It seems like I would have an opportunity to learn those things when they come up, no? Do I need to be preparing for what 100/200 players are doing when I’m playing 15/30? I know my player pool extremely well. I’m not routinely folding sets on the river... hell, I didn’t even fold a set in the hand in question! If Joker 3-bets the river, i would almost surely fold. Even in retrospect, we can’t come up with any reasonable ranges he can play this way where I should consider calling. And what if he does “exploit” me by 3-betting, doesn’t he still have to beat the big blind? I honestly don’t get where you guys are even coming from. People in my games are not 3-betting rivers to exploit the initial bettor. Like the first raiser is just some convenient pivot that is going to go away once you get rid of the initial bettor? Huh.

What would I do with second pair? Gee... do you want me to cover all the possible flop textures? I would imagine I’m betting most textures, especially when I have good backdoor equity... like if I had any of those JXdd hands I could have on this particular board.

The most hilarious part is that it's actually you who has a history of getting upset when people point out you are wrong or post something stupid/useless and you take it as an affront to your ego. This happened the last time I pointed out something you did wrong, and it took about a dozen posts until you finally admitted it. But like I said, it wasn't worth it.

I didn't give a **** about the 10%/90% comment until you had to beat it like a dead horse 3+ times because it was the only thing you could find to nitpick about my post. I was going to let it go, but you obviously can't because you continue to mention it. And then when I explain it (even though I think it's pretty frickin' obvious if you're not a complete moron), you tell me I'm lying. LOL.

At this point, I actually pity you, because it's clear you have some kind of inferiority complex and feel an overwhelming need to prove to other people you are right or smart or something.

If this is how you deal with interpersonal relationships with other people ("it's not me, it's you!") in real life, it really is sad and I feel bad because it's clear you can't interact with other people at any sort of reasonably social level. But go ahead and ignore it, and continue being an asshat.

Oh, but nevermind, I forgot, it's not you. It's me.

Opportunity? Yes. How much you're able to learn in those opportunities remains to be seen.

It depends on your goals. If you're content where you're at and you know your opponents very well, then there may be very little for you to learn from anyone.

You might want to consider how delicate the scale is balanced here. Perhaps with this precise opponent you can make all of these assumptions (correctly) and fold everything but the virtual nuts. But consider that if it's possible that villain sometimes slowplays KJ or 22, you're going to be way off on your river action.

According to your read, beating the big blind isn't super-tough.

Maybe you're so finely tuned to "your game" that you are completely unable to think outside of it. DD's quote here is almost prophetic.

From a theoretical point of view, the fact that you're inclined to build big pots should make you more inclined to see showdowns with strong hands and less inclined to make big folds. (What you might consider a "big" fold may be different from everyone else.)

You're asking Aaron W. what players are doing in the 100/200 game? What does he play, like 8/16 at Red Rock or something?

To be honest (and I'm actually being objective here), based on what I've read, I think you play better than Aaron W.

I welcome you to provide evidence of this. You keep making these claims, but they do not seem to be true.

Which thread are you referring to?

Which is probably why you said something as wrong as you did. And it's not really a nitpick when you're saying something that's quite plainly false. The chances of being outkicked is very stable under a wide range of assumptions for the same reason that the chances of TPTK being good is very stable under a wide range of assumptions.

Nah. It's called learning. I'll put my whole argument on the table to be dissected. I will challenge ideas until I come to a place where I feel as though I've attained the requisite level of understanding of what's true and what's false. And if it takes me an extra several posts to become convinced, I'm not embarrassed by it and see no reason why I should be.

And yes, I am calling you a liar. I think you're trying to post-hoc justify a throwaway line that you didn't even care about because now you realize that it's wrong. I think it's completely implausible that someone would say "closer to 90%" to mean "larger than 70%", especially if they really don't care what they're saying.

Not that I expect that you would actually be able to produce evidence, but I think 70% outkicked and 30% outkicked are pretty far on the extreme ends of the space of reasonable assumptions as well, and would welcome some sort of demonstration of situations that match those numbers.

Here you go, after countless posts of arguing...

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...l#post52891827

I particularly like this post --

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/s...7&postcount=29

I'm done, catch y'all in the next stupid thread.

I’m not asking him anything. I don’t know who he is. He’s just a random name online to me. I was just making a point that it doesn’t make sense to consider that I might be getting exploited in these 3-bet river spots in some hypothetical game I’m not playing in... when the game I’m playing in just isn’t that advanced. No one is 3-betting rivers in my game trying to exploit anyone. They are 3-betting because they think they have the best hand or because they are recklessly bluffy. Joker is the former and if he thinks he has the best hand here, all variables considered, he 100% has my hand beat.

