Reasonable question(s).

Villain is someone I've played with quite a bit over the last few weeks. He's not a random newly tagged aggressive fishy looking player. He's a full-blown agrowhale. He opens the button a ton. Folds to 3bs almost never. Loves betting when checked to.

I think there's a few interesting decision points in the hand.

Flop: I think a c-bet is sort of reasonable. To target any 1 pair and any random offsuit combo that contains a heart that will want to see the turn. But, this guy loves to bet when checked to. So checking and betting accomplish the same thing (inflating the pot), however sometimes he's going to fold to a c-bet with total air, but if I check he might decide to bluff with 0 equity. That's really the key to why I make the station-down all the way. Decided he just had random 2 cards often enough.

Turn: If the turn is a total brick and he fires again I can check-shove AK here (no heart) to protect my equity and charge random 1heart to see the river. Of course the Ah is not a particularly good turn since now I lose to a ton of things. When he barrels the turn, it's the critical decision point in the hand. This is where the decision is call turn/call river bricks. Or fold turn (putting him on a heart too often). I decided he's spewy enough that I can call down. I expect to lose quite often, but I think I can eek out a profit. The only river I was planning to fold on was a 5th heart. Since now a call is to chop at best but when you lose, you lose it all.

River: Even these total agrowhales will sometimes check back a really weak heart. So I expect airballs/decent heart not really thin value from tiny hearts. Although I would not have been totally shocked had he had nut-low flush.

I don't really think he's thinking on a very high level. It's just a matter of he's betting because he likes his hand or he wants folds. In this case he realized the only way he could win was betting so he kept betting.

Hand 5: I feel like I have a live game leak in these spots. I know he's passive like most live players, but the training vids always advocate to bet/fold in these spots. Or check/call and check/fold river. A passive player can have lower overpairs like TT/99 here and decide to bet half pot when you show weakness to get you to "fold your AK".

That being said, against which player profiles are you bet/folding the turn?

I mean I can b/f turn c/f river. Or c/c turn c/f river. Just kinda felt like c/fing turn. Not saying I always play perfectly and it could have been a mistake. It's definitely close between all options

As expected I played 0 poker yesterday (4/19). These sporadic days off really seem to recharge me as I was VERY excited to play poker this afternoon. I had another excellent session.

People always complain/acknowledge when they're running badly but when they're winning they're "running normal". That's not the case in April, I am running insanely hot. Going to enjoy it while it lasts *crossing fingers, knock on wood*

4.20 'Nother day 'nother dolla



Hand 1) Hitting the best part of reg's range
Think my range is pretty flush heavy here, he has the 3rd nuts. I can understand why he's vbetting but I think I can x/f baby flushes very comfortably here. I also have basically every combo of the nut-flush (except AKhh, some AQhh and the hands he blocks). Would have been a really nice x-back in his shoes imo



Hand 2) Slow-playing vrs unknown agro-fishy looking guy
Ofc when the board pairs river and he overbets it's not the most comfortable spot in the world. But nutflush, cawl



Hand 3) Reg who has been pounding on me puts me in insane spot
My range contains *some* flushes here given stack sizes. But, I'm pretty darn close to top of my range. He's repping something like AA, flushes, and straights when he jams over my river bet. I timebanked all the way and I was going to click call but then I timed out. I'm not entirely disappointed as I don't think the fold is all that terrible. I think I have to v-bet river thinly as clubs miss and I'm going to want to be bluffing quite a bit. He also has a lot of QQ, KK, random AX here that I can put in some pain.

His river bluffing range here seems extremely narrow to me. It basically has to be KdKx, QdQx, AxX(d?) and maybe total air. The thing is when I pot the turn, I expect to be generating some folds from some mediocre stuff. Also a river bluff with total air seems suicidal as I can definitely have flushes/sets and people don't fold those hands.



Hand 4) Hero calling good reg BvB
This guy opens [too wide%] sb. Decide to bluff catch since everything wiffs and I block 8 of his value combos




Very happy with how I'm running (and in turn, playing). More poker Thursday!

