You need strong hands in your betting range is what I am saying

Because of the imperfection of man.

That is the real point that convinces me.

Look, if you're going to rack up after the hand in question and never play another hand with any of these players (which obviously didn't happen between the first hand and the second), then I can buy the argument that you're simply not good 4-5% of the time or whatever. Let's say you're actually good 2% of the time instead. So you save half a big bet.

But what if you're planning to play again in this game? In general, your opponents won't generally play GTO so you should play exploitatively rather than being too concerned with GTO. In this case, though, your big laydowns will move them much closer to GTO, which means you'll need to move closer to GTO. You'll need to bet/call much more often (rendering your present argument moot), which means almost all your arguments for thin value reraise/folds will be out the window*.

If you want to make your big folds and risk the proverbial fur coat** to win the shrimp cocktail at Binion's, wait until a 10 or so bet pot to do this. You can't keep doing it against sentient opponents without consequence anyway, so you may as well pick your rare time to do it when you're laying shorter odds.

The funny thing is, next time I'm in Bay 101, I'll probably just start putting in spewy 4-bet bluffs in huge pots in hopes that I'm against Mubsy.

if you are 100% certain you are beat then fold and there is no point to the thread.

most opponents are bad at poker, so we call because they may be doing something bad. Bluffing naked Ad, value raising smaller flush because you tanked on turn. There are also massive nits who would only raise river here with better and you prob should have checked river vs them.

Hand 2 villain can have As Qx pretty easily here, planning to check back blank rivers but getting in extra bet when she binks and even had the parlay that you make some terrible fold on the turn.

Results-oriented, of course, but I don't even think XR bluffing Ax is bad there. Hero tells us he tanked on the river, so V1 has a reason to think he's not that strong. V2 might have enough to look Hero up, but probably not enough to call two. The pot is 19 bets.

Getting 19:2 on a raise here, it looks like a pretty good play to me.

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(V1 doesn't know, as we do, that Hero likes to discuss big folds on 2+2, but it's plausible that there may have been other folds that Hero didn't consider that notable but that still garnered some attention. Or perhaps Hero just has a reputation around Bay 101 of being that guy who folds all the time. )

This thread reminds me the old advice: don't raise if you can't call a re-raise.

Big difference. OP is telling us that he can bet (1) / reraise (2) and confidently fold to a [re]raise getting better than 100:1 (hypothetically). We think that's bad, but if he's right, there's no doubt involved about how to respond getting 19:2.

Wow, most people are seriously over-exaggerating how much players will adjust to your big laydown. 1) A lot of players are not that observant, can't hand read, and won't realise you made a big laydown. 2) Only 8 or 9 other peoples will observe this hand. It will not cascade into a tornado where everyone in the goddamn world tries to exploit you. 3) Players are bad. They do not make exploitative adjustments. 4) You should be able to recognize the good players that do. Against those people, don't hero fold. Against steady regs who always play the same consistent way, you have nothing to worry about. 5) If you do end up with a reputation of folding big hands, you can counter adjust! Not the end of the world.

In the end, it boils down to the math. Do you have the requisite 19:2 to call down. "OMG the pot is so big I have to call" is not sound reasoning. It means you have to be more sure when you fold, but folding may still be correct.

Although this is generally true, one way to absolutely gain attention is to 4-bet/fold. We're talking about 20/40 and not 3/6 so over half the people at the table will probably tend to pay attention at least a bit.

Part of the problem with taking very prominent highly exploitable lines is that, whereas in other situations you might know the 2 or 3 people who observe your play carefully, in this case you're potentially catching everyone's attention, not just the ones you think of as good players.

Indeed. Hence, since you can only do this so often before adjusting, you might as well choose to do it on the hands where the margin for error is greater.

I'm actually much closer to the view that in hand 2 you're not good enough times to justify calling getting or 17: 2 than some accomplished players ITT (i.e., I'm closer to your view than they are). Therefore, I reconsider whether my gut feeling is wrong, and start to consider other angles.

I think too many people have a phobia of folding the best hand in a big pot. It can happen as part of a balanced strategy -- not the end of the world, fur coats be damned. In the first example, we bet into a a 18 BB pot and get raised, getting 20:1 on a call. If we're playing to Nash equilibrium, we should be folding ~4% of the time and cannot get exploited. If other players now try to overbluff us, we can maintain our strategy of calling 96% of the time and be fine off. We don't even need to counter-adjust to anything if we just play solid poker based on math and pot odds.

Funny how people throw out balance and equilibria out the window in big pots.

If you are folding a king high flush on the river that should be more than 4 percent of your betting range.

I'm far from the expert on GTO here, but it seems to me the fallacy here is playing exploitative poker (raising and re-raising only incredibly strong hands) until you get to this one decision point, and then saying "well, now we can fold 4 percent of the time".

