So, I don't want to put in any examples because I am simply not good enough a player to give any indicitive examples. Anyway, my question here is this:

Say you have no/ little idea of the hand(s) villain(s) could have, how do you value your hands? I'm mainly referring to facing sub-optimal lines from your opponent (say a donk bet/ jam where there isn't much merit).

I posted a question on similar grounds before that was pretty heavily ridiculed, but I still haven't really quite got my head round how to play such spots in a theoretical manner instead of making some assumptions as to the player types that take these lines.

The hand I was referring to in that post involved opening MP in 6max holdem, BTN 3-betting and SB cold calling. Now I'm thinking in this spot it makes a lot of sense to go for the ISO play and 4-bet or folding. I'm not quite sure how defensible this is a strategy multiway, but in a heads-up pot I understand a raise or fold strat to be quite exploitable, but neverthelesslet's assume a flat is in order for some range.

Then, otf sb donk bet pot and I call with top 2, btn jams and sb calls. Again, I don't mean to be going on about this hand, I really don't care for the analysis because I understand it was a rather misplayed hand, but it is still the only real example I can think of where I am stumped in valuing hand strength, and defending frequencies.

So, for this post, please give any example you might prefer to go into, even in toy games idm, I am simply trying to find some type of methodology for constructing committing ranges when there isn't really any range villain should be playing with. By this I mean no assumptions of what they may be doing preflop, nor any assumptions about their tendencies, rather assume just a bit of a goofy play. How do you determine which frequency you should play with (especially multiway), and how to estimate your EV.

I struggle hard with these concepts because, say for instance villain only takes this line with the nuts (one potential possibility), then you are just destined to be -EV here, however because the chance of getting these holdings means that the overall EV loss will be small because it is very unlikely you will be put in this spot, but I am not sure how to quantify this in the overall EV vs this strat.

On the other hand, for anyone who plays more than just nutted hands, you can play close to MDF and break-even/ profit, but how do you do this multiway?

Also, how do you determine the strength of someone who just stacked off multiway? Like obviously the stones is a snap, but for which n do you fold the nth nuts?

Spots like these are made for SPR imo. SPR isn’t a fixed metric based strategy as people make it out to be. You can use it and create your own strategy around it.

Say the SPR of the pot is 4.5 and your strategy is to always call off top 2 in a pot with an SPR of 6 or less then you call and live with the results.

You can make additional adjustments like making changes to your SPR thresholds multi-way as opposed to heads up.

For me I only count SPR on the flop.

SPR<=3 I’m in with TPTK+.

3.1-6 I’m top 2 or better.

6.1 or more it’s usually a set or better. As it gets higher when playing really deep I’ll make adjustments based on the board texture, hand strength, etc.

It’s not written in stone because I play more exploitative than theory. I’ll adjust it differently vs a nit than a TAG or LAG.

SPR is just a tool though, right? From what I understand, everything should be able to be reduced to simple win/ loss right? Like the only reasons you'd me more likely to commit with an SPR of 2 than 5 is because with an SPR of 2, you stand to win more and lose less (comparitively), while also reducing the RIO.

I'm more interested in the actual mechanics behind why it is/ how it is one is to figure these things out. It can definitely be seen as a flaw of mine to have such a fixation on the coherence of theory, but it's always been how I learn things and it has it's upsides, even if it is unnecessarily rigorous.

Anyway, you know of some good resources behind this? It had actually completely skipped my mind until you mentioned SPR and looks to be exactly the concept I'm looking to study up on. I'm still quite behind on my reading, so anything is solid. I still haven't finished tMoP nor Janda's stuff, so if either of those have a coherent guide I'll just get on with them.

You'll get more responses if you thought out clearly what you wanted to ask instead of meandering about with a wall of text.

If you can't ask a question clearly then you haven't begun to put serious thought into it yourself.

It's very apparent you're working out your own thoughts as you write your stream of consciousness posting.

Just some thoughts going forward.

Why are you apparently so reluctant to make assumptions about your opponents? Poker is incredibly difficult when you first play the game, because you have no experience of what kind of hands people show down when they take lines you don't understand. But just from playing for a while, anyone with basic observation skills gets some kind of "population read", for the common spots at least.
On the really rare spots (e.g. uncommon runouts, or strange betting sequences) where I don't understand what villain is doing, I usually just call and take a note, then decide later if it was a terrible or a good line that he/she used.
It literally all comes from experience. In one spot I'll just "know" that AK is a good hand and I'm happy to stack off, and in others I know it's garbage. On the ones where I'm not sure, it's usually because it's a breakeven spot and it doesn't really matter which option I pick.

