including fullpot or overbets. I used to think initiative overcame the advantage from smaller pots but I think that's not so true. One of the common scenario I have a problem when checking without position as initial raiser is the small bet and then they are allowed to choose what to do on turn unless I would include leading quite a bit more but that also leaves some hard scenarios. This is especially true in sb v bb, which is why tend to tighten up when they give me too much action; either flat or 3b (if I'm the SB), but still those hands happen regularly. Not sure I made total sens but I hope I did. Also, thanks again this is a lot of help.

Not got time atm to read or answer fully - but in the example I gave with the 3bet and calling statistics it was BTN vs CO, i.e. noone inbetween. Flatting and cold calling do require different range adaptations, and likely you are too loose in both spots judging from the hand histories I've seen on here.

A lot of people have it backwards overcalling in the BB for instance. They see a UTG open, 2 more callers and think "ooh I now have better pot odds" and adjust by calling wider in the big blind than they would have otherwise called. This is an incorrect adjustment. Yes pot odds became better, but now you are 4 way instead of headsup and you require a stronger hand to win. Furthermore you're in the worst position of the 4 players and you just won't realise even close to your equity, especially with weak holdings. Unsure if this applies to you, but this can also been shown to be the case with solver solutions, which are tighter when overcalling than they are defending big blind when it's going to be headsup.

On June 11 2020 21:02 Oddeye wrote: One of the common scenario I have a problem when checking without position as initial raiser is the small bet and then they are allowed to choose what to do on turn unless I would include leading quite a bit more but that also leaves some hard scenarios. This is especially true in sb v bb, which is why tend to tighten up when they give me too much action; either flat or 3b (if I'm the SB), but still those hands happen regularly.

check raise flop more if they stab a lot (which they usually do) and overbet turn/river more if they're trying to pot control

+1 to what lebowski said above. I think a lot of people have the misconception that checking means you have to take passive lines. You can still put lots of money into the pot via check raising flops/turns or overbetting turns when the flop checks through.

In terms of how much to check it's going to vary massively from board to board. Some boards will be 100% checks, others may have high bet frequencies, really will depend on the range vs range interaction on a specific board.

I've only really done a decent amount of sims on SB v BB which is very different to UTG v BTN or CO v BTN. In the SB v BB sims I've done I have given the solver the bet size options of 1/4th, 3/4ths and 1.16x. Typically the boards that have high cbet percentages are the paired boards where the paired card is a 9 or above and the 2 broadway + rag boards or the dry A high boards that do not contain lots of straight draws A72 A94 and the like. These boards mostly get cbet for 1/4 pot with 75%+ frequency, as much as 97% on Qh 7h Qd. Lower bet frequency boards are mostly monotone boards, low/mid boards, wheel boards even when an ace is present. These are being checked 50%+ on the few boards I've run, the lowest cbet one I've run had 80.53% check on Ah 3h 2d.

I would have to run some sims with specific ranges to see outputs on other boards. Considering I have 3 sizes per street it takes about an hour to do 1 sim, so takes a while before you have a good amount of boards to look through. If I had a super computer and could run them in 10 minutes each I'd just load up like 25 different boards and set it to run when I have some downtime at my PC, but sadly my computer is 5 years old now and although it was a beast back then, it's not anymore sadly.

Results change drastically when preflop ranges are adjusted. The GTO preflop calling ranges are heavily mixing lots of hands between calling and 3betting and have a wide spread of hands covering lots of board textures. Many humans will tend to have hands at either 100% or 0% frequency and will typically lack overall board coverage. They will often smash flops or miss them completely, which will lead to very different solutions to what you'd have if you plugged in GTO preflop range vs GTO preflop range.

the last time I ran a sim he starved to death because the bedroom didn't have a door

all you need is a good read

Great discussion, guys!