I’ll cross that bridge (of worrying about being exploited on the river) when I reach it. I don’t play the same game I used to crush 4/8. I don’t play the same game I used to crush 8/16. The style I play in 15/30 at Palace and 20/40 at Bellagio are not even the same. I haven’t had the level of success I’ve maintained for almost a decade now by not constantly adapting and learning as I go.

Making “big folds” is not something I’m trying to do. Folding to a 3-bet from J here is a relatively trivial fold because I have over 1000 live hours played with the guy and I know his tendencies. If he slow plays the 22 until the river here, for the first time in the last two years, then guess what... I can adapt.

I find it interesting that a back and forth of about 10 posts is "countless." But if that's what you consider to be the case, and if you really believe that's the only time I've ever been wrong and admitted it, so be it.

That's been my position since you posted something like "I didn't calculate how many queens he could have, I calculated how many were dealt out."

It is absolutely correct, and also absolutely useless to Captain R.

SSLHE is generally beyond the point where ignoring ranges is useful. Although I wish it were otherwise, the reality is that very few people in this forum play below 20/40. And as much as I appreciate people like you being there to teach new players how to count combos, I'm not going to spend the time double checking your posts.

Or, just a rational cost-benefit decision based on the likelihood your posts contain valuable information.

Like if I launched into a 10-paragraph explanation of probability starting with "the probability of drawing a card higher than 5 can be expressed as a fraction, where the numerator is the number of cards higher than 5 and the denominator is the total number of cards," I bet very few people would make it to paragraph 2.

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying it's wrong for the audience. You seem to pride yourself on giving the most general advice to a total group of unknowns - if this were the poker equivalent of 4chan where everyone were anonymous or if we were Wikipedia editors or if Captain R hadn't been posting for 10+ years or if advanced tools for calculating range vs range equities weren't widely available, I think your posts would be received differently. In those cases, you really don't know your audience so general advice and your generic calculations are worth more.

As it stands, Alan already posted something like "flopzilla is your friend" and everyone who was interested in learning modern poker has downloaded it. Only people who were interested in rederiving Obama-era poker from first principles has benefitted from your posts.

It's the same methodology as counting outs. It's not a strange thing to do.

This may be true. It would be interesting to see a pole. But if it is true, then it seems that there's some sort of decision to make:

* Kill the forum and just have a single limit hold'em forum
* Actively do things to promote limit hold'em discussion among the new players.

If you write it that way, then I would agree. My longer posts are more often lists with summaries at the end. You can check the work if you choose, or you can just jump to the conclusion. In this thread, the explanation of the calculation may have been several paragraphs long, but the paragraphs were almost entirely single-sentence statements.

The most amusing thing about this is that I was replying to lawdude's use of numbers that work under essentially the same methodology except that it didn't consider the queen on the board. I chose to use the *identical* approach as the one that was presented to me and used that as the starting point.

My argument was "If you believe your numbers, you're ahead 2/3 of the time when you flop a queen. I think you can play profitably from there." That's basically the bottom line.

If you don't agree with the numbers that lawdude provided, that's fine. It doesn't detract from the argument being made. And if you don't like my minor refinement of the method, that's also fine. Show me better.

All I did was a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation. It took something like 7-10 seconds because of all the cancellation. That's a nice thing about these types of calculations.

I offered the challenge of using computer simulations to prove that the chances of getting outkicked was as elastic as Captain R said. He didn't do it. He shifted his argument from "anywhere between 10% and 90%" to "30% to 70%" because I think he started to recognize the absurdity of the range he provided. He's prone to exaggeration and tried his best to try to walk it back just to be more reasonable.

But here's the thing: I fully expect that the number will be in the right ballpark over a fairly wide range of assumptions. A couple quick things I did (simulations that I described) seem to confirm that. I'm still open to someone proving me wrong, but I'm pretty comfortable with the position I've taken and am not interested in pursuing it further until someone shows me something new.

The funny part of it for me is just the blind hand-waving non-argument of "You're just stupid." It's not like, "No, look at this simulation. It shows that you're getting outkicked 90% of the time under these assumptions." It was, "I think your assumptions are stupid, therefore LOL YOU STOOOOOPID! I PWN YOU GUD!"

I stand by my assessment of this forum. It's not a place where people are trying to learn anything. And I've decided that I don't care what all the rest of y'all do. I'm still going to put out reasoned arguments and show my work. I may be right, and I may be wrong. I will continue to weigh my thoughts on the merits of the arguments put forward, and not care about the personalities that come with it.

