I watch a lot of streams / vlogs, so I've seen a ton of content involving the stand-up game, or the 7-2 game, or the fire engine game, and various other variants. So many commentators have observed the tendency players have, to lose thousands in order to avoid losing hundreds. Eventually I came to the conclusion that the best approach in most scenarios is to ignore the added variables in play, and just play our best poker.

Like, is someone really going to be jamming all in as a bluff here, for almost $2k, just to set up the opportunity to win less than $250 in bounties, and only IF he also wins the next hand? How much should we adjust our play to allow for that sort of lunacy, as opposed to simply playing a fundamentally correct game?

I struggle to envision how our pre-flop strategy should change for a long-shot 12.5bb bounty which is contingent on winning the current and subsequent hand.

This seems way more speculative and gambooly than simply raising with 72 when we're dealt 72 and stand to win >10bb in the current hand, or incrementally adjusting our ranges as we get closer to being the last man standing during the stand-up game, and every pot we lose brings us closer to a penalty over-lay.

Yea i dont see how the payout from the game variant could possibly make playing 75o out of the small blind profitable

you can't ignore the variables in play but you have to quantify them.

To clarify - if we're playing the 72 game, we should remember 72 is still a trash hand, not a premium, and not go over-board bluffing when we get dealt it. Likewise, we should be careful to remember the 72 game is on when 7's or 2's hit the board. But we shouldn't be calling too wide because we level ourselves into believing everyone is trying to bluff us with 72.

Not sure how we quantify something like that in a way that's useful for making in-game adjustments. It's not like counting combos of A5s, if the bounty is inspiring players in the game to play every 72 combo from every position, and if they're often barreling off with it.

Sure, we can quantify the overlay on the pot created by the bounty, and we can add 16 bluff combos to opponents' ranges, but it's nearly impossible to judge opponents' willingness to barrel off with an air-ball bluff in spots that wouldn't otherwise make sense if the 72 game wasn't on.

Like, who can say if a guy has the balls to barrel off when every draw missed, and we're going to call wider, versus only barreling off when the most obvious draws get there?

I'd expect ignoring the added variables of the 72 game will lead to better decisions than giving them too much weight.

In the stand-up game, I'm convinced just playing correct ranges in correct ways will yield higher EV than playing more loose-aggro. The bounty only seems to increase the variance for players who try to adjust to it.

In the two-hands-in-a-row bounty game OP's described, I can see how the game would inspire higher VPIP's from players who won the previous hand, but not how or why it would lead to making adjustments in our pre-flop strat if we didn't win the last hand, other than possibly making lighter calls or lighter 3B's versus the winner of the previous hand.

This would appear to be a scenario in which we absolutely should ignore the fact that the game is on, unless we won the previous hand, or we're involved in a pot with the winner of the previous hand. Otherwise, the bounty should have no bearing on our decisions.

IMO posting hands that arent your own is a waste of everyone’s time. If you arent the person in the hand, you dont know the relevant reads that may have colored the hero’s decisions, so we can sit here and say the play was bad when for all we know he was playing wide vs a player he thought was weaker than OP thinks, and he got a live tell otr.

well here figure bounty eligbile btn wins the hand about 35%? of the time maybe slightly higher (button becomes extremely incentivized to win the hand because he wins 10bb in bounties whereas everyone else only loses 1 so the pot odds are going to be very different for both players for all decisions) and then progressively can win more though discounted bc less % chance of the event occuring with also less % chance to win as position gets worse. probably the ev is somewhere in the idk 80-110 range? for winning this particular hand. i doubt thats enough reason to flat the sb w this. im getting that ev number from .35 * 200 for 70 and then just sort of hand waving off about what i think the subsequent conditional ev's would be.

you can't really ignore the bounties / game variation being played without burning large amounts of ev. for like the worlds most simplified example look at the ev of opening on the button when u have the opportunity to win the bounty. you can risk 3bb (straddles) to win 1.75 in a normal game, but in this variant you can risk 3bb (straddles) to win 11.75 bb or (adjust your open size). thats just too big of an ev discrepancy in smaller pots to overlook entirely.

Trying to be as nice as possible ...

Poker is a weird game, and esp. live humans can do "whale things" for various reasons but not be long term whales. Certainly everyone makes mistakes, and "whale" isn't exactly a precise description of a play.

Saying that: 75s isn't a defend with normal blinds 200bb deep for robot open sizings SB vs. CO. Again, in a normal blinds game 200bb deep BB is not defending 75o/86o/76o/65o/54o, and only defends a small amount of 87o and J9o (most T9o and all QTo).
Being in the SB with three blinds should make us much tighter, CO opening 5.2x instead of 2.5x should make everyone tighter.
Does the bounty game loosen up certain positions ... at a guess probably BTN/3rdB/CO in that order ... maybe BB if 3rdB is tight or has reads, maybe a little bit for HJ if CO/BTN are weak or reads they are folding. Also, I'd guess that a lot of that looseness should be when you won the last hand (Eg. being loose for the first win in CO or BB isn't worth much because you'll be in HJ/SB next hand and have to fold a lot). Yes, if you play wider from SB and win the hand then the next hand you are on the BTN with the bounty ... but then you need to be able to play and win that hand for an extra say ~32sb -- which isn't a lot if you are calling 20sb in the worst position with a wide range.
All of that is a long way of saying "overly loose preflop decision" is also not a good description.


Flop then looks like clicking buttons because SB should have basically no 5x in range (A5s 3bets a lot, 65s is like 15% 3bet and 5% call and even 55 only defends 50% and that's it for 5x -- again all of those are with only 2 blinds) and all good Kx are pure 3bets, with even K9s 3bet more than call and it's folded 33%.

i thought this at first but i think the bounty actually drives a large amount of the action in this game. try to figure out what you think the ev of winning the hand is for the sb - what % of the time will he win the bounty on the button * 200 (the bounty), then find some smaller amount of ev you can assign to the increasingly lower chances of winning at each subsequent position. you dont ignore this until you win a hand, that ev has to factor into your decisions in every hand as a huge chunk of your winrate comes from bounty hands so you want to put yourself in that position as often as possible. think about it. winning a bounty is worth 1000bb / 100 hands in winrate. thats just such a massive effect on results that you need to structure your strategy around giving yourself that opportunity as much as possible.

comparing equilirbium strategy from another game (plain nl) is going to give you incorrect conclusions. its why things like standup etc are so good, there are (and probably never will be for obvious reasons) no public facing tools so people either have to do their own work / acquire their own software lol or try to use logic and intution. the guys who don't adapt and just mimic normal strategy bc my gto are actually leaking large amounts of ev in specific spots