Sorry to hear about your struggles with your illness. I can relate with my mental ailments. Hopefully poker gives you some motivation to stay healthy and a distraction from the less pleasant aspects of life. Run like a god!

Thanks dude. I feel you, we all have to fight a tough one at some point. Pull it together every day and never give up🔥🔥

The jump from midstakes to high stakes

The key is to really start understanding the specific nuance to each spot. There are no short cuts here and it just takes study and repetition. Every spot is different. Let me give you an example.

HU

BTN open, we call AQ887 Ahhh

T63hhs, check check

turn Js. T63Jhhss

We have a decision here. Since there are many combodraws available our hand is not particuarly premium, especially with a 3 card fd. The backdoor FD is more valuable here and can be played more aggresive as a probe than frontdoor FD. Still the hand will be indifferent. Since we generally don't make a good follow up bluff with his hand because of poor blockers, the ev will largely come down to how light our opponent will raise our probe here. Some players are more straightforward and a probe is fine. Some more aggro players could raise this turn quite light as there are many possible combos to do so with.

We decide to c/c. River 2h. We lead pot.

Not a bad play, however, do we really understand how this river should be played? When we dive into the solver it becomes clear potbetting is not much of a strategy, even with A high hearts. The reason is that ranges are still very wide and mergy here. Our opponent can have K high hearts, vs which we want to check raise. We also for example have 2ps/sets/straight with the Ah blocker that want to c/r as a bluff. We don't have as many bluffs that make sense to psb lead.

Our main lines here are small and check raise. What bluffs do we have small? what do calling ranges look like? How does our opponent interaction deviate based on his flop and turn betting strategies? What exploits can we make if we assume population understands this spot roughly at the level we did pre studying it?

Particularly the last questions I find difficult to answer in this case. I try to soak it up as much as possible and over time these things become more apparent.

Oddly I find poker gives me a little sense of control over my life as well. There’s a lot we can’t control in life like unavoidable health issues and poker like negative variance but with hard work discipline some smarts and enough volume you can actually win in this game which is something I appreciate.

What a great take on moving up! Thanks for your contributions to this forum.

For sure it’s a classic self improvement grind like training, coming in better every day.

Even if you’re day is totally ****ed and depressing if you can just get a some work in and make a plus on your skill in that day it gave meaning to that day.

Funny because it’s a zero sum gambling game that attracts a lot of scumbag people and behaviour.

Breaking down ranges from flop to river in visions:

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/Mz...=1731824984000

Like melody to hear you talking about poker.
If you have any feedback for vision, Matthias the developer is usually quite quick in responding to users. He is active in the vision discord channel.