To use an example, when I was new to poker I thought that "A flush is a really good hand", so I would be happy to stack off with a 7-high flush, no matter what the exact situation was. Later on, I realised my 7-high flush was about the 19th nuts on some paired boards, and it's often a losing hand in multiway pots. I learned my lessons about relative hand strength by paying off boats and quads and better flushes.

So my advice boils down to this: Play some poker and learn from experience how strong each hand is in a given situation. You can always do post-session reviews (and post hand histories in the relevant forums) for all the spots you were unsure about. I mean, the reason most people post HHs is to say "I didn't know what to do here in this weird spot. Can someone with more experience help?"
No one in this forum can give you the complete solution to poker, although we can definitely give some guidelines and advice. Ultimately, you have to put the hours in (both playing and studying) yourself.

I mean I just want to refrain from making assumptions at this point because I want to focus on the concept I'm trying to get at. Also, I completely understand where you're coming from that these things are moreso learnt through observation/ trial-and-error as opposed to any sort of analytical process due to the chaotic, ongoing nature of the maths, however I just want to learn the basic idea here as it's just always been how I've learnt thinigs (for better or worse).

So what I'm trying to get at is that atm the biggest hole in my understanding of theoretical strategies is how exactly they make money off sub-optimal lines.

There are 3 main (extreme) scenarios for a nonsensical line, right? He either 1 has nuts and wants to get money in the pot, 2 is a bad player and wants to pull a lot of crazy bluffs, 3 he is reasonable but is - for whatever reason - taking a sub-optimal line. Assume we have no data about the distribution of which people fall into these categories and atm don't have any reads of this player. By this I mean we are looking to only develop a purely defensive strategy in which we can't possibly lose to any other strategy (and thus maximize EV vs GTO given this line?).

In order to construct our range (and simultaneously evaluate hand-strength), we have to evaluate each scenario, no? Now, typically this involves maximizing EV vs the 'optimal' strategy of this line (the bit that's confuzing me in this part is that the 'optimal' strategy doesn't exist, or rather can't be easily estimated as it is not a GTO line), but overall it means we neither lose should villain only take 1 or 2 (and thus any variation of both).

Scenario 2 is relatively easy to tell if you can beat, you simply meet MDF and thus he profits nill off his bluffs.

Scenario 1 is a little more complex, as our EV comes from the absence of his ability to play his value/ nutted hands in more flexible ways and of course his failure to extract value from our other holdings and thus leaving us in easier spots with our marginal hands. This means although we lose every time this exact situation occurs, every time it doesn't occur we don't lose as much (again, assume no exploitation for argument's sake), we win EV in the other spots even though we aren't exploiting him as he simply just has a weaker range now even though we aren't switched on to this.

Now this would make sense to me if you can break it down to this. You should then be able to dismiss certain value-oriented ranges from this as you know overall it will be losing more money than another strategy which you also want to defend against. This means although in this specific situation, you may be -EV should villain only have the nuts, overall you will be ahead enough to maintain this strat in order to defend against the other possible strats you're up against.

So here, it looks as though you should be able to make some sort of optimal strategy irregardless of what villain's hand distribution may look like. In other words, there should be some way to construct the range you should be maximally countering, and any resources on how to go about this in a line with little theoretical foundation is something I just don't know how to study...

Like lets say we have this fixed line programmed into a solver. How do I go about finding a strategy in which I do not lose EV to any range?

Bolognese, for your own sake, nobody is going to read that and take notes to figure out what you want to say.

If you can't ask a question in one or two sentences then it's a poorly thought out question. This will also help you immensely in your career where succinct email is necessary.

I'll honestly spend the time to help you if you spend the time attempting coherent communication.

If you know your opponent's strategy (and feed it into a solver), you can find the maximally exploitative counter-strategy, if it's not already completely obvious. e.g. You don't need a solver to know you fold 100% of your range vs a nit that never bets worse than the nuts on the river.
If you don't know your opponent's strategy, the solver can calculate the GTO solution that is guaranteed to at least break even vs all possible strats. Assuming you try following the "GTO line", you might find that you're losing with river bluff-catchers. That would be because your opponents are unbalanced, so when you get that read, you should deviate from what the solver told you. It's not rocket science. If your opponents don't bluff much, stop calling.

Solvers are much more useful if you specify accurate ranges for your actual player pool and node-lock the common lines your opponents use. For that reason, it's crucial to get reads on the player pool, if not exact players, so that you have idea of tendencies. (e.g. If your villains rarely check-raise bluff the turn, don't try and "defend" against those check-raises as much as the solvers say you should. Just fold).

