I balance my range with 3-betting Axs hands, (especially A2s-A7s) sometimes just calls with the higher ones.

I know it has reverse implied odds when hitting the A against AT-AK, BUT, most many 4-bet AK and some fold AT, so we are down to AJ-AQ (+ a few other Aces).

I think Axs works really good against people who call 3-bets too much. They play very good against SC's since they make TP (A) and make nut flushes that beat their flushes and stacks them.

Furthermore they have nice equity against low/mid pairs. You get one bet against those on A-high boards, and there are more combinations of small pairs calling thans there are combinations of AJ-AQ (+ some), if you ad SC that hit one pair i think that when betting a A-high flop and get called you are ahead more often than behind, and can often check it to showdown because you have difficulty gewtting more than one streets of value out because if the reverse implied odds mentioned before.

SC and low/mid pair are exactly the hands these types of players calls 3-bet with (players that calls to much).

Am i missing something here ?

Are the lost money against bigger Aces calling bigger than your wins against low/mid pairs and SC's.

I allways thought it was standard, now i am confused ??



ps.

I 3-bet Axs mostly OOP from the blinds as blinds defence.

Yep. You fold out all the J6s, Q7s, 95s, etc. that people will open on the button and stack off with if you both hit flush draws.

Why 3bet something that you're just going to try and bluff catch with postflop most of the time? It doesn't provide any balance for your strong hands postflop. If your reverse implied odds are bad it should make sense that you don't want to inflate the pot.

3betting Axs depends on what they're calling your 3bets with, if they are calling with SCs and PPs then Axs is a good 3betting hand, if they are calling with AK, AQ, AJ AT-2s then Axs is a bad 3betting hand. Personally I think calling with Axs in the blinds is too profitable compared to 3betting Axs if I can 3bet Kxs, off suite broad ways etc. instead and play more hands over all - however that also depends on the opponent's tendencies on A high boards and whether or not I have to balance by weighting my range with more A combinations etc.

My take would be that if villain:
1) raise wide/call wide, we can attack the relative weakness of his range by 3betting for value, favoring card strength;
2) raise wide/call tight, we now can attack his frequent folds by 3betting as a bluff, using hands that plays well vs his calling range (avoiding domination, for a start).

Villain can defend in case 1) by strengthening his calling range, ie. folding dominated and speculative hands. In case 2), he can add hands with good strength, which means he will now see more flops and he will generally have the best of it, while our bluffs won't work as often.

Villain can also counterattack by 4betting, forcing us to fold our tweeners in case 1) and our bluffs in case 2). Obviously folding value is worse than giving up a bluff.

The 4betting creates new imbalances that we might exploit either by tweaking our 3bet ranges (cutting out the weak parts), or by counterattacking ourselves with 5bets.

I would say the #1 mistake is to attack negligible, non-existing imbalances (eg. 3betting as a bluff an open-raiser who is ready to shove most of his range) or even worse, unfavorable imbalances (eg. 3betting a tweener vs the mentioned villain, or 3betting as a bluff vs a loose gun on the button who hardly folds).

Would you agree overall?

It's reasonable, tho' 3betting "middling value" hands in the 09/10 games at uNL and SSNL isn't the most profitable approach IMO, because the 4bet is over used and the call is under valued right now so if you're 3betting AJo, KQo, Axs etc. you're just throwing away your profitable pre-flop calls to unprofitable 3bets (unprofitable in the sense that you may as well be 3betting with "air" vs. their 4bet/fold approach) Given the current 3bet dynamic, I think your should start 3betting Kxs, double and triple gapped suited connectors or off suit broad ways before you start 3betting your middling value hands, because until they show you they can actually call and play a hand post-flop in a 3bet pot you may as well seek to play as many hands as possible vs. the button from the get go (or for the BB to force you to adjust by squeezing and "corral" you into calling less and 3betting better hands)

a friend of mine came to me and asked me what is the difference between the Blueprint and the Blueprint 2nd edition. ??? i did not know what to tell him could you guys help me i am having hard time figuring it out....
he says 2nd edition is 340kb short. the 1st one being around 2 megs or so

2nd Edition fixed typos.

i am through the intro and pre-flop sections. while it is probably true that this information is somewhat elementary and for the most part can be found by reading through the stickies on the micro-stakes forums, i think this is a very easy read. by that, i mean the authors use simple language to convey thoughts clearly. i'm sure that will become more important to me as i wade through the post-flop concepts.

i'd recommend this book already, but i'll let the higher stakes people give their own opinions. my game is directly in the buy-in levels discussed in this book.

i'll try to post more when i finish the remainder of it.

+1

nearly finished with the book. all i can say is that, while a lot of people are much more advanced than i am and would probably think the book sets forth basic information, i think there's a huge population of advanced beginners / lower intermediates who should read this book. if for no other reason than because the writing style is so simple and straightforward. i have read miller's ssnlhe, and i find the blueprint to be much easier to read and, in actuality, much better on advice. i suspect that's due to the differing target audiences.

great book. well worth $37 in my opinion. i'm a live player, and i think a ton of these things will help me with my live game. to that end, the book is not poker tracker or holdem manager heavy, which is great for me because i don't have either.

Blueprint 1 was a classic Hova really put it down every song was tight. Blueprint 2 was too long had too many songs half the album was good and haf sucked so they made BP2.1 which had all the good songs. Blueprint 3 is good but not as good as the orginal blueprint.

I recently purchased this book and am a bit disappointed with the number of typos. It would be one thing if the typos didn't affect the content (such as misspelling an unimportant word), but in many places it changes the meaning of the sentence enough that it could actually create confusion about what the author(s) actually intended for a poker strategy. There are also a few places I've noticed where it it looks the like both the author and the editor fell asleep at the keyboard and hit their head on it (some very odd looking typos).

I certainly hope Aaron and Tri will give a more thorough review of the content and fix the numerous errors (and e-mail the customers proactively when the new copy is ready).

A pretty common example:

On page 128, we are set up with a hand where we hold J9, the board ends up at the river Q7386. We've floated the flop, the turn is checked through, and our villain checks to us.

The author tells us the villain won't have much here and we should bet because "Once he checks the river on this board, he’s going to fold most of the time". The very next sentence he says, "And since we can beat Ace-high, we should bet."

Obviously he meant "And since we can't beat Ace-high, we should bet."

There are these types of issue prevalent throughout the text where keys words are omitted (such as "not" "shouldn't", "are" vs "aren't", ad nauseam) but if you don't read carefully, you could actually end up implementing a strategy opposite the intention.

There were a couple of paragraphs were I really just couldn't figure out what the hell he was trying to say because the sentence was completely butchered. One could make arguments one way or the other for the position taken, but it wasn't clear what the author had intended. This was very frustrating.

Another (ugly) example I remember from page 64: "However, that doesn’t it's back to c-bet too much." Even given the context of the paragraph, it's difficult to determine precisely what the author was trying to say. I assume he meant "However, that doesn’t mean it's bad to c-bet too much.", but who am I to assume what these great players meant?

Is this the first or second edition you have? Tri released an updated version a couple of weeks ago. That J9 example threw me off too lol.

But i dont like to call with Axs, especially not OOP, so i think it is good in the sence.

To good to fold, to bad to call.

Anyway, i see what you mean, and it makes a lot of sence; but 3-betting Axs has just worked so fine for me.