ok but if you don't look at solver where do you get your baseline strategy from?

Where did people get their strategies from before solvers?

A big problem is that you wrote a lot about v2's postflop tendencies, but virtually nothing about his preflop ranges. The question here is. Does V2's 3bet range is the same as the pop's? What % of hands does he 3bet? Is it closer to 4%? Or is it closer to 10%. If it's the former, your hand is clearly a fold notwithstanding that on occasion he shows up with trash. If it's the latter, then you can start thinking about doing stuff, although they aren't textbook.

In addition, you can't say that you don't want to get 5bet with this hand. It's ok to have a folding range in every part of your game tree and since we are talking about your 4betting range, KQs in low frequencies would be at the bottom of it and count as a bluff, so it's ok to fold it if it faces a 5bet.

But again, if you think V2's range is mostly value, then it's a clear fold.

Last but not least, since this is a 3way pot and you say that you are betting mostly value (while your bluffs like JT have a ton of equity), the correct bet size is 25-33% on the flop.

Once villain gets it in, it sucks, but given your description, it's a call.

Is the run out posted (QQ9tt)? Or is that a typo (the "tt")?

Preflop you are OOP to an uncapped range. You are OOP relative to the PF 3!, and with a low SPR which is bad for your hand. Seems like an easy fold to me.

Once we get to the flop, it would be nice to know the suits. But given the description of V and the narrow range of combos that are ahead of us; seems like we should be shoving our stack before V finishes saying all in...

snap, nobody x/r jams with the nuts here in a 3b pot when stacks are going in by the river anyway if anyone has anything.

how many of them are still competitive? what do you gain by actively avoiding tools / information to get better?

again. beyond writing walls of text affirming your play, how do you actually know if you made a good play or not when you're analyzing it?

you're going to find poker a much easier game if you have something to anchor your assumptions / adjustments to.

It's "two-tone", i.e, two of the same suit on board.

Apologies if that abbreviation caused confusion. I don't remember where I saw it, but I thought it was universally understood to mean a two-tone flop.

Did read the spoiler, not read much else after the first post ...


I think pre. is bad, I think mix call/fold is maybe okay around 900 deep with everyone.
Yes, V2 is loose/agro. but V1 can still have good hands and shove when there's over 100 in the pot when it gets back to him. Also V1 can overcall AK/AQ hands, so even though V2 doesn't have them as much we still don't love K72.


After the flop it's nowhere near deep enough to do anything but bet/call it off IMO. Don't see checking this being better than betting, although I think you'd want to bet smaller or bigger than 75 into 165. Random saturday morning guess of 55 for JJ/TT/88/77 type hands and 125 for Qx/99/JT?

I mean, this is a ridiculous question. The vast majority of them. Im certainly not a solver hater or anything, but the idea that time traveling 2010 phil ivey couldnt sit down at a 2024 2/5 or 5/10 table and crush is incorrect. A lot of the top level pros are the same guys we had before solvers (not to say they havent studied solvers since then)


The issue is that at least some of the answers you give are just blind copy pasting from the tool, which both ignores exploitative factors, and is not a scalable answer since it provides no understanding of the reasoning. I think if you wanna post gto, you gotta anchor it with why, and if you dont know why, or if the why is irrelevant to the factors of the post in question, its not really a valuable insight.


By gaining a consensus from other skilled players. Thats the whole point of this forum, If this is genuinely how you feel, why do you even post here? If the answer is in the gto tool, what information do YOU gain from reading this forum?

I agree, sorta. People do have baseline assumptions, and can be good players without solvers, but gto has challenged some of mine and improved my play, so to this, i mostly agree.

yeah idk this isnt really an argument you're going to win. mid and high stakes have mostly turned over from 5 years ago both live and online. the idea that anyone that didn't use software 15 years ago would be competitive at even something like 1/2 online or 5/10 live isn't really reasonable given the state of the games. idk if you're out of touch with game conditions either now or back then or extremely underrating the progress of poker strategy, but there's just no way that would happen. would he have access to aids that would help him and be capable of learning to beat them? could he maybe break even or be a smaller winner in some lineups? probably but that those aren't the questions being presented. the game conditions / quality are just night and day and it was a very (almost entirely) different skill set back then as opposed to now. maybe in like some random geofenced area / gated games. who do you think are still the top level pros from pre solvers that are still at high stakes? the only ones i can think of no longer play cash and study with solvers an incredible amount (the super high roller guys) or only play private (this includes streams).

