Hey guys,

First post on this forum and I couldn't find anything on this here so made a post. Likely quite a fishy question, but where can I find material on the logic behind shoving with both the nuts and good nut-blocking bluffs at approximately 50/50 frequency?

If you shove half the time with the nuts and half the time with air it seems perfectly GTO and unexploitable, but I don't understand how that is the most profitable option rather than the typical pot, pot, pot betting line. Could a patient player not just wait for excellent hands before calling your shoves so that they are only calling when ahead?

It seems like super fast play is the most profitable thing to do when you get a big hand, especially at mid-high stakes with thinking players but I really am not sure how to go about it all the time.

Clearly semi-bluffs will play a role here because villain will have to wonder if you flopped a set or flush draw on a 2 flush board for instance and so you must therefore play semi-bluffs and flopped sets and whatever else in a similar fashion. It would also mean you may have to shove turns as semi-bluffs and pure bluffs sometimes as well if you are shoving turns with nutted or excellent hands?

In any case, was wondering where I can read on the details of this and why and how it should be done. I assume in many cases it would basically just be an attempt to get all the chips in when villain feels you may be drawing and wouldn't like to fold top pair+.

Feel free to school me below if there aren't detailed sources out there on this (which there must be right?)

Cheers

If someone is only calling you with the very top of their range then your GTO adjustment would be more bluffs. Nobody is playing unexploitable poker, so doing anything at a predetermined frequency will most likely be -EV.

Read mathematics of poker by bill Chen to intro you to gto/range construction/optimal frequencies. Gl

It's not 50 50. If you have 50% bluffs, no one should ever fold to you on the river.

Any good poker theory book will explain this in much more detail than anyone here ever could. Janda's books are a good start for modern poker theory. But many other books will be useful as well.

Try "Poker Math that Matters" by Owen Gaines, for a simpler alternative to Bill Chen's book.

Thanks all for the replies. I have read all of the suggested books and understand the theory behind it but it is not as easy to properly implement and remain balanced in practice. For the most part it seems I am usually called when beat lol... Clearly I have to work on it and be patient to use blockers when bluffing. Part of the problem is being able to make pots large enough to make profitable bluffs, it is quite difficult at least for me.

If you are massively overbetting the pot and laying opponent almost 50% odds that would imply you must bluff half the time to remain balanced and unexploitable. The opponent should thus call half the time with bluff catchers or simply assume that you are playing GTO and given this would mean indifference they could fold every time (obviously not what happens in practice). Am I missing anything?

If you had read the books and understood the info at any type of level you wouldn’t have asked this ? Cuz you’d know that these frequencies are way off yo

Feel free to let me know where I have mistaken.

If on the river the pot is $10, and we overbet $30 into that pot, opponent must call $30 to win a pot of $70, meaning that he must win nearly 43% of the time in order to turn a profit. Assuming he has only a bluff catcher and we have a polarized range of nuts and air, We can bluff around 40% of the time- if we overbet larger our GTO bluffing ratio approaches a limit of 50%. Whats wrong with these frequencies?

He’s calling a bet of 30 to win 40