Hand 1: Very WP.

Hand 2: What's your line against more passive/straight-forward rec players on turn/river?

Hand 3: Are you really potting turn with diamonds? Looks like an excellent play by him OTR. Would you make a similar play in Vs shoes with ATC against another reg?

Thank you for re-analyzing that hand. Glad to see that April is going better.

Hand 2: I'm probably checking the turn against anyone. Against a really passive/stationy fish donking the turn when you make a flush may be the best play. But even against a stationy/passive fish if they have an overpair they might still bet (to "protect" from 4-flush) or they'll go for a bet/check/bet line and I can go for a delay c/r on the river.

Hand 3: Definitely potting the turn with a lot of draws, maybe even some good AX. I'm not sure how "excellent" his play is on the river. Putting other regulars in insane/tough spots is fun and all, but it's not how you make money in poker. I think legions of regs in my spot would snap a set (without thinking). He's jamming into an incredibly uncapped range (-AA) in a spot where a lot of regs refuse to fold 2pr+ even deep. Think against me it worked nicely this time. Of course he could have just been value betting.

In his shoes, I would be making this play with ATC almost never. My game does not involve folding out strong parts of people's range when they're uncapped. People don't fold absolute value strong hands often enough in weird spots like this so if anything I prefer his line (of a flop x/back range) for balance/value.

No problem! Thanks for the great questions. Wouldn't say March went poorly per say , things just going extra my way in April, thus far

I don't think that I could have found a fold with a set in that hand. Unless I knew that he played flush draws passively, I would have called. You probably made the right play though.

In that case, would love to see some hands where you represent hands vs capped ranges.

To date, there have been a few posted. While I could go back and quote them here, [I'm lazy] I think it would be a useful exercise for you to dig into the thread and re-read some HH and determine if you think villain could have a capped range in some of the spots I choose to bluff. In some of the commentary, I indicate villain appears capped in certain spots so that should help.

Also, I can't post all my good moves on a public forum . That wouldn't be very GTO



Here's an unposted one from yesterday to get you on the right track. Without getting into detail I'm pretty sure villain opens no 6x in MP besides 66. Don't think he's the kind of guy to check TT 3 ways with a rec in the pot. Ergo->capped

Fair enough. You had a FD here to make the semi-bluff so it looks reasonable, but would you do this with ATC because your cards are basically irrelevant here? That's what I'm particularly interested in trying to pull off at my live games.

Doubtful. Not a fan of low equity bluffs. But 4 to 6 outs is certainly enough to make plays like this if you think you have lots of fe

Perfecto!

Games tonight were really dead and also quite bad. I found myself 6 tabling most of the session struggling to find good tables to add to the mix. Unfortunately, I also ran pretty bad at the higher stakes. Quit early as I didn't feel like grinding a lower edge out tonight. I had a 12 session win streak going into this one, but booking a loss was bound to happen eventually. Imo, it's important to objectively decide to quit sometimes if games are bad and things are not going your way. Keeping losses small is just as important as pushing yourself while winning when games are great.


4.21 Snappin' the win streak


Mostly a bad-beat/cooler highlight real tonight

Hand 1) Brutal cooler vrs reg
Dude was the guy who I folded a set of 7s to in a 3bet pot yesterday, which made this extra frustrating.




Hand 2) Unknown villain sitting on a short stack. Seemed to be somewhat tight preflop but no real reads yet




Hand 3) Vrs whale




Hand 4) Light river call vrs agrofish HU
Think this one was very close, decided to look him up this time





I'm hoping the lack of games running was just a one-off Thursday night thing. The weather is just starting to get nice so perhaps people were outside enjoying that. NBA playoffs were on tonight too.

Hoping to get a small/medium amount of volume in this weekend. I'm leaning towards playing that $1M guaranteed live MTT so depending on how many days I last that could keep me out of online action early next week. Sitting on 54k hands played this month which is very light compared to the pace last month. I don't set volume goals, so I'm not disappointed, but I do hope games pick up next week so I can finish April strong.