re posting on the forum, pretty much everyone i know no longer plays poker or at least hold em so it forces me to analyze hands.

im not trying to start an argument or be condescending to you, but you literally ran your first sim this week. it's possible that you may not know what you're talking about here.

to kind of follow up on that, theres no requirements to post on the forum. you have no idea if the people you're talking to are linus or a guy whos struggling to beat the lowest stakes. generally a random person's intuition if it's not proven shouldn't be worth much to you, even more so in a totally / pseudo anonymous environment. you can generally tell who is good because they reference optimal play / math / stats, and they stop posting relatively quickly as there's not much upside beyond ego / validation (online forum is a bit different than this one), and instead you get left with people who don't know what to do with trips good kicker vs a maniac stuck 700bb on qq9tt at spr 3.

re the adjusting gto, im all for making adjustments but the vast majority of hands posted here don't have nearly enough evidence to warrant shifting strategies in any meaningful way in complex spots (beyond overfolding in general / in spots that are complex to find bluffs in), and literally no one ever talks about the cost / degree of adjusting just very binary 100 /0 strategies.

but idk man

Query, should we then be posting decision trees with projected V ranges, perceived H ranges, and EV estimates for various decisions? Which I can certainly do, but posts are going to get a lot longer...

I guess, an intermediate would be to show the GTO for a blindingly obvious hand that the commentariat keeps posting, and have alternative situation EVs for how typical LLSNL players deviate from GTO. Or show how GTO can keep the unwashed from donking off 2-300 bbs as happens in a few of these threads. (Ironically, citing these sorts of concepts as why we should call.)

Ive said before im just some dumbass who plays recreationally, and i do this cuz I cant play poker as often as im like. Im sure youre better than me, so no offense taken.

If you dont mind me asking, do you primarily play live player? (Because you seem like an online player) Your statement might totally might be true online, or even probably is. I have no idea the landscape, and it sure does seem like a game with not a lot of factors but my dumb ass running my first solve this week has beaten 2/5 by a good margin for quite some time, and my recent foray into 5/10 has not felt like a considerable change in skill of my opponents. Still plenty of recs setting money on fire. Not having a HUD at your fingertips, and playing such a small number of hands means your balance is much harder to spot or exploit. Live also just has so many more factors like tilt and table chatter, and live reads and boredom that play a bigger part of the game imo. The first time i sat at 5/10 this year, i spotted a massively profitable and trustworthy tell on a 60+ hr/week pro.

As far as the super high rollers/only play private thing, I mean, this is basically what ive heard about live poker: the high limit games are ALL private, and its not about how good you are, its about how fun you are to play with, and who you know. 2010 phil ivey wouldve crushed HCL.

you can post whatever lol. i think the flow that works best is
1) what is right
2) what is v doing wrong
3) how to (max) exploit

everyone for the most part seems to skip over step 1 and overestimate their abilities to assess step 2 / 3 on limited information (mostly bc they dunno how / wont do step 1). its why this thread exists imo. if you don't have anything as an absolute reference / anchor point, every decision becomes an existential / philosophical dilemna.

i usually just post what gtow looks like and like a brief suggestion of how / why i think it should be adjusted

i think you're a good poster and you raise valid points here / the other thread we bickered, i just think you're underestimating how large your edge would be vs almost any population you're going to come across if you replicated the solver strategy / how much accuracy and ev you can capture by trying to deviate without stats or mda info vs relative and complete unknowns. i only play live at this point, as i think online esp nlhe is more or less dead unless you have access to games that others don't. am not sure what market you're in but the majority of public games at 10$ blind levels live / ~2$ blind levels online are generally 75+% regs in my experience. is not always the case but that really cuts down on potential winrate available

i mean im not talking about hcl when i say high stakes, that's not really a poker game lol. i mean public / open games.

i can accept my tone in posting is more hostile than i intend it to be and i try to edit these multiple times before i post but think i still end up more argumentative than i intend to

I'm not sure what you're trying to say with this. HCL is def. a weird thing and often feels like watching random bad 2-5 players, certainly disabuses anyone of the idea that the game has to be harder as you move up.


As for any general point that Phil Ivey was technically as good in 2010 as people are now ... I think that's more hero worship than anything else. Would recommend the Phil Galfond video on Isildur: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ1ij7Za7HA