It's hardly worth bothering with the really rare spots. They come up so infrequently that they don't have a huge effect on your winrate. I'd recommend spending more time fixing your play in standard spots like c-betting or check-raising the flop in SRPs between BTN and BB. There are a lot of "slightly losing" players that are either c-betting too much or too little, or not x-raising often enough. You don't have to worry about the randoms that make ridiculous and unexpected overbet donk-shoves. They are all losing players that give you money in other more common spots.

Hey, I only had the time to reply today.

Yeah, I understand entirely what you're saying, and it took me a while to remember again that getting caught up in the nitty gritty isn't very useful seeing as, like all strategy games, poker is about capitalizing on your opponents' mistakes (i.e. every player will make some type of mistake to make it a worthwhile game). The general fundamentals are thus the most important to focus on, and hammering these disciplines - along with how to fine-tune my exploits (the whole Bayesian thing) - are much more integral to what I should be studying.

I'm more obsessing over this though as I want to develop more of an understanding as to what fundamental mechanics are at play when determining hand strength (thus, how to estimate what is optimal, to then determine what is over-extending and under-defending). I guess you could say you defend at MDF, but when the net EV is locked to equate to the overall EV of the game tree (say a certain run out and betting pattern leads to a net advantage to one player)? This would depend on the dude's range though anway...

Idk, anyway, I need to check out what that node-locking thing is as I haven't been able to find any quick articles on it, but what is that exactly? All I was referring to with regards to the solver is more so how I go about figuring out what strategy to employ when I don't know villain's range. It would be amazing if I could focus in on how to play this way as I feel that would be an iron foundation...

Surely you know what I'm getting at right? If you play a strat to counter an 'optimal' range in a spot, you will ultimately gain EV should villain deviate at all. This isn't all that clear though given you do not know optimal, so say I put in 3 ranges for V: default, loose and tight. I assume there is some method for getting the original strat and forcing that to play vs the other two to see the EV difference?

Can someone with more experience answer ^^ this ^^? I've only had a cursory play with solvers.

Post is a bit confusing. When V takes some line that doesn't exist in theory you should think why that line is not part of theory. When you get it it will be easier to exploit it.

Lets say V bets in spot where he should never bet. This means his cheking range is weak and you can exploit that. If you see V doing something suboptimal it doesn't mean you can exploit that immediately.

I think it's confuzing because I was asking about something without knowing what exactly it was I was having trouble with.

I made a new post asking what I think that was: Essentially it's more about difficulty understanding the theoretical approach for playing against polarized ranges. More specifically, when someone takes a deliberately unnecessary line sspecifically to confuze you - think Tom Dwan making huge overbets back in 2005.

Say for instance, you have a fh on a FD board, it makes sense to slow down quite a bit as you want draw hands to get there, maybe you want sets to hit a lower full house, maybe you want to get a couple two pairs in for the ride, maybe you want to induce some bluffs, or maybe you just donk 2x the pot for no apparent reason because then you get to bluff like 40% of the time and get a free pot with **** all/ force everything with a foot in the door to stack off vs your nuts. I have very little understanding as to how you approach these bets as the caller and am thus particularly afraid of paying off these plays for deviating from a better theoretical line.

Edit:
Some quick calculations I have to run through now. Let's assume 40% bluffing frequency, the other 60% let's assume are stones, and you're making a 2x pot shove. Villain is getting 3:2 pot odds, or 40%, he needs to call at least 33.3% of the time to meet MDF, if he calls 33.3% of the time, your stones are making 0.6*.333*2 = 0.4 and your bluffs are losing 0.4*.333*2 = 2.666, thus you make 2.266 should V meet MDF. I suppose the reason this loses is just by being inefficient right? I suppose you can assure your fh gets more than 33% calls with quite a bit more over the 3 streets, and you will probably lose less bluffing right? I guess this is just one of those plays in which as long as you defend close to enough, they will just lose by default? (i.e. no adjustment needed anyway)

You make some mistakes in calculation:
EV(NUTS)=0.67*1+0.33*3=1.66
EV(BLUFF)=0.67*1-0.33*2=0

So V should call MDF to keep EV of bluffs minimal.

That's just an alternate calculation. You can still disregard the pot value when making comparisons, but yeah that's what I meant to do anyway lol

Wait, maybe not I can't remember what I said

Yeah lol, first off it's 0.266, thus 0.033,

But you win .4*.333 bluffing and .6 value betting additionally which adds up to .733

It's not a constant so yeah you're right rip.

It's weird though how by calling more, (meeting MDF), you're giving him more EV on his value than you're taking away from his bluffs though.

Wait, no it doesn't. Ffs my brain isn't working today