I think a fundamental issue that you need to consider is that you're thinking that people are playing to very rigid rules. Let's suppose it's absolutely true that SB in this spot should never call with a set. Does that mean that sets will be folded 100% of the time in reality? You don't think there's a chance that SB doesn't get stubborn in a pot that's around 20 BB and say "I just can't fold top set."

So it's not about "advanced" as it is about "people aren't robots." I'm reminded of the way to think about chess. Chess is a game of absolutely ZERO luck. So why is it that you can play someone once and win, then play again and lose? Shouldn't the better player always win if there's no luck in the game? In theory, perhaps. But that doesn't happen.

Even if the underlying game has no luck in it, humans do random things that sometimes works better or worse for them. By building out a strategy that's so narrow that you're folding everything but the nuts, you're creating a window of opportunity to be burned badly by things that shouldn't happen but end up happening anyway.

There are times when, for whatever reason, you've become absolutely convinced that doing something is right. At the end of the day, it's your money and you can do with it what you want. But it makes for a really terrible way to analyze things, and is incredibly prone to results-oriented thinking and post-hoc justification. That is among the MOST difficult things to shake as a poker player. You can basically *always* justify your plays yourself to yourself if you try hard enough.

I'm going to point this out to you again:

Two out of the three conditions are met by your scenario. You've explicitly acknowledged that BB has a pretty wide raising range here AND you've explicitly acknowledged that you're folding everything but the nuts. These were not conditions I put on why a 3-bet could be good. These are things YOU said.

Here's an Obama-era EV calculation with made-up percentages. Feel free to change the numbers around and play with it. Let's do the EV calculation for Joker's coldcall on the river. There's 16 BB in the pot when it's on him.

At that moment of decision, he can reasonably conclude he's ahead of you a huge percent of the time or more since you've got so few flushes in your range. And he should also feel very good against BB's range because she's special like that. So let's say that he's 95% sure he has the best of it. You will fold some small percent of your hands. (I think you can fold one pair hands -- including AA -- on the river pretty comfortably. I'm not sure if you can drop two pair.) Let's say you end up calling 100% of the time anyway.

EV[Call] = 95% * (17) - 5% * (-2) = 16.05.

What about 3-betting? This probably only goes 4 bets if someone has the nuts. So let's call that 2% of the time. But let's also say that 10% of the time that you're losing, you just can't bring yourself to fold. Here's how the calculation looks now:

EV[3-bet] = 2% * (-4) + 3% * (-2) + 95% * 10% * (19) + 95% * 90% * (17) = 16.2

The combination of those very few times that you can't find a fold, combined with the extreme rarity of being 4-bet makes it more profitable to 3-bet than to call.

2% of the time, there's a loss of an extra 2 BB. With a 10% chance of you calling, there's a 9.5% chance of winning an extra 3 BB. That's money being left on the table. (I'll leave it to you to figure out the break-even point. Spoiler alert: It's a rather small percent.)

Are you enough of a robot to always 100% of the time absolutely fold a flopped set to a river 3-bet in this spot? That's for you to decide. With so little downside of doing it (if you never-ever-ever call, the loss is 0.04 BB), even if I felt that you probably almost certainly would fold, I just might pull the trigger anyway.

I think you might be making some poor assumptions here... since this pot had at least four players going to the river (could have been all five), let’s assume I’m never bluffing into three opponents on the river, a fair assumption. I think it’s reasonable to assume the worst hand I barrel off with is KT suited.

Here’s what that distribution looks like:

AA (6)
Sets (6)
AK (12)
Suited Kings (9)
Flushes (7)

That’s 7 of 40 combos that have flushes on the river. That’s 17.5% of my combos beating 43dd.

Even if you add KQo into that mix, which is reasonable, we are still at 13.4% of my river betting combos that beat 43dd.

Plus, I don’t always bet the river with one pair hands. This board seems pretty safe, but there are times when I have an extra sense of danger - for whatever reason - and my intuition/subconscious has proven to be worth listening to. What I’m trying to say is - whether good or bad - there are times I’m not betting the river with the one pair hands, so when I 3-bet pre and barrel off in this specific situation I’m probably showing up with a flush around 15% of the time. While I am not opposed to betting a jack (or QQ) on some rivers, this is not one of them.

So... in conclusion, Joker is winning on the river no where near 95% of the time — and we haven’t even looked at the big blind’s range yet.