30ko overlay in the borgata 150k today. Live poker dead too.

Haha woulda been good to know. Perhaps would have made the trip earlier Defo gotta play the milly if there is overlay potential!

Hand 1: Plan on turns? Especially broadway ones?

Hand 3: Vbetting a flushing river?

Shove

The flush did come in

Yeah, so are you vbetting AT there when flush completes expecting to get called by worse?

No too thin but I can certainly bluff catch

Oh sorry, I misread because you swapped positions on river. C/c seems perfect.

Ahh yeah hand history converter gets funky with 888 software sorry for the confusion

I'm going to do a little something different and give a Fri/Sat update instead of waiting and posting a total weekend update.

This is because I've been losing (mildly) since Thursday and just want to make a post before today's session in the hopes of clearing my mind and putting things into perspective (for myself). There were quite a few nice 400, 500, and 1k line-ups this weekend that I couldn't pass up. Unfortunately, I ran quite meh (can't say I ran awful, but certainly didn't run well) and lost a few buyins as a result. If I call my average stake over the last few days sample "300NL" I've lost 8 buy-ins which is more like a run of the mill losing session. It would be disrespectful to real downswings to call this a downswing.

4.22-4.23 Losing (slowly)


I was fully aware and appreciative that I was running quite well most of the month. It was bound to happen that I would cool off. I've lost 3 out of 4 of my last sessions and I've lost roughly 1/4 of my table profits for the month over that period. Unfortunately and classically, the run-good has ended as I've taken more shots at higher stakes.

As I've said the in past, most poker players (and gamblers) ascribe winning to skill and losing to bad luck. It's made me think about what "bad luck" is in poker. I think a level 1 description of bad luck is "EV" and when people are losing flips it's easy to point to EV as a totally-out-control quantifiable measure of run bad. While I think flip analysis is an important measure and you can lose a lot of flips for quite a while (dragging down your results) I think there are much more sinister and less talked about measures of luck in poker: strong hand distribution, how hard you hit the flop, and the MOST important, WHO you are making your strong hands against and whether they are holding a suitable second best hand to lose money with. I think these factors are much less easy to quantify.

After you've played a few million hands of poker you get a little better at recognizing the less quantifiable versions of run-bad. It's a bit subjective and when you're winning you're bound to think about it less. However, I've felt specifically that I never seem to have "strong hands" at the right time on one specific site at the 500NL games where my results are quite bad over a small sample. My WWSF is laughably low over the sample, which is good evidence that this is the case. It's important to remind myself that at some point I WILL run good in these games in the right line-ups and have a (relatively) big winning day.

In the past, after 10 buy-in downers at bigger stakes I drop back to regrind immediately. Then the regrind ends and I'm comfortable/complacent and don't push myself back into the midstake games. This time, I'm going to try to give myself a little more room than in the past and keep pushing at the good midstake games for another 10 buyins or so.

I've also decided not to play the live MTT this week. Did a quick cost/benefit analysis of immediate and opportunity cost and it makes no financial sense for me to play the tournament. There are also a few big tech companies set to report earnings this week, which I want to be able to trade. I suppose I could use a similar logic for the ME in July, but the ME is an entirely different beast and more of a bucket list item than 1 random 1mil guarantee.




Since this post has been pretty wall of text heavy here's a few hands.


Hand 1) Rough spot vrs agrowhale @ 1k
Think this is one of the only clear mistakes I made this weekend. River is a call given sizing. He had 2 barreled bluffs once or twice over the session which made me think his river bet was value heavy. But even still the price is too good and he's too loose aggressive and his line makes 0 sense. By no means is this an easy call of course.




Hand 2) Super hard spot vrs reg at 400
I had 3b to 10bb in order to call a 4b. But exploitatively this reg is way more likely to call a 3b oop with a marginal hand than 4b bluff given positions, so I just should have gone huge to punish preflop calls and in order to inflate the pot to win with cbets on favorable boards (that I miss). I don't think I'm perceived to be bluffing that often preflop here so in theory he should just be folding/set mining a ton, and he's a reasonable player so that's probably what he's doing.

His flop c/r is pretty sigh since he's repping like 6 combos or air. Think folding is meh/maybe okay. If I'm perceived to be 3betting wide then maybe he can be bluffing but it's such a texture that a c/r makes little to no sense. With bdfd I sigh/call. River also was not a fist-pump call by any means, but I figured there's chop potential and a non-zero % chance he's bluffing. I think he's a bit scared of KK (and now AA, too) tbh when I bet/call and he wants to nit control some. I can't blame him as if this particular guy wants to play a 170bb pot @ 400 I'm probably finding the fold with AK.

I also thought about bluff jamming, but I don't think I can ever get this guy off a set especially when he bets river this large. Pretty great example of a spot where theory says you should polarize when you jam and have KK/AA and some bluffs. But in reality, you should always have it because people don't fold sets in reraised pots, even deep, even when evidence says maybe they should.




Hand 3) Overbetting AI vrs whale @ 1k
Maybe not the best line, but I'm not comfortable with the stakes + I think he can definitely call with pair+draw or naked flush draws. This guy was donking all-in a bunch on "scary" rivers so I wanted to avoid that decision too. Maybe not the best logic but I was fine with it.




Hand 4) Awful stack off by reg @ 200
My image is so so so tight. I have no idea why any reasonable looking player (who I have multiple thousand hands with) would ever take this line. But I suppose thx for the EV, have a set here really often. Original PFR said he snap folded AK which I think is pretty good/standard multiway here.




Hand 5) Fun hand vrs whale deep
Decent flop. HOW DOES HE FOLD!?




Hand 6) Station reg bet/calling river too thin




Hand 7) Reg spazzing





I was planning to put in a monster day today and play an MTT or two, but some friends hit me up for day-drinking in the beautiful weather. I'm going to try to keep the drinking to a minimum so when the sun goes down I'll be in good shape to put in a long evening and night grind. Volume shmolume

Pretty exhausted so short update. Had a really nice bounce-back session today. Games were amazingly good and I ran quite well again. My play was so-so but good enough to get the job done.

Unfortunately, also bricked 2 Sunday MTTs for -415. Bummer. I'll post bust out hands below. Not really too many interesting cash hands. Just whales whaling and nits nitting

4.24 Bounce Back



Tourney bust out 1) Lol/sigh/cry vrs agrofish




Tourney Bust Out 2) More standard but still sigh
Guy in CO was playing tight and 2.5x'd it which kind of scared me. In theory I think his call is fine against a range that includes some light sqz all ins (such as AXss, 22-66, KQss) type stuff. But given that I was kinda spooked by the 2.5x I may have chickened out on bluffing this spot so my range might look more like 99+/AQ+. He has at worst like 33%ish equity needing 43% to call here. So if he includes even a few bluffs his play is fine. There were about 100/240 runners left when I lost this flip. Certainly would have cashed had I won here. TOURNIES




Hand 1) Awesome punt by whale
This generous fellow really made my day




Hand 2) Optimism by fun player




Hand 3) Coolered by decent reg I dislike
I think I'm going to start 3betting bigger against guys who love to call 3bs to punish. I always forget to make that adjustment in game. This guy c/r's or raises cbet IP in 3bet pots, repping so narrow, but I haven't seen him fold to a jam or not have it yet. Of course I can't fold this hand. But happily folding every single 1 and 2 2pr here to him.

I wonder if the stubborn/station regs will adjust if instead of 3betting 3bb to 9-11bb ip I start making it 12-14 range. Only one way to find out




More or less returned to month's peak. Hoping to get 3 good weeknights of grinding in. Followed by a really heavy weekend. Crossing my fingers for some good trading this week as well.

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