If you are going to play GTO, play GTO. Then you are going to have a really balanced range up to this point, including all the raises and re-raises, and can then fold the 4 percent of your range that GTO tells you to fold and not get exploited. (I still am not sure that 4 percent includes a 2nd nut flush, but perhaps it does.)

But if you are not doing that, you can't suddenly use a GTO justification at the decision point. Since we are playing exploitatively, you only fold if the pot odds justify it, and the large pot odds make it very important that we be very sure that our hand can never be good.

Pretty sure GTO strategy can be applied at any point in a hand. Think of this new point as a 'minigame', for which a NE can be found.

More philosophically, we shouldn't just switch to GTO for no reason in the middle of a hand. Instead, the reason that GTO comes into our calculations is that we've gone from a situation where no one typically thinks to take the exploitative line (XR bluff in three way pot on the river) to one where we're advertising that the correct line might be to put in one more bet and hope we fold.

Not all our opponents will adjust at all but some will. However, the ones who notice will probably not notice whether we do this in a 10-bet pot or a 20-bet pot, and will think:

• He puts in a lot of raises and folds to reraises.

not:

• He puts in a lot of raises and folds to reraises in a 10-bet pot, but I'll bet he doesn't do this as much in a 20-bet pot, because GTO says he can't.

Therefore, we may as well do it in a 10-bet pot and reap the rewards when they try to bluff us out of a 20-bet pot.

KQdd is clearly a check here. Given that it was bet, probably best to fold most of the time.

I think it's ok to play a strategy that deviates from equilibrium on earlier streets but still has the property that when we reach say a certain river spot with ranges R_hero and R_villain, in the corresponding sub-game we play the optimal strategy. We may do this because we strongly believe that opponent's play deviates from equilibrium on the earlier streets but we have no information about his play in the subgame.

However this doesn't mean that we can bet with an exploitative range, then when we get x/r'd go "oh ****, i'd better revert to GTO". There is no proper subgame there.

OP,

For both hands, please list out Villain's perceived calling ranges (in full) to justify your claim that they call enough to warrant a cap.

Raise/folding is rare because there's a very narrow window in which it is correct - under 50% you should not bet and over 66% you should call.

Don't you run into issues where your ranges just lack enough hands to play optimally in a given spot. To give a trivial example, you only put in raises with the nuts. Now, you raise and get re-raised and decide "I don't know his subgame, so I revert to GTO". However, your full range of hands is so unbalanced that you can't now find proper ratios. Clearly, a range can be so bad getting to now that you can't play GTO from that point forward.

In more complex situations, your PF hand selection can be bad enough that you can't hit proper balance on later streets. In reading Applications of NLHE, part of picking hands on a given street is all about having enough of X or Y on the next street. Thus, I'm not sure that you really can just go forward from here and play perfect. Maybe you can optimize from this point forward, but you're not jumping off the world of playing by feel and then going to GTO from any given step at random.

This is the key to me calling a single raise in a 19BB pot, your opponents are so rarely good enough at poker to be this sure about anything. They soul read you and make a "dumb play", they misread their hand, or they decide the 3rd nuts is good. On the paired board they have A2 with the ace of trump, hit trips and value raise it. 19:1 or whatever? Heck, even 10:1 is a big ask. Hero folding the 2nd nuts is hard to talk in abstract b/c you have to be so sure.

You can always define the subgame as the game to be played with board B where hero has range R1 and villain range R2, then find the GTO strategy for that. It is quite possible that the EV of this strategy will be less than the EV of the GTO strategy for the subgame that would have arisen from GTO play, but the hope is that over all possible subgames that can arise from taking the exploitative action, the expected EV will be higher than the overall GTO EV. (in fact, i think that would practically be the definition of successful exploitation)

I get what you're saying here, but I wonder in practice. Agreed that you could theoretically maximize a given spot going forward. I wonder at the table someone gives up on an exploitative line, he decides to revert to GTO. How would he do that at game speed? I've got rules of thumb about not folding to make bluffing immediately profitable, and GT bluffing frequency to go to. However it is easy to make cases where my previous actions make my range lack the hands I need to get the frequencies my rules of thumb tell me.

Guess my point is that once we're off in the weeds, it could be pretty hard to get back to some form of optimal. That's part of the strength of non standard lines, our opponents are unused to the situation. The downside is we can confuse us. it is like playing Captain Ron. You're sure he's doing it wrong, but are confused about what next.

Good question. I think when playing exploitative we should focus our decision making on our hand vs their range and when "reverting to GTO" we switch to considering range vs range.

As I have stated before Captain Ron is a huge fish, so it doesn't matter what you do next

If we are indifferent to what Captain Ron does next, does that not mean that he is playing GTO?

Wot

This.