Edit: I suppose I may check some of the flush draws (AQdd, ATdd) on the turn occasionally. However, it’s also worth noting that, given this distribution, I will have three nut flushes in my range, which means I will be 4-betting the river almost 6% of the time... so not only will Joker not be winning 95% of the time, he will be facing a 4-bet considerably more often than you think and, again, we haven’t even considered the big blind yet and she has all the ace high flushes in her range.

If you set aside your self-inflicted persecution complex for a second, you'll note that I think you're factually right. As a matter of fact, if this were a one-dimensional problem along the right-wrong axis, you score pretty high.

But it's not a one-dimensional problem. You score low on the useful-useless axis, especially in a poker world that now features free programs better than the best proprietary programs ten years ago. That's the part you're missing - you don't NEED to do "back of the envelope" calculations any more. You don't NEED to show your work. And as correct as it is to go back to first principles to show where it came from, the reality is that no serious player does that any more. Why would you calculate the percent time that a queen is dealt, when in thr same 7-10 second time frame you can load up a program, bang in some ranges, and get the percent time a queen is good?

Why would you spent more time to get an incomplete answer?

Let's put it in an analogy. If I were a high school chemistry teacher, I would teach the Bohr atom. It's grossly incomplete, but it gets the basic framework down. It's easy to understand and people need to understand it before they talk about orbital shapes and spin numbers. But if I were to show up at a scientific conference and talk about the Bohr atom, I would be booed off stage. I would be labeled as worthless, not because I'm wrong, but because I don't know what the audience knows. And if I started firing back at my critics explaining how crucial the Bohr atom were, I would be labeled stupid - not because I am factually wrong but I refuse to operate at the level of modern chemistry. I'd be some weird, archaic throwback to the early 1900s.

If it hasn't happened already, bots will soon be able to provide GTO decision trees for multiway pots. People will move on from where Captain R and Alan B are, and start talking about calling percentages (like what percent of the time they call/raise) and taking suboptimal flop actions to optimize their multistreet lines. You're about to become several steps behind the forefront of modern poker, instead of the 1-2 you are now.

And just to be clear, I freely admit I'm personally falling behind the curve. I haven't played a hand of LHE for over a year and I haven't studied it seriously for maybe three and a half. I don't even have Equilab much less Flopzilla or whatever the MSLHE bot du jour is.

So I totally get where you're coming from.

There is a GTO post I started drafting ... in 2011. I was very proud of it 7 years ago, but to be honest it's just embarassing at this point because everything revolves around an Excel sheet which does less than programs do now. It's all first principles, with probability matrices row-reduced to get eigenvalues and Nash equilibria. As a matter of fact, I had to upgrade it in 2014ish because I learned Excel 2013 solves matrix equations and it obviated a huge chunk of my work. It got me pretty far up the food chain in 2012-2015, so I have no regrets about the time I put in. But it's pretty laughable now.

I think you'd be impressed.

I think Captain R would laugh. Hopefully politely.

PokerSnowie does multiway spots but it's not GTO nor Nash Equilibrium. Basically it plays vs a slew of (potentially very bad) counter strategies, which leads the bot to some obviously bad solutions that are not GTO. It's a very real possibility that Nash Equilibrium preflop ranges will perhaps never be known for multiway pots due to the impact of collusion on the minimum ev provided by Nash Equilibrium strategy. Unless your GTO bot is psychic(knows if opponents are colluding or not) then this will likely always be a road block for multiway solvers.

----

The analysis provided showing how frequently we face a better Queen? I think it could produce some cool graphs in the right hands, but I would put the analysis in my pile of (viewed and appreciated for novelty but not actually used in decision making) stuff. Like the graph of how often your pocket pair faces an overcard on the flop. 77 faces an overcard > 70% of the time. Yet we raise that hand from any position in almost any game type of limit holdem. It's interesting, but not instructive.

I think a better idea would be to look in a tracker for the ev of (my small blind calling range in limped pots and its ev as a whole and by hand for hand). I think there will be indications of what's unprofitable there. I don't have tracker though so I can't do that.

Which are the 7 flushes do you have?

If we add in AQs and ATs, that's only 5. Which other hands are you 3-betting from SB?

That's fine. As I said, I just made up numbers and you can change them as you see fit.

Even if he's only best 75% of the time, he only needs a few calls from SB to turn a profit. This calculation is highly elastic (the conclusion is strongly dependent upon assumptions). He just doesn't need to see very many calls from SB with worse hands for this to turn a profit (17% of the time).

I don't have a problem with people citing simulations. The earliest iteration of the twodimes simulator goes back perhaps almost two decades. That still counts as showing your work. But do you know what you didn't see? Someone else posting a simulation to show that my estimate was wrong.

And you're right that we don't NEED to do back of the envelope calculations. If I had a lot of experience with Flopzilla or PokerTools or whatever, I could probably whip out a simulation and get some exact numbers in a few minutes. (But I don't have as much experience with those, so it may take me 10-15 minutes to get there.) Or I can do a rough calculation that will be close enough to the answer in about 10 seconds.

I don't deny the value of these simulation programs. But the existence of such tools does not negate the value of quick estimates. (Edit: I'm actually reminded of one of my college physics professors, who made us to back-of-the-envelope calculations on some problems before diving in and doing them fully. It helped to gain some higher level intuition about things and assist with the development of conceptual understanding instead of mere computational proficiency. Maybe that's where I get it from.)

Do you think the absolute lowest level limit hold'em forum is anything like "a scientific conference" in your analogy? And if there really was interest in learning, then take what I've said and explain how to use the latest and greatest poker tools to simulate it and get exact numbers. (I'd actually quite like to see that sort of thing.)

QTdd and T9dd. I’m calling with T9dd most of the time, but I will 3-bet in this spot on some occasions.

Let's say I'm calling with all my two pair or better hands... which I'm not. That means I'm calling his 3-bet 25% of the time, but almost 31% of the time I call, I have a bigger flush than him. In reality, I'm calling with the four flushes I can have on the river, so when I put more money in the pot vs a 3-bet, he's always losing. You guys can make whatever assumptions you want about Joker's range here, but I've played enough with him to know that if he happens to go call flop, call turn here and then 3-bet the river, I think he's always going to have a flush. I think he would err on the side of caution with his straights (and apparently his baby flushes too). I also think that Joker would not expect me to call 3-bets on the river with two pair/set hands, but I don't think he's ever considering 3-betting specifically to get me to fold better and hope that he's good against he fishy big blind. We play on a different level in heads up pots, but when there are stations and maniacs in the pot with us, we are not actively looking to exploit one another. If that day ever comes, then I can start adapting and reconsidering my strategy in these spots. I think he played the river fine and I think if he 3-bets and I fold, I'm playing the river fine.

Lots of math based players itt and IDK whether or not to be surprised. For myself I know basic math and ignore the rest of w/e you ppl are talking about. Give me a 10 hours v. anyone and I will start calling out what their hands are. Whatever happened to that part of the game?

You seem to have missed the point entirely. What taking into account all the times that you're NOT playing fine?

There's some chance I'm doing these calculations wrong, but using Aaron's formulas earlier, with my generous percentages:

EV(call) = (85% * 17) + (15% * -2) = 14.15

EV(3-bet) = (5.7% * -4) + (7.7% * -3) + (17.3% * 19) + (69.3% * 18) = 15.3

That's assuming I'm calling with two pair or better, only 4-betting with nut flushes, and that the big blind never has Joker beat.

In reality, I'm not calling 3-bets and losing nearly that often and I'm sure the big blind wins substantially more often than 0% of the time. Also, with this board texture, I think I would give at least some thought to 4-betting my queen high flushes. While Joker will have a flush pretty often, I don't think he will have a lot of nut flushes after cold calling from the cutoff preflop in a 5-handed game - I think he's reraising most of his suited aces, maybe all of them (as he should). And if the fish in the big blind has a queen high flush beat, then she just gets to win all the money.

I'm an English major, but you're going to have to help me out here.

Interesting post.


I believe that *you* are not trying to learn anything. If you were, you'd post your own hands or concepts that you had questions about, in threads that *you* create. You'd wade into the medium stakes forum and debate the many players there who are better than you and who play higher stakes than you.

Perhaps you're making the mistaken and common assumption that other people think/act the same as you (and so if you're not here to learn, then no one else is either)? I think we're all guilty of this thought process sometimes.


If true, this attitude is part of the problem. We're a community with some rules aimed at keeping things civil and fair.

However, I don't think I've ever seen you let anything (a point, an argument, a detail, a debate) go, so I don't believe your statement aligns with your actions. You seem to care a lot about winning and lecturing and having the spotlight on you.


Please do so in threads of your own creation. There is no need for long, off-topic posts in other people's threads, especially posts that refer back to other posts you've made in other threads.

You clearly think very deeply about poker, and that's a valuable asset to the forum. It'd be great if you could bring that to the table without all of the other stuff.