This is meant to be my ‘giving back to the community’ post. To be honest, about 7 months ago I thought I was going to try and write the next Fee’s Guide (if you are a new poster reading this and haven’t read Fee’s Guide I urge you to do so) after having a 3.5ptbb/100 month at 50NL. Soon thereafter, I was humbled with a 22 buy-in downswings at 50NL that cut my bankroll in half, and brought on the self-doubt that always accompanies downswings. With my ego in check, I realized that trying to reinvent the wheel for my own self glory would be a waste of time. To be clear, thinking I was ever capable of writing something truly groundbreaking was pretty delusional. With that in mind, I decided I would put off writing a post like this indefinitely. Over the past 6 months, and a long break from poker, I feel like I have a more humble attitude that has given me the clarity to approach my game from a much-needed fresh perspective. To that end, I wanted to revisit a giving-back post, and discuss a few topics that I think are generally overlooked. It is in my nature to discuss what I perceive to be unique topics, and unlike my original plans for this post, it isn’t the product of vain intentions.
’Results-oriented thinking’
One of the most common phrases you will encounter on the 2+2 forum, it is meant to encourage people to not doubt a +EV line/action just because they found themselves on the short end of variance in a situation (e.g. set over set 100bb deep, etc). What I have learned regarding this is that ‘results-oriented thinking’ can be, and is often, used as an all-encompassing justification for ‘2+2 standards’. Results-oriented thinking is a useful concept that is applicable for beginning players who are still limited by shortsighted vision and have not, or will not, understand the concepts of coolers and/or ranges (threads like “88 on T87hh, can I get away?”).
Why do I bring this up? Because ‘results-oriented thinking’ can be a trap for those who get past that first hurdle. The danger is that a player will establish in his/her mind that situation x has a standard action/line that is always +EV, and to deviate from that will be –EV no matter the results (where a common situation x is something like getting JJ+ all-in on any flop T-high or lower postflop). The catch to this thinking is that the player must be able to recognize the difference between short and long term results, which is something even veteran players don’t usually agree on (e.g. is 10k hands enough? 100k? How long can I break-even before I recognize that something must be wrong?). There is no simple mechanism for the player to audit his play except to post the hand to 2+2, where he might get 3 or 4 responses of ‘standard’ or ‘don’t be results oriented’. The only real solution is for the player to go through a rigorous analysis of his database (assuming it is adequately large), find all the spots where situation x occurred and come to a conclusion based on aggregate results (oftentimes the conclusion is that the situation is only ‘standard’ insofar as the villain plays some ‘general’ style discussed in the next section). The important thing to note here is that you must eventually look at results to assess the validity of your play. The downfall of avoiding ‘results-oriented thinking’ is that your win-rate is dependent on the help and knowledge of others, and in the end you haven’t learned the tools to success, only a simple concept that is a means to an end.
What I’ve said in the last two paragraphs is not groundbreaking, and many veteran posters and players may read this with ‘obv’ floating in their mind. Self-analysis of play is really just the surface of something bigger: thinking for yourself. Much of the strategy in uNL should be thought of as training-wheels, it helps you grow to a certain point, but is ultimately limited in its usefulness. Results-oriented thinking is a concept that forces a novice player to accept the presence of variance in a +EV playing style, but must eventually be outgrown once that player builds a foundation from which independent decisions can be made. This may not even be a conscious transition: if said player actually has the initiative to delve into his database or analyze his sessions, it is likely he already understands that there is more to the story then what is available to him on the surface of the uNL forums.
Vacuum hand analysis
A fabricated hand history of one of the most common types of hands posted in uNL:
25NL – 6 max
Situation/reads: BTN is 33/17 over 9 hands; not really sure of anything about him.
Hero (UTG): $28
Villain (BTN): $26.50
Preflop: Hero is dealt QhQs
Hero raises to $0.75, 3 folds, BTN calls $0.75, 2 folds
Flop ($1.65): 8s 2s 6h
Hero bets $1.45, BTN raises to $3.00, Hero raises to $27.25 (all-in), BTN calls $22.75
Turn: 4h
River: 2c
Showdown:
Hero shows QhQs
BTN shows 6s6d
BTN wins
This is one of the most common types of posted hands: overpair on a low, wet board in a single-raised pot where villain raises the flop. It is actually a fairly basic pokerstove exercise once you establish a range for the villain, but establishing a range for that range is the real key to analyzing this hand. Villain could be anything over that sample size. Anyone who tosses around labels like ‘reg’, ‘fish’, ‘lag’, etc is trying to apply a stereotype in a situation where there is insufficient evidence to do so. To be clear, stereotypes have their usefulness, but not over 9 hands.
In my experience, a thread like this will have about 65%-70% of people saying ‘get it in’ and the remaining 30%-35% saying fold. You will see many attempts to stove a range, often with resulting hand equities of ~20% all the way to ~70%. Even if you recognize the nuances of stoving a range for villain (draws increase equity slightly, lower overpairs and TP increase it greatly, the more hands you add in general the greater your equity since you’re only dead to 9 combos of sets, etc. etc.), the results are only helpful if you can make educated guesses about villain’s range. Is he ever raising a lower overpair? Why would he raise a draw in position? Is he flatting 86s or 62s for 2-pair? Can he bluff-raise air? Anyone who answers these questions with a black-and-white yes or no response is conjecturing based on their experience in the situation, which is often strongly affected by short-term variance (i.e. poster x hasn’t gotten it in good w/ an overpair 10 times in a row and runs as good as a beached whale, etc.)
The point is that everything hinges on what assumptions you apply in a situation where there are too many unknowns, and that these assumptions need to be recognized and examined by the player to ensure profitability. I call this vacuum analysis, because oftentimes you see posts including ‘in a vacuum, I would do x’, which is an important caveat to include in hands like the above example. I have developed a method that helps to give a clearer, but by no means perfect, way to assess a range in a vacuum.
The idea is to establish a quasi-real range that is the average of what you would expect from a random collection of players – i.e. include the hands you would expect from all different kinds of play-styles, but weight them respectively. You weight hands depending on how often you see a particular playing type. Let’s pull a number out of the air and say 30% of players are playing a style where they are raising draws. In the above example, stove yourself against a range that includes all the standard nutted hands (88, 66, 22 since close to 100% of players know to set mine pre) and 30% of all combinations of draws (flush draws, 97s, etc). In the above example, if you stove yourself against the tightest possible range (88, 66, 22) then you have ~10% (drawing to 2 outs w/ no backdoor equity). Take the extreme case where villain is flatting really wide preflop and is raising every draw imaginable: 97s, 75s, A2ss+, T9ss+, J9ss+, QTss+. Let’s say that this is approximately 30 hand combos. For your actual stove, include a balanced selection of 30% of those hands, which could be something like: AJss, ATss, A9ss, KJss, KTss, JTss, T9ss, 9c7c, 7d5d. This isn’t the actual range, because we can’t know the actual range. It’s what we expect to see on average if 30% of villains are raising draws in this spot.
This is still doesn’t give us a clear picture, because it assumes that the group of villains raising draws are flatting super wide preflop and are always raising every draw they have in their range on the flop. We should probably take our modified range and cut it by some % just to account for tighter preflop ranges. We didn’t include that some % of the time you are getting bluff-raised by a reg who has AJo or spaz-raised by a fish who has A6o. This is a time consuming process, and admittedly it requires knowledge about the player field at that level (25NL) that really can only come with experience. The benefit is that it if the general knowledge is there, it provides a more accurate range that gives a better result for hand equity in a vacuum.
uNL as an information resource
This last subject is meant to be a simple suggestion, and is mostly my advice to new posters. This forum is no different than any other domain you will encounter on the internet. It’s not Harrington on Cash Games or No Limit Hold’em Theory and Practice, it’s a bunch of guys (and some girls) who are posting whatever they want with effort to moderate offensive posts. Not everything will be correct, the correct stuff may not be explained, you may get short responses, you might get offended, etc. The sooner you accept this reality, and try to determine for yourself where the knowledge is and how to obtain it, the more you will benefit from 2+2 and its limitless resource of poker wisdom and knowledge. I will be honest, when I first started posting in this forum, I disliked many of the regular posters. Because I don’t think he’ll mind if I say this, I used to not like aggo. Following hand is me when I was still a hudge fish, and aggo trying to help me (sick bump):
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/69...p-flop-472090/
If you read the thread, you will see me trying to defend my flawed perspective on the hand. Aggo’s advice in this hand is really good, but not sugarcoated, especially the last post. If I had been a little more open and receptive to advice, I would have benefited a lot more. Always try to keep an open mind, and if you know the poster is a winning player, always think critically about what they are trying to tell you. Oftentimes the posts that are the most right are no more than 1 sentence (or 2 words if its ww). It took me a long time to learn that it’s more beneficial to have the answer without the explanation (and subsequently having to find the explanation yourself) than it is to have an incorrect conclusion explained.
Two Plus Two
